November 1 Day of Action in Defence of Migrant Rights
Raise the Call: Status for All!
Migrante and la Association de Mexicanos en Calgary
visit an Alberta farm on Thanksgiving, share a meal, games
and karaoke before the migrant workers return home for the season.
The Migrant Rights Network has called for a national day of action
on Sunday, November 1 to once again raise the call for Status for All!
Actions will include pickets, rallies, online events, banner drops,
postering, leafletting and phoning the office of the Prime Minister and
of local Members of Parliament. Migrant Workers Alliance for
Change has announced a live facebook event -- Niagara: Mourning the Dead,
Fighting for the Living -- Status for All. The
Workers' Centre of CPC(M-L) has called for a picket in front of the
Toronto constituency office of the Minister of Immigration, Refugees
and Citizenship at 11:00 am. Worker's Forum calls on
our readers to take up the demand of Status for All and organize or join in the actions.
Participants in the November 1 actions will be collecting signatures
for the Status for All open letter initiated by the Migrant Rights
Network before the recent Throne Speech and opening of Parliament. Over
350 organizations, including the Communist Party of Canada
(Marxist-Leninist), signed the open letter which states, "We the
under-signed call for a single-tier immigration system, where everyone
in Canada has the same rights. All migrants, refugees, students,
workers and undocumented people in the country must be regularized and
given full immigration status now without exception. All migrants
arriving in the future must do so with full and permanent immigration
status." The government has failed in its duty. The rights of all must
be recognized!
 Status
for all would, for example, end the situation where a worker is tied to
a single employer. It would allow migrant workers a pathway to
permanent residency, remove the obstacles that currently restrict the
labour and collective bargaining rights of agricultural workers and
enable access to supports that are available only to those with
status in Canadian society.
Denial of status is a significant factor in the spread of COVID-19
among agricultural workers. In Ontario alone there have been 1,100
COVID-19 compensation claims from agricultural workers -- 17 per cent
of the 6,600 COVID-19 compensation cases in the province -- and,
according to the Toronto Star, many cases were
simply not reported. The overwhelming majority of these claims were from
migrant workers. Neither the government nor the agribusiness owners
took the measures necessary to protect these workers. The United Food
and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), together with the Agricultural
Workers Alliance took it upon themselves to distribute thousands
of masks to temporary and migrant agricultural workers -- as well as
all other workers in need of protective equipment for work -- at the
union's Agriculture Workers Support Centre in Leamington.
In Alberta, UFCW recently reported that, because of the work of
the union and migrant rights advocacy groups, conditions have improved
in the meat packing plants which were so hard hit with COVID-19
outbreaks earlier this year. However, two outbreaks were declared in
August, this time at the Cargill case-ready meat packing plant and at
the Harmony Beef plant in Calgary, both of which are now over. An
outbreak has now been reported at Capital Fine Meats in Edmonton. More
than 1,600 workers in total had been infected earlier at
Cargill's High River plant and the JBS Canada plant in Brooks, east of
Calgary.
 Foreign
students have also faced great difficulty due to lack of status during
the pandemic. There are nearly 700,000 foreign students in Canada on
post-graduate work permits and study permits. Foreign students pay
nearly four times the tuition paid by domestic students, adding an
estimated $22 billion to the Canadian economy in the 2016-17
academic year. Their tuition fees account for roughly 30 per cent of
total undergraduate tuition fee revenues of Canadian universities.
Their fees are sustaining post-secondary education in Canada yet they
are bearing a tremendous burden and difficulty because of their
precarious status. Their study programs were disrupted. Their
employment
opportunities were disrupted. Their study visas and work permits
expired. It is completely unjust.
Workers' Forum once again calls on our readers to take up
the call of Status for All! Visit the Migrant Rights Network website migrantrights.ca for more information on how you can be involved.
This article was published in
Number 71 - October 20, 2020
Article Link:
November 1 Day of Action in Defence of Migrant Rights: Raise the Call: Status for All!
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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