March 22, 2024

The international workforce of economic migrants is exploited by politicians and their employers.

In Canada, it is a story that goes back to before the official boot heel stamp of the Crown. Migrant workers brought in by employers and the state operating on behalf of employers to bring down the cost of labour. Sometimes paid, sometimes not.

The current battle around migrant workers continues along the same lines. Employers have been hooked on migrant labour as a cheap labour pool and state policies support that process through successive governments. The inevitable backlash against the impact of "too much" migrant labour is expertly channelled to worker-against-worker angst.

They took our jobs.

They took our homes.

They took our food.

They took our healthcare.

They caused covid to spread.

They brought drugs.

They brought weapons.

They brought violence.

The list "they" are blamed with sounds a lot like the list of things you blame on the bogeyman.

The issue is that the economics of exploitation of labour means that more labourers means cheaper labourers. But, more cheaper labourers also means more strain on the social systems that sustain those labourers.

The Chamber of Commerce never changes its tune.

Diana Palmerin-Velasco, senior director for the future of work at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “The reality is that we currently have more than 600,000 unfilled job vacancies across the country negatively impacting our ability to grow our economy.” (BN)

Canada has an explicit policy to respond to labour market needs of employers with "temporary foreign workers". With the whiny cry of capital since the before the pandemic of skills-need mismatch and now the hard working workers-need mismatch, the government's go-to lever was pushed hard.

International students have also become a favourite go-to for funding an increasingly marketized university and college system in Canada.

The result has been a much higher growth of "temporary" workers entering the country than permanent workers.

• temp workers: 2.5M
• permanent residents: 400K

The minister has announced that the temporary resident population will be dropped by about 500,000 people.

Employers in food manufacturing, wood product and furniture manufacturing, as well as accommodation and food services, will only be allowed to have 20% of their workforce come from the low-wage stream of the program, down from 30%.

The reduction will likely affect owners, operators and franchisees of restaurants or fast-food chains. The 30% cap will remain in place for employers in health care and construction sectors, at least until Aug. 31. (BN)

The blaming of temporary residents (let's call them what they are: students and workers) from everything from high food costs, high healthcare costs, low wages, and now high housing costs is, flatly, ridiculous.

The housing issue is not caused by the number of temporary or even permanent workers. It is caused by a market system that does not link labour with planning social services to support workers.

At the centre of the abuse of temporary workers is simply that these folks are seen as expendable sources of labour market "balancing" (in the favour of capital) and nothing else. Just like the women who are not currently in the labour force, it is not that these people deserve dignity and access to work, it is that they may constrain the rise in the cost of labour to capital.

Canada thinks of childcare this way, immigration this way, boarders this way, and indigenous community development this way.

It is exceedingly backwards and never gets us to where we need to go.

The left must start being clear about their basis for all these programs and ours. We want to build self sufficiency and see the economy in a wholistic way that should sustain and foster the individual self. Of all people.

As such, we must put forward a program where immigration is permanent, where workers and their families are supported as guests into this country. We treat guests with the knowledge that they should not be exploited but supported and facilitated to a level that they can fully express themselves. With the full understanding that their contribution will mean more than the simple addition of their own work.

The fact that we want the same for everyone else should make this call very easy.

It is an economics that is significantly different from what we have now and a language equally distinct.

I am not going to get into it today, but a graph and a table says a million raging keystrokes.