Any takers to milk cows for $20 an hour?
Labour shortage exacerbated by new rules regarding foreign workers
EDMONTON — Nita Floryn has been trying for weeks to hire a herds-person for her family’s dairy farm west of Lacombe, Alta.
Despite ads in newspapers and online, she has yet to receive a realistic application for the job that pays $18 to $20 an hour. The family needs help, but she’s not optimistic about finding someone to assist with milking their 300 cows.
“It’s always not that great, but in the last couple of years it’s been really bad,” Floryn said.
It’s a problem often seen by Tony Kok. He has run an online agriculture employment service based in Alberta for eight years. There has been a steady shortage of workers for the past three or four, he said.
The recent downturn in oil prices elicited a few queries, but wage expectations weren’t in line with what farms offer.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow, I guess. I can’t blame them, they’ve had a good job with good pay, but the reality is farms aren’t going to pay like the oilpatch,” Kok said, adding that even if they don’t work in the energy sector, farm kids are flocking to urban centres.
Kok and Floryn also said it’s increasingly difficult to hire foreign workers, despite being exempt from federal caps that limit the number of people hired in other industries.
“We don’t have a problem to hire someone from outside Canada ... but all the permits make it difficult,” Floryn said, referencing federal rules for advertising jobs to foreign workers that came into effect April 30.
Before recruiting an international worker, farmers are required to advertise in Canada for a minimum of 14 days during a three-month period, then must apply for a labour market impact assessment. Only after the assessment is completed and the results show there is no Canadian worker available can the farmer start searching abroad. In April, the federal government increased the fee all employers seeking an assessment must pay from $275 to $1,000. Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council task force co-chairman Mark Chambers said the labour shortage endangers Canada’s food supply, affecting both producers and processors.
There are about 1,000 vacancies across Canada “and it’s going to get tougher to replace people or to add more people when you’re short and getting capped,” he said.
Without a reliable regular workforce, Chambers said processing plants may close or move south, creating challenges for producers suddenly without places to send livestock and growers who produce feed.