Canadian government braces for surge in passport renewals ahead of U.S. border reopening

2021/10/18 Leave a comment

Some interesting data. Surprising that there is not a monthly report in IRCC’s “Operational Processing” open data sets, some 8 years after passport was moved from Global Affairs to IRCC in 2013:

…

Source: Canadian government braces for surge in passport renewals ahead of U.S. border reopening

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New Zealand: Tertiary institutions given 10 years to end minority pass rate disparity

2021/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note (and the difficulty of change):

It’s the third time in the past decade the commission has set a deadline for achieving parity.

In 2012 the commission wanted to eradicate disparities in polytechnics by 2015 and in universities by 2018. But that didn’t happen. In 2018-19 the commission aimed to achieve parity within five years and fined institutions that failed to improve. But it quietly dropped that deadline and last year introduced the 10-year target.

Tertiary Education Commission deputy chief executive, Learner Success Ōritetanga Directorate, Paora Ammunson, said past attempts at tackling the disparities had failed because they were based on isolated interventions.

“One of the frustrations I guess is that our approach to equity has tended to be really well-intentioned but quite bespoke and disconnected piecemeal interventions and we’re at a stage in the TEC now where we realise that’s not going to close the gap, that’s not going to serve the learners well that we want to succeed,” he said.

Ammunson said the commission had been trialling a different approach requiring large-scale whole-of-institution changes.

“The solution is going to be about a whole-of-ecosystem approach in those institutions towards tackling the problem of attrition, really taking a holistic approach to that. Using your data intelligence, using your guidance systems, making sure that your leaders are setting the direction, making sure you’re doing it in partnership with the community groups and organisations that are important in your context,” he said.

He said the commission was confident its approach would work.

“We’ve been testing this model with tertiary partners. It will require us to work with them and it will require us to have sometimes hard conversations about parts of their delivery that aren’t achieving what they and the TEC would be expecting.”

Last year universities had a qualification completion rate of 52 percent and course completion rate of 82 percent for Māori students. For Pacific students the figures were 48 and 75 percent, while for non-Māori and non-Pacific students the figures were 66 and 90 percent.

In polytechnics Māori students had a 48 percent qualification completion rate and 70 percent course completion rate. For Pacific students the rates were 46 and 71 percent, and for non-Māori and non-Pacific students the figures were 57 and 84 percent.

The Tauira Pasifika National President of the Union of Students’ Associations, Jaistone Finau, said the time was right to tackle the disparities.

He said tertiary institutions were taking student wellbeing more seriously and were also moving to introduce a new code for pastoral care.

Finau said institutions should treat students as partners and use their insights to improve completion and retention rates.

Te Mana Akonga tumukai takirua (co-president of the Māori students’ association), Nkhaya Paulsen-More, said universities had not been doing enough to help Māori students achieve.

“University strategies seem to be aligning with Tiriti-led policies but on the ground we’re still getting complaints from students that they don’t see much of a change,” she said.

“Things like ‘my lecturer doesn’t understand me because I’m Māori and they don’t respect the fact that I’m not the person to go to automatically if they don’t understand anything that’s Māori’, so being referred to as the cultural trainer in formal settings or utilising their knowledge without reimbursing them for that knowledge.”

The organisation’s other tumuaki takirua, Renāta White, said if the commission used financial penalties against institutions that failed to make progress, it should require the institutions to spend the money on improvements.

“I would rather the funds go back into supporting the students. So if there is a fine they are fined needing to employ maybe more support and mental health or more support and peer mentorship rather than the funds going back to government,” he said.

Huhāna Wātene from the Tertiary Education Union said universities and polytechnics could make a big difference for Māori students by hiring more Māori academics and tutors.

She said students also needed more culturally-appropriate support.

“In institutes whether it be in schools, polytechnics, kohanga, kura, it’s the services that are wrapped round them [students] that really assist and allow them to flourish. If you put any students, not just Māori and Pasifika, in that kind of environment they can’t do anything but do well,” she said.

“We know for a fact that Māori students do exceedingly well when they have that support services around them or people who value and appreciate their cultural aspirations and the tikanga.”

Wātene said the commission should use incentives rather than penalties to encourage change.

Source: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/453303/tertiary-institutions-given-10-years-to-end-minority-pass-rate-disparity

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DiManno: Why can’t we say ‘woman’ anymore?

2021/10/18 Leave a comment

Some silliness going on that DiManno highlights:

“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Person with a Vagina.”

“Man! I Feel Like a Person who Menstruates”

“Oh, Pretty Person with a Cervix”

Apologies to Aretha Franklin, Shania Twain and Roy Orbison, but this appears to be where we’re heading if language radicals get their way.

And they’re getting it, tying everybody up in linguistic knots so as not to offend or get clobbered by the social media mob.

The inclusive objective is worthy.

The erasure of women is not.

“Woman” is in danger of becoming a dirty word … struck from the lexicon of officialdom, eradicated from medical vocabulary and expunged from conversation.

Which is a bitchy thing to do to half the world’s population.

It shouldn’t leave well-meaning people tongue-tied, lest they be attacked as transphobic or otherwise insensitive to the increasingly complex constructs of gender. 

“The Lancet,” the prestigious and highly influential British medical journal, put “Bodies with Vaginas” on the cover of its latest issue, referring to an article inside, entitled “Periods on Display,” a review of an exhibit about the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London.

Maybe the editors, who tweeted the piece, were just looking for clickbait, with a pullquote on the cover teasing that “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of such bodies have been neglected” — this although the author had used the phrase “bodies with vaginas,” only once and “women” four times. 

A hell-storm broke out, quite rightly, with readers indignant over the wording. As one, an author of books on childbirth and women’s bodies, wrote: “You’re telling us that you’ve noticed that, for hundreds of years, you’ve neglected and overlooked women, and, then, in the same breath, you are unable to name those people you’ve been ignoring.”

The magazine’s editor-in-chief apologized hastily. 

This isn’t an argument against gender self-identification. Surely we’re well past that. It’s more about an infelicitous evolution of language, which is fundamentally about communicating clearly. Even if making the argument ends up aligning uncomfortably with reactionaries and regressives with whom I have no truck. 

In one fell swoop, “The Lancet” — remember, this is a medical publication! — reduced womanhood, biological or metaphysical, to purely anatomical parts, a gross reversal of the century-long campaign to, not only achieve equal rights, but for women to be seen as more than their biological and rampantly objectified, sexualized packaging. This is fundamental to feminism and humanism. Further, we are seeing, in, for example, legislation passed or coming down the pike in U.S. to severely restrict abortions, basically undoing Roe vs. Wade, how fragile these gains can be. 

“That Lancet” episode was not an over-woke outlier. 

The American Civil Liberties Union took detestable liberties by deliberately mauling the words of beloved and brilliant Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in marking the one-year anniversary of her death. Reaching back to comments Ginsburg made during her confirmation hearings in 1980, wherein she spoke about the right of women to obtain an abortion, the ACLU unilaterally removed “woman,” replacing it with “person.”

It came out thusly: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a (person’s) life, to (their) wellbeing and dignity …. When the government controls that decision for (people), (they are) being treated as less than a fully adult human and responsible for (their) own choices.” 

Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, also subsequently issued a grovelling mea culpa, promising he’d never again drastically alter quotes in the future.

But is that really a lesson that needed to be pounded into his head? 

And still Romero tried to justify his interference by claiming that Ginsburg would have supported more inclusive language.

Maybe so. I would really like to know what she might have thought. But we don’t and can’t and it’s outrageous for anyone to mishmash the justice’s voice.

