By: Isaac Patroulis Lessig
In January, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) introduced new guidelines to shield migrant workers “who experience or witness workplace labor or civil rights violations” from deportation or a loss of work status. The protective measure marks a positive step towards the empowerment of migrant workers in the country and should be seen as a win for workers everywhere.
Similar protections for immigrant workers are urgently needed in Québec as well as the rest of Canada. A record 38,505 foreign nationals arrived in Québec through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) in 2022. That number reflects the province’s growing reliance on so-called temporary labor. Yet immigrant workers continue to be denied the basic labor protections and access to social services afforded to permanent residents.
For thousands of temporary workers and asylum seekers in Canada, retaining legal status is dependent on keeping a job with a specific employer. There are few accessible paths to permanent residency, and immigrants who choose to remain in the country after their work authorization expires risk becoming undocumented. As a result, many immigrant workers decline to speak up about workplace abuses out of fear of either being fired or deported, or both.
This tilts the balance of power steeply in the direction of individual employers and temporary placement agencies that profit from the legalized insecurity of immigrant workers. Labor violations have become abundant in the absence of means to legal redress.
A 2021 survey conducted by the Commission on Warehouse Work in Montréal found that large percentages of immigrant workers experienced abuse in the workplace. These abuses were not only prevalent but wide-ranging, spanning from wage theft and a lack of compulsory paid sick- and vacation-days to discriminatory treatment, in addition to having to routinely confront improper safety conditions.
As the number of temporary foreign workers in the province has ballooned, workplace safety conditions have slid the other way. Whereas in Québec in 2019 there were 154 officially reported workplace accidents involving immigrant workers, that number rocketed to 362 in 2022. The number of workplace desertions by temporary agricultural workers — a rational response to poor pay or treatment sans institutional support — similarly rose from 276 in 2021 to 484 in 2022.
In March, Québec’s workplace health and safety board (CNESST) announced that it would increase the number of agents on its prevention team from 10 to 22. The CNESST prevention team, a group mandated to educate workplaces on labor laws and protections, currently only visits workplaces where it has been invited to do so by the employer.
Under the new DHS guidelines, workers with temporary or undocumented legal statu in the U.S. can report workplace abuse without having to fear their employer or immigration services. Immigrant workers in Québec need the same basic protections now. Not as a stop-gap, but as the first step towards the regularization of all laborers in the province and beyond.
Comments are closed.