If the Temporary Foreign Worker Program Exists It Should be Run by Unions

And the Left should stop ignoring this labour rights issue

I like reading the business news sometimes because it’s so mask-off. It’s the enemy class, or at least the professional-managerial minions of the enemy class, telling you exactly what they think about things in a way that is usually obscured. Last week an absolutely bananas article came out in the Financial Post entitled 'Not addicted to cheap labour' — Businesses feel unfairly targeted by foreign worker cuts. The gist of it is that the Trudeau government, having pretty much destroyed the longstanding consensus among Canadians that immigration is basically a good thing by flooding the country with way more immigrants than the labour market or the housing market can absorb, has flipflopped on immigration policy and is now promising to cut the number of temporary foreign residents slightly, to 5% of the population (right now it’s at 7%); and as a result, capitalists are mad.

One guy quoted in the article, Michael Aitkens, runs a restaurant with two locations in Mississauga called, unfortunately, El Mariachi Tacos and Churros, featuring such exotic delicacies as “Burritos: Flour tortilla rolled with rice, beans, guacamole, Pico de Gallo, sour cream and your choice of protein”. According to this guy, it is literally impossible to run a Mexican joint in southern Ontario without importing temporary foreign workers. “I tried hiring cooks locally in my first year and it didn’t work out,” he says in the article. “Today, I have 14 foreign cooks who are able to maintain the food’s authenticity consistently. Without them, I have to shut down and that will put 60 people, mostly Canadians, out of work.”

Keep in mind that Mississauga is part of the Greater Toronto Area, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world (in both Mississauga and Toronto, Canadian-born whites are a minority). Obviously not all non-white people are going to magically be able to make good tacos, but the point is that it’s not like we’re talking about the middle of Saskatchewan here. Downtown Toronto is a 45 minute drive from this guy’s restaurant. The idea that Aitkens can’t find anyone among the 7 million inhabitants of the ‘majority-minority’ GTA and needs to specifically bring in cooks from Mexico in order to make “your choice of protein” authentically, seems more than a little bit suss.

And indeed, the article goes on to reveal the real issue. It’s worth quoting at length here:

[Aitkens] hired local cooks in his first year as a business owner, but they “didn’t last” as they moved on to other businesses, which made maintaining his restaurant’s consistency difficult. Culinary school graduates in Canada prefer working in “bigger, corporate” restaurants where they have a chance to move up the ladder and not in an independent restaurant like his, he said.

“In a restaurant like my own, you are hired as a cook and you are basically going to stay a cook, because that’s what we need,” he said. “So, that’s difficult.”

As a result, Aitken decided to use the [Temporary Foreign Worker Program] to bring in cooks from Mexico. The move resulted in bringing a more “authentic” flavour and added more stability, since workers who come into Canada through this program generally tend to work for the same employer until the end of their work permit.

“The government tells us to invest in Canadians. How am I going to teach knife skills, cooking skills, temperature? That’s not my job,” he said. “That’s what schools are for. My job is to look for experienced people to do the job. If I hired people with no experience, imagine the number of work complaint claims I would have with people cutting half their fingers off.”

Absolutely amazing.

What Aitkens really wants is experienced workers with no demands and no ambitions. He acknowledges that in order for workers to get experience, somebody has to pay for it one way or another — whether that’s in the form of school, on-job training, or just an employer hiring somebody green and dealing with any issues that arise — he just doesn’t think it should have to be him. And he acknowledges that workers typically want the option to quit if the job sucks, but again, just feels that he shouldn’t have to be the one to deal with such uppity employees. Leaving aside the fact that it’s extremely doubtful that he needs culinary school graduates to make a $20 chicken burrito in Mississauga, there’s no way it’s the case that in his first year of business, 14 cooks left because they wanted to work in ‘bigger, corporate’ restaurants where they could become head chef or whatever. I spent years working in kitchens. Nobody at a place like that has a cooking degree and lofty ambitions, it’s just working people trying to make the rent. We all know that what actually happened is literally just that he didn’t want to train anybody and doesn’t pay his cooks enough, and is probably an asshole boss, so Canadian hires kept leaving, and he solved the problem by applying for a semi-indentured workforce through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program: a special category of labour with reduced rights and reduced mobility, dropped into his lap by the federal government.