Women have abortions. Or, I suppose, in the tiniest of numbers, people born with female genitals who identify as male or fluid can terminate a pregnancy.

Women have babies. Or, in the tiniest of numbers, people born with female genitals who identify as male or fluid, can get pregnant. 

Yet in 2016, the British Medical Association recommended staff use “pregnant people,” instead of pregnant women. A British hospital now instructs staff on its maternity ward to use “birthing people,” instead of pregnant women. The Biden administration’s proposed 2022 budget substituted “birth people” for mothers. Rep. Cori Bush has used that term, while her Congressional Squad teammate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has talked of “menstruating people.”

These are women I admire but they’ve jumped the shark. 

All of this recalls the point bestselling author J.K. Rowling was trying to make, wryly, in a tweet that got her bludgeoned by the mob: “People who menstruate. I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” 

Rowling was branded a TERF — activists do like their neologisms — meaning trans exclusionary radical feminist. As if she was hostile to the trans movement, which she assuredly is not. Some bookstores removed her work from their shelves. Were she not a gazillion-selling author, Rowling could have lost her publisher.

In Britain, where roughly 680,000 people do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, according to government figures, midwives at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals were told to start using terms such as “chest milk,” instead of breast milk. This, apparently, because some transgender men who give birth and nurse their babies were distressed at being reminded of what they were doing with those lactating female appendages. Although surely “breast” is a gender-neutral term, as both sexes have them and both can develop breast cancer. 

This is all directly a phenomenon resulting from trans activism run amok.

I get the passion for recasting language, to improve gender and LGBT equity, to minimize the “cognitive mental salience” of males. 

The movement has been spectacularly successful in the progressive West, although English isn’t as heavily gendered as, say, Italian or French. Truly, props for an undertaking that has given voice and power to a demographic historically oppressed, horribly shaped and disproportionately subjected to violence!

Merriam-Webster was the first dictionary to add gender-neutral pronouns “they” and “themself” to refer to a person whose “gender identity is non-binary.” 

But these examples go far beyond insistence on neutral pronouns, into an outer orbit of linguistics where both women, as a gender, and “woman” as a noun are being blotted out. 

There’s more than a whiff of misogyny to it. Why “woman” the no-speak word and not “man?” Why not “persons who urinate standing up” or “people who eject semen?” 

Certainly there are words — they are slurs mostly — that are no longer acceptable. “Woman” shouldn’t be one of them. 

The battleground of language has turned into a baffleground of agendas. 

I am woman and I am roaring.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2021/10/15/why-cant-we-say-woman-anymore.html

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USA: Student loan debt is deepening the racial wealth divide

2021/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note. Anyone aware of comparable studies, even if Canadian tuition rates are more reasonable than in the US:

By design, economists’ reports are rather staid, which makes it all the more noticeable that in their 2016 report Black-White Disparity in Student Loan Debt more than Triples after Graduation, written for the New York-based Brookings Institution (BI), Professor Judith Scott-Clayton and Jing Li characterised the US$25,000 loan debt gap between whites and blacks in the United States a few years after graduation as “whopping”. 

At graduation, black students owed US$7,400 more than did their white peers (US$23,400 vs US$16,000). 

Since Scott-Clayton and Li’s paper, a series of other papers BI published have shown that the gap, if anything, has grown. 

Last June, a paper prepared for BI by Andre M Perry, Marshall Steinbaum and Carl Romer showed that in 2019, 75% of blacks who took out student loans to finance higher education owed more than they had borrowed as compared with 48% of whites.

“Black students finance their education through debt, and thus college degrees actually further contribute to the fragility of the upwardly mobile black middle class,” wrote Perry et al in Student Loans, the Racial Wealth Divide, and Why We Need Full Student Debt Cancellation.

“And because education does not achieve income parity for black workers, the disproportionate debt black students are taking to finance their education reinforces the racial wealth gap. Today the average white family has roughly 10 times the amount of wealth as the average black family, while white college graduates have over seven times more wealth than black college graduates.”

The debt differential begins as soon as the students write their first cheques. The financial crisis of many black families means that a much lower percentage are able to contribute to their sons’ and daughters’ higher education than is the case for white families. 

Some 72% of black students (as opposed to 34% of white students) qualify for Pell Grants. This federal programme provides the very poor with a maximum of US$6,495, roughly one-third of the cost of tuition, room and board at public universities and colleges, and a seventh of the average cost at private colleges and universities. 

In their study, Perry et al point out that the black student debt crisis is partially fuelled by the shift from “public funding to tuition-based business models in higher education – all financed with federal student loans”. 

According to figures from the American Association of University Professors, between 2009 and 2011 state governments cut their grant for full-time students at state universities and colleges from US$9,124 to US$7,364. 

Only in 2019-20 did the state grant equal what it was in 2009. The cumulative financial loss over this period for each full-time student is more than US$7,800. These figures show the reality behind Perry et al’s claim that “the balance (US$1.7 trillion) on the federal books represents the states’ disinvestment from higher education”.

Further adding to the aggregate black student debt is the fact that about 12% of black students enrol in for-profit colleges and universities, approximately twice the rate of whites. This sector has come under scrutiny for predatory practices that target, among others, economically disadvantaged populations such as blacks. 

“Despite enrolling only 11% of the higher education population, for-profit colleges and universities receive 25% of all federal student aid … Some of the largest for-profit colleges receive as much as 90% of their total funding from federal aid, incentivising schools to target low-income students and veterans who are eligible for large amounts of federal aid,” wrote William Roberts, managing director for democracy and government reform at American Progress, and Marissa Parker-Bair in an article published on the Center for American Progress’s website in July 2019.

According to Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrolment management at Oregon State University, “in addition to predatory practices, for-profit colleges and universities have very successfully lobbied the federal government to reduce oversight of their programmes”. 

“Further, for-profit colleges and universities tend to have lower graduation rates (26% v 60%) which means that students who took out loans to attend these institutions are unable to benefit from the increased salaries that are expected for college graduates. Historically, default rates for students who don’t finish the degree or programme they started are considerably higher than for graduates,” Boeckenstedt said.

Struggling to repay

The wage gap between blacks and whites is a significant factor in why black students – both those who drop out as well as those who graduate – struggle to repay their student loans. 

In 2019 the US Department of Education reported that one year out from graduation, blacks who hold bachelor degrees earn 10% less than their white counterparts (US$36,000 to US$40,000). In 2020 the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection reported that, for whites and blacks who are further into their careers, the annual salary gap grows to US$21,900: US$64,700 to US$42,800. 

Nor does higher education close the gap. A slightly higher percentage of blacks go on to graduate school than do whites (14% to 13%). Yet, wrote Scott-Clayton and Li, “blacks with graduate degrees still earn less on average than whites with only a bachelor degree.” 

Equally important for why blacks are less able to repay their college loans is the structure of the federal student loan programme. As soon as a student drops out of college or university, or graduates, the interest clock starts ticking. 

Graduate students are given a forbearance from repaying their undergraduate loans for the period of time they are enrolled in graduate school; however, the interest keeps accruing. 

The accrual of interest onto the principal debt, what economists call ‘negative amortisation’, is why nearly half of all blacks who took out student loans owe more on their loans than they did upon graduation.

A further factor mitigating against blacks repaying student loans is the direction of intergenerational transfer of wealth in black families. 

According to a 2017 study covering 23 years beginning in 1989 and conducted by the Economic Research unit of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (FRBSL), after graduation white students benefit from their families transferring money to them to, for example, put a down payment on a house. By contrast, the FRBSL found that black graduates are much more likely to transfer money to their families to, for example, support their parents, thus leaving less money each month for loan repayment.

