This article was originally published by OpenFile, with files from Justin Ling and the Halifax Media Co-op.

In 2004, Nenette moved to Nova Scotia from the Philippines. She paid a placement agency back home about USD $4,500 to find her a job at a nursing home. When she arrived, a room was waiting for her in the home of a Filipino woman who had a relationship with the original agency. The woman charged Nenette $350 per month to share a small bedroom with two other female workers. It was furnished with only a couch and a pillow on the floor. The cost included food. In addition, Nenette paid her hostess 50 cents out of every hour she worked to cover transportation to and from the nursing home. For a full-time worker, this would have cost around $80 per month.

Nenette lived in these conditions for three months before finding her own apartment. She was unaware of her rights. She didn’t know she could refuse a shift. The nursing home had recruited Nanette through the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, which allows employers to fill labour shortages by hiring workers from abroad.

As of June 27, 2010, Nenette said there were other workers from Taiwan and the Philippines who are still living in the same conditions she was.

Abuses triggered reforms to TFW program

Their stories aren’t isolated. For years, workers in Nova Scotia have been abused and exploited under the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, according to Human Resources and Skills Development Canada documents obtained through an expansive freedom of information request by Justin Ling for the Halifax Media Co-op.

Original names and locations in the documents were blacked out due to concerns of privacy; Nenette is not her real name, and it’s not possible to tell exactly where in the province she was working.

Most of the documents are responses to a 2010 consultation on Temporary Foreign Workers carried out by the province’s director of Labour Standards, Bill Grant, for the Labour Standards Division of the provincial government. They identify the following problems:

• Migrant workers in the construction, farming and domestic sectors are most often exploited under the TFW program.
• Recruiters abroad and in Canada are charging workers thousands of dollars to find jobs in Nova Scotia. These fees sometimes don’t include airfare.
• Once they arrive, employers pay workers lower wages than promised, and force them to work long hours, sometimes with no overtime pay.
• Workers often aren’t aware of their rights, and some employers abuse this fact.

Last April, three amendments to the Temporary Foreign Workers program came into effect across the country. The first aims to assess the genuineness of job offers. The second bans employers for two years if they have been caught breaching contracts. The third has received much flak from critics of the recent reform: it places a four-year limit on a Temporary Foreign Worker’s time in Canada.

At the end of June, another amendment passed, requiring all third-party representatives such as consultants and lawyers to be authorized before providing services to Temporary Foreign Workers.

Last month, Federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney renewed his efforts to reform Canada’s immigration program by requesting input in Alberta. The tar sands employ tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers. Two of them died in an accident in 2007.

Reforms rely on communication

Lee Cohen is an immigration lawyer and founder of the Refugee Clinic in Halifax. He has advocated on behalf of migrants for over 25 years. He isn’t convinced the recent amendments do enough to protect workers.

“Ultimately I don’t know how the government of Canada will find out what’s going on in the workplace unless it is so bad that somebody dies, or unless you have a foreign worker that is so self-possessed that they’re prepared to go public about it,” he said. “And that’s very, very rare.”

Foreign workers face many boundaries when seeking help, he explained. Workers who come here from developing countries often aren’t aware of their rights under Canadian law. They may not understand that they can quit a job. They may be reluctant to challenge their employers for fear of being fired or deported. Sometimes they send income back home to support their families.

The scale of abuse that workers may have experienced in other countries can be much worse than it is here, Cohen says, so foreign workers may view exploitation in Canada as an improvement. On top of this, migrant workers may also face cultural, racial and language barriers when they arrive.

It’s no wonder, then, that the FOIPOP documents show a stark lack of communication between foreign workers and the officials who could help them. When the NS Human Rights Commission responded to the consultation, they said out of the 300 complaints they receive each year, none were from temporary foreign workers, even though their issues would likely be relevant to the commission.

Cohen says it’s common for employers to take advantage of migrant workers’ silence and lack of knowledge about their rights. The responses from the consultation largely agree with him.

“In Canada, we don’t think Canadians do this, and we’re doing it in fairly significant numbers,” he said. “We’re just taking advantage of people who can ill-afford to be taken advantage of, for our own personal gain. And it’s really ugly.”

The solution is information

Almost every immigration problem Cohen has seen over the last 25 years has been directly related to information and education. No matter how desperate they are for help, immigrants can’t get answers to questions. Whether it’s the immigration office that defers them to the call-in phone service, or the automated phone service itself, or the website that looks confusing even to a born-and-raised Canadian, Cohen said migrants are receiving a lot of misinformation.

“What foreign workers don’t have is an opportunity to sit down with an objective person who has nothing to gain by providing useful information.”

Because Canada’s immigration system is so complicated, migrant workers and their employers both need to be educated about their rights and responsibilities, Cohen says. And since he can’t travel the world giving conferences to everyone who would like to come to Canada (as much as he would like to) he thinks the responsibility to educate temporary foreign workers and employers is in the government’s hands.