Seasonal worker program seeks to 'get the truth out'

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Seasonal workers make as much money in a morning on his farm as the monthly minimum wage in Jamaica, says the president of FARMS

by DON STONEMAN


Flushed with a sense of pride after an extremely positive meeting with top leaders of Caribbean countries about the foreign workers program, Hamilton area hort farmer Ken Forth, president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), started casting around in January for ways to get out what he considered to be a good news story.

By the time a public relations firm was engaged and a press release issued in March, FARMS was already fighting a battle that wasn't even theirs: the fallout from a tragic traffic accident that claimed the lives of 10 Peruvian poultry barn workers northeast of Stratford in February.

FARMS is a non-profit company that administers Canada's seasonal agricultural workers program. Annually it brings about 15,600 people to Ontario from Mexico, Jamaica, Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean and Trinidad/Tobago to work on farms.

Forth points out that the workers killed in that tragic tractor-trailer van accident were not technically farm workers – a company that serviced poultry barns employed them. Moreover, they were in Canada under a different temporary worker program and the accident took place on a public road, not on a farm.

Nevertheless, "we've taken a big hit," Forth says.

In March, FARMS issued a news release touting the benefits of the program. The release marked the launch of a public relations campaign intended to "get the truth out there," says Forth.

FARMS is trying to counter what Forth describes as inaccurate portrayals of the seasonal agricultural worker program. He describes it as a model for countries elsewhere in the world. It has "more rules than any seasonal temporary migrant worker program on the planet," he says, pointing out that housing must be inspected by the health ministry, workers receive Ontario Health Insurance as soon as they arrive and if they have to return to their home country early because of injury, they will still collect Workmen's Safety and Insurance Board compensation and receive referrals for health care. They are eligible to collect a pension and can take parental leave, "just like everybody in Canada."

Workers under the FARMS program are covered by health care "as soon as they step off the plane," Forth says, while everyone else waits three months.

Forth says workers on his farm make as much money in single morning as the monthly minimum wage in Jamaica, C$65.

On his own farm, which has employed workers under the program for 42 years, "we go to their weddings, we go to their funerals and they go to ours," he says. When he speaks to government officials in the other countries, he's told that steady employment (many workers return year after year to the same farms in Ontario) has lifted many families out of poverty, helped workers to send their children to university and acquire homes.

He attributes much of the negative publicity generated about the seasonal agricultural worker program to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union of Canada which has sought to organize farm workers.

Forth says the union "dragged a political agenda" over the bodies of 10 foreign seasonal workers from Peru who died in an auto accident near Stratford in February. He adds that union representatives are "angry" they lost a challenge to Ontario's Agricultural Employee's Protection Act last year after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the province's appeal that the Act was constitutional. The union had argued the Act was unconstitutional because it doesn't require employers to bargain over wage and job conditions and lacks a mechanism to resolve labour disputes. "It was an 8-1 decision," Forth says. "That never happens."

Governments both here and elsewhere continue to back the program, but he says the participating workers' biggest fear is that bad publicity will drive it out. Negative publicity also causes aggravation for the farmers who use the program, he adds.

Stan Raper, the union's national co-ordinator for its Agriculture Workers' Alliance, denies the union used the deaths as a platform to promote unionization. Interviews with media did bring up discussion about other provinces having unionization rights, "but I don't recall specifically indicating that, had those workers been unionized, these types of accidents wouldn't happen," he says.

Raper claims there are 6,000 alliance members in Ontario and the "vast majority" are temporary foreign workers. Through four centres in Ontario, the alliance provides workers with information about their rights, health and safety education, and services such as a death benefit programs and translation, as well as income tax referrals.

Raper says the union is concerned about the methods being used to transport farm workers from residence to work and he uses the example of employees sitting on the floor of a flatbed truck. "I argue they're not safe." He says that the frequency of seasonal farm workers being transported in large groups by their employers from residence to work has risen over the past decade.

Transportation standards are among the additions the union is pushing for under the provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act to protect farm workers.

"We're talking about the basics," he says. "I've certainly seen vehicles – and we've taken pictures of vehicles – with workers being in the back of a U-Haul truck or in vehicles that don't have roofs, don't have doors, or workers hanging off the back of a flatbed driving down rural highways."

Forth says he is unaware that transportation of workers to job sites is an issue. Raper says the province's chief coroner has responded to the union's request for an inquest into the death of the workers. "He is waiting for all the reports to come in and review them before he makes any decision."

But, he adds, "we're not optimistic" that recommendations from an inquest "would actually transform into viable legislative protects for farm workers."

Forth might take some comfort in that. He says he has done about 25 media interviews since mid-March and he has been dispelling myths about agriculture. There is a sense that the farms employing these workers are headquartered on Bay Street and they are not, he says. BF

With files from Mary Baxter