Commentary on Temporary Foreign Workers

2014/06/28 Leave a comment

A range of commentary on Temporary Foreign Workers, starting with Mathew Mendelsohn and Ratna Omidvar four recommendations:

Before a temporary foreign worker can be brought to Canada, make it a requirement for the federal government to consult with provincial employment agencies like Employment Ontario or WorkBC as part of the federally mandated Labour Market Opinions that must be conducted to ensure that there are no Canadians who can fill the job. Employers may be able to find the workers they need right here in Canada….

Second, provincial employment agencies could think of themselves more explicitly as fulfilling an HR function for small and medium-sized enterprises. These agencies often know exactly who is looking for work in their communities and which skills they possess, while many SMEs have no expertise or department to help them hire strategically….

Third, employers, governments, and agencies should work together to develop locally based labour market information. Many groups, like the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, already do so for their own sector. If these existing efforts are combined, the quality of information could be improved. Such local efforts should not replace the need for the federal government to improve its national data collection and dissemination efforts.

Fourth, the way we describe the skills needed for particular positions should become simpler and more easily understood. We desperately need common language that employers, governments and agencies agree on to describe the skills required for particular jobs.

Four changes to the TFW program that would help Canadian businesses

Leslie Seidle’s reminder of the provincial role in reducing abuse:

To improve the situation of temporary foreign workers during their term of employment in Canada, provincial governments need to bolster the federal overhaul by more proactively enforcing health and labour standards. They have primary responsibility in these domains, not the federal government. Here the record is uneven, as demonstrated by a recent “report card” exercise carried out by the Canadian Council for Refugees CCR.

Provinces also need to combat foreign worker abuses.

And lastly, a left-wing perspective from David Macdonald of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:

So as a progressive, what’s to be done? Cancel the program and deport every single temporary foreign worker?

I believe there is a middle ground. Let’s cancel the TFW program, but before we do that, let’s offer all temporary foreign workers an expedited process towards permanent residency, if they want it. In the meantime, TFWs should be given a choice to stay at their present employer or find a new one if they wish.

(Live-in caregivers, one of the TFW categories, already have the right to apply for permanent residency. Although, there is discussion that this right should be removed as it might back up the immigration system).

Interestingly, it is a union that spearheaded this approach on a small-scale. The Canadian government should expand it on a large-scale. If you were an employer who treated their foreign workers fairly, then good for you as those folks will likely stick with you.

However, if you’re an employer who used the threat of deportation to deny foreign workers basic rights and fair pay, then welcome to the Canadian labour market where if you treat people badly … they quit because they can…without deportation.

Temporary Foreign workers: a progressive solution

 

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Scrapping TFW program for low-wage jobs will be on the table in 2016, Kenney says – The Globe and Mail

2014/06/26 Leave a comment

More public comment and foreshadowing by Jason Kenney on the Temporary Foreign Workers program and live-in caregivers:

But in a meeting with The Globe and Mail’s editorial board Tuesday, Mr. Kenney insists the warnings from business leaders are exaggerated. He also indicated the government could soon go much further.

Through a phase-in of new caps on low-wage foreign workers and the launch of more detailed labour market surveys, Mr. Kenney indicated that the government will be in a position by 2016 to assess whether it should take the next step.

“At that point [in 2016], I think the government can do a reassessment and look at whether it would be desirable to go to zero right across the country,” Mr. Kenney said. “So I’m saying quite publicly that we’re leaving our options open. There will be great resistance to that.

”The overhaul of the program has been called an “appalling overreaction” by business groups and has the Conservatives suddenly playing defence in the Western stronghold of Alberta, where the changes are expected to hit hard….

As far back as 2009 when he was immigration minister, Mr. Kenney said he recalls meeting in Manila with 70 women who were on their way to Canada via the program and every single one of them planned to work for a relative.

“The biggest problem I see in it is that … to a great deal, it has mutated into an extended family reunification program, which was not its intent,” Mr. Kenney said Tuesday. “As best we can tell, a majority of the entrants in that program were actually coming to work for relatives – for family members.”

