Canada

The Canadian Council for Refugees has made public its concerns at the dramatic shift towards temporary migration in recent years. This shift represents an important policy change, but it has taken place largely without public debate. The CCR’s comments on the proposed amendments are made in the context of concerns over the particular vulnerability of workers on temporary visas and the broad impacts on Canadian society of expanding the temporary migration program.

The CCR's comments are available here.

A few weeks ago, Kumanan Thurairajah and Parvathy Thamboo approached the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) about organizing a union in their workplace. Last week they were fired, along with four other union supporters.  

Earlier, Thurairajah had spoken with members of UNITE HERE (the union representing workers at some of the hotels) who face many of the same challenges as laundry workers: low wages, heavy workload, and little job security.

Canada's system for bringing in temporary workers is a mess, writes the Toronto Star in this special series. One sign of this is the influx of foreign recruits into Toronto's underground economy. A Star investigation has found that the recession, employer abuse and poor monitoring is leaving more and more of these workers vulnerable and without legal employment.