”A lot of Filipinos and others are silent in their jobs....They are scared that if they do something for change, they will be deported....They feel held at the blade between life and death.”

The migrant worker who spoke these words, quoted in Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants, is talking about an experience that is becoming increasingly common in Canada. Workers from countries across the global South are seeking decent work in Canada, yet when they arrive here, they often find themselves chained to the bottom of the labour market, and reluctant to speak out for fear of extradition. Fight Back, written by five politically engaged academics who work with the Montreal-based Immigrant Workers’ Centre (IWC), helps to counter the exploitation of migrant workers by documenting their struggles.

The scope of Fight Back is broad, drawing on interviews with about 50 migrant workers, including both those who come to Canada through established channels such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, and so-called “illegals,” who must navigate workplace challenges in constant fear of being deported.

While certain challenges that migrant workers face — racism, for instance — are shared by many Canadians, deportation is a unique threat that serves to keep migrant workers from asserting their rights and demanding equal treatment. On a daily basis, workers — including visa-holding contract workers — run the risk of being deported to their home countries if labelled as troublemakers by their employers.

Migrant workers are often socially isolated: those who come to Canada through the Live-in Caregiver Program, for instance, are required by contract to live in their employer’s private home; the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) requires that workers live on-farm in dorm-style accommodations provided by the employer.

The publication of Fight Back is timely. The Harper government recently expanded the Temporary Foreign Worker Program through the passage of Bill C-50, despite the objections of groups like the Alberta Federation of Labour, which called the program “part of a deliberate effort to drive down wages and working conditions and to bypass unionized Canadian workers.” As noted in Fight Back, this immigration bill has streamlined the flow of guest workers from countries like Guatemala into sectors ranging from fast food to the tar sands.

The explosive growth of this migrant workforce in recent years, Fight Back reminds us, is a direct consequence of neoliberal policy and corporate malfeasance, at home and abroad. The North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, has opened the Mexican market to cheap, subsidized U.S. corn while allowing transnational agri-corporations to purchase enormous swaths of Mexican land. This results in the displacement of rural peasants, who must then pursue work in exploitative maquiladoras or look further north towards jobs in the U.S. and Canada. Similarly, the destruction caused by Canadian mining corporations in countries like the Philippines and Guatemala push people off of the land, further enlarging the migrant labour force.

Governments of countries that provide migrant workforces, in turn, encourage migration in order to mitigate poverty crises at home through monies remitted to the families of workers.Fight Back emphasizes that these family obligations frequently bind workers to their jobs, in relations that are often gendered. As one migrant worker states, “Especially the Filipino women, most of us believe that sacrificing is the way to get to heaven.”

The pressures to conform to Canada’s job market often result in what the authors call “learning in reverse,” a key concept in Fight Back. This pro cess teaches immigrants to “accept and accommodate harsh economic conditions...to deny their social status and education, to hide their “over-qualification” and adapt to this bottom of the labour market.” Trained nurses find that their foreign credentials are worth little; as domestic workers, they receive a low level of compensation while providing a high standard of care.

But migrant workers also learn to resist, and Fight Back draws on the experiences of migrant workers to demonstrate the process of transgressive learning. For example, Maria, an immigrant from El Salvador, demanded respect from her employer — L’amour, a garment manufacturer headquartered in Montreal — who was harassing employees and demanding higher production quotas. While the L’amour company union discouraged her from taking action, the IWC helped Maria to file a successful complaint with the provincial labour standards bureau.

Fight Back emphasizes that transgressive learning and active resistance require community support: “Individuals that did eventually take action always did so with the support of others, who provided them with information and other resources to help them in a dispute with an employer.” Key organizations offering this kind of support in Quebec include PINAY, a non-profit organization of Filipina women, and the Centre d’appui pour les travailleurs agricole which works with the United Food and Commercial Workers to empower migrant farm workers in Quebec.

The authors argue that although these organizations are connected to the labour movement at large, global dynamics like the widespread relocation of industry to cheaper sites of production abroad have “in some cases fueled exclusionary or racist practices within unions towards immigrants, rather than solidarity or support.” Fight Back calls for unions to embrace new models of organizing capable of introducing “a community approach to traditional unionization” that would benefit immigrants and other low-wage workers.

