The Dominion - temporary foreign workers

Hogtown, Manitoba

stephlaw — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:03:13 +0000

An investigation into one factory's radical impact on labour and the environment in a prairie town

SASKATOON—The meatpacking industry once provided thousands of Canadian workers with a decent living wage. Thanks in part to globalization the industry now employs far fewer people at wages that have essentially been frozen since the mid-1980s. These days, many meatpacking employees are temporary foreign workers who must sign restrictive contracts with their employer for a chance at attaining Canadian citizenship.

Maple Leaf Consumer Foods’ hog processing plant in Brandon, MB, is the largest such plant in Canada. Employing over 2,200 people, it is the primary economic driver for the booming “Wheat City.” By all accounts, Maple Leaf's facility, opened in 1999, is a modern, world-class processing plant. The facility expanded in 2008 increasing its processing capacity to over 85,000 hogs a week, totaling over 4 million annually. Yet despite its impressive size and modernity, the facility has struggled with retaining workers as the work is hard, repetitive and undesirable for many.

In 2003, the annual turnover rate at Maple Leaf was well over 100 per cent. To satisfy its need for labourers and to reduce turnover, the plant began recruiting workers from abroad. Maple Leaf’s Brandon facility now employs over 2,200 hourly, unionized workers, the majority of whom are either temporary foreign workers or new residents who have passed through the foreign worker program.

“When the turnover was really high, my understanding is that it was in the early stages of the plant, and there’s a lot of growing pains that happen with that,” explains Blake Caruthers, Communications Officer with UFCW Local 832, representing the workers at Maple Leaf. “Once they started using the temporary foreign worker program, people were staying and making Brandon their home.”

The annual turnover rate has been reduced to below 100 per cent, due in part to the hiring contracts that temporary foreign workers and many immigrant workers are required to sign. In order to qualify for fast-tracked landed immigrant status, temporary foreign workers must agree to extend their six month contracts for another two years at Maple Leaf.

“You have a more or less captive labour force, based on immigration,” says Joe Dolecki, Professor of environment and economics at Brandon University. “It [is] much the same as the old indentured servitude model.” Many of the jobs at Maple Leaf in Brandon are unskilled positions, with starting wages hovering around a dollar or two above the provincial minimum of $10 per hour, totalling approximately $19,000 a year. According to Caruthers, skilled labourers at the plant can earn as much as $18 to start, not including shift premiums offered to employees.

In addition to the relatively low wages, the work conditions are far from ideal. “The work is not only hard,” says Dolecki, “it’s physically debilitating for people.”

“It was pretty shitty work conditions,” says Geoff Mann, a former line worker at Maple Leaf in Brandon. “I would stand in one spot, literally, for two hours, then get a coffee break, then stand in the same spot again for two hours, and so forth. A pig leg, a loin, would come down the line, and I would turn it,” he explains. “Turn, turn, turn. It was coming lengthwise, so I would turn it the other way, and it would move on to the next person, who had to do a specific cut.” Mann, who is now 32, kept the job for three months in 2002 before finally quitting to attend Brandon University. “Your feet would just freeze,” Mann recalls as the factory is temperature-controlled to prevent meat from spoiling. “It didn’t matter what kind of socks I wore, my feet would freeze, standing in one spot all the time. You couldn’t walk around to warm them up, you could rock or maybe take one step to the side and back.”

Mann remembers shift premiums being used at the plant as incentives to combat absenteeism. If a worker showed up on time every day for an entire month, they would receive an extra dollar per hour worked. Shift premiums still exist but Mann sees the terms for getting this financial bonus as unrealistic for most workers, especially those with young families or those who are single parents. “Say if you missed one day or [were late for] 15 minutes one day because your kid had a doctor’s appointment, then you’re losing out on that one dollar an hour for 80 hours a pay-cheque, for a whole month,” he said.

Martyn Conrad, who worked at the plant between 2002 and 2003 as a wash bay attendant, recalls a lack of employees and workers not showing up on time or at all. “It was my job to clean and return large, bloodied metal bins that once contained various pig parts, back to the production line,” Conrad explained via email. Conrad kept the job, working from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday to Friday, for almost a year before finally quitting.

