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 Editorials | Issues | July 2007 
Migrant Workers Toil on Farms, Struggle for Union
 Guelph Mercury
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 |  | The workers are fed up of being mistreated.
- Patricia Perez |  | | Montreal - A steady flow of migrant workers who toil Canada's farms and provide the cheap labour necessary for many to turn a profit are meeting bitter resistance as they try to unionize.
Workers at three farms near Montreal are anxiously waiting for a labour board ruling about their respective union drives, a decision which could be pivotal to foreign workers trying to assert their rights in Canada.
"The workers are fed up of being mistreated," says Patricia Perez, founder of a support group for migrant workers that is funded by the Quebec chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Earlier this summer, Manitoba's labour board handed down a groundbreaking decision that certified a group of Mexican farm workers in Portage la Prairie, though it is currently facing appeal.
Manitoba Conservative labour critic Ron Schuler has denounced the board's ruling, believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, as "nonsense."
The Quebec decision has been delayed repeatedly since the request was originally filed in 2006. In the meantime, there have been a number of well-publicized confrontations between farm owners and their foreign farmhands.
In one incident, a farmer reportedly withheld health-insurance papers from an injured worker before police intervened. In a separate incident, two farmers are facing assault charges following a quarrel with Perez at Montreal's airport last fall.
"There are established work guidelines that are not applied and not respected," Perez says. "But for the workers, what is most important is to be respected as people."
But the head of an association of Quebec horticultural producers counters that if conditions were that bad, so many workers wouldn't come back each year. "Every year 75 to 80 per cent of the same workers return to the same farms," says Rene Mantha, who heads the Fondation des entreprises en recrutement de main-d'oeuvre etrangere.
Many of the migrant workers are here through the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, a 34-year-old agreement with Mexico and Caribbean countries that provides seasonal visas to 18,000 workers. |
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