The article goes on to spotlight a number of resorts and hotels complaining that they can’t find Canadians to work for them. Similarly to Aitkens, the owners of these businesses explain that the concept of workers who wish to be able to leave their place of employment at will is simply too complicated to deal with:

Sabrina Donovan, a general manager at the Pacific Sands Beach Resort in Tofino, said it’s easier to plan ahead with workers coming through the foreign workers program since they are bound to work for the employers that bring them to Canada for as long as their work permit remains valid, which has generally been around two years.

“That’s something we haven’t been able to do relying solely on Canadian employees,” she said. “We know that TFWP employees are here to stay for up to two years. This way, we are able to have a core group of employees who help us provide better service to our customers, which in turn helps our businesses grow.”

Furthermore, they explain, it isn’t fair that hotels and resorts should have to hire fewer temporary foreign workers just because there’s an unprecedented housing crisis in Canada. This is because in this industry, “[most] employers house their own employees”. Again, the quiet part is being said out loud remarkably clearly here. What these managers want is a workforce made up of people who cannot leave and do not expect to be able to live in their own homes, people who will accept living in dormitories or hotel rooms for years in remote locations without the kind of corresponding pay that the Canadian labour market would otherwise demand for such a sacrifice.

As the title of the article suggests, these business owners bristle at the idea that they have become ‘addicted to cheap labour’. They are, of course; the restaurant owner’s claims that he needs Mexican foreign workers in order to make authentic burritos is absurd, and the resorts simply find it difficult to attract Canadian workers because nobody wants to go live in a hotel room for years in some tiny town for 25 bucks an hour. But here’s the thing: of course they’re addicted to cheap labour. As a whole, capital will always attempt to find the cheapest labour with the fewest rights possible. Individual capitalists might prefer to pay better wages and offer benefits and so on, but there is a process of competition always ongoing which rewards those businesses which are able to pay the least for labour. There are also associations of business owners and various other organs of the capitalist class which advocate for laws and policies which will benefit capital at the expense of labour. In the US many industries rely very heavily on ‘illegal’ immigrants for this reason. In Canada exactly the same demand — cheaper labour with fewer rights — has come to be fulfilled more formally, with temporary foreign workers.

This issue is one which, I think, has bamboozled the Left completely. Hypnotized by identitarian or anti-racist arguments, we’ve been boxed into a corner that we have found ourselves sharing with some of the most despicable members of the liberal ruling class. But from a pro-labour perspective — which to be clear is the basis of what it even means to be on the Left — it’s disastrous to allow capitalists unfettered access to an alternate source of labour in this manner.

First of all, the people being employed through these programs, or through the shadier alternate route of student visas, are being exploited. If Canadian workers wouldn’t do it, nobody in Canada should be doing it. If some asshole in Mississauga wants to be able to invest money and circumvent the Canadian labour market and basically just purchase a ready-made docile workforce from abroad, too bad. In Canada working people should be able to leave their jobs. They should be able to demand better working conditions. They should be able to turn down jobs that suck. The fact that the people we’re talking about in this case are not Canadians and are overwhelmingly people of colour shouldn’t change this stance.

Secondly, it’s clearly terrible for labour standards in Canada if employers can just go over our heads to find people who will work for cheaper and in worse conditions. It lowers the floor for everyone, especially because these workers usually are not unionized, leading to wage deflation and undermining the power of organized labour in relation to the capitalist class. The benefits of the situation accrue only to business owners, especially when we stop thinking of ourselves as ‘consumers’ and think of ourselves as workers. Our loyalty is to our class, and it makes no sense to support policies which help capitalists at the expense of workers both from Canada and from abroad.

I have what I think is an elegant solution to this issue. Years ago Ottawa abolished a rule requiring employers to check with relevant unions before hiring a TFW. We should go a step further than bringing this rule back: socialists and organized labour in Canada should demand that only unionized workplaces be eligible for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program — or even better, that unions should be in charge of applications to the program. This way, any worker entering Canada through these programs would be automatically protected, and it would be impossible for the capitalist class to depress wages using foreign labour. If they don’t want a unionized workforce able to make concerted demands of them, they have to find local workers. If they don’t want to find local workers, they have to go through the unions. Workers, both Canadian and foreign, are protected; capitalists are put in their place.