Neither the ability of well-off families, which are disproportionately white, to refinance student debt at favourable rates, nor what the income tax act allows former students to deduct from their income taxes, directly contribute to the debt crisis faced by blacks. 

They do, however, contribute to the wealth gap between the two groups and, thus, skew perceptions of the issue, leading some to argue that those who cannot repay their debts are the authors of their own misfortune.

Graduates from well-off families benefit from their history of positive credit scores. The interest rate on federal student loans is presently 6.8%. The most creditworthy customers, however, are able to refinance student debt for as low as 1.8%, says Carl Romer, Perry’s co-author. 

All former students can deduct US$2,500 of interest charges from their federal taxes. However, as Romer explained to me, the greater benefit goes to those who have borrowed less money. “If your loan is US$100,00 and you are paying 6% interest, then you are paying US$6,000 in interest. But you are still allowed to deduct only US$2,500 in interest. This penalises households with high amounts of student loans, which are disproportionately black households,” he told University World News.

The inequity is even more striking if we look at it over 20 years. Students who can refinance their debt at 1.8% repay the debt at the rate of US$496 a month and pay US$19,150 in total interest. Students whose debts are repaid at 6.8% interest pay US$763 per month and over 20 years pay US$83,000 in interest, or more than four times the amount their peers from well-off families pay.

Alleviating worst consequences

In their 2016 paper, among their proposals, Scott-Clayton and Li theorised that a ‘Revised Pay As You Earn’ (REPAYE) could alleviate the worst consequences of the racial debt disparities. 

Their caveats, including daunting paperwork and the fact that “too often students do not learn about the income-contingent options until after they are already in trouble – having missed payments, accumulated fees and damaged their credit” have proven all too prescient.

“Policy-makers as far back as the Clinton administration were very much influenced by the income-driven repayment plans in place in Australia and the UK,” Scott-Clayton says. 

“The difference in both of these cases, though, is that in those countries the plans work much more seamlessly with the treasury and payments are integrated into the tax system. So, this [the American system] is kind of trying to take that model and fit it into the very not automatic US system.”

REPAYE may look fair on paper, having, for example, former students pay 15% of their income towards their debt. Yet, Romer notes, because these households are in such straightened conditions, the presence of, in many cases, decades-old student debt on their credit report means “they are unable to access the type of credit that middle-class households need in order to thrive”.

“They are not able to get a credit card. They are not able to purchase a home. They are not able to do the types of things that would make their lives that much easier.”

Nor, Romer says, does the government’s logic make sense. For those who have been paying 15% for 20 or 25 years, the government cancels the debt.

“This is another reason why we say to cancel the debt instead of holding these households really hostage to their student debt for minimal levels of repayment, if any, it is better to just make their lives better by cancelling the debt.”

After underscoring that 51% of the student debt is held by households with zero or negative net worth, and that black households at every income level and at every age are more likely to hold student debt than are non-black households, as had Scott-Clayton, Romer framed the question as a social justice issue.

Romer concluded, however, by speaking the language of political economy, saying that cancellation of student debt can help in the economic recovery from the COVID crisis. The FRBSL, he says, found that student debt slowed the recovery from the 2009 Recession. According to Romer, the Lee Institute based in Charlotte, North Carolina, reported that cancelling student debt would grow the economy by US$100 billion every year for the next 10 years. 

“They did this study five years ago. So, the amount of student debt has only grown since and it is pretty simple to infer their projection would have grown as well. As we recover from the pandemic-induced recession, it’s important to think about how previous economic studies on the macro-economic effects of student debt have shown that the answer is to cancel it in order to grow the economy,” says Romer.

Targeted or piecemeal approach?

A few days before I interviewed Scott-Clayton, the Biden administration cancelled the student debt of 323,000 people who together owed US$5.8 billion, which brought the number of former students whose debt the government had wiped out to 455,000 and the amount to US$8.7 billion. 

When I asked her about the government’s approach, given that the amount on the government’s books was US$1.7 trillion, Scott-Clayton said: “It is obvious that rather than pushing hard for some kind of blanket forgiveness, they’re trying to do a more targeted approach. And, to the extent that they are committed to that, they’ll keep identifying additional groups that are at high risk of delinquency and default.”

The problem with this piecemeal approach, she says, is that it “won’t reach all the borrowers who urgently need help”.

Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-nl.php?story=20211015145615217

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Carpentier et Harel: L’interculturalisme, seul choix pour Montréal

2021/10/18 Leave a comment

More semantic than substantive, with the main difference being reference to a French-based society rather than multiculturalism’s reference to both official languages and bilingualism. And highly ironic given that most opposition to Bill 21 is in Montreal, precisely because of its divisiveness and exclusion, not inclusion:

Les 50 ans de la politique du multiculturalisme canadien (1971-2021), commémorés par Justin Trudeau le 8 octobre dernier, conduisent à une négation telle de la nation québécoise qu’un candidat à la mairie de Montréal s’est cru autorisé à proposer un référendum pour choisir la ou les langues officielles en usage dans la métropole.

Cette déclaration et bien d’autres du même acabit sont les résultantes de la même conception qu’affiche le premier ministre du Canada lorsqu’il affirmait, cette semaine : « En plus des membres des Premières Nations, des Métis et des Inuits, des personnes appartenant à plus de 250 groupes ethniques considèrent le Canada comme leur foyer et célèbrent leur patrimoine culturel avec fierté. » Exit l’existence de la nation québécoise, de son histoire, de sa culture, et la nécessité d’intégrer en français la diversité ethnoculturelle qui l’habite et contribue à sa vitalité. Cet état de fait est fortement préoccupant dans le contexte d’une nation francophone minoritaire en Amérique du Nord, dont les besoins démographiques et l’épanouissement sont assurés par l’immigration.

Multiculturalisme vs interculturalisme

Alors que le multiculturalisme canadien est consacré par une politique officielle (1971), un principe interprétatif de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés (1982) et une loi (1988), le Québec n’a jamais formalisé son approche interculturelle en matière d’aménagement de la diversité ethnoculturelle et d’intégration des personnes immigrantes. Le choix québécois de l’interculturalisme a bien fait l’objet de définitions ici et là et de déclarations publiques, mais rien sur le plan juridique ne vient le soutenir.

Pourtant, le multiculturalisme et l’interculturalisme diffèrent, notamment en ce qui a trait aux représentations de la communauté politique et nationale qu’ils proposent au regard de la diversité. L’approche québécoise insiste sur la présence d’une société d’accueil francophone, alors que celle promue par le gouvernement fédéral et les autres provinces, qui représentent une culture anglo-saxonne hégémonique, n’en ressent pas le besoin.

Sortir de l’ambiguïté et de l’imprécision

Nous sommes sensibles aux craintes exprimées par Gérard Bouchard quant aux dangers associés au laisser-faire québécois, lequel favoriserait le développement d’un véritable multiculturalisme montréalais.

D’autant que cela contribue à creuser le fossé qui sépare Montréal du Québec des régions. La présente campagne à la mairie est l’occasion de demander au gouvernement de formaliser l’interculturalisme. C’est là un élément crucial du rôle que la métropole doit assumer dans le contexte québécois !

Engagement électoral phare pour Montréal

Malgré les bonnes volontés exprimées de toutes parts, ce choix de l’interculturalisme demeurera vide de sens tant qu’il ne sera pas officialisé — et pourquoi pas constitutionnalisé, alors que le gouvernement s’apprête à modifier la Constitution interne du Québec en vertu du projet de loi 96 à l’étude.