In the early 1980s, managers of many Albertan meatpacking plants aimed to drastically increase profits on the backs of unionized workers. Plant owners followed the lead of their US counterparts, who—through reorganization, hostile takeovers and other extreme tactics—reduced or eliminated many of the gains made by workers since the Second World War. Albertan meatpackers responded with a series of strikes which lec to job cuts, lowered wages and reduced benefits.

In 1986, Peter Pocklington, former owner of Gainers meatpacking and the Edmonton Oilers, told Alberta Report, “The unions are very self-serving.” At a time when union workers were paid around $1800 a month he said, “In Taiwan, workers get $300 a month for the same job. And Taiwan isn’t that far away by air. [Unions] need to find out what the new realities of business are.”

The “new realities” of globalized business are clear to unions in Canada today, as wages and benefits have been scaled back dramatically since the 1980s. The strike-breaking tactics used by Peter Pocklington and the management at Gainers forced the UFCW to accept major concessions at the bargaining table for years to come.

In 1986, hourly wages were between $8 and $12 for meatpackers. Today, at Maple Leaf, hourly wages start at $12 and go to a maximum of $18 for skilled positions. Taking inflation into account, wages are lower now than they were in 1986.

The meatpacking industry itself, like many other industries in Canada, has turned to globalization to fill demand for workers. Since the introduction of the “temporary foreign worker program,” Maple Leaf has successfully recruited workers abroad by offering “fast-tracked” immigrant status to temporary workers who complete their initial contract with the company, and who agree to sign on to a contract extension as landed immigrants.

To accommodate these new workers, UFCW Local 832 has pushed to have the collective bargaining agreement and workplace information available to workers in four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Ukrainian. “It was the first of its kind in Canada,” Caruthers says of the collective agreement. “You’ve got to give Maple Leaf credit for that, because it was not a hard bargaining issue with them. They understand the value of keeping their employees, our members, informed of their rights, and they realized that the better everybody understands the collective agreement, the better the workforce.”

While the UFCW has been successful — and groundbreaking — in securing rights for its foreign members, temporary foreign workers at other work places in Canada are still without the rights and protections of Maple Leaf employees. Apart from rights to translators, temporary foreign workers only recently secured the right to an expedited arbitration process in cases where they have been terminated, allowing them to remain in Manitoba until the issue is resolved. Agricultural foreign workers in southern Ontario and foreign workers in northern Alberta’s oil patch are often lacking information about worker's rights and without many of the benefits included in the collective bargaining agreement between Maple Leaf and the UFCW.

For the first time in years, Brandon's schools are filling up, houses are being built and new businesses are opening their doors. It is clear that Maple Leaf Commercial Foods’ Brandon plant has positively increased population growth in the community, which has in turn spurred the economy forward at a rate unseen for decades. The vacancy rate in Brandon is now less than 0.5 per cent and the unemployment rate sits at about 2.8 per cent.

Growth comes at a cost that is more difficult to quantify. The success of Intensive Livestock Operations (ILOs) — often disparagingly referred to as “factory farms” — that feed the processing plant in Brandon comes on the backs of small, rural communities already struggling with demographic change and losses of basic services.

Of the 85,000 hogs processed weekly in Brandon, over 60,000 are sourced from hog producers in Manitoba, while the rest come from eastern Saskatchewan. Only Quebec produces more hogs annually than Manitoba. Today, only 10 to 15 per cent of hogs produced in Manitoba are by small-scale “traditional” livestock operators producing less than 1,000 hogs. A transition from small-scale hog production to ILOs began in the 1990s, and has continued to the point where over 50 per cent of hogs in the province come from massive ILOs that house 5,000 or more hogs.

Critics of ILOs charge that such large-scale operations have negative social and environmental impacts on rural communities. Farmers and rural residents in south western Manitoba were concerned about the shift towards ILOs that taking place as early as 1999, presenting arguments before the Citizen’s Hearing on Hog Production and the Environment. Residents had organized the hearing in anticipation of the opening of Brandon’s Maple Leaf plant, the results being presented to the province in early 2000.

“Often you’ll find in rural Manitoba, when ILOs are proposed, a great deal of hype about contributing to the growth of small communities that have experienced population declines,” explains Dolecki, who has written repeatedly on the subject of ILOs. “Almost none of that stuff pans out, almost none of those spin-off benefits pan out.”

