In the News June 9

For Your Information

Employer-Specific Work Permits

The Association for the Rights of Household and Farm Workers (RHFW) has as its present priority the recognition of the right of all household and farm workers, including those working in Canada as temporary foreign workers, to change employers. The Canadian government formally prohibits many of these workers from exercising that right.

Typically, employer-specific or closed permits are valid for a period of between six months and two years and are renewable. Certain foreign workers have had their permits renewed for as long as 25 consecutive years.

The federal government imposes the prohibition of changing employers by applying two main legal sanctions against temporary foreign workers with an employer-specific work permit: the threat of revocation of the right to work in the country and deportation. A worker can be sanctioned in this manner for an array of reasons, many of which the worker has no control over. For example, if upon the worker’s arrival in Canada the employer is nowhere to be found, or in the case of an employer’s bankruptcy or death, or if the employer is excluded from the program, the worker automatically loses his or her right to work in the country.

Once the ability to leave one’s job is restricted, the already fundamentally unbalanced relationship of power between the employer and employee curves much more dramatically in favour of the former.

Over the past two decades in particular, the conditions of workers linked to a single employer have been observed and regularly condemned by various United Nations’ agencies. Worldwide, workers tied to a specific employer are also amongst those the most at risk of human trafficking.

Abuse takes various forms such as non-payment for hours worked, excessively long shifts and days without breaks, inadequate or non-existent health and safety measures, etc. Such working conditions lend themselves to a deterioration in the health of workers, an increase in occupational injuries, and deadly work accidents.

In describing their conditions, temporary foreign workers themselves have confirmed that they experience extreme anxiety caused by the fear of losing their legal status as a worker and that they are treated “like a machine,” “like an animal,” “like a prisoner,” “like a slave.”

Some face violence, constant psychological harassment, physical aggression and even rape.

In the words of RHFW Executive Director Eugénie Depatie-Pelletier, “the restriction of the ability to leave one’s job and to change employers has four main effects on the conditions of a worker: it leads to limited physical freedom with regard to freedom of movement; it reduces their capacity to make fundamental choices, such as the choice of one’s residence, of a co-tenant, of living with a spouse or of continuing a pregnancy; it increases the risk of a deterioration in one’s health, both mental and physical; and in general, it poses an obstacle to the exercise of rights and in particular, of seeking justice within the country.”

Workers’ Forum, posted June 9, 2022.