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In this paper, Fay Faraday explores how to provide workers in the on-demand service economy protection under the Employment Standards and Labour Relations Acts. Ontario’s Bill 148 – the Fair Workplace Better Jobs Act, 2017 – should provide protections to workers in precarious employment in the 21st century labour market. Workers in the on-demand service sector are at the forefront of both precarity and technological change. This paper provides guidance on how Bill 148 could be amended to extend protections to these workers. --Website description
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For the approximately 600,000 migrants currently working in Canada, changes made to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in 2014 have left them more vulnerable to exploitation and have further narrowed their access to permanent residence. These are the findings of Canada’s Choice: Decent Work or Entrenched Exploitation for Canada’s Migrant Workers?, the latest report from human rights lawyer and Metcalf Fellow Fay Faraday, that builds upon her two previous Metcalf papers on the precarious conditions created and perpetuated by Canada’s controversial Temporary Foreign Worker Program. “Canada has lost its innocence on temporary labour migration,” says Faraday. “The 2014 reforms do nothing to alleviate – and in many cases exacerbate – insecurity for migrant workers. And exploitation predictably follows.” The report details the continued exploitation faced by migrant workers — including unscrupulous recruitment practices, employment mobility restrictions, and a lack of protection from rights abuses— and provides clear policy recommendations to strengthen protections and build employment security for Canada’s migrant workers. Canada’s Choice is also part of a submission to the Parliamentary Committee that is currently studying the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. With Canada’s labour migration policy at a crossroads, we hope that this timely report will contribute to informing the public discourse and lead to comprehensive reforms that enforce the rights of some of our nation’s most vulnerable workers. --Publisher's description
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This report builds on the framework and analysis of Made in Canada. As a next step in the research, it focuses on recruitment because that is the stage where the power imbalance between workers and recruiters/employers is greatest, and yet it is the stage with the least effective legal oversight. This research aims to move beyond the now well-worn phrases of “unscrupulous recruiters” and “exorbitant fees” to build a more nuanced understanding of how low-wage migrant workers experience transnational recruitment. It examines the choices workers make (and are forced to make) in seeking work abroad; how recruiters exercise leverage over migrant workers, their families, and communities; why recruitment fees are oppressive; and how a recruitment relationship can undermine workers’ security and their legal rights long after they arrive in Canada. --From introduction.
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In the past decade, Canada’s labour market has undergone a significant shift to rely increasingly on migrant workers who come to Canada from around the globe on time-limited work permits to provide labour in an expanding range of industries. Since 2000, the number of migrant workers employed in Canada has more than tripled. Expanding in response to employer demand, with little public debate, the greatest proportionate growth in migrant labour has been among low-skill, low-wage workers in sectors such as caregiving, agriculture, hospitality, food services, construction and tourism. This report provides a critical analysis of the federal and provincial laws that regulate and constrain the rights of low-wage migrant workers, proposes a rights-based framework to assess their treatment, identifies the ways in which the law constructs migrant workers’ insecurity through each stage of the labour migration cycle, and examines options for systemic change to increase workers’ security.... Executive summary