The fact that the caregiver program allows workers to apply for permanent residency for themselves and their family has “clogged” up the immigration system, said Mr. Kenney. The minister would not speculate on whether the government is considering the elimination of this benefit.

Scrapping TFW program for low-wage jobs will be on the table in 2016, Kenney says – The Globe and Mail.

Tom Walkom’s commentary in the Star aims at Temporary Foreign Workers covered under free trade agreements like NAFTA and CETA, forgetting to mention that these agreements also provide equivalent access to Canadian workers in the  US and other countries we have these agreements with:

But regardless of the judge’s ultimate decision, the B.C. case points to a fatal flaw in Kenney’s much-publicized get-tough policy:

In the end, he and the rest of Stephen Harper’s government aren’t serious about protecting Canadian jobs and wages.

As one government program designed to undercut domestic wages ratchets down, another is already gearing up.

True, Ottawa understands the politics around jobs. In response to a scandal last year in which the ICT program was used to outsource highly paid information technology jobs from Canada, the government tightened its definition of “specialized knowledge.”

Yet tellingly, this tighter definition doesn’t apply to workers from countries that have free trade agreements with Canada — such as the U.S. and Mexico.

The temporary foreign workers program may have been hobbled. But the war against good wages continues.

How Canada lets employers avoid temporary foreign worker reforms: Walkom

On the other side, Dan DeVoretz tries to defend the Temporary Foreign Workers Program for the food and hospitality industries:

How are economic benefits generated by the unnecessarily maligned hospitality and restaurant TFWs? These benefits arrive in two forms. First, the vast majority 70 per cent circa early 2014 of these TFWs reside in Alberta, where the restaurant and accommodation sector have the largest and fastest growing job vacancy rate of any industry in Canada. The province’s labour market is characterized by high wages and low unemployment. Unless unemployed workers migrated from the rest of Canada to work for minimum wage in Alberta’s hospitality and restaurant sector, many of Alberta’s existing hotels and restaurants would not be in business. Since low-priced restaurants provide a benefit to Albertans the loss of these restaurants would deprive Albertans of an important economic benefit.

Does not pass the common sense test unlike for agricultural workers. And, surprising for an economist, increasing supply by increasing wages (classic theory) ignored.

New foreign-worker rules a solution in search of a problem – The Globe and Mail.

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Ottawa’s foreign workers decision hogs spotlight in Western Canada

2014/06/24 Leave a comment

From “There are tens of thousands of employers who tell me that they would go out of business if they couldn’t find people to fill those jobs” to “I can’t count the number of people who tell me their kids can’t get jobs in the fast-food industry.”

Along with a shift to data and evidence-based policy by Jason Kenney:

But federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney insisted in an interview that the program had caused serious “distortions” in the labour market, and Albertans, like most Canadians, understand that. The reforms are based on data and evidence, not on “special-interest politics,” he said.

“There are some political actors in Alberta who are more attuned to a few thousand beneficiaries of this program than to the broader public,” Mr. Kenney said in phone interview from Calgary. “Everywhere I go people are thanking me for the changes, unprompted. Most people here believe the program grew beyond its original intent and caused distortions in the labour market. … I can’t count the number of people who tell me their kids can’t get jobs in the fast-food industry.”

The changes are expected to hit hard in Alberta’s fast-food industry, where employers complain they can’t find Canadians to work because of tight labour markets.

The government is showing a rare populist streak with its about-face on the foreign worker issue, baffling traditional allies in the business community.

Ottawa’s foreign workers decision hogs spotlight in Western Canada – The Globe and Mail.

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Kenney Op-Ed: Foreign workers in Canada: Let’s separate the facts from the myths

2014/06/21 Leave a comment

From anecdotes (“”There are tens of thousands of employers who tell me that they would go out of business if they couldn’t find people to fill those jobs.”) to Minister Kenney’s more evidence-based approach announcing the changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers program.

His op-ed is particularly revealing:

Several recent studies have come to this conclusion, suggesting that over-reliance on the program’s general low-skilled stream has prevented wages from rising in some low-paid occupations in parts of Western Canada, and may have reduced labour mobility. For example, overall median wages in Alberta have gone up by an average of 31 per cent since 2006, but wages in the province’s food services sector, a heavy user of the program, increased by only 8 per cent. This kind of distortion is unacceptable.

Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney put it well last year when he said “We don’t want an over-reliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary… The intent of the government’s review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.”

Foreign workers in Canada: Let’s separate the facts from the myths – The Globe and Mail.

Lots of coverage on the changes, largely targeted towards abuse of the program for the fast food service industry. CBC overview on the changes, Changes to Temporary Foreign Worker Program include limits and fines, Macleans (Temporary foreign worker rules reformed, but tensions remain) and the Government briefing package with the key message of Overhauling the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

Initial commentary of interest:

Campbell Clark in the Globe, makes some valid points in Reforms to foreign worker program are welcome, but why the long wait?:

To their credit, they produced a serious plan. The reforms provide greater incentives for employers to find low-wage workers at home by raising application fees and limiting the percentage of each company’s work force that can be brought in from abroad. The caps will be phased in over two years. And Mr. Kenney promised to increase transparency by reporting the numbers for each employer.

Even the style used to unveil the reforms was refreshingly grown-up for a government that typically prefers slogans to explanations. The ministers briefed journalists on technical details, and did a talk-till-you-drop press conference explaining their rationale. They acknowledged some businesses might be hurt, but said companies should turn more to recruitment, training and wage increases. Mr. Kenney said he wants to return the program to what it is supposed to be: a last resort.

But there is also the past. Should the Conservatives have woken to the problems before? “No,” Mr. Kenney said. The Conservatives, he explained, accepted the policy in place when they took power as “normal.”

That is a frank admission. Governments do not look under every rock for worms. But it is a tad short on mea culpa. Under the Conservatives, the number of low-wage workers – those not in special programs for nannies or farm workers, or covered by agreements like NAFTA – grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Mr. Harper’s government spent to speed up processing for TFWs. If it is broken now, they should have fixed it sooner.

Helpfully, to the Government’s communications strategy, negative reaction from Alberta and the tone-deaf Canadian Federation of Independent Business (Alberta decries changes to foreign worker program):

“This is an appalling over-reaction,” said Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which has supported the Conservative government’s economic approach in the past. “This will be a serious knock on this government’s small-business credentials to have taken the kind of move that they just did.”

Restaurants Canada, which represents restaurant owners, predicts the formula, combined with new $1,000 user fees, will force some restaurants to close, while others will need to raise prices to cover higher wages.

“I think there are going to be business casualties,” said Joyce Reynolds, Restaurants Canada’s vice-president of government affairs. “Are Canadians prepared to pay double what they pay now for a steak?”

Andrew Coyne starts off with a somewhat predictable more libertarian economic approach in Hiring foreign workers in Canada is a crime, but outsourcing overseas is fine but ends up arguing for a pathway to citizenship:

And the reforms themselves? They will be widely praised, and should succeed in moving the controversial program off the front pages, adding to Mr. Kenney’s reputation as the safest pair of hands in cabinet. Unfortunately, that does not make them good policy.

Consider an employer in the manufacturing sector, who finds himself unable to attract enough workers for certain kinds of unskilled labour, at least at the going wage. He is entirely at liberty to outsource the work to a company overseas, paying a fraction of the wages he would have had to pay his Canadian employees. He can move the whole plant offshore if he likes, laying off every one of its current employees, and import the product he sells rather than make it here. ….

This is the crime of which these [food service] employers, whom Mr. Kenney vows to harass and punish with $100,000 fines, are guilty: operating a business while in the service sector. They “cost” no more jobs than their manufacturing counterparts. It’s just that the hard-working, low-wage foreigners they employ are in our midst, and visible to us, not toiling away in some sweatshop overseas we never see. …

It certainly won’t help the foreign workers themselves, who will now be subject, as a support group, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, put it, to a kind of “mass deportation order.” Many had hoped to convert their demonstrable fitness for life in Canada into permanent residency, and ultimately citizenship. Those hopes will now be dashed.

