Business, labour agree on TFW
Word out of Ottawa that the federal government is going to make it tougher for employers to access the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) program is welcome news, but much more needs to be done.
Raising the $275 fee for applying for workers under the TFW is a sensible step, and tying access to the program to the unemployment rate should prevent the program from being abused in areas of high unemployment.
Another proposal being mooted is a “wage floor’’ that would ensure that temporary foreign workers would not be paid below the market rate paid to Canadians doing the same job.
But what’s really needed is a major rethink of the entire program. What began 40 years ago as a program to help provide foreign workers for seasonal agricultural jobs, as live-in caregivers or to alleviate short-term skill shortages, has morphed into a program to provide cheap foreign labour to the service industry on a more or less permanent basis.
It’s true that restaurateurs, retailers and construction companies are having a hard time filling their rosters in areas of low unemployment, like Saskatchewan and Alberta. But the TFW, as it exists today, may not be the best tool to address chronic labour shortage problems that seem to be plaguing these industries, particularly in regions of low unemployment.
What’s needed is a program that supports and actually raises wages — for Canadian and foreign workers — rather than undercuts them. A program that will provide a permanent solution to the problem of finding workers for low-wage service industry jobs, especially in areas of low unemployment.
Last month, Employment and Social Development Minister Jason Kenney declared a temporary ban on new applications under the TFW program for restaurants in the wake of media accounts of abuse of the TFW program by unscrupulous employers against both foreign and domestic workers.
Kenney, dubbed Mr. FixIt by his cabinet colleagues, has been wisely using this time to seek input from stakeholders (i.e., business and labour) to fix the program. From what I’m hearing, so far, so good.
Higher fees would discourage businesses from using the TFW program as an expedient means of filling low-wage jobs. In the U.S., employers have to pay as much as $2,300 to access the American foreign workers program. Fast-food restaurants, retailers and other service industry employers should be using the TFW program as a last resort — not the first step — in filling job vacancies.
And a wage floor would stop the widespread practice of using the TFW to undercut salaries being paid to domestic Canadian workers doing the same type of work.
While useful first steps, these proposals represent the bare minimum required to clean up the program.
More interesting are proposals from business and labour groups, which appear to be on opposing sides of the issue, but in reality share much in common.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) has been one of the most vociferous voices in opposing the government’s moratorium and defending employers of foreign workers from being “painted with the same brush’’ as program abusers.
Yet the CFIB’s recommendation to fix the TFW program are not fundamentally different than those of Unifor.
Both groups are calling for the TFW program to be fixed, wages for TFWs raised and abusers punished.
More importantly, both are also calling for increased rights for foreign workers (A Bill of Rights for TFWs, CFIB calls it). Unifor says temporary foreign workers should have the same rights as and protections in Canadian law as any Canadian worker anywhere in the country.