Temporary foreign workers tapped for high fees: group

OTTAWA — Canada needs to do more to protect temporary foreign workers from being charged predatory recruiting fees and falling victim to human trafficking, says a national nonprofit organization that fights for the rights of refugees and vulnerable migrants.

The Canadian Council of Refugees says some temporary workers brought in to fill lowwage jobs are being recruited overseas by agents who charge upward of $40,000 to place them in a job.

This has led to situations where migrant workers are left indebted to the recruiters and are then vulnerable to abuses, including human trafficking.

Charging employees recruitment or placement fees is illegal, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, said Janet Dench, executive director of the council.

Often, the culprits are overseas headhunting companies or agents hired by Canadian companies to find workers, she added.

“It’s widespread and it comes up again and again, people saying: ‘When I got here I had already paid this amount of money in order to get this job,’ and so people are in a very bad situation.”

With fees that can range from a few thousand to, reportedly, up to $40,000, temporary foreign workers sometimes end up in debt to the recruiters. This is how they then become victims of human trafficking.

Some workers also find out after coming to Canada they are not earning nearly enough money to pay off their debts to recruiters or that their work permits are shorter than they were told, Dench said.

She said it is hard to measure how widespread this problem is, because of what she says is a lack of enforcement and monitoring on the part of provincial and federal governments, except in Saskatchewan. There, employers can only use agents who have officially registered with government to headhunt for migrant workers, which allows government to monitor the recruitment firms and also offers workers an avenue to file a complaint.