Yet if any reform were needed, that remains the more promising route. If temporary foreign workers were not temporary, they would no longer be foreign. They would not be “taking jobs” from Canadians. They would be Canadians.

John Ivison sides with the CFIB and other small businesses in With the temporary foreign worker changes Jason Kenney has done a great deal to insulate himself:

The Employment Minister has certainly gone to great lengths to insulate himself from more incendiary allegations of abuse. Unfortunately, the risks will be borne by those small businesses that are about to see their costs soar.

Tom Walkom from the Star, from a different perspective, ends up in the same place (Jason Kenney’s temporary foreign worker changes not enough):

Public pressure has forced Kenney to make the arrangement seem more palatable. But it is not. If we need more foreign labourers, let them come as full-fledged immigrants.

If paying Canadian fast-food workers a decent wage means we must shell out more for a cup of coffee, so be it.

 

 

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Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending

2014/06/12 Leave a comment

More indications of the botched up Temporary Foreign Workers program, linked to bad labour market data, cutbacks and overall approach to evidence-based policy making:

“Things are getting done in the opposite direction,” said economist Don Drummond, who will release a paper Wednesday for the Institute for Research on Public Policy calling on Ottawa to tackle Canada’s long-standing labour market data problems. “Normally you create an information infrastructure and that informs the policy. But here we’ve had dramatic changes in policy with the temporary foreign worker program and the Canada Job Grant, while we’re undermining the lousy information infrastructure we already had.”

Mr. Drummond chaired a 2009 panel on labour market information and says many of the panel’s recommendations have not yet been fully implemented.

A spokesperson for Mr. Kenney said the minister has repeatedly noted the need for better labour market information in Canada and is looking for ways to achieve this. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada explained the spending reduction by stating that the department has modernized its data portfolio in a “tighter fiscal environment,” in part by stopping low-priority surveys to fund higher-priority research.

The recent debate over labour data has focused in part on the government’s decision to reduce funding for Statistics Canada, which gathers labour data through phone surveys of employers, while relying more on private-sector data based on scans of Internet job boards.

Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending – The Globe and Mail.

Update:

The Government announced that it would restore funding to StatsCan to improve labour market information:

“The government will be launching two significant, robust, new labour market information studies,” Mr. Kenney told the House of Commons Wednesday. “Of them, one will be a quarterly study on job vacancies and the other a robust annual survey on wage rates, just as experts have asked us to do.”

Sources say the new $14-million would largely reverse the 20 per cent cut by 2015-16, returning the department’s annual spending on labour market information to more than $80-million.

Ottawa increases funding for labour-market surveys

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“Keeping the price of latte low” – Why the Conservatives need to make changes to the foreign worker program fast

2014/05/31 Leave a comment

Good piece by Campbell Clark in the Globe on Temporary Foreign Workers. Latte line is priceless:

Temporary foreign workers really shouldn’t be part of any company’s basic business model, especially if it’s their strategy to fill jobs that don’t require training. Governments should be expecting wages to rise, not stepping in to provide thousands of visas for low-paid workers.

But the government has watched that grow into a common practice over several years. Freezing it has just added unpredictability.

The moratorium won’t kill Canada’s economy. Most consumers will spend their dollars elsewhere in Canada if a restaurant with a labour shortage has a long wait. But the tourism industry does have some reason to worry that the sudden freeze just as their busy season starts will cause problems for some businesses, and perhaps hurt the sector….

But whatever the government decided to do, it should have provided a transition program so the sector wasn’t hit suddenly, he [Garth White, Restaurants Canada] said. And the government should stop moving its deadline and announce its plans to reform the program, he said….

The president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, David Goldstein, said most in the industry don’t like the current program, but they do need the workers. There are some jobs it’s just hard to fill with Canadian workers, he said.

“The inconvenient truth is that in a Richard Florida society, somebody still has to make him his latte,” he said.

It’s not clear that Canadians should make it a policy priority to keep the price of the latte low, by making it easy to recruit lower-paid workers from abroad.

Why the Conservatives need to make changes to the foreign worker program fast – The Globe and Mail.

