Canada

They hand you a soothing cup of Tim Hortons, pack frozen beef in factories, pick blueberries and apples on Abbotsford farms, serve fast-food meals and wipe tables, excavate mines and drill for oil in Western Canada, and raise your kids as if they were their own. Typically paid far less than Canadians, unprotected by labour laws, and disposed of when their contracts end, these migrant labourers have become ubiquitous while remaining all but invisible.

Jose Sicajau is finally back in Canada, but not the way he wants to be. The farmer from Guatemala would like to be working on a Canadian farm for several months, harvesting cabbage and peppers, and earning triple the money he could make back home.

Sicajau did just that four years in a row through a joint Canada-Guatemala program to bring seasonal workers to Canadian farms. He was one of tens of thousands of labourers on whom the agriculture sector relies to produce its crops.

Made in Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity shows that low-wage migrant workers are brought into Canada on terms that leave them open to exploitation and that present barriers to enforcing basic rights to decent work.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has always vehemently denied bringing cheap foreign labour into Canada. Employers had to pay foreign temporary workers “the prevailing wage,” he pointed out.

That indeed is what the rules said – until Wednesday, when Human Resources Minister Diane Finley quietly changed them. Employers will now be allowed to pay foreign temp workers 15 per cent less than the average wage.