Comme candidate et candidats à la mairie, faire preuve d’audace serait de demander à Québec cet ajout essentiel pour établir clairement les conditions du vivre-ensemble, indispensable pour une métropole cosmopolite comme la nôtre.

Il s’agit aussi pour Montréal, dans le cadre québécois, d’un engagement qui fait appel à sa responsabilité quant à la réaffirmation du caractère pluriel de la nation, où l’on ne peut faire l’économie de la conciliation entre les aspirations de la majorité francophone et la valorisation de la diversité ethnoculturelle. Autrement dit, si Montréal ne prend pas clairement position pour une nation inclusive, qui le fera ?

Source: L’interculturalisme, seul choix pour Montréal

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We’re about to find out how many new seats there will be in Parliament. Then the fighting starts

2021/10/16 Leave a comment

Yes, indeed. Looking forward to the overview and eventually the new riding list:

The federal election may be over but a new fight over ridings is about to start.

On Friday, the Star has learned, Elections Canada will announce the number of new seats each province will be allocated in the House of Commons. It’s not quite the gerrymandering that occurs in the United States — where politicians draw zigzags to create safe districts — but every 10 years in Canada new constituencies are added and riding boundaries are reviewed. And here too, MPs have lots to say about where they want those lines to be.

“Every party is going to look at this and say, ‘OK, what polls did we win? Where did we lose? How can we create a combination that will give us the best outcome at election time?,’” one MP told the Star. “Everybody does it.”

It may be less overt — and less successful — in Canada but political parties will try to sway the decisions of the independent three-person commissions that decide where the boundaries go.

Those panels, one for each province, will be struck in the next two weeks. The chair is named by the province’s chief justice and the two other members by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Liberal MP Anthony Rota. Over the next year, they’ll draw up a proposal for where they think the lines should be, based on population data from this year’s census. The public will then have a say before a final report is issued. That’s where things can get interesting.

In 2012, for example, when the Saskatchewan commission suggested getting rid of eight pizza-shaped ridings that split Regina and Saskatoon up into four pieces with a tiny bit of urban area and a large rural part, there was massive opposition.

The commission suggested creating two urban districts in Regina and three in Saskatoon to reflect the cities’ rapid growth. They expected 40 people to show up at the hearings: 230 registered. Four extra days were added to the schedule.

MPs came, as did defeated candidates, small town representatives and the public. The vast majority opposed the changes. But once commissioners started receiving identical postcards and petitions and 3,000 written submissions, they understood politicians had mobilized their supporters.

The commission’s task was to consider the community of interest and weigh that against a manageable geographic size for districts. What the commissioners heard at the hearings were concerns that carving out urban seats would give the NDP an advantage. (For the record, since 2019, the Conservatives have held all the province’s 14 seats.)

Still, unlike the 2002 commission that bent to public pressure after proposing six urban districts, the 2012 commission resisted. Well, two commissioners — Justice Ronald Mills and Prof. John Courtney — did. A third, David Marit, now the MLA for Wood River and Saskatchewan’s agriculture minister, wrote a dissenting report calling on parliamentarians to reverse the commission’s decisions. He worried the new ridings would lead to voter apathy, didn’t reflect natural trade patterns, and felt the province’s growing population would mean it would revert to urban-rural ridings in 10 years.

Some Conservatives certainly hope that happens. They argue the rural ridings are too large. In Kelly Block’s Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek riding, for example, driving to all three corners takes about six hours. “Is that safe, especially in the wintertime?” asked one MP. “We’re going to watch [this process] very closely. No question about that.”

NDP national director Anne McGrath told me this week it’s too early to say what her party’s priorities will be but “clearly, we wouldn’t want to return to the days of the really wonky boundaries that existed, particularly in Saskatchewan.” Ridings, McGrath suggested, should match “the test of common sense.”

One riding the NDP opposed back in 2012 was the bizarrely shaped Burnaby North—Seymour, which includes part of North Vancouver on one side of the Burrard Inlet and North Burnaby on the other. NDP MP Peter Julian argued at the time that commissioners were forcibly joining two communities that had little in common. Unsurprisingly, the Liberal MP who’s won three elections since the riding was created in 2015, doesn’t want to see it changed. “I would like to keep representing the community that I currently represent,” Terry Beech said. Aside from the traffic on the bridge, he said, representing the riding has been “a wonderful experience.”

What concerns most MPs is the battle in the suburbs and increasingly the ex-urban areas around the GTA and in places like Kitchener, Hamilton, London and Vancouver.

“People can’t afford to live there anymore so they’re moving out a little bit further, and that takes the more ‘lefty vote’ and spreads it,” one Conservative MP said.

Tory incumbents in places such as Brantford—Brant, Flamborough—Glanbrook and Dufferin—Caledon should be worried, that MP added. “That will flip those close seats in those areas.”

Whatever the result of the commissions’ work, it’s unlikely to take effect until after April 2024 — that could be after the next election.

Source: We’re about to find out how many new seats there will be in Parliament. Then the fighting starts

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with ,

Building back better includes taking action against hatred

2021/10/16 Leave a comment

The how is the difficult part:

“Don’t read the comments . . . Don’t feed the trolls.” There’s a certain caricature of people who write nasty, hateful comments online. This election campaign, it seemed as if the people who express hate in comments sections and on social media decided to show up in real life, armed with nasty signs and throwing rocks at the incumbent prime minister. Many of these protesters were supporters of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC).

Hate crimes are on the rise in Canada, including an increase in anti-Muslim hate arising from the policies and rhetoric of the post-9/11 world. We know hate crimes are the highest they’ve been since Statistics Canada started tracking them in 2009, that they are under-reported, and that only one per cent of reported hate crimes are investigated by police.

Some of this can be linked to the COVID-19 pandemic — for instance, a dramatic rise in anti-Asian hate crimes motivated by the virus’s origins in China. Researchers have also documented connections between the anti-vaxx movement and far-right groups. “The racist right that we monitor and the COVID conspiracy movement are inseparable from each other at this point,” Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, told the Canadian Press.

We know there is a problem. I want to talk about what we can do about it. Here are policy solutions that we should take seriously in this new climate of hate and far-right extremist activity.

Scrutinize and go after far-right and white supremacist movements with the same vigour as other terrorist groups

When I was an undergraduate student in the 2010s, it was normal for officers from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to infiltrate Muslim Student Associations as part of anti-terrorism efforts by the Canadian government. Some students even had CSIS officers come knocking on their doors. These activities were done in the name of “community outreach,” presumably to groups thought to be potential breeding grounds for terrorism.

Over the past two decades, Canada has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on anti-terrorism efforts through activities such as counter-terrorism capacity building, research funding and augmenting agencies such as CSIS and the Canada Border Services Agency, Stephanie Carvin, associate professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, said in an interview.

So now that we know the demographics, whereabouts and identities of violent far-right extremists, where is the same level of policy action and government spending?

We need to dedicate adequate funding and personnel to root out violent extremism in far-right and white supremacist extremist groups. The federal government has acknowledged the threat of white supremacy and radicalization in Canada, and has funded research into far-right extremism and listed far-right and white supremacist groups as terrorist entities. But I want to see the same level of funding, urgency and legislation devoted to combatting white supremacist and far-right movements as we did other efforts to counter violent extremism. We urgently need governments to take action against hate — both harmful online activities and the violent hate crimes that have seen an uptick in recent years. The National Council of Canadian Muslims published a robust list of recommended legislation this summer, which provides clear direction for federal, provincial and municipal governments to better legislate against hate.