Dolecki argues that large-scale operations tend to replace smaller independent operators. This puts further negative pressure on rural communities, which are already struggling to survive. Before the policy landscape shifted to favour ILOs in the 1990s, there were upwards of 4,000 hog producers in the province. Today there are fewer than 800. “Large barns can be run be with only a few people,” says Dolecki, “because they’re so heavily mechanized and computerized. This does not enhance the possibilities of using that as a catalyst for the restoration of rural populations.”

Maple Leaf isn’t the only large-scale hog processing plant in Manitoba. Hytek’s plant in Neepawa processes over 900,000 hogs annually, the bulk of which are Manitoba-raised. In order to process such high numbers of hogs, large meatpacking plants require a constant and reliable supply of animals. By dealing with large-scale producers, hog processors like Maple Leaf are able to guarantee their production goals. However, ILOs, along with other intensive agricultural practices, have been blamed for much of Lake Winnipeg’s current pollution problems, as well as pollution in southern Manitoba and the Interlake region, where intensive hog operations are common.

Since the early 1990s, Lake Winnipeg — Canada’s eighth largest freshwater lake — has faced increasing problems with algal blooms. Algal blooms are fueled by high availability of nitrogen and phosphorus in the aquatic environment. These substances can be introduced into the waters through the addition of sewage and fertilizers in a process known as eutrophication. At the height of summer, many beaches at the south end of the lake are closed due to health concerns related to the algal blooms. Further to the north, fisheries are negatively impacted when eutrophication runs rampant, as it has been in Lake Winnipeg for the past twenty years.

Degradation of the environment as a result of industrial agricultural practices is difficult, if not impossible, to put a price tag on. While the full cost of remediation at this point is unknown, it will undoubtedly be borne by tax payers for years to come.

Currently, the Manitoba government offers up to $26 million annually directly to hog farmers to improve manure management, and to reduce the risk of contaminating water with excess phosphorus and other pollutants, explained Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Initiatives in an email. This is provided through the Manure Management Financial Assistance Program.

“I did an estimate for the Clean Environment Commission on the environmental subsidy that was involved in hog production as of 2005,” recalls Dolecki, who totaled the estimated cost of clean-up and site reclamation required to deal with the pollution caused by ILOs in Manitoba. “In 2004, I estimated it to be between $125 and $140 million dollars a year, while the net income for the hog production side was about $100 million a year. So, if you made the hog industry pay the full cost of clean up and waste disposal, the industry would have imploded.”

Although The Dominion contacted the senior Human Resources manager at Maple Leaf’s Brandon plant to comment, Maple Leaf refused to participate in an interview.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and song & dance man living in Winnipeg, MB.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Maple Leaf Flag

Freezing Feet

A Costly Commute

Moira Peters — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:32:59 +0000

Foreign migrant workers provide long hours of cheap labour on Canadian farms

MONTREAL, QUEBEC–Don Jorge* stands outside the St Joseph Oratory, looking at the Montreal landscape in awe.

Don Jorge is a peasant farmer from a small town in Central Mexico.

Every summer he comes to Canada to work for six months on a farm close to Montreal. He has been working that farm for the last 14 years.

Even though he comes every year, he doesn't know Montreal or its surroundings. His knowledge of Canada and Quebec is confined to the fields that he harvests, the IGA where he shops for his weekly groceries and Montreal's St Joseph Oratory – where agricultural workers go to mass once a year.

He cannot leave the farm except for Sunday afternoons, and his only human contact is with other farm workers like himself and with his foreman.

Don Jorge lives and works in Les Fermes du Soleil, a farm owned by the ex-Quebec MNA André Chenail. Don Jorge says Chenail does not really take care of the farm business anymore, leaving day-to-day operations to his family instead. Chenail’s retirement was good news for the workers.

"He used to ‘tabernacle’ us all the time.” Tabernacle – the receptacle for the sacrament in Catholic churches – is used in Quebec an insult. “We were not treated as people. It is as though he thought we were animals," Jorge says, looking at his hands, calloused and roughened by farm work.

Don Jorge is part of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP), a Canadian federal program that brings migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean to work in the agricultural sector every summer.

The CSAWP began as a pilot project with Jamaica in 1966, when 264 Jamaican workers came to Ontario to harvest tobacco. The first Mexican workers arrived in Canada in 1974 after Mexico and Canada signed a memorandum of understanding.

