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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.

For many years, Canadian governments have tried to legislate higher earnings for low-wage workers. With origins at the municipal level, living wage laws are a relatively new policy that gained prominence in American cities starting in the mid-1990s. Currently more than 140 American municipalities have a living wage law. In 2011, the City of New Westminster in British Columbia became the first and only Canadian city to adopt a living wage ordinance. This report reviews the scholarly research on living wage laws from the United States and concludes that the US experience should make us cautious about adopting this policy more widely in Canada. -- Publisher's description

Employs an index of "labour market flexibility" to assess labour relations' law in Canadian and U.S. jurisdictions.

It is well known that unions and collective bargaining allows workers to achieve progress in areas such as compensation, working conditions, and other "economic issues". This report examines how unions have also had a positive influence in their communities, in society at large and on the quality of our democracy. The Rand Formula is a formula dating back to 1946 when a decision was made during an arbitration hearing by Justice Ivan Rand that union dues would be paid by all employees benefitting from the collective agreement, not just signed union members. This means the employer deducts the dues from all employee paychecks and then forwards those funds to the union. The Rand Formula prevents employees from benefitting from the work of the union, while not paying union dues.

Young people today in Canada face a reality vastly different from the one 20 or 30 years ago, economically and socially. This paper will examine how young workers are experiencing various changing realities such as: student debt, precarious employment (unemployment, under-employment, and unwaged work), reduced job security (including unionization), rising inequality, changing wealth/debt dynamics and, less quantifiably, diminished social cohesion and community connection as a result of growing insecurity. While this paper will examine the issue from a national perspective, it will also identify how some of these trends are being played out — or differ — in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Canadian labour law has ensured that all workers who benefit from collective agreements contribute to the cost of maintaining those agreements through union dues. Today the security of unions is under attack within Ontario, and elsewhere in Canada. This paper looks at how Conservative proposals, imported from the US, would threaten union security in Ontario by removing the Rand Formula requirement of mandatory dues payment, and allowing workers to opt out of the bargaining unit. The Rand Formula is a formula dating back to 1946 when a decision was made during an arbitration hearing by Justice Ivan Rand that union dues would be paid by all employees benefitting from the collective agreement, not just signed union members. This means the employer deducts the dues from all employee paychecks and then forwards those funds to the union. The Rand Formula prevents employees from benefitting from the work of the union, while not paying union dues.

[Examines] the prevalence of both precarious and stable employment in the labour market stretching from Hamilton in the west to Whitby in the east, and centred on the City of Toronto. [The report] expands the discussion of the social consequences of Canada’s polarizing income distribution by examining the effects of precarious employment on people’s lives. It explores how employment precarity and income together shape social outcomes. What makes this issue all the more important is our finding that barely 50% of people in our study are in jobs that are both permanent and full-time. --Website description. Contents: Background -- Part 1: The rise of precarious employment -- Part 2: The characteristics of the precariously employed -- Part 3: Precarity and household well-being -- Part 4: Precarity and the well-being of children -- Part 5: Precarity and community connection -- Part 6: Options for change -- Appendix A: How we collected our data -- Appendix B: Defining individuals in precarious employment -- Appendix C: How we determined low, middle, and high household income brackets -- Bibliography.

In the present context of labour shortages and skills gaps in Canada, it has been acknowledged that the country cannot afford to keep going without the talents of entire groups of populations that are currently underrepresented in the labour market. Among those groups are people with disabilities. This group is far from homogenous, and therefore not easy to define. Data in this paper helps to show a picture of the employment situation of people with disabilities. This paper also addresses some of the barriers that people with disabilities face, and provides an overview of certain federal programs that can help them. Finally, this paper discusses the Canadian legislative framework, with a focus on measures that prevent discrimination against people with disabilities, allowing them to join the workforce and engage fully in their communities. [Introduction]

In Canada, unionization rates declined in the 1980s and the 1990s, but remained relatively stable over the 2000s. However, the rates evolved differently across various characteristics, including gender, age groups, provinces, and industries. In this brief, unionization rates are examined across various characteristics over the last 3 decades.

Although several recent articles have underscored the importance of human resource management, employee involvement, and labour-management cooperation, there has been very little research addressing these topics from the perspective of organized labour. This study is aimed at providing some practical information about labour-management relations across the country.

