An advocate is advocating for a rethinking of the structure that oversees the hiring of migrant workers in Canada.
“The Seasonal Agriculture Workers Program is presently systematic enslavement,” argues Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
Hussan made the remarks in an open letter to Jamaica’s Ministry of Labour, in which he advocated for improved working conditions for these employees.
In terms of living conditions, he claims that the majority of migrant agricultural laborers are housed in employer-controlled housing, which he describes as “essentially stables or warehouses where people are living in bunk beds, piling on top of each other to sleep, even in COVID.”
“[The employees] do not have privacy, community, friends visiting, or families living with them.” “This housing is about warehousing people, and in this sense, persons are being dehumanized and made into robots, rather than being treated as whole people,” he claims.
According to a prior assessment, immigrants accounted for around 25% of the overall COVID-19 death toll in the early months of the epidemic. Furthermore, migrant farm laborers from other countries who come to Ontario are at a higher risk of developing COVID-19 and other infections. This is because of their shared living and working environment.
A week after the letter was written, 57-year-old Garvin Yapp, a Jamaican agricultural worker, was killed while operating farm equipment.
“We don’t know if his family will receive any compensation,” Hussan said of the worker in a CTV News story. Hussan adds, alluding to migrant farm laborers, that “human beings are being treated like machines.”
The Migrant Employees Alliance wishes to provide these workers permanent status so that they can campaign for their rights without fear of being deported or dismissed.
The federal government proposed 14 regulation changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations in July 2021. (Temporary Foreign Workers).
In addition, Budget 2022 recommends a variety of steps to strengthen worker safeguards, decrease administrative barriers for trusted repeat employers, and guarantee firms may promptly hire employees to address short-term labor market gaps.