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Ottawa approved thousands of foreign worker requests at minimum wage, data reveals, Banff profile

2014/05/28 Leave a comment

More evidence of how the Temporary Foreign Workers program expanded without adequate oversight and analysis:

Using Access to Information legislation, the Alberta Federation of Labour obtained extensive statistics about the program and provided its findings to The Globe and Mail. The union sought and obtained information on the number of Labour Market Opinions approved by Employment and Social Development Canada that were for minimum wage jobs. An LMO is a screening process meant to ensure employers have exhausted efforts to hire Canadians before turning to the program.

According to the documents, at least 15,006 minimum-wage positions were approved between March 31, 2010, and Feb. 10, 2014. (Only the numbers for Ontario go back as far as 2010, which means the actual totals for the period would likely be higher.)

Ottawa approved thousands of foreign worker requests at minimum wage, data reveals – The Globe and Mail.

On a more positive note, good profile on how Temporary Foreign Workers have transitioned to permanent residency in Banff, and some of the integration challenges:

Dean Irvine, principal at Banff Elementary, says this can sometimes be a struggle with immigrants from countries like the Philippines, where the culture says you leave education to the educators. “My experience is that is pretty standard in Asian countries for parents to say to teachers: ‘You’re the experts, you take care of things, we don’t necessarily need to communicate.’ That’s been a challenge here, but I think it’s getting better.”

Then there is the adjustment to living alongside moose, elk, deer and sometimes bears. When one elementary-school teacher noticed children from the same Filipino family absent a few days in a row, Ms. Godfrey’s office called to inquire what was going on. It turned out the mother couldn’t walk her children to school and didn’t want them going alone for fear they might encounter some wild creature.

“It’s all about educating them,” Ms. Godfrey says.

Mr. Jalalon says his family has adapted fairly easily to life in Canada, and a decidedly different climate than that of the Philippines. He has been surprised at how welcoming the people here have been, which is much different than the treatment he received in Abu Dubai, where he worked as a paramedic for two years before coming here. There, he says, Filipinos were treated as second-class citizens. Not in Banff.

If anything, he says, he wishes the many Filipinos in Banff worked harder to integrate themselves into the community, to do things like volunteer. Instead, many keep to themselves or stick close to their fellow countrymen. The Filipino community in Banff is too insular for Mr. Jalalon’s liking.

“There was a bad typhoon back home in November of last year – Typhoon Haiyan,” Mr. Jalalon says. “And it was the people of Banff that led the fundraising to help out, not the Filipinos here. I felt quite ashamed by that.”

Many here are concerned about the chill the federal government has put on the temporary foreign worker program. It is a reaction to stories suggesting some businesses are discriminating against non-immigrant Canadians because they don’t believe they have a comparable work ethic to employees they’re bringing in from overseas. But Darren Reeder, executive director of the Banff Lake Louise Hotel Motel Association, says the two resort communities desperately need the TFW to compensate for the loss in workers to higher-paying resource jobs elsewhere in the province.

Mr. Reeder says the fact many of these foreign workers are converting to full-time residents has been a huge benefit to towns like Banff. “It’s been wonderful to see [foreigners] become immersed in the community,” he says. “But we still need assistance in better meeting the needs of our foreign national population.” Despite challenges around housing and other issues, he says, “the fact so many want to become permanent residents speaks to community spirit and the lifestyle we offer. They’re saying: ‘It’s a price worth paying.’”

 Banff’s changing labour landscape 

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Alberta Labour Minister blasts feds over foreign workers

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

Kind of amusing given previous bad blood between the two Ministers (Jason Kenney apologizes to Thomas Lukaszuk for a-hole email gaffe). But substantively, another call for pathways to permanent residency and citizenship:

“We need you here to stay. A revolving door is simply not humane, and economically not sound,” he said.

“In most cases what we need in Canada, and particularly in Alberta, is permanent foreign workers.”

Lukaszuk blasted federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney for suspending the TFW program in the food sector last month to launch a review, after several Canadian businesses were accused of giving TFWs more hours or priority work status.

Alberta Labour Minister blasts feds over foreign workers | Alberta | News | Calg.

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