As part of pandemic recovery, find ways for people to connect with each other again

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unfortunately, it’s hard to build political will to implement preventative policy solutions because the fruits of those investments often come many years later — when the government of the day is no longer in office.

We are emerging out of (and, strangely, simultaneously re-entering) a prolonged period of isolation and frustration. There are decades of research that show these conditions breed radicalization and extremist views. “Isolation exacerbates already existing grievances, leaving individuals vulnerable to extremism,” argued a May 2021 piece in openDemocracy. The Canadian government’s own 2018 National Strategy on Countering Radicalization to Violence (which focuses on groups such as groups such as Daesh and al-Qaeda but also references far-right extremism) acknowledged that a “desire for empowerment, belonging, [and] purpose” can help radicalize individuals.

There are policy implications for the isolation, frustration and anger we have all experienced over the last year and a half, and we see it in the increased polarization in our society. I want to see government fund programs that have people meaningfully engage with those they don’t agree with — Stanford University’s America in One Room project is a great example — as well as grassroots organizations that provide opportunities for individuals to connect with community. While Heritage Canada has funded anti-hate and anti-racism programs, these programs should be expanded in scope and funding as we emerge from this pandemic, especially given the tripling of popular support for the PPC in just two years.

It has only been a few months since four members of the Afzaal family were fatally run down by a truck in broad daylight in London, Ont. I wonder about the journey taken by the man accused of their murder. What happened to him in the years and months before this violent, Islamophobic crime? How many others are going through the same journey he did, and are on the cusp of expressing their hatred through violent means?

If we don’t take action fast enough, we will find out the hard way.

Source: https://policyresponse.ca/building-back-better-includes-taking-action-against-hatred/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=151021&utm_source=Policy+Response&utm_campaign=b0da1d1e1d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_02_25_11_09_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e0a96a8e52-b0da1d1e1d-377030342

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Government urged to speed up foreign-worker applications by farms and meat plants

2021/10/16 Leave a comment

No surprise. Some administrative bottlenecks likely can (and should) be reduced (e.g., reintroduction of online forms, more streamlined application and renewal applications):

Canadian farmers and meat processors are urging Ottawa to quickly bring in more foreign workers to help ease a labour crisis that is hurting the country’s agriculture industry.

They want the federal government to raise caps and speed up applications for the temporary foreign worker program to allow them to increase production.

Agriculture is one of many sectors struggling to add staff as the Canadian economy tries to recover from the damage caused by the coronavirus.

Although farms and plants were not subject to the sorts of lockdowns faced by restaurants or retailers, the pandemic made travel to rural sites difficult and slowed or stopped international travel. As well, COVID-19 outbreaks in some facilities put migrant workers’ health in danger and hampered operations.

But, agricultural business leaders say, the flow of foreign workers to Canada is integral to keeping the sector functioning as it has struggled for years to retain domestic employees.

Groups, including the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA), Mushrooms Canada and the Canadian Meat Council, say application processing times have grown exponentially during the pandemic, which is making it more difficult for farms and plants to maximize their production.

“When we talk about unfilled jobs, what we’re talking about is lost opportunity,” said Mary Robinson, CFA president and partner of a family farm operation that produces soy, barley and hay in Prince Edward Island. The CFA estimated the agriculture industry lost about $2.9-billion in revenue in 2020 because of low productivity, or about 4.5 per cent of overall sales.

Canadian agriculture has increasingly relied on bringing in workers from overseas to make up for shortfalls in domestic hiring. According to a Statistics Canada analysis from 2020, 27.4 per cent of all workers on crop production in Canada were temporary foreign workers (TFWs).

Meat processors have fewer foreign workers because, by law, there is a cap of 10 per cent or 20 per cent of their work force that can be TFWs. The percentage depends on the amount of a plant’s historical use of the program.

Marie-France MacKinnon, vice-president of public affairs at the Canadian Meat Council, said her group is calling for the cap to be raised to 30 per cent, which is where it was before the Ottawa lowered it in 2014. That year, the Conservative government tightened the rules to the TFW program, responding to reports that it was being overused and abused by some Canadian businesses.

“Our labour shortage is critical right now,” Ms. MacKinnon said. “It’s over 4,000 empty butcher stations from across the country.”

The federal government said in a statement Thursday that adjustments to the program are made on a continuing basis, depending on changes in labour-market conditions.

Mark Chambers, vice-president of Canadian pork production at Alberta-based Sunterra Farms, says his production runs below capacity because of a shortage of workers. He said his pork-processing plant has 120 stations, 20 of which are empty because there is no one to work them.

Mr. Chambers said he has had difficulty attracting new domestic workers to the company’s farms and plants, which he attributes to the low population of the rural communities, the reluctance of urban Canadians to work in the country and the nature of the work.

“You can’t completely fill every position with Canadians,” he said.

As part of the application to bring in a temporary foreign worker, employers first have to fill out a Labour Market Impact Assessment to show that no Canadians want the job. The federal government unveiled a new online form last year to speed up applications. But the website went down in August and has remained offline in the months since then, forcing employers to once again file by e-mail or fax.

Mr. Chambers said using the online portal, the turnaround time on an application was two to seven days – but now that he’s back to old methods, it’s lengthened to two to four weeks.

A spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said some “technical issues” emerged on the website after an update, and department officials are still working on a fix. The government was not able to provide a timeline for when it would be online again.

The government also said processing times have increased because of an increase in the number of applications.

Representatives of the meat industry say their goal is to bring workers into Canada under the TFW program and then sponsor them for permanent residency, because their ultimate aim is to create a long-term work force in the sector. Ottawa made that easier with the launch of the Agri-Food Immigration Pilot in 2020, which allows agricultural employers to sponsor non-seasonal, full-time employees for permanent residency under some conditions.

Syed Hussan, the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance of Canada, said if Canada’s economy requires an influx of new immigrants, those people should be brought in through permanent-residency programs and not work permits that are tied to individual employers.

He said migrant workers who have to rely on their employers’ good graces to stay in the country are open to exploitation and abuse, such as having to endure unsafe working conditions. He said he has worked with TFWs who feared lodging labour complaints because they could lose their work permits if they did.

“Our members say this isn’t a pathway [to permanent residency], it’s a minefield where very few of us will survive to get to the other end,” Mr. Hussan said. “And most of us will be injured or hurt or forced to leave the country.”

Mr. Hussan said one solution is for TFWs and their sponsorship status to be protected under collective bargaining agreements, which helps shield those workers from employer reprisals.

One such agreement covers about 2,000 workers at the Maple Leafs Foods’ pork-processing plant in Brandon. That agreement requires all TFWs to be sponsored for permanent residence, which they can qualify for under the provincial nominee system after working two years.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-government-urged-to-speed-up-foreign-worker-applications-by-farms-and/

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Wage theft hits immigrants — hard

2021/10/16 Leave a comment

Curious to know extent of this practice in Canada with respect to Temporary Foreign Workers and Permanent Residents:

Audelia Molina, a Mexican immigrant, was earning 10 cents for every garment she trimmed at a factory in Los Angeles, America’s clothing-assembly capital. Her wage was so meager that she started putting in 11-hour days to drive up production. When she asked for a raise, a supervisor denied her request, so she quit in July 2017 — and turned to a labor-rights attorney to help her file an unpaid-wage complaint with the California Labor Commissioner.

A year later, the state found that Molina was paid, on average, $199 a week, violating overtime law and rules that piece-rate workers earn at least the state’s then $10.50 hourly minimum wage. But Molina’s employer didn’t pay her the almost $23,000 owed, not including attorney fees. Her best option was to apply to a state fund for cheated garment workers, a rare backstop California finances with business registration fees.