The Mexican government plays a double role in this arrangement: it makes sure the program works smoothly, and it also functions as the representative of migrant agricultural Mexican workers in Canada.

For Caribbean workers, the program is run jointly with the governments of the participating Caribbean states, which recruit workers and appoint representatives in Canada to assist in the program’s operations. Workers come from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (Grenada, Antigua, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Monserrat).

For Guatemalan workers, the project was established in 2003 through an agreement with FERME (Foundation of Recruiting Enterprises of Foreign Agricultural Labor), which also lobbies the Canadian government for Canadian farm owners, under the supervision of the Department of Human Resources Development of Canada.

According to the Canadian United Farm and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), 20,274 migrant workers came to Canada in 2005: 11,798 came from Mexico and 5,916 from Jamaica; the rest came from Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). In 2004, fewer than three per cent of participants in this program were women. In 2009, the number of migrant workers in Canada is expected to be over 156,000.

Seasonal workers like Don Jorge come to work in the horticulture and fruit and vegetable sectors. Most workers (nearly 16,500) are employed in Ontario; Quebec follows suit with 2,670 seasonal workers.

The temporary workers visa allows them to work only on a specified farm and for a limited period of time. Mexicans and Jamaicans can stay for a maximum of eight months.

Workers live in housing provided by the employer and are not allowed to spend the night outside the quarters. Employers are required to cover certain costs (which vary depending on the nationality of the worker), to ensure that the employee is covered by workers’ compensation and under health insurance, and to sign a contract with the worker.

"The Guatemalan workers pay $35 per week for their lodging but the farm owners pay for their plane ticket. Mexican workers pay for half their plane ticket (up to $550) but they don't pay lodging," says Edgardo Flores Rivas, General Consul of Mexico in Montreal.

Most workers are married with children, which ensures they have an "anchor" back home, preventing them from staying in Canada after their work term. They have health and labor insurance while in Canada, and when they fall ill their employers must take them to a doctor. Under the rules of the program, a worker cannot be repatriated due to illness.

Don Jorge says, however, that this is not always the case. He recounts an incident that happened during his first years in Canada.

"We were working in the fields even though they had announced a severe storm. When the storm hit, it hit hard. We had a bunch of boxes full of produce stacked up. They were knocked down by the wind and they were going to fall over a Quebecker. A young Mexican jumped in, risking his life. He was hit here and there, and afterward he was suffering from intense shock and trauma. He couldn't work and asked to see a doctor, and the patron” – the boss – “refused. Two days later, while we were all in the fields, they tried to repatriate him. But the young man left a message for his roommate and that's how we found out. They never thought we would find out," he says.

Don Jorge says the farm workers decided to take action. After lunch, they all refused to go to work. When Chenail found out about the strike he went to the workers’ quarters and threatened to send them all back to Mexico if they refused to go to the fields. The workers called the Mexican Consulate for support, but were baffled when Fanny Carranza, a Consulate staff member, told them to get back to work instead of looking for trouble.

But the workers refused, saying they would rather return to Mexico than allow such injustice to occur. The young man finally received medical attention and worked the Canadian fields that summer. He wasn't offered a job the next year.

Andrea Galvez works at a Temporary Workers Support Center (Centro de Apoyo) in St. Remi, Qc. She cites numerous problems that allow for worker abuse in the program.

"The workers sometimes work 14 hours per day. They don't get a break. They are afraid to complain because they fear they will be sent home," she says.

The majority of workers want to work as many hours as possible to maximize their earnings, since they have to cover for the costs of coming to Canada in the first place. No matter how many hours per day they work, migrant workers do not get paid overtime.

"What they earn is what the Canadian government establishes as the minimum wage for agricultural workers. People and media ask why they earn so little. We can't modify Canadian law. Those who come know this is how it is," says Flores Rivas.

"[The government omitted overtime pay] because they wanted to protect small family farms. The problem is that now agriculture is industrial, not family owned," says Galvez.

For René Mantha, General Director of FERME, low wages are essential to stay competitive in the global economy.

"They can’t be paid time and a half. Let’s use the lettuce harvest as an example. If workers are being paid too much the lettuce will be more expensive to compensate for the higher wages. If the lettuce doesn’t sell because it is too expensive we will not be able to hire any workers later. You see, we are in a global economy," he says.