Fight Back reveals an alarming trend in Canada’s political economy: the emergence of what the authors describe as “a new underclass of immigrant labour” that risks undermining the rights of all workers as it becomes easier to evade and weaken organized labour through expanding temporary foreign worker programs. Anyone who desires to live in a fair society should take notice.

—Dave Koch

This review first appeared in Briarpatch Magazine

(View Original)

(Close)

The ongoing slippery slope of neoliberal capitalist restructuring continues 

to have a disproportionately racialized and gendered impact on people 

around the globe. The stark meaning of this is that people are more and 

more surviving and resisting in conditions of often-profound inhumanity. 

Along with too many cases of out-and-out war, the various forms of 

combined economic, political and social attacks all are intertwined, causing 

large-scale displacement of people and increasingly fragmented and 

weakened possibilities for working-class power. 

 The authors of Fight Back, who form the Immigrant Workers Centre 

Research Group in Montreal, offer us a detailed primer on (im)migrant 

conditions, struggles and rights in this context.  The book is based on 

interviews with some 50 people whose lives have been wholly re- 

organized by their displacement and migration, varying in form with the 

different market forces and related state-based immigration programs and 

policies they encountered when arriving in or in order to depart to Canada 

and Quebec in different periods. 

 Before exploring a number of these different socially organizing 

forces and systems, the authors explain the importance of the Immigrant 

Workers Centre (IMC) as ‘a place of intersection between the traditions of 

labour and community movements’ (12). Founded in 2000 by Filipino- 

Canadian unionists critical of how union officialdom has often treated 

workers, given the traditional organizing (limited-to-unionizing) model, 

the core group is now a mix of immigrant labour organizers and allies, all 

of whom have a range of experience in labour and community struggles. 

The IMC carries out individual case work, as well as labour education to 

increase skills and analysis, and builds union-community relationships, 

through campaigns ‘that reflect the general issues facing immigrant 

workers, such as dismissal, problems with employers or, sometimes, 

inadequate representation by their unions’ (11).  

A key piece of the context for the IMC activity is the historic 

organization of migration to Canada, spanning over four periods of white- 

settler colony and nation-state building. Slavery, indentured labour, 

modern-day displacement in the global South, the dispossession and ‘triple 

exploitation’ (31) of Indigenous peoples, and the historic favouring of 

white migrants have all led to an ongoing ‘racialized hegemony that 

underpins immigration and labour market policies’ which plays out in 

‘contemporary Canadian immigration, labour and other policy frameworks 

[that] maintain a regime where different categories of workers enjoy 

deeply unequal rights’ (16).  

 Neoliberal restructuring, starting in the 1970s, has deepened the 

racialized class character of Canadian social life through the casualization 

and expanded precariousness of work with new job creation largely in 

part-time, service sector work in which migrants of colour are over- 

represented. The late-1960s origin points system for independent 

immigration, the 1995 $975 head tax, and the various and expanding 

temporary worker programs of the last four decades, are all state- 

organized and market-driven mechanisms that have resulted in the 

‘commodification of immigrants’ (19). 

 The generalized experiences of immigrant workers, across the 

various programs that organize migration, are summarized by the concept 

of ‘learning in reverse.’ This learning is a process of socialization into the 

immigrant worker category and experience, involving various degrees of 

accommodation to poor economic conditions and possibilities, as well as 

denial of class and social position, educational background, and often of 

hiding skills and expertise to get access to the low-paid jobs that are 

generally available to immigrants. It is also about loss through the process 

of accepting disappointment and injustice, and a self-redefinition to less 

than one’s full humanity. This is fundamentally about survival in a context 

that also sees major inequities in migrants’ access to legal and social rights. 