It took two more years before Molina received her check. Her former employer still hasn’t reimbursed the state fund, as required.

A 30-year resident of California, Molina got caught in a toxic cycle centuries old: Immigrants perform some of America’s lowest-paying, arduous jobs, and are among those most victimized by employers failing to pay them fairly. Even if they have support to file a lawsuit or a claim — with a state labor agency, as Molina did, or the U.S. Department of Labor — they often settle for less to get money faster or must wait as cases drag on.

“They pay whatever they want to pay,” said Molina, now 58, referring generally to the worst of garment factory employers she’s had over the years. “What interests them,” she said, “is that the work gets done, and fast.”

Just like U.S. citizens, any non-citizen whose job is covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act has the right to be paid overtime after 40 hours and the minimum hourly wage. But it’s not unusual for immigrant workers, documented or not, to face employer intimidation — which is illegal — when they assert their rights.

The U.S. Department of Labor, which operates in all states, doesn’t ask victims of suspected wage theft if they’re immigrants. The agency plainly acknowledges that complaints are reviewed regardless of workers’ immigration status.

But a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Labor Department and U.S. Census Bureau data found that industries with higher percentages of foreign-born workers had higher rates of wage theft.

Nationally, 16 percent of U.S. workers are foreign-born. By contrast, 42 percent of all workers performing cut-and-sew garment assembly are immigrants. That’s one of the highest percentages of immigrant workers in the nation. Public Integrity’s analysis also found that the cut-and-sew garment industry had the second highest rate of federal wage-violation cases over the last 15 years.

Other industries with significant numbers of immigrant workers and wage-theft problems include agriculture, building maintenance, hotel work, restaurant and other food services. In certain regions, immigrants and wage problems are also concentrated in construction, nursing homes, warehouses and car washes.

The AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor organization, has long argued that a path to legal status for millions of undocumented workers is crucial to reducing wage theft that harms all workers. After years of deadlock, Democrats who control Congress are struggling to advance proposals for a path for some of the undocumented, most of whom have been here for years and are deeply rooted in families and local economies.

“Immigration is integral to the nation’s economic growth,” a seminal 2016 National Academy of Sciences report found, examining research on documented and undocumented workers. “If the American economy grows and requires more workers both to replace those who retire and to create new firms and industries, the primary source of labor will be first and second-generation immigrants.”

In Los Angeles, nobody disputes that undocumented workers are among the 45,000 Latino and Asian immigrants who sew clothing that ends up in many high-end chains and other retail stores. When the pandemic hit last year, some garment workers began sewing face masks and other crucial protective gear. Some 300 workers contracted the coronavirus themselves at one factory, Los Angeles Apparel, and six died.

“The pandemic highlighted the issue of the high level of immigrant workers, especially undocumented workers who were essential workers,” said Victor Narro, project director of the University of California, Los Angeles Labor Center. “What are we going to do for them now?”

Narro supports a path to legal status — and a bill that California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Sept. 27 that will bar piece-rate pay for garment workers unless it’s additional to an hourly wage and part of a collective-bargaining contract. Staff at L.A.’s nonprofit Garment Worker Center, where Molina learned about her labor rights, lobbied for years for the bill. Center staff say that wage claims they’ve helped file showed an average pay of about $5 an hour — nowhere near legal thresholds. The law, in effect as of 2022, also extends broad wage-theft liability to retailers that contract with factories.

Narro hopes for more reforms to speed collection of unpaid wages.

“Justice needs to happen more on the front end,” he said, “and then all the way on the back end.”

A century of immigrant exploitation

The struggle for fair pay in California echoes a time in the early 20th century, when immigrant garment workers from Europe fought for protections eventually enshrined in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

Immigrants toiled in dangerous conditions that led to New York City’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Flames engulfed a building and 146 people died, 125 of them immigrant women and girls. Outraged workers fought for safety and child-labor laws and developed momentum toward a national minimum wage. By the time standards were approved, though, immigration was plummeting, reduced by nativist policies with quotas and exclusions.

By 1970, with nativist policies lifted, legal immigration was again on the upswing. But between 1990 and 2007, the undocumented population tripled. That created an unprecedented pool of nearly 11 million people who are more vulnerable to workplace abuse — and who work in communities coast to coast.

Because of alleged abuse, U.S. labor officials this past August obtained a preliminary injunction barring a Danbury, Connecticut, bakery owner from “retaliating, taking any adverse action, or threatening to take any adverse action” against employees. The Labor Department alleges that the owner of Padaminas NY Bakery told workers that he’d fire them or report them to immigration agents if they spoke with labor officials who were investigating the bakery’s employment practices. Bakery staff hung up when contacted by phone for a comment about the allegations.

In California, federal labor officials in May ordered an L.A. County contractor producing garments for the Anna Bella label to pay 10 employees a total of $5,846 in back wages. The department also ordered the contractor to pay $3,485 in penalties for “willful” violations related to bookkeeping and cash-only payments to workers.

Ruben Rosalez, the Department of Labor’s California-based West Coast regional director of wage and hour enforcement, said that while officials don’t inquire about immigration status, their probes often take them to businesses employing “a lot of people of color and large immigrant populations.”

“This is 2021,” Rosalez said. “To have minimum wage, federal minimum wage violations in the garment industry should be unheard of. But it’s not. It’s actually pretty common.”

U.S. labor officials enforce the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. If states or local jurisdictions have higher hourly minimums, state or local officials enforce those. Both enforce federal overtime law requiring time-and-half pay for work over 40 hours in a week.

Los Angeles County’s local minimum hourly wage became $15.00 as of July 1 of this year.

In its quest to deter wage theft, the Garment Worker Center spent years persuading California legislators to end piece-rate pay in factories and extend liability for wage violations to retailers. The California Chamber of Commerce fought back, calling the bill a “job killer” and arguing that fashion companies will flee the state to find cheaper factories abroad and in other states. The chamber also argued that piece-rate pay is a benefit for some workers.

But during former President Barack Obama’s administration, U.S. labor officials investigated L.A. garment factories 77 times in a sweep, finding violations in 85 percent of factories and $1.3 million in unpaid wages.

Officials also researched the time and cost of producing garments and found that incentives for wage theft began with pricing: On average, the price per garment that manufacturers received from retailers was only 73 percent of the price needed to support paying workers even minimum required pay. In some cases, retailers paid $4 per garment rather than the $10 needed.

California’s own state labor agency is robust, with staff who review complaints, and also conduct surprise inspections and investigations. Inspectors also work with the Garment Workers Center and other advocates to identify suspect businesses. That’s how state investigators recently discovered an alleged scheme to deprive restaurant workers of overtime pay. Immigrant workers at a series of Baja Fresh franchises in the L.A. area approached the local Restaurant Opportunities Center, an advocacy group. The center helped the mostly Latino workers prepare for an investigation by the state Labor Commissioner’s office.

The probe culminated in March with the Labor Commissioner issuing a citation to G & D Investments, Inc., which operates multiple Baja Fresh restaurants in the L.A. area, as well as seven related entities and their CEOs. The citation accuses them of rotating workers among restaurants to work double shifts in violation of overtime pay. The commissioner said the companies and their CEOs owe 188 workers a total of over $375,800 for minimum wages, overtime, penalties and damages. They have appealed the citation and a hearing is expected next. Baja Fresh and G & D Investments did not return multiple phone calls and email messages seeking comment.

When workers contemplated complaining, “some people were very afraid,” said former employee Rocio Martinez, 30. She said managers often urged her to put in double shifts, and sometimes would make remarks that made workers feel powerless.

