David Fairey, co-chair of the BC Employment Standards Coalition, contributed this critique of BC’s minimum wage policy to The Tyee last week. According to StatsCan, BC now has the highest overall poverty rate in Canada, despite its wealth of natural and human resources.
At a forum in downtown Vancouver on Saturday, August 10th, the West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association (WCDWA) presented findings and recommendations from its new report, “Access to Justice for Migrant Workers in BC.” The report addresses a wide variety of inequities and forms of discrimination that are intrinsic to the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), along with the program’s successes. It also includes specific stories of abuse and injustice experienced by people in BC employed under this program. Next to Ontario, BC employs the second-highest number of TFWP workers in Canada.
Participants at the forum included a number of individuals employed under both the Live-In Caregiver Program and agricultural worker streams of the TFWP, as well as representatives and advocates from a number of organizations involved in migrant labour issues. Other participants included Vancouver-Kensington MLA Mable Elmore, Lorene Oikawa, Vice President of the BC Government Employees Union, Judith Diesta from the Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers’ and Caregivers’ Rights, Lucy Luna from the Agricultural Workers Alliance, and Al Li Lim, Staff Lawyer and Executive Director of WCDWA. Following the WCDWA’s presentation, participants engaged in a roundtable discussion on the issues addressed in the report, including how to better serve needs of people who are employed under the TFWP.
To read “Access to Justice for Migrant Workers in BC,” please click here.
During British Columbia Youth Week this past May, First Call BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition released a report on child labour in BC. First Call is also a member organization of the BC Employment Standards Coalition.
Their report, “Child Labour is No Accident: The Experience of BC’s Working Children” was an eighteen-month research project funded by The Law Foundation of B.C. Links to the full report and associated documents are available on this page.
In a recent article for the South Delta Leader, Coalition member Jeremy Bryant was interviewed about his advocacy volunteer work alongside farmworkers in Delta. He discusses the lack of fairness in Canada’s “guest” farmworker programs, and points out the need for those who are employed under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) or the agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) to be offered a route to citizenship.
Read the article here: Critics say the temporary foreign worker program is replacing immigration.
Please see the following link for an article by Coalition members Jonathan Hanvelt, David Fairey and Gurpreet Pabla. This piece, which was circulated to the media earlier this spring, describes the systemic exploitation of farm workers in BC, most of whom are temporary foreign workers or recent immigrants:
