Mexican Labour Ministry resolves to end discrimination in Canadian farm employer hiring practices

Thursday, April 28, 2016

by SUSAN MANN

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada has taken another step in its fight to end discrimination in the 50-year-old seasonal farm worker program that allows Canadian growers to hire offshore employees when they’re unable to find workers here at home.

In March, union representatives signed an agreement with the Mexican Labour Ministry that “includes a commitment to eliminate Seasonal Agricultural Worker program recruitment practices that are based on discriminatory criteria,” UFCW Canada’s April 26 press release said. The agreement was signed at a meeting also attended by the Mexican National Council to Prevent Discrimination.

The Mexican ministry plans to inform Canadian employers “they will no longer be allowed to ask for the specific gender of their potential employee under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program,” the release said. “These requirements will be communicated to Canadian authorities.”

Ken Forth, president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), disputed the union’s contention the program is discriminatory.

“We ask for the people that we employ by name,” he noted. “We’ve employed people for years and year under the program, and we ask for them by name.”

FARMS was incorporated in 1987 and is the non-profit organization that facilitates and coordinators farmers’ requests for foreign seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico or the Caribbean.

In a previous interview, Forth said about 80 to 85 per cent of the worker participants in the seasonal agricultural worker program go back to the same farm they worked on in previous years and that “works for everybody.”

Forth said in the telephone interview Friday, he hasn’t seen the agreement signed by UFCW and the Mexican labour ministry and he’d like to see it.  

UFCW said in its 2015 release women accounted for just 3.29 per cent of all Mexican workers who came to Canada for seasonal farm work.

Under the seasonal agricultural worker program, there are about 15,000 workers who come to Ontario from both Mexico and the Caribbean to work on farms during the growing season. Across Canada, there are about 30,000 workers coming from those countries to work on farms for the growing season.

The program, which began in 1966, stipulates employers must first try to find Canadian workers before being able to fill positions with offshore employees.

Forth agreed there aren’t a lot of women in the program. However, that’s because the majority of women in the supply countries are between 20 and 50 years old, and are generally raising children and are unable to leave for work in Canada.

The program “just happened to start as a program where they, (the supply countries), supplied men and it went from there,” said Forth, who has a vegetable farm near Lynden. “Before that, my farm in particular, employed almost 99 per cent women for 30 to 40 years in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I live near Hamilton and the steel industry took all the men. Was it discriminatory? No.”

Stan Raper, UFCW national coordinator of the Agriculture Workers Alliance, said it presented its complaint of systemic discrimination in the seasonal agricultural worker program to the Mexican human rights commission two years ago. The agreement the union signed in March with the Mexican labour ministry is the result of that complaint.

Raper noted the agreement could take up to five years to implement.

In launching its challenge, Raper said UFCW is trying to ensure anti-discrimination laws in Canada are enforced. The small number of women being sent to Canada to work in the program is an indication there is “some flaw within the program. In all other sectors, there are higher percentages of women working in those programs.”

Forth said this is just another thing in the program the union has found to complain about.  “Their motive now is clearly to destroy the program because they haven’t had their way in unionizing the workers in it.”

In Ontario, UFCW launched a systemic gender discrimination complaint against the program to the Ontario Human Rights Commission two years ago. The commission declined to investigate, but issued a statement and posted it on its website.

The commission’s statement said, in part, that migrant workers are protected by many of the same laws that protect other workers in Ontario, including the Ontario Human Rights Code. The code says everyone has a right to equal treatment in their employment situation.

That means employers cannot refuse to hire a person because of their sex or other code-protected grounds, and that they cannot include discriminatory preferences in their hiring process, the statement said.
 
UFCW has other discrimination complaints before the British Columbian and Quebec human rights’ commissions, Raper said. The B.C. commission has agreed to investigate and “we’re still waiting for Quebec.” BF