Workers, advocates call for changes to proxy unfamiliar workman program

Henry Aguirre, a proxy unfamiliar workman from Guatemala, deliberate himself propitious when he got a pursuit in Quebec as a duck catcher, rounding adult ornithology and handing them over for processing.

Aguirre, 27, pronounced he was fast artificial when he schooled a pursuit paid him by volume instead of full-time, with no compensate for time spent travelling from plantation to farm.

He pronounced he and his associate Guatemalan workers had sealed pursuit offers they didn’t know given they were all created in French.

“We didn’t know a work permit, if we had we wouldn’t have signed,” he pronounced by an interpreter in a new interview.

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Aguirre was one of a organisation of unfamiliar workers and activists who attended a tiny proof outward Montreal’s St Joseph’s Oratory progressing this month to call for changes to Canada’s proxy unfamiliar workman program.

Among other things, they are pursuit for an finish to a use of arising sealed work permits, that restricts a workman to a singular employer.

Viviana Medina, a village organizer who attended a protest, pronounced sealed work permits, denunciation barriers and a fear of losing their jobs means many workers are demure to record complaints opposite their employers.

“The impulse they contend something, they’ll be sent back,” she said. “They have to stay in these conditions since they don’t wish to remove their jobs.”

Recruitment fees

A investigate from a Université de Québec published progressing this month found that many Guatemalan migrant workers in a range are charged recruitment fees in their home countries, notwithstanding such practices being prohibited.

The study, that is formed on interviews conducted between Jun and Nov 2015, found some workers even finished adult regulating a deeds to their homes as a pledge they’d compensate behind a income they due for recruitment fees, according to a orator for a kinship that helped with a study.

Some proxy unfamiliar workers, like Aguirre, work on farms in Quebec. They’re seeking a supervision to stop arising sealed work permits, that shorten a workers to a singular employer. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

“The precarity that brings unequivocally creates it formidable for a workman to ever take a mount and protest about a operative or vital conditions or abuses in a workplace or miss of removing a things that were guaranteed to them,” pronounced Pablo Godoy of a United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

The sovereign supervision says it acknowledges a need for movement and has taken a series of stairs to revoke exploitation and abuse of proxy workers.

“Changes embody augmenting inspections, softened information pity and referrals for rapist investigation, and executive financial penalties and bans for employers who violate module conditions,” Julia Sullivan, an central with a dialect of Employment and Social Development, wrote in an email.

The supervision skeleton to do some-more in a destiny by serve augmenting inspections and creation certain workers and employers know their rights and obligations, she said.

Systemic problem

Aguirre, undone with throwing chickens, eventually began regulating a pursuit chain group to demeanour for other work.

He and 14 others were subsequently picked adult by limit services in October 2016 and indicted of violating a terms of their work permit, he said.

The workers have filed complaints with a province’s workplace health and reserve house and requested a legal examination of their diagnosis during their arrest.

Their lawyer, Susan Ramirez, says she’s met hundreds of workers who have been denied medical or other rights.

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“It’s a systemic problem,” she pronounced in a phone interview. “It’s cryptic since they’re underneath a governance of one employer who ignores their rights, and there’s a denunciation barrier.”

Aguirre, for his part, has successfully performed an open work assent until October, when a ask for a legal examination will be listened in court.

He has a new pursuit and hopes to eventually be authorised to stay in Canada permanently.

Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-temporary-foreign-workers-calls-for-change-1.4228246?cmp=rss