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Interview On the Burning Issue of Workers' Migration Out of New BrunswickDaniel Légère is the President of the New Brunswick Federation of Labour. Workers' Forum: Migration of workers outside the province has been a long-standing problem in New Brunswick. You have often spoken about this. What is your view on how the problem poses itself? Daniel Légère: In New Brunswick we have seen big industries shutting down, mines shutting down, mills shutting down. These industries employed a lot of very highly skilled workers, tradespeople. When the industries closed there was nothing left for them in New Brunswick that paid comparable wages. Two years ago, we had the lockout of the smelter workers in Belledune by Glencore. There were a number of those workers that you did not see on the picket lines. They went out west. They had to pay the bills. In the course of the lockout, Glencore shut down the smelter for good, and that also contributed to the migration out West. As you know, New Brunswick is characterized by its low wage economy. Government and businesses do everything in their power to keep wages as low as possible to attract businesses with the promise of maximum profits. We are in a situation now where many workers’ retirement plan will be declaring personal bankruptcy. Workers are making less and less money. Every year they get further behind and many are looking after their families by using their credit cards. At some point it catches up to them and ends up in bankruptcy. At a convention that I attended about a year ago a worker went to the mike and bluntly said that her retirement plan was personal bankruptcy. We are seeing a continuous exodus out of the province. This started about 20 years ago. It has been compounded even more by competition from outside the province where wages are higher. Employers in New Brunswick do not want to pay, and that is not just in the private sector, not just in the mines or in the mills. We see an exodus of nurses, we see an exodus of psychologists, of psychiatrists. People don't want to be stuck in this low wage, no benefit economy that we have in New Brunswick. That is why we find ourselves in the position we are in right now in health care. There is a shortage of over a thousand nurses in our health care system. These are positions that are vacant. That is not counting nurses who are on stress leave, or sick leave, or maternity leave. These are just vacant positions that are not being filled. We see the consequences. Today we see emergency rooms in small hospitals being shut down on the weekends. Some have completely shut down. We see maternity wards being closed for weeks on end and expectant mothers being told "You can't come to our hospital. We just don't have the staff. You'll have to travel further." This is not just a problem in hospitals. The biggest problem is in nursing homes and it manifested itself throughout the pandemic across the country, especially in privately run for-profit homes where the owners are trying to get rich on the backs of workers, paying them low wages and having as few staff as possible. They cut corners to save money. That is where the effects of the pandemic were the worst, in private nursing homes. But this problem exists in our public nursing homes too. For 30 years we have known that they need higher worker/residents ratios, that there is just not enough staff. The staff shortage has a domino effect. The more you work short, the more you burn out. Fewer and fewer people are willing to work in that environment with low pay and a constant shortage of workers. The problem keeps compounding and the situation is getting worse and worse. Personally, I think governments are deliberately letting the public system fail. They will reach a point where they say that the public can't deliver the services any more, that they have to turn the system over to the private sector. The province's solution to the shortage of workers is to try to fast track immigration, to recruit workers whose working and living conditions are worse than what we have here. Government is talking about providing permanent residency to immigrants. We will see. Some time ago, I attended a business conference that was framed as a workers' forum. It was a brainstorming session for businesses on how to get cheap labour. A representative of a tech company told the story of how he made use of recruitment programs in countries like India to get workers to come here and work for long hours for a lot less than what it would cost to hire someone in New Brunswick. He said that the way he is keeping them is with the promise of status, the promise of immigration. He uses the carrot of immigration, he said, to keep them working for almost nothing. This is horrible. And this was said in a public forum. This is a race to the bottom and it has to be reversed. As long as New Brunswick maintains a low wage economy, with precarious work and precarious workers, we will continue to have an exodus of workers out of the province.
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