A lawsuit launched by two Mexican workers against a New Brunswick seafood processing company signals deeper systemic problems in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Juan Pablo Lerma Lopez and Adriana de Leon Silva travelled from Mexico last year to work for Pêcheries LeBreton & Fils Ltée. For both, it was their first time coming to Canada through the TFW Program.
They are now suing the company, which has operations on the Acadian Peninsula, for allegedly putting them through an ordeal that involved stolen wages and mold-infested living conditions.
The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change held a media conference outside the Moncton courthouse to announce the lawsuit on August 20. The workers experienced “widespread exploitation, mistreatment, breach of contract and bad faith dismissal,” MWAC said in a media release.
Pêcheries LeBreton didn’t respond to interview requests and hadn’t filed a response in court the time of publicattion. The allegations haven’t yet been tested in court.
The company was in the news last year for sending dozens of migrant workers home two months earlier than planned. In April, the feds banned Pêcheries LeBreton from hiring migrant workers for two years and fined the company $365,750 after finding that it had violated multiple rules, the largest known fine in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program’s history. The previous year, it was fined $30,000.
Yet none of those funds go to the migrant workers affected by the violations, according to Niger Saravia, an organizer with MWAC.
Saravia said many companies in New Brunswick bring in migrant workers on contracts that specify regular work hours, yet fail to pay them when no work is available. Many TFWs also rent what he described as substandard housing from the employer.
Juan Pablo Lerma Lopez, 27, one of the plaintiffs in the case, managed to obtain an open work permit allowing him to stay in Canada - under a special program reserved for workers either experiencing or at risk of abuse - following his ordeal working for LeBreton.
Speaking in Spanish outside the Moncton courthouse, he told reporters that his story reflects those of migrant workers across the country.
“I have decided to fight because I no longer want to be invisible in this society,” he said. “I do not want thousands of temporary foreign workers across Canada to remain invisible.”
Groups including MWAC have called for Ottawa to provide migrant workers with permanent resident status so they can walk away from abusive conditions.
Saravia said the lawsuit sends a message to employers: “Follow the contract, and if you don’t, migrant workers will organize in their workplaces and will see you in court.”
For more on this story, the NB Media Co-op spoke to Vasanthi Venkatesh, a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Windsor.
Exploitative conditions are common in the TFW program, but it's "extremely rare" for migrant workers to sue their employers, said Venkatesh who runs a legal clinic in Ontario for migrant workers with the volunteer-run group Justicia for Migrant Workers.
Very few resources exist for migrant workers to launch legal action, so the case indicates substandard working and living conditions for TFWs in New Brunswick more broadly, she said.
The Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre, which runs the only legal clinic for migrant workers in New Brunswick, said it supported more than 100 TFWs in less than a year of existence.
Read the full story on our website, nbmediacoop.org.
8 окт 2024
