Canada’s non-agricultural or Temporary Foreign Program (TFP) has similarities to the USA’s H-2B guest worker program. According to Canadian advocates, the TFP has grown exponentially, with 40,000 workers coming to the province of Alberta alone in 2006. Employers are not required to provide housing, transportation, or cover recruitment costs. It is typical for employers to rent housing to the workers, oftentimes charging inflated rents. Under payment of promised contract rates is rampant and enforcement is scare. On a positive note, although difficult, it is possible to switch between employers who have already been approved to hire foreign workers.
Notably different from Canada’s SAP program is that it does not rely on sending country governments to select the workers, but instead engages private labor recruiters to hire the workers. As discussed in regard to the USA programs, unregulated labor recruiters who are free to charge workers as they see fit, can force the worker into such tremendous debt that they are placed in extremely vulnerable positions when laboring abroad.
Global Workers thanks CALL for the invitation to share information and ideas about temporary labor programs and looks forward to continued collaboration to raise the bar on protections for the world’s most vulnerable workers.
Invited by the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers (www.call-acams.com/en-guest/), a Global Workers representative traveled to Yellow Knife, Canada to speak on the USA guest worker program. It was a unique opportunity to discuss the USA program with top Canadian labor lawyers and learn about the Canadian system from its leading experts.
The Canadian guest worker program is touted by many institutions world wide as the program to emulate, the “best practice” model. That myth is now unceremoniously debunked. Unfortunately, Global Workers learned that the Canadian program is very similar to the USA program and is almost as equally flawed. From the perspective of employment and labor rights, Global Workers has yet to encounter a temporary labor program (as they are better known globally) that satisfies even the most minimal rights.
Similar to the USA, the Canadian program is divided into agricultural and non-agricultural temporary labor programs. The agriculture program is known as the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAP). The SAP program, with the exception of Guatemala, which sub contracts the recruitment to the IOM as a pilot project (mentioned in previous blog entries), is run as a government to government program. That is the Canadian agricultural employers petition the Canadian government that then requests the foreign governments to select and send the farm workers to Canada. Currently Canada has Memoranda of Understanding with Mexico, Jamaica and various Caribbean countries, which send approximately 20,000 temporary farm workers to Canada each year.
Although the SAP program is better than the USA H2-A program in some important ways (e.g. the portable pensions,) the Canadian advocates cited four main obstacles that ultimately prevent the temporary farm workers from being able to defend their basic rights.
1. Repatriation. Workers are sent home for “non-compliance, refusal to work, or any other sufficient reason.” Fear of deportation is the employers’ omnipresent trump card. 2. Labor Mobility. As in the USA, the farm worker can only work for the employer identified in the visa. If there is a problem, they must leave Canada. 3. No Access to Citizenship. Unlike domestic workers who can apply for citizenship after two years, temporary farm workers never can. 4. Conflict of Interests. For fear of losing out to another more compliant country, the sending countries often discourage their farm workers from complaining about working conditions. Advocates contend that this could violate Canada’s Unfair Labor Practices Act. Due to these issues, workers are vulnerable to exploitation and face multiple obstacles to addressing them while they are still physically present in Canada.
Global Workers attended a House of Representative’s Education and Labor Committee Hearing on “Protecting U.S. and Guest Workers: the Recruitment and Employment of Temporary Foreign Labor.” Representative George Miller called the hearing, in part to discuss his bill (H.R. 1763) on labor recruiter accountability. The hearing mostly discussed broad points of immigration reform. Three of the witnesses (including Global Workers’ Advisory Board member , Mary Bauer) highlighted the major flaws with the current H-2 Guest Worker program (no real labor test to determine lack of available US workers; chronic exploitation of the guest workers; legal obstacles to organizing guest workers) while one witnesses argued to stream line the administrative process and expand the program.
Although the time was limited (5 minutes each of witness testimony then questions from the committee members), the lack of portable justice issues was notable. The immigration reform debate is so polarized that it remains on a superficial level (guest workers or not; legalization of unauthorized persons or not). As a result, it lacks an in-depth and serious examination of the current guest worker program and how it affects the foreign workers while laboring in the USA and in their own countries. Global Workers wil contnue to monitoring and write more about the current immigration debate on the hill.