Union report examines migrant farm workers employment conditions

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada has released a new report with the goal of kick-starting fresh discussion on migrant farm workers’ employment conditions.

But Ken Forth, a farm employer and president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services, sees the report as another attempt by the union to shut down the Seasonal Agricultural Workers program and paint all farmers as bad bosses. “This is about destroying the program,” says Forth. “They (UFCW Canada) don’t want any of these workers in Canada.”

There are 45,000 migrant farm workers coming to Canada annually, says UFCW’s report, called the Status of Migrant Farm Workers in Canada 2015. UFCW and its Agriculture Workers Alliance released the report Tuesday.

About 20,000 workers annually come to Ontario as part of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program and 9,000 come as part of the agricultural stream and low-skilled agricultural stream in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

This year’s report is a periodic update to reports the union has issued since 2002. The previous report was released in 2010.

Stan Raper, UFCW spokesman and national coordinator for the Alliance, says the 2015 report is being forwarded to all provincial politicians in Canada, federal MPs, the new Liberal Cabinet once it’s appointed and officials in the countries sending workers to Canada.

Raper says hopefully the discussion that ensues from the report’s release is livelier this time and gets more results “than what we’ve had over the last 50 years.”

“I would say that the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program, heading in to its 50th anniversary, has seen very little change” other than a huge increase in the number of migrant farm workers coming to Canada, Raper notes. The program is “designed by the employers, for the employers. There’s nothing in this about workers and giving them an ability to deal with the system.”

The report contains 19 recommendations, including that farm workers be given transferable work permits “so that they’re not tied to one employer if they have an abusive employer or there are problems with that specific employer,” Raper says. Currently, workers can only be transferred with the permission of their employer but the union recommends ditching that requirement.

 Some of UFCW’s other recommendations include:

• Install an impartial appeal process for workers who are arbitrarily sent home before their work term is due to be completed.
• Enable workers to have access to some form of sponsorship so they can become citizens of Canada.
• Have national standards to monitor and discipline offshore recruiters.
• Have mandatory dormitory health and safety inspections.
• Revise discriminatory legislation where it exists in Canada to give agricultural workers the same rights as other workers to join a union and bargain collectively.

In Ontario, the Agricultural Employees Protection Act enables farm workers to form associations but not bargain collectively nor go out on strike.

Raper says their recommendations are designed to provide flexibility for employers and workers and acknowledge that workers “are human beings. They don’t need aggressive policies and programs in place. They’ve proven their worth to their employers.”

Forth challenged a number of the union’s assertions. For example, he says recruiters aren’t involved in the seasonal agricultural worker program. Furthermore, in Ontario there are already mandatory inspections of seasonal agricultural worker program housing by the province’s public health departments.

If there are problems, government officials from a worker’s country, who are based in Canada, can ask the department to re-inspect the housing, he says.

Moreover, under the seasonal agricultural workers program migrant workers can’t be arbitrarily sent home unless the government agent from their country working as a liaison officer in Canada gives permission. “This program has government agents from the workers’ countries that have to approve all those moves,” he says, noting UFCW doesn’t want to acknowledge that.

As for transferable work permits for workers, Forth says workers and employers sign a contract and they both have “moral obligations” to uphold the terms. It’s similar to a hockey player signing a contract to play for a specific team. BF