A new report suggests that migrant workers in Nova Scotia face overcrowded and substandard housing, wage theft, and other pressing issues despite regulations intended to protect them.
Falling Short: Troubles with the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Nova Scotia was released Wednesday morning.
“Falling Short paints a bleak picture of the treatment and occupational conditions of migrant workers in Nova Scotia. In Nova Scotia, the issue is not a lack of regulation but rather a lack of implementation,” researchers noted in the report.
“Rules do exist, but governments do not require employers to adequately implement these rules to create a safe, dignified, and regulation-compliant work environment for migrant workers.”
Produced by Migrant Workers in the Canadian Maritimes Partnership (TFW Maritimes), the report was published in collaboration with the Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA-NS).
Dalhousie University researcher and one of the report’s co-authors Dr. Raluca Bejan explained that the study focused on the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) in Nova Scotia, not the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP).
The SAWP involves bilateral agreements between Canada and participating countries in the Caribbean and Mexico. Bejan said because the SAWP is “much more regulated,” they expected conditions to be better for the Mexican workers they interviewed. But that wasn’t the case.
“The rules that exist on paper — specifically in relation to housing — they’re not implemented,” Bejan said in an interview. “The main problem was by far housing. It was inadequate and overcrowded.”
Inadequate housing that violates regulations
While the SAWP stipulates that employers must abide by CMHC occupancy guidelines of no more than two people per bedroom, Bejan said the workers they interviewed shared different experiences. They described inadequate, unsuitable, and overcrowded housing that violates regulations.
Homes where migrant workers lived sheltered anywhere from 25 to 50 people. Kitchen and bathroom facilities were insufficient, and substandard housing stock created unsafe and unsanitary living conditions.
Some study participants mentioned one accommodation that had housed 42 people one year, 56 another year.
“They had bunkbeds, but nothing more. The division from one bunk to another. . . was a sheet,” one worker said. “So practically nothing, no rooms or anything, they were simply comfortable bunkbeds. Can you imagine, 56 people?”
Beyond the lack of privacy, this led to difficulties accessing bathrooms, washing machines and dryers, as well as kitchen appliances.
“Imagine a house, let’s assume a house that is for 14 people, and they put 22 people [in it]. There were three stoves,” one worker shared. “Then we all arrived together. Sometimes one wanted to cook, others wanted to eat, some had to wait, and then, when were we supposed to do the cleaning?
Another shared that sometimes migrant workers lost their food to spoilage because there wasn’t enough space in the fridge for them to store it.
Bejan also said while someone from the Mexican consulate in Montreal can come to Nova Scotia and inspect workers’ housing, they don’t always see the entire picture.
“Some of our workers were saying, for instance, that sometimes even if the Mexican consulate comes and visits the housing, the employers are actually only showing the good housing stock,” Bejan explained. “So yes it’s (SAWP) in a way better regulated. But we still have the problem that these rules are not implemented as well.”
Information not easily accessible
Researchers also noted that information on temporary foreign worker housing in Nova Scotia is not easily accessible.
When we requested information from Nova Scotia’s Department of Labour, Skills and Immigration on housing inspections, we were told to contact Service Nova Scotia, the agency responsible for residential tenancies.
When we requested this information from Service Nova Scotia, they directed us back to the Department of Labour, Skills and Immigration for the information. It appeared that the provincial departments in charge of housing were unclear as to who was responsible for inspecting the housing of temporary foreign workers.
“The guidelines from the federal government are that the appropriate provincial department should inspect the housing,” Bejan said.
“But if the provincial departments don’t know which one is the one that’s going to inspect, this also points to a problem in implementing the rules.”
One of the report’s recommendations for the Nova Scotia government is that it proactively conducts spontaneous inspections of housing provided for seasonal agricultural workers in the province.
This is the third report created by the Migrant Workers in the Canadian Maritimes Partnership. The first, published in 2021, was titled Safe at Work, Unsafe at Home: COVID-19 and Temporary Foreign Workers in Prince Edward Island. The second, Unfree Labour: COVID-19 and Migrant Workers in the Seafood Industry in New Brunswick, was published last year.
While much of the research into migrant workers and the SAWP program has been conducted in larger provinces like Ontario and British Columbia, Bejan said they wanted evidence-based data to better understand what’s happening in the Maritimes.
“This is so we can actually inform future policy positions that will improve the occupational and living conditions of migrant workers in the region,” Bejan said.
Legalized wage theft
Low wages and legalized wage theft were among other key issues highlighted in the report’s findings.
Many workers performed piecework at rates that often advantaged their employers. Employers frequently capped piece rates at amounts lower than the minimum wage or under-counted boxes of produce. Workers being paid by the hour did not always receive the same rates as Canadian workers doing the same jobs, even on the same farms.
Bejan said despite signing contracts stating they’d be paid hourly, migrant workers also often arrive to learn they’re being paid by the piece or box of product.
“What happens is that a lot of this product gets undercounted, and oftentimes they end up getting paid less than the minimum wage,” Bejan said.
This is despite federal program guidelines that prohibit that from happening.
Bejan said in this case, federal legislation contradicts Nova Scotia’s labour code which specifies that employers of workers who harvest fruits, vegetables, and tobacco are permitted to pay piece rates.
“You have a very outdated labour code which also still envisions this idea of a traditional farm which relies on family or maybe close friends to work,” Bejan said. “But this is not the case any more.”
The report also noted that workers often had pay deductions they didn’t understand. For example, in some cases their employers deducted wages for “groceries,” but no groceries were provided.
“Some also complained that they had to pay out of pocket for equipment like boots and rain gear, despite their contracts stating that these expenses would be covered,” the report said.
Health care access
Workers’ access to health care was described by the report’s authors as “beholden to the whims of their employers.” Although medically insured through their employers, workers were dependent on their bosses to transport them to medical facilities.
The report found that employers frequently delayed taking workers for medical treatment, in some cases even suggesting they forgo treatment altogether.
“Let’s say you have a worker that goes to access medical care, and then the doctor’s recommendation is that they have to take days off work and so on. That employer’s actually not going to have a worker,” Bejan said.
“So what happens is that you have these employers playing doctors, but they also have a vested interest because they need a worker. So it’s just not an ideal situation.”
One experience highlighted in the report was that of a worker who’d broken a bone after falling in substandard employer-provided housing. Their employer told them they didn’t require medical care.
When the worker insisted on treatment, the employer waited for an entire day before transporting them to a healthcare facility.
When this same worker was told that he would need to be off work for several weeks, the employer told him that he would not be paid, even though the state of the house contributed to the injury.
‘Local’ often involves extraction of cheap labour
Among many recommendations outlined in the report, the report’s authors urge the federal government to grant permanent residency to temporary foreign workers on arrival.
Bejan said doing so means workers will have access to things like health care and social services. They also want the federal government to end closed work permits and guarantee workers the right to labour mobility so they can change employers.
In the report, participants were asked what they would like to improve about their working conditions. The workers said they wanted employers to listen to their concerns, cover all their transportation costs, and to face fines when they fail to respect workers’ contract hours.
They also indicated a desire for help setting up community kitchens, and/or facilitating outings or community-building events and services like Spanish libraries, religious services, or English classes.
As someone who only arrived in Nova Scotia in 2021, Bejan said she’s noticed how Nova Scotians pride themselves on supporting and buying local. She wants them to also think about how they get a lot of those local products.
“Within a globalized economy, local oftentimes is also produced through an extraction of cheap labour from the states that are not performing that well economically,” Bejan said.
“I think it’s important even for us here to understand that even if we consume local, this local oftentimes is actually very dependent on an internal international extraction of labour.”
Shameful !!