Type of Proposal
Oral presentation
Faculty
Faculty of Law
Proposal
Human trafficking is not a recent development. A considerable amount of academic scholarship has addressed the problem of illegal human trafficking; however, attention has not been paid to the avenues that foster legal human trafficking. This paper focuses on the critically important side effects of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which is a major driver of legal human trafficking. This program allows Canadian employers to hire foreign workers from the United States, Mexico, the Philippines and so on to fill temporary labour shortages when qualified Canadian citizens are not available. In theory, immigrants are admitted into Canada as parties to an ongoing and open-ended social contract with their employers. In practice, however, the program is not administered as seamlessly as it purports to be. Canadian employers temporarily admit foreign workers into the country to complete jobs that are undesirable to Canadians due to poor wages or working conditions. Four problems of the program have been identified as the following: (1) the employment contract; (2) provincial standards; (3) recruitment agencies; and (4) the lack of union representation. This paper proposes that the current Temporary Foreign Worker Program has reduced the human rights of all immigrants due to the nature of the visa requirements and the types of industries that predominantly house these workers. To improve immigrants’ quality of life during their stay in Canada, it will be suggested that the federal and provincial governments must work congruently to implement safeguards that protect these individuals. Specifically, two viable options are proposed that can tackle the aforementioned problems. Federally, the government can enact an overarching program that governs the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in the entire country. Provincially, governments can adopt an identical program with federal-provincial working groups that complete semi-annual audits on employers.
Start Date
29-3-2016 2:30 PM
End Date
29-3-2016 3:50 PM
Lancer's Lair
1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Boosting our Economy: How the Temporary Work Visa Program increases Migration, but decreases Human Rights
Human trafficking is not a recent development. A considerable amount of academic scholarship has addressed the problem of illegal human trafficking; however, attention has not been paid to the avenues that foster legal human trafficking. This paper focuses on the critically important side effects of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which is a major driver of legal human trafficking. This program allows Canadian employers to hire foreign workers from the United States, Mexico, the Philippines and so on to fill temporary labour shortages when qualified Canadian citizens are not available. In theory, immigrants are admitted into Canada as parties to an ongoing and open-ended social contract with their employers. In practice, however, the program is not administered as seamlessly as it purports to be. Canadian employers temporarily admit foreign workers into the country to complete jobs that are undesirable to Canadians due to poor wages or working conditions. Four problems of the program have been identified as the following: (1) the employment contract; (2) provincial standards; (3) recruitment agencies; and (4) the lack of union representation. This paper proposes that the current Temporary Foreign Worker Program has reduced the human rights of all immigrants due to the nature of the visa requirements and the types of industries that predominantly house these workers. To improve immigrants’ quality of life during their stay in Canada, it will be suggested that the federal and provincial governments must work congruently to implement safeguards that protect these individuals. Specifically, two viable options are proposed that can tackle the aforementioned problems. Federally, the government can enact an overarching program that governs the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in the entire country. Provincially, governments can adopt an identical program with federal-provincial working groups that complete semi-annual audits on employers.