Treat migrant workers fairly
After months of telling people to stay home if they’re sick, or even if they think they might have been exposed to someone who is sick, the Ontario government told one particular group of workers to stay on the job if they test positive for COVID-19.
This wasn’t a group of specialists vital to the functioning of the health-care system, or a key pool of experts who run our nuclear power plants.
This rule is for migrant farm workers who come here by the thousands from Mexico and the Caribbean to plant and pick our crops. They are paid little for this backbreaking work and, thanks to lax government regulations, have few real workplace protections, even in the best of times.
But the edict to keep COVID-positive farm labourers who are not experiencing symptoms working in clusters shows a shocking disregard for them and the communities where they live.
Thankfully, local medical officers of health in farming areas hit by coronavirus outbreaks, including Windsor-Essex and Niagara, have shown better judgment and refused to adopt this policy.
But how could the province have been so willing to treat these workers so differently from the rest of Ontario’s workforce?
Given its actions, it’s ludicrous to hear the Ford government insist that a “worker’s passport does not determine how they are treated in our system.”
“That’s not the Ontario way,” says Labour Minister Monte McNaughton.
The province has very deliberately treated these workers differently — for the sake of their agricultural employers and economic interests. And that’s what Ontario and the federal government have always done.
Migrant farm labourers work and live here under a separate, lesser set of protections. They are excluded from many of the protections Ontarians get, including residential tenancy requirements and general labour rights, including the ability to unionize.
This needs to change. It’s never been good for the workers and COVID-19 has made it clear that it isn’t good for anyone, including the communities that rely on their labour.
At a time when communities across the province are reopening — even previous hotspots like Toronto — Leamington and Kingsville remain unable to do so because of the number of cases in the agri-farm sector.
Just like long-term care, the province has been reactive, not proactive, when it come to protecting this pool of vulnerable people. It ignored numerous warnings about how easily the virus could spread, given working conditions and bunkhouse accommodations. Instead, it waited until the cases grew too big to ignore and farmers feared lost crops for lack of workers.
Ottawa was similarly slow to act. It did come to the table with $50 million to help farms modify their worker accommodations and subsidize wages during self-isolation but its inspection regime is so abysmal that it’s impossible to know if those measures have been effective.
The federal government conducted many farm inspections remotely. That’s the same thing Ontario was rightly excoriated for when it “inspected” long-term-care homes over the phone.
The provinces and Ottawa need to join forces to fix the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and improve working and living conditions for migrant workers. That’s been the case for years but COVID-19 has made it all the more urgent.
Migrant workers must be reassured that being tested will not result in an unwanted ticket home. They need to trust that they’ll be properly supported — medically and financially — by their employers and the government if they test positive and need to isolate.
“If you are working in this province, I want you to know that your health and safety is a priority for our government,” McNaughton says.
That’s the way it should be. It’s long past time Ontario took the necessary steps to make it so.