Alberta Workers Rally to Oppose Anti-Worker Temporary Foreign Workers Program More than 100 building trades workers and their allies rallied at the Alberta Legislature on March 3, the first day of the Legislatures spring session. They came to oppose worker trafficking carried out under the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP). The rally was organized by building trades workers to demand that the Harper government stop using the TFWP to provide employers with cheap labour, and that the Redford government stop supporting this anti-worker program. The TFWP is not about filling labour shortages but about driving down wages, degrading working conditions and abusing temporary foreign workers, the workers said. Bricklayer Brian ODonnell, one of the workers who organized the rally proposed that if employers are allowed to hire temporary foreign workers, they should have to pay the highest going wage for that trade. Many employers using the TFWP receive tax breaks and actually pay little or no tax, and often do not put back into the society anywhere near what the average Canadian worker puts into this country, he said. He proposed a tax on employers to provide funding for training of Canadians who want to learn a trade or other skills. ODonnell provided examples of the fraud being perpetrated by employers. For example, one worker found 200 job postings on Service Canadas website in his trade. But when he contacted the employers, he found no job was available. The employers were only posting jobs on the Service Canada website to fulfill a requirement for an Accelerated Labour Market Opinion (ALMO) to hire temporary foreign workers. In this situation, unemployed workers, who must prove they are actively seeking work to receive EI, are at risk of losing EI benefits for jobs that are not even real, he said. These companies are not being held accountable, and no one is verifying that they have been unable to hire Canadian workers before an ALMO is approved, ODonnell said. ODonnell stated that as a bricklayer he had learned his trade from skilled craftsmen who had immigrated into Canada from Italy. Now instead of immigration, the TFWP is being used to allow employers to exploit workers from all over the world and drive down wages and working conditions in Canada. This has to stop. Gil McGowan, President of the Alberta Federation of Labour said, Hats off to the Ironworkers! for exposing how the TFWP is being used to drive down wages. Governments are not representing the public interest, but the interests of their friends the employers, he said. These employers are staffing projects, especially in the oil sands, with increasing numbers of temporary foreign workers. Temporary foreign workers are being lied to, promised high wages and the chance to become Canadian citizens. Instead, they are paid less than prevailing rates, used as pawns to drive down wages, denied citizenship and forced to return home after four years. The claim that the program exists to fill skill shortages or labour shortages is not true, McGowan said. He gave the example of the 65 ironworkers laid off by Pacer Promec Joint Venture in early February. Many of these workers had came from other parts of Canada to find work in Alberta, only to be discarded and replaced with temporary foreign workes by a greedy employer to drive down wages. Both federal and provincial governments are intervening in the labour market to impose their cheap labour policy. McGowan asked workers to document all the examples of how employers are using the TFWP so as to show that the problem is not isolated abuse, but endemic and built into the program. This program cannot be reformed, it must be scrapped in its entirety, he said. Rachel Notley, NDP member for Edmonton Strathcona pointed out that the Chrétien Liberals were those who dramatically ramped up the TFWP. The Harper government then further expanded the program, which is designed to drive down wages, she said. Lori McDaniel, a worker at Suncor and UNIFOR Local 707A health and safety representative called on everyone to go all out to defeat the Conservatives in the by-election in Ft. McMurray-Athabasca and send a message to Harper that the TFWP has to go. McDaniel is the NDP candidate in the upcoming by-election.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 02:53:34 +0000
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