Harper Inc.'s approach to EI Is Another Rail in Building the Exploitation Express

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Migrant Workers in Canada:
Why we migrate
Migrant Workers in Canada:
Working and living conditions
Migrant Workers in Canada:
Injuries on the job
Migrant Workers in Canada:
Our hopes on Migrants Day

Ottawa – December 17, 2012 – Since the proclamation in 2000 by the United Nations initiating December 18 as being International Migrants Day, the international trend has been towards less protections for some of the planet's most vulnerable workers - so called "temporary foreign" or migrant workers.  Motivated by eager employers, governments around the world have consciously abandoned protecting migrant workers leaving them often  alone in a sea of exploitation and basic unfairness.

In Canada, many provincial governments and the federal government in Ottawa, have played a fundamental role in the deprivation of basic protections for migrant workers and the overt implementation of harmful legislation. To our national embarrassment this has more often than not been the rule and not the exception.  Our governments have, in many situations, been the driving force.  The dilemma for Canadians is that they drive with myopia and strategize about the Canada of next year as opposed to the Canada of the next 20 years.

The most obvious and belligerent driver of this myopic approach to public policy has, of course, been the Conservative Government in Ottawa.  To list the examples of their persistent blows to ordinary working people who migrate to Canada to simply build a better life, would transform this article into a lengthy dissertation.  That is not necessary. The Conservative attacks to elementary principles of justice and fairness, as they relate to migrant workers, arrive with such regularity that we need only to look at the last several weeks for an illustration.

For instance, less than two weeks ago on December 7, 2012, with no notice to migrant workers or their advocates, Conservative Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada Diane Finley announced regulatory amendments whereby seasonal migrant workers have essentially been disqualified from accessing parental or compassionate care benefits.  Finley's release noted that:

...eligibility for EI special benefits will be available to only those individuals who are authorized to work in Canada with a valid [Social Insurance Number] SIN. Specifically, individuals with expired SINs will no longer be eligible for these benefits.

Why ensure that recipients of Employment Insurance Benefits have a valid SIN numbers?  Upon closer inspection it becomes quite obvious. Social Insurance Numbers for workers under the Seasonal Agriculture Workers Program (SAWP) for example expire once they return to their sending country.  This ambush is merely an additional spike in the "Great Tory Rip-off of Migrant Workers."

This same group of workers have been paying premiums into the Employment Insurance (EI) fund since the program’s inception in 1966. Annually, migrant workers under the SAWP pay an estimated $25 million into the Employment Insurance program.  From a longer-term perspective, billions of dollars have been deposited into government coffers with limited benefit to the insured.  With each paycheck, approximately 30,000 SAWP workers essentially make a donation to the Canadian government. 

While seasonal migrant workers pay into the EI program at the same rate as a permanent resident or a Canadian citizen, they have never been able to receive the same benefits.  What little benefit they had has been erased by Stephen Harper and Associates on December 7. This has all of fairness of buying mandatory auto insurance, but being told that it is impossible for you to collect most benefits.  It seems that the EI program is now even more akin to "unjust enrichment" by the Conservative Government than it is to insurance.

In defence of this new brazen attack on some of the most vulnerable people in our society, Minister Finley came up with a new primary "purpose" for EI benefits. From her perspective, and that of the Conservative regime in Ottawa, "the core principle of the EI program is to provide temporary income support so that individuals can transition back into the Canadian labour market.  This alleged "core principle" of the EI program contradicts specific aspects of the EI Program whereby residents of the United States or individuals working in another country outside of Canada can claim benefits. People who are working outside of Canada, and continue doing so, are in no way transitioning "back into the Canadian labour market."  This new "principle" is hypocrisy at its best.

For the Conservative Government this is par for the course. For instance, after much fanfare last year, Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced in April that the government had set up a website to list employers that had been deemed “ineligible” to retain migrant workers.  These "bad employers" could be banned from taking part in the Temporary Foreign Workers Program for up to two years. Although thousands of cases exist and the Conservative Government has been provided with documentation of abuse by way of the UFCW Canada's Migrant Worker Book of Abuse, which documents hundreds of cases, the Conservative Government list of "bad employers" remains empty.

Like the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), if you paid into the EI program, where someone resides once they've paid their premiums is not reasonably relevant to receiving benefits.  Whether benefit cheques are sent to Kingston, Ontario or Kingston, Jamaica should not make a difference once a premium has been paid. Some Canadian workers who, for whatever reason, such as forced retirement due to layoff, never rejoin the Canadian labour market.  Some of those workers may even move abroad. They would be paid under the EI Program.

Moreover, there are tens of thousands of retired Canadians who live outside of Canada and collect CPP benefits after having spent a lifetime paying into the CPP. The point here is that there is no rational public policy basis to exclude migrant workers from receiving a benefit from an insurance scheme that they paid into simply based on the idea that to collect such a benefit one must be in Canada. Sadly, this new Harper Inc. attack on migrant workers has little to do with sound public policy.

This action by the Tories in Ottawa, and the general condition under which tens of thousands of migrant workers toil, has planted further seeds of inhumanity in an already ripe garden of exploitation. There is little fruit, from a Canadian perspective, that we should be proud of.  The consistent and strategic diminishment of basic and essential protections for migrant workers will undoubtedly continue to be the hatchet that axes away at the values of fairness for all of us.

 

In solidarity,

Wayne Hanley
National President