 Fight Back focuses on two significant and longstanding temporary 

migrant worker programs in Canada, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker and 

Live-in Caregiver Programs (SAWP and LCP). The endurance of these 

programs demonstrates how the labour shortages they are addressing are 

not temporary, even if the workers are treated as such. The organization of 

the SAWP on the basis of low-wages, precarity, isolation and vulnerability 

is a case of ‘an explicitly racialized underclass’ (60). Yet SAWP workers 

continue to apply to the program because of few options in their home 

countries. And, like LCP workers, the remittances to family back home are 

a huge driving force for workers to endure the multiple harsh workplace 139 

and life conditions, not limited to but involving long hours, no overtime 

pay and threats of job loss and deportation when they are ill or injured. 

 The LCP workers are mainly women, who also labour in often quite 

difficult and under-paid conditions, a reality that is partly socially 

condoned by the historical undervaluing of this gendered and, this case, 

racialized form of work. While its early incarnation – the Caribbean 

Domestics Scheme – granted permanent residency status right away, LCP 

workers now must wait until they complete their two-year contracts 

before making such application. This is a deeply material demonstration of 

the impact of neoliberal policies of precarity on thousands of peoples’ lives. 

And it plays out in profoundly disrespectful day-to-day forms, in 

conditions women must put up with, one of whom interviewed graphically 

described as being ‘treated…like an idiot’ by her employer (79). 

 In the face of such inhumanity, (im)migrant workers are living a 

complex mix of survival, adaptation and resistance. Learning in reverse is 

accompanied by often-courageous acts to restore and maintain dignity and 

demand respect from abusive employers. Many different types of 

organizations have developed to try to support individuals and collectivize 

this when possible. 

 What I experienced as breathlessness in the writing style of the 

book seems to be about the real urgency and commitment of the authors to 

migrants they interviewed and the complexity of supporting their ongoing 

resistance in increasingly challenging conditions. What I was not entirely 

sure about was for whom this book was written, largely because of the not 

fully explicated theoretical frame. The anti-capitalist, anti-racist working 

class politic is unmistakable but the full meaning of this for the authors - 

beyond the ‘anti’- is not clear. And some key concepts – such as ‘material 

conditions’ – are left unexplained. Given it is such an important primer, a 

better explicated theory of social organization and change would have 

been extremely valuable. - Sheila Wilmot, OISE/University of Toronto for 

Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2)Fall 2009

(Close)

Securing employment during a global financial crisis is a challenge for anyone, but finding equitable employment as a new immigrant to Montreal adds extra challenges to a job hunt in today’s marketplace.

Montreal’s Immigrant Workers’ Centre in Côte-des-Neiges has emerged as a focal point for grassroots organizing around working conditions for immigrant communities in Montreal, and it is a focus in the recently published book Fight Back.

Scribed by professors Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Steve Jordan, Eric Shragge and Martha Stiegman, Fight Back details the working conditions experienced by new immigrants in multiple sectors, including the restaurant industry, live-in domestic work and agricultural industry around Montreal.

”Fight Back is about bringing the voices of immigrant workers forward,” says co-author Martha Stiegman. “It’s important to tell the story of migrant farm workers in Quebec, or live-in caregivers in Montreal, these are stories that are so often forgotten in the mainstream media.”

The book interviews immigrant workers about their jobs and their experiences. Although it serves an academic audience, it also enlightens those currently looking for work as a new immigrant in the Montreal job market, and their rights as workers. Fight Back presents a unique marriage between engaged academics and community organizers at the Immigrant Workers’ Centre, telling the human tales behind labour struggles.

”[We] hope that Fight Back can be useful

both for those trying to learn about the working experiences [of] new immigrants and also within immigrant communities actively organizing for just labour conditions and employment opportunities,” continues Stiegman.

The testimonials collected in Fight Back aren’t found in any other contemporary publication, and as such offer a unique portrait of the experiences of those working in the immigrant labour sectors in Quebec. Fight Back also deals with non-status labour, detailing stories on the working conditions experienced by thousands living without immigration status in Quebec, and including local jobs like driving, kitchen help and factory work.

Fight Back details both the policy side and human stories that complete an important snapshot on often untold stories faced by immigrant workers in our city.

For more info, see the book’s website: www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/367.  - Stefan Christoff, The Hour, August 27, 2009.

(Close)