Migrant workers toil on Canada's farms, but struggle for union rights

MONTREAL (CP) - A steady flow of migrant workers who toil the country's farms and provide the cheap labour necessary for many to turn a profit are meeting bitter resistance as they try to unionize. Workers at three farms near Montreal are anxiously waiting for a labour board ruling about their respective union drives, a decision which could be pivotal to foreign workers trying to assert their rights in Canada.

"The workers are fed up of being mistreated," says Patricia Perez, founder of a support group for migrant workers that is funded by the Quebec chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Earlier this summer, Manitoba's labour board handed down a groundbreaking decision that certified a group of Mexican farm workers in Portage la Prairie, though it is currently facing appeal. The Quebec decision has been delayed repeatedly since the request was originally filed in 2006. In the meantime, there have been a number of well-publicized confrontations between farm owners and their foreign farmhands.

In one incident, a farmer reportedly withheld health-insurance papers from an injured worker before police intervened. In a separate incident, two farmers are facing assault charges following a quarrel with Perez at Montreal's airport last fall.

"There are established work guidelines that are not applied and not respected," Perez says. "But for the workers, what is most important is to be respected as people."

But the head of an association of Quebec horticultural producers counters that if conditions were that bad, so many workers wouldn't come back each year.

"Every year 75 to 80 per cent of the same workers return to the same farms," says Rene Mantha, who heads the Fondation des entreprises en recrutement de main-d'oeuvre etrangere. "Even on the farms where there have been union drives, the same workers returned."

Many of the migrant workers are here through the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, a 34-year-old agreement with Mexico and Caribbean countries that provides seasonal visas to more than 18,000 workers. Workers have access to health care and other benefits, while farmers often provide lodging. Migrant farm workers in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada regularly work between 12 and 15 hours a day and have few, if any, days off. In Quebec, the farmhands make around $8.50 an hour but don't receive overtime pay.

Jenna Hennebry, a communications professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who has conducted extensive research on migrant farm workers in Canada, says the program is very effective at filling the labour shortage on Canadian farms. But she adds the program, which gives farmers the right to decide which workers return, leaves migrants at the mercy of employers.

"Clearly these workers don't have an advocate," Hennebry says. "They want to be protected, they want to have rights, they want to have a day off. They want to be treated as Canadian workers are treated."

Mantha plays down the tensions, describing the program as a model that provides opportunities to workers from developing countries.

"The demands (for union certification) are not the end of the world," he says. "We're convinced the workers will say no. The workers are very satisfied." He says labour shortages are so acute that his group is lobbying the government to expand the program to other Caribbean and even some Asian countries.

Perez counters that diversifying the workforce is simply a tactic to undermine their union drive.

"They want to make the jobs more precarious," she says. "They will try to break the union movement, but the workers are in solidarity with each other regardless of their nationality."

For Hennebry, organizing unions at various farms across the Canada is ultimately only a half-measure for improving work conditions.

"It's not necessarily going to lead right away to any sort of better situation for workers," she says. "The solution has to come in a more Canada-wide approach." Part of that approach, she stresses, is realizing that mobile labour is a reality of globalization that can't be taken for granted. "They might be temporary, but they are permanently temporarily here."