“You’d hear things like, ‘You can’t take a break. You’re illegal,’” she said. “It was said like it was a joke. But it really wasn’t.”

Ripping off immigrant families

Narro and other UCLA researchers have heard stories like these for years.

Multiple UCLA Labor Center reports have long warned of a “crisis” in wage theft that strips money from California’s immigrant families. A 2010 report estimated that low-wage, mostly immigrant workers in L.A. County lost an average of more than $2,000 annually, adding up to more than $26 million per week.

Reviews of claims for unpaid wages can take months, even years, state officials admit. The process includes conciliation attempts, hearings and appeals that can spill into courts. And then, in the end, some businesses just don’t pay up.

Employer failure to pay garment workers was such a festering problem 20 years ago that California legislators created the Garment Restitution Fund, financed by $75 diverted from each manufacturer’s annual registration fees. Employers are notified to reimburse the fund.

But workers’ claims ballooned as fly-by-night factories mushroomed in L.A., and began competing for contracts by promising cheap production. By 2018, the fund was insolvent. With hundreds waiting for checks, legislators in 2019 transferred $16.3 million into the fund from other kinds of business fees and general funds.

California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower says the state needs to do better.

“Every day, a hard-working person provides their labor and are robbed of their wages,” she said at an event in Los Angeles in February. She said she’ll be working with the L.A. Sheriff’s Department to compel employers to pay up when a judgement is issued.

To take steps to press employers to pay unpaid wages, Garcia-Brower’s office does have a Judgment Enforcement Unit. The office also provides an online brochure explaining how workers themselves can try to collect their money. Victims can obtain a lien on an employer’s property, and hope they get a cut of profits if it’s sold one day. They can also try to enlist sheriffs to seize money. But both options, advocates say, require piles of paperwork and fees that are hard for immigrants to take on.

Challenges in other states

Immigrants can face even more limits to obtaining unpaid wages in other states.

In Houston, Texas, the Fe y Justicia (Faith and Justice) Worker Center helps immigrants who’ve been cheated by negotiating directly with their employers. The Houston metro region is estimated to be home to half a million undocumented residents who perform an array of labor, including construction, dry cleaning, landscaping and warehouse work. When workers press for unpaid earnings, some employers try to get them to back down, said Jessica Lorena Rangel, manager of the group’s Community Consultation Legal Center.

“Employers fill their minds with stuff, like telling them: ‘You can’t do anything about me, you have to suck it up because of your status. You’re not even supposed to be working. I’m doing you a favor,’” Rangel said.

In a year’s time, the group received over 540 calls accusing employers of failing to pay at least $1.36 million in wages. Some victims turn to small claims courts, Rangel said, but face similar burdens as in California to collect. The Texas Workforce Commission accepts claims. But many immigrants rotate among construction and other worksites, and are considered independent contractors excluded from filing with the commission.

In Florida, another heavily immigrant state, no state agency is wholly dedicated to investigating wage theft or reviewing claims. The state labor department was abolished in 2002. Alachua, Broward, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Pinellas, Osceola counties have anti-wage-theft ordinances with distinct versions of complaint procedures. In Miami-Dade, workers are steered to a service that mediates disputes over, on average, about $1,800, according to Gregory Baker, an administrator in the county’s Office of Consumer Protection, where the program is housed.

“We don’t advocate on either party’s behalf,” Baker said. If employers don’t honor an agreement, it also falls on workers to seek legal remedies to collect.

In New York, unpaid workers can avail themselves of a state system similar to California’s. But in the New York City metro area — home to possibly 1 million undocumented people — attorney Lou Pechman said that groups of workers are increasingly opting to file lawsuits in federal court.

Pechman is representing immigrant janitors who cleaned a Wayfair warehouse and distribution centers in New Jersey last year. Workers allege that their employer, New Jersey-based DME Janitorial Services, paid them between $12 and $16 an hour, with no overtime although they worked up to 90 hours a week. “Plaintiffs were essential workers during the pandemic, ensuring that the facilities that they cleaned were sanitized according to COVID-19 protocols and requirements,” the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey says. In a court filing, the company denies violating wage laws and, among other defenses, says it acted “in an appropriate, business-like … manner (without) malice or intent to injure.”

‘Just telling the truth’

In California, garment workers’ stories speak to how crucial organizers have been in helping immigrants exercise their rights. After becoming a seamstress Audelia Molina rarely brought home more than $300 a week. Ten years ago, a co-worker urged her to sign up for a labor rights program at the Garment Worker Center.

“I never got to study much in Mexico,” Molina said. “When I joined the program I began to lose my nervous feelings, my shame. I began speaking with more certainty.”

The mother of three grown children mustered moral support from family before quitting the job in 2017 that led her to file a complaint. A year later, she testified at a Labor Commissioner hearing about her former employer, Callaway Fashion, Inc. “One tells oneself, there’s no reason to get nervous because you’re just telling the truth,” she said.

A Labor Commissioner decision document says that Callaway Fashion and its owner didn’t respond to the complaint or appear at the hearing. The company’s corporate status was suspended by the Franchise Tax Board, but the state doesn’t say why. To support her case, Molina submitted notes she’d kept documenting the days and time worked, production and various brands she sewed. A year later, the hearing officer ordered the factory and its executive to pay Molina over $39,300 — for overtime and other violations and hefty damages. The officer also ordered Callaway to pay Molina over $21,400 in attorney fees as extra punishment — a penalty the garment fund doesn’t pay out and that the employer hasn’t paid either.

California law does already allow for holding brands that directly contract with factories liable for unpaid earnings that are proportionate to work done for them, but workers must provide evidence of that link and work. Before her hearing, Molina settled with the Jasmine Sportswear label for $900 and six other labels for over $6,600. The hearing officer later ordered Kjen Apparel, Inc., to pay her over $4,570 and Du North Designs, Ltd., to pay her over $3,220.

Matthew DeCarolis, Molina’s attorney, said it’s not unusual for small factories such as Callaway to ignore wage complaints, and abruptly shut down or declare bankruptcy. DeCarolis is a staff attorney with L.A.’s Bet Tzedek law group, which offers free help to workers.

“I’ve had garment worker clients,” he said, “who showed up to work and literally overnight the factory had disappeared, all the machines and everything.”

Public Integrity called two numbers associated with Callaway Fashion that were disconnected.

Another L.A. garment worker, a Guatemalan immigrant, filed a complaint because a supervisor allegedly fired her after a federal wage-theft investigation in 2017. “I wasn’t the person who complained. All I did was speak with investigators when they came to the factory,” she said, requesting anonymity out of fear of retaliation. U.S. labor officials asked her questions about her work hours. And one official later contacted her to tell her that her employer, Boss Collection, Inc., owed her $4,000 in unpaid wages for three months’ worth of work. Federal records show the company was ordered to pay a total of $35,000 to 11 workers in 2017.

After she received her $4,000 check the Guatemalan immigrant said that a supervisor confronted her and other workers and ordered them to cash the checks and return the money to him. She refused while others complied. The worker was dismissed with $570 in final wages.

“I left crying because I have a family to support,” the worker said. He pushed her, she said, “and treated me as if I were a little dog.”

Months later, staff at the Garment Worker Center helped her file her own complaint with the state Labor Commissioner for additional unpaid wages going back two years. Boss Collection never responded to the claim and the company shut down by September 2018, records show. Property managers for the building where the factory once was had no contact information for the business or its executive.

