On Oct. 23, 2015, the Coalition for Migrant Workers’ Rights Canada (CMWRC) set their MoVE campaign in motion. The 100-day MoVE campaign stands for the Mobility, Voice and Equality of migrant workers across Canada.
The CMWRC was formed over the course of the last year when groups of migrant workers from Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec came together for a single cause: Migrant workers’ rights. The MoVE campaign targets Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the Liberal government, to commit to their campaign promises of making family reunification easier and to end tied work permits. More specifically, the CMWRC’s end goal is to provide workers with the mobility to get away from exploitative employers, to provide workers with open rather than tied work permits, to remove the four-year limit on permits, and to give migrant workers permanent resident status upon arrival to Canada.
Migrant workers include those in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP), and the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Their work permits restrict them to employers indicated on their permit. As a result of existing policies, migrant workers are extremely common targets of discrimination, harassment, abuse, low salaries, degraded working conditions. In the past, migrant workers have been exploited as a result of their vulnerable immigrant status —which puts them at great risk of deportation should they displease their employers—and because they are restricted to working for the employer indicated on their permit. Migrant workers are allowed to change designated employers, with permission from various individuals within the existing migrant worker bureaucracy, only after an extremely lengthy and arduous process, which involves effort on the part of the employer-to-be, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of time.
Very few employers, if any, are willing to put in that much effort to hire someone when they can hire a Canadian citizen with next to no trouble. In short, the only options available to migrant workers are to either acquiesce to an exploitative employer, or to search for other work and risk deportation.
In an Oct. 28, 2015 article for Rank and File, Jane Ordinario, from Migrante-BC—an organization comprised of Filipino immigrants—compared the existing migrant worker system to modern-day slavery. She explained that workers are fearful of challenging their employers.
According to Nandita Sharma, a sociology professor at the University of Hawai’i at Maui, In certain cases, migrant workers are put under very strict rules such as curfews, gender separation, and are discouraged of getting involved in any groups or associations.
By providing migrant workers with mobility and a permanent resident status, they will have access to equal rights, benefits, and will not be treated as second class citizens. In an Oct. 28, 2015 article for CBC News, Craig Walsh, from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union—also part of the coalition—noted that it is only fair that these workers get the same rights as any other person in Canada, especially considering the fact that they are also paying taxes and employment insurance.
“If they’re coming and they’re paying taxes and they’re paying EI, I think they should get the same rights as everyone else who works here,” said Walsh in an interview with CBC News.