Furthermore, a survey in the Niagara region showed that Canadian farm workers' hourly rates increased nine to 14 per cent over the past five years.

Bilateral government agreements call for a rest day after six days of work but employers can ask workers to volunteer to work their rest day during harvest periods.

"I wish they would work no more than 12 hours per day. It is what is stated in the contract," says Mantha. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the workers sometimes face longer working hours.

"They are not here for one week. They are here for six or seven months, so if they are exhausted I can tell you they will not be as productive," he says.

Flores Rivas agrees, saying they are not supposed to work more than 12 hours per day ever. "This has been decided to protect their health," he says.

In Canada, agriculture accounts for several times more work-related injuries and deaths than other industries. Risks stem from operating heavy machinery, applying pesticides, and working long hours during extreme heat. These dangers are compounded with the fact that most workers have inadequate training and sometimes do not understand safety instructions.

According to the North-South Institute, one in three workers from St. Lucia, Grenada and Mexico and one in five workers from Trinidad, Jamaica and Dominica report injuries or sickness due to the combination of long hours and exposure to chemicals and other hazards. Between one half and one third of sick and injured workers go to work rather than risk being considered unfit for work or losing wages.

****

Paulino* has worked Canadian fields for seven summers.

He has been a peasant all his life. “My father showed me how to clean the corn, the yucca, the camote since I was a little boy,” he says.

He appreciates his job, since he says it is hard to find a job back home, but he bitterly complains about the expenses involved in working here, and the lack of wage increases in spite of a rising cost of living in Mexico.

“In Mexico everything is very expensive. We want our salaries to increase but it’s not like anybody asks us what we want. We are illiterate; we have no say in the negotiations,” he says.

To begin with, while still at home, Mexican CSAWP hopefuls bear the cost of traveling to Mexico City five times or more to fulfill the bureaucratic requirements of the program.

To be eligible for the program, workers must pay for and pass the medical screenings required by the Canadian government. Canadian Immigration Health Services has approved very few clinics that carry out required medical screenings, and all of them are in Mexico City.

Workers must also travel to Mexico City to apply and pay for their work visa with the Canadian government.

"We cannot force the Canadian government to open offices elsewhere to give the visa. In the Third World they use their own standards. Not all clinics can pass the standard. The worker who comes knows he will have these expenses," says Flores Rivas, adding that the Mexican government has opened several offices in Mexico to make the Mexican paperwork easier for the workers.

Mexican workers pay half the cost – $550 – of their plane ticket. An economy class round trip from Mexico can be bought by the general public for as little as $600. However, Galvez says the tickets are bought through a travel agency owned by FERME, and she believes this is clearly a conflict of interest. Flores Rivas disagrees.

“The only way they can reserve the seats with the airlines is to reach an agreement with them,” he says. For Paulino, the $550 amount is staggering.

Seasonal migrant workers have to pay income tax like all other workers in Canada. They also pay Canadian Employment Insurance (EI) and make contributions to the Canadian Pension Plan. In 2001, Ontario CSWAP workers contributed $3.4 million to EI even though they cannot claim such EI benefits as welfare.

Paulino says the money he is able to bring back home is spent fast, and he believes the Mexican government is unwilling to negotiate better salaries.

Given the great personal cost, why do so many agricultural migrant workers like Paulino keep coming to the Canadian fields year after year?

Paulino says he, like many others, comes from a poor rural Mexican family. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to high school. He says he leaves his sweat and health in the Canadian fields when he comes and that it is very difficult to be away from his family for so long. “I have two young children. They miss me and I miss them,” he says.

Even so, traveling to work every year is an act of love towards his family. “I want to give my children a better life. I want them to study. That’s the only reason I come so far to work: for them,” he says.

Flores Rivas believes the conditions of the program are the best the negotiations have allowed.

“It [the program] is not that bad since people keep on coming,” he says.

When asked if he will continue to come back to Canada, Paulino says he will. He says it is not because the program is good for the workers, but because there are not enough jobs back home.

“We come because we have to come,” he says.

*Workers' names have been changed to avoid problems with their employers.

Verónica Islas is currently completing a Masters degree in Public Policy and Public Administration at Concordia University.

TFW Fence