At a 2019 hearing, the worker testified about her firing and 11-hour shifts she endured with no rest breaks. The hearing officer found that Boss Collection owed the worker over $92,000 for overtime and unpaid breaks, damages and other penalties and interest. Prior to the hearing, the worker settled for $4,000 each from the brands Entro, Mana USA and Ashley USA.

Because of uncertainty over who supervised workers, the business owner was not held personally liable. Like Molina, the Guatemalan immigrant received her money from the garment fund — three years after filing her claim.

“I won,” she said, almost in disbelief.

Labor officials tried to collect reimbursement for the garment fund. On Jan. 21, 2020, the state mailed Boss Collection a final demand letter and notice of a lien in the Guatemalan immigrant’s case. Officials mailed the same type of documents to Callaway Fashion, Audelia Molina’s former employer, on May 24, 2019.

So far, officials said, the state hasn’t recovered a penny from either.

Susan Ferris is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.

Source: Wage theft hits immigrants — hard

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Les agences privées écartées du recrutement à l’étranger

2021/10/16 Leave a comment

Of note (processing delays and impact on regions):

Des régions en pénurie de personnel auraient pu compter sur plus d’une centaine d’infirmières provenant de l’étranger, mais le réseau de la santé a tourné le dos à plusieurs offres de recrutement provenant d’agences privées, a appris Le Devoir.

Parmi elles, l’agence de placement Serenis, qui n’a pas ménagé ses efforts pour présenter un « projet clés en main » afin de faire venir au Québec une vingtaine d’infirmiers et d’infirmières originaires de la France et du Maghreb. « En ce moment, j’ai 20 infirmières et infirmiers hautement qualifiés qui sont en stand-by », affirme Jackie Lamothe, présidente de trois franchises de l’agence de placement Serenis, pour les régions de la Mauricie, du Centre-du-Québec et de la Montérégie Est.

Selon elle, ces professionnels de la santé ont été choisis par l’agence parce qu’ils sont prêts à aller travailler dans les régions éloignées où les besoins sont criants, comme à La Tuque. Et ils ont tous en poche l’évaluation comparative du ministère de l’Immigration qui indique l’équivalent québécois de leur diplôme.

« J’en ai parlé à des chefs de service des établissements de santé, qui en ont ensuite parlé à leurs supérieurs, et ils étaient tous intéressés. Mais ça finissait toujours par bloquer en haut, comme au niveau du ministère. On a vécu ça partout où on a essayé, même en régions éloignées comme la Gaspésie, le Bas-Saint-Laurent et dans le Nord, comme la Baie-James… »

C’est au début de l’année 2021 que, devant la détresse de plusieurs employés en lien avec la pénurie de personnel, Mme Lamothe a commencé ses propres démarches de recrutement à l’étranger. Neuf mois plus tard et après avoir investi 20 000 $, notamment en analyses de CV, en entrevues et en frais de consultant en immigration, cette ancienne infirmière a été en mesure de dresser une liste de travailleurs francophones « surqualifiés » avec de l’expérience à l’urgence et en pédiatrie, dont la formation allait être facilement reconnue par l’Ordre des infirmières et infirmiers du Québec (OIIQ). « Pour être membre de l’OIIQ, il faut faire un stage de 75 jours dans le réseau public et j’offrais même aux établissements de santé de le prendre sur mon bras », soutient Mme Lamothe. Son agence allait également s’occuper de l’accueil et de l’intégration des travailleurs, comme le logement et la première épicerie. « Je pouvais même signer un papier pour confirmer que ces personnes-là allaient rester dans le public. C’était gagnant-gagnant ! »

Alors que Radio-Canada a rapporté que le gouvernement Legault mène actuellement une opération sans précédent avec Recrutement santé Québec pour faire venir 4000 travailleurs de la santé hors du Québec — dont 3500 infirmières —, des agences privées s’étonnent que leurs offres de recrutement n’aient pas été retenues. « J’ai trouvé ça très dommage. Si le gouvernement avait pris nos services, on aurait déjà une soixantaine d’infirmières pratiquant en Abitibi, ça n’aurait coûté que quelques centaines de milliers de dollars et on aurait pu économiser plusieurs millions en location de personnel », a déclaré Marc Blais, président de l’Agence de placement et de développement internationale (APDI), qui a près de 2000 CV d’infirmiers et d’infirmières de l’Afrique subsaharienne dans sa base de données. « Il y a eu un manque total de vision là-dessus. »

En 2019, son entreprise, qui fait uniquement du recrutement, avait proposé un projet pilote en collaboration avec le Cégep et le Centre intégré de santé et services sociaux de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue (CISSS-AT) pour offrir une formation de mise à niveau reconnue par l’OIIQ à quelque 400 des Africains de l’Ouest qui avaient été présélectionnés. La force de cette initiative était la promesse que les gens recrutés allaient vouloir s’installer durablement en région, puisqu’ils viennent eux-mêmes de l’extérieur des grands centres. « On a sollicité le ministère de la Santé pour avoir des fonds, et ça a été refusé. [Le gouvernement] préférait travailler à l’interne avec Recrutement santé Québec », a soutenu M. Blais, qui se sent comme s’il s’était fait un peu voler son idée. « Ce programme-là, au fond, c’est nous qui l’avions mis en place. »

Le président de l’APDI constate que les agences privées de placement ou de recrutement sont boudées par le gouvernement. « On dirait que le [ministère] n’est pas très à l’aise avec les agences privées. Lorsque les solutions viennent du privé, il ne les retient pas. On nous met tous dans le même bassin. »

Jackie Lamothe déplore aussi que les efforts de son agence semblent être mal perçus. « Le gouvernement a peur qu’on vole du personnel du réseau, mais ce n’est tellement pas ça ! » lance-t-elle. « C’est le contraire. On prend du sang neuf qu’on met dans le réseau. On évite le [recours au] TSO [temps supplémentaire obligatoire], qui force les infirmières épuisées à partir. »

Longs délais à l’OIIQ

Entreprises privées de personnel soignant du Québec (EPPSQ) dit recevoir une trentaine d’appels par jour de professionnels de la santé de la France et du Maghreb prêts à venir travailler dès maintenant au Québec. « Nous, on pourrait se porter garant, comme agence, de les faire travailler, après validation des acquis et d’un cours accéléré. Mais ce pont-là ne se fait pas », dit Hélène Gravel, la présidente de cette association. EPPSQ a d’ailleurs intenté une poursuite contre le gouvernement, qui veut limiter le recours aux agences privées. Selon elle, le nœud du problème ne se situe pas uniquement dans l’administration du réseau de la santé, mais surtout au sein de l’Ordre des infirmières et celui des infirmières auxiliaires.

« Même pour une personne qui vient de France, c’est très long avant qu’elle puisse venir et gagner sa vie. […] Les délais à l’OIIQ sont encore trop longs. Il va falloir qu’ils s’amenuisent », a-t-elle ajouté.

Selon les données fournies par l’OIIQ, il faut de deux à trois mois pour obtenir une réponse à une demande d’admission par équivalence d’un dossier une fois que celui-ci est complet. À cela s’ajoute un programme de formation de 10 à 14 mois que doivent normalement suivre l’ensemble des infirmières diplômées à l’étranger, sauf les Françaises, qui bénéficient d’une voie rapide en vertu d’une entente France-Québec. S’ajoutent aussi les délais d’obtention des permis d’étude et de travail auprès des autorités en immigration.

À l’heure actuelle, environ 90 dossiers sont en traitement, selon l’OIIQ, qui précise que, généralement, seulement 40 à 50 dossiers parviennent à être complets et sont présentés à son Comité d’admission.

Source: Les agences privées écartées du recrutement à l’étranger

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