The objective of this report is to examine Aboriginal labour market performance in Canada from 2007 to 2011 using data from the Labour Force Survey, which excludes people living on-reserve or in the territories. This is performed by first providing an overview of how the recession affected the Canadian labour market, followed by a Canada-wide portrait of the Aboriginal labour market in 2011. The Aboriginal labour market performance from 2007 to 2011 is then compared to the rest of the labour force on a national level, before being broken down by province and main heritage group. Using this information, the report then discusses the implications of future labour market developments for Aboriginal Canadians and for the labour market policies and programs that support their labour market performance. [Prepared for the Métis National Council by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.]

In Canada, many workers do not earn a living wage because of discrimination. Women work­ers and those who are racialized, immigrant, Aboriginal, living with disabil­ities or similarly disadvantaged are all segregated into low wage job ghettoes—their work systemically devalued. Governments and employers need to deliver more equitable compensation incomes for vulnerable workers. This paper explores how we can close discriminatory pay gaps, so that this basic human right — the right to work and to earn pay free of discrimination — is realized for Canada’s low-paid workers. --Website description

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

Every year, 30,000 agricultural migrant workers arrive in Canada as part of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Low Skill Pilot Project. Although the TFWP is intended to address short-term labour demands, most of these workers return to the same communities year after year, sometimes for more than 25 years. As a result, growing numbers of migrant farm workers are permanently temporary. The increased presence of temporary workers will most certainly have an impact on Canadian communities and workplaces for years to come. Is there a way to conceptualize integration in the context of these migration patterns? How does the TFWP fit into Canada’s multicultural landscape and its goals of integration and social cohesion? In this study, Jenna Hennebry draws on experience with agricultural workers to address some of these questions. The author uses empirical data, interviews and research on the situation in Ontario, the province with the largest number of agricultural migrants, to examine the degree of integration of migrant farm workers. She finds that their inclusion in the communities where they live and work is poor, despite laudable efforts by nongovernmental organizations, community groups and unions – notably the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada union, which has sponsored some unique transnational initiatives.

The term ‘working poor’ is in common usage, but it does not have a widely accepted definition. We use the term throughout the paper to refer to persons with non-trivial paid earnings who live in a household with low income. Our report provides a new definition of ‘working poverty,’ one that allows researchers to measure the incidence of working poverty now and in the future. It identifies the areas in the Toronto Region where they live, and describes the changing trends for this group, based on custom tabulations drawn from Statistics Canada microdata using both the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) and the Canadian Census. --From Summary

Study of housing for Mexican migrant workers in the Okanagan Valley under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Concludes that the workforce is "captive" (i.e., lacking basic rights) to its employer, including for accommodation.

[This report] draws on 2006 Census data to compare work and income trends among racialized and non-racialized Canadians. It’s among the more comprehensive post-Census studies on this issue to date. This joint report from the Wellesley Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reveals that despite an increasingly diverse population, Canada’s racialized income gap shows a colour code is still at work in Canada’s labour market. --Publisher's information

Canada’s agricultural sector has relied on temporary foreign workers from Latin America and the Caribbean for more than 40 years. Since 1999, their numbers have tripled. Most temporary workers on farms are men, but the number of women is on the rise. Both depend on these work opportunities for the livelihoods of their families, yet women rely more heavily than men on this source of income since most are single mothers who have limited access to the labour market in sending countries because of persisting gender inequalities. In Canada, they endure precarious working and living conditions on the farms and face gender-specific challenges. This policy brief documents this new trend in temporary migration and highlights the vulnerabilities of female workers employed in Canada’s agricultural industry. The analysis is informed by various research projects, observation work and interviews with female migrant farm workers conducted in rural Canada and in sending countries over the past 10 years.

[This report] draws on Statistics Canada data and broad academic literature to present a conceptual and empirical profile of the Ontario’s service class. We define the ‘service class’ as an occupational grouping of typically low-pay service jobs. This term was developed by Richard Florida as part of his framework for understanding creativity-led economic growth; however, it is a concept developed in counterpoint to the creative class, and has been neglected in recent research and policy debates.