Temporary foreign workers, without the racial angle
Williamson made sense, if not for his unfortunate choice of words
I’d like us to return now to a moment in time, a very precise moment in the recent past. It is the moment, the exact instant, just before MP John Williamson, at a gathering of conservatives in Ottawa, embarked upon his ill-starred discussion of “whities” and “brown people” and their relative disposition under the temporary foreign worker program.
Suppose, immediately after he had said “I’m going to put this in terms of colours,” he had not said “but it’s not meant to be about race” (RED FLAG! DANGER! GO BACK!). And suppose, instead of then plunging on to say “it makes no sense to pay ‘whities’ to stay home while we bring in brown people to work in these jobs,” he had merely said “it makes no sense to pay ‘greenies’ to stay home while we bring in ‘purples.’ ” Presumably he would not have landed in quite such hot water.
Or suppose he had eschewed the colour experiment altogether, and simply said “Canadians” (the ones we are paying to stay home) and “foreigners” (the ones we are bringing in to work in their place). Would that have been all right?
Why yes, that would have been perfectly all right. People use that formulation all the time to explain why they are so vastly upset about this small ( just 30,000 workers, in the low-skilled category) and quite unremarkable program. It’s not about race. Not at all. It’s merely about all those foreigners, mostly from Third World countries, taking our jobs.
But back to Williamson. We are still in that fateful moment, hovering on the brink of disaster, and we are right inside his head. What, if anything, might he have been thinking? What, other than racism, might have been his point?
The detour into race, while it may have been statistically accurate (at least in Atlantic Canada, which is what he was describing), was unfortunate, but what might he have really been getting at?
The idea that it “makes no sense” to “bring in people” to fill certain types of low-wage, low-skilled jobs, especially when jobs are going begging, enjoys a strangely broad constituency, one that embraces economic illiterates and sophisticates alike.
For the Illiterates, it is the usual expression of the “lump of labour” fallacy — the notion that there is only so much work to be done in an economy, and only so many jobs to go around, and thus that any addition to the labour pool can only come at the cost of existing workers.
This is contradicted by the experience of, oh, the last 200 years: as workers have flooded into the labour market — immigrants from abroad, women from the home, young people from school — employment has expanded to absorb them. Aside from just before the recession, the employmentto-population ratio in Canada has never been higher.
The Sophisticates have a different argument. If, as employers maintain, workers cannot be found for certain jobs in certain parts of the country, why not just offer higher wages to attract them? The temporary foreign worker program is in this light not, as the Illiterates see it, a blight of “neo-liberalism,” but an unwonted intervention in the free market: a disguised subsidy to employers.
This makes a certain sense, if you accept that the default position is a closed economy, from which the admission of new entrants is an unusual deviation. If the market for labour is defined in exclusively local terms, then yes, the free market response to a shortage of labour, whether generally or in the particular, is to raise wages.
But for the most part it isn’t, and for the most part we do not insist that it must be. If a firm in Smallville finds it can’t hire enough workers locally at the going wage, no one forbids it from advertising in the next town over. Similarly, if an oil rig in Alberta needs to bring in Newfoundlanders to fill out its workforce, no one seems to have a problem with that. It’s only when it involves crossing national boundaries that it becomes contrary to God’s plan.
Actually, it’s even more arbitrary than that. If a company, instead of having things done in-house, were to subcontract the work offshore — hiring foreigners, only without “bringing them in” — it would be unlikely to invite the same wrath, except from rank protectionists.
Or if the workers, rather than being “brought in” to work, had already moved here — immigrated, that is — why, only racists and xenophobes would object to that.
But if, as with the case of temporary foreign workers, they’re in between the two — if they work here but live there — everyone gets to let their nativist flag fly, conscience-free.
Williamson, on the other hand, seemed to be making a much different argument. The part that “made no sense,” in his estimation, was not so much the bringing in of the, ahem, “brown people,” as the paying of the “whities” to stay home. The Sophisticates’ argument, that it’s a distortion to bring in TFWs when employers could just pay higher wages, assumes not only that the universe of available labour is defined by whatever arbitrary boundaries people think to draw around it, but that the market for labour is not already distorted — in this case by lax employment-insurance policies, such as have traditionally applied in Atlantic Canada. Fix those, and employers might not need to venture further afield.
That they do so, just the same, even in areas of high unemployment — that they are willing to go halfway around the world in search of unskilled labour, with all of the screening and the language training and the other costs this entails — is not so they can shave a few cents off the hourly wage.
It’s because they have no other choice.
The idea that it ‘makes no sense’ to ‘bring in people’ to fill certain types of low-wage, low-skilled jobs, especially when jobs are going begging, enjoys a strangely broad constituency.