Yellow Knife, North West Territories, Canada June 29, 2007
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.