April 2014 Sisters and brothers, The Asian Canadian Labour Alliance (ACLA) strongly endorses the candidacy of Brother Hussan Husseini for president of the Canadian Labour Congress. ACLA is impressed by the vision that brother Husseini has outlined for transforming the labour movement away from today’s stays quo to an a activist oriented working class movement. …
Sisters and Brothers, The Asian Canadian Labour Alliance is urgently requesting financial support for the family of freelance journalist Ali Mustafa. Mustafa, the Canadian born freelance journalist was recently killed in Syria while reporting from Aleppo. The family has taken out a loan to cover the approximately $20,000 it will cost to have his body…
November 12, 2013 at 7pm School of Image Arts Ryerson University 122 Bond Street Toronto, ON M5B 1E9 **Winner of the LA Film Fest Audience Award & Best Documentary 2013 and Winner of the Best of the Fest at AFI Docs 2013 This is a free screening open to the public with admission on…
Immigrants come to Canada to secure a future for themselves and their families. Yet a recent study undertaken by Ryerson University has painted a gloomy picture of the long lasting impact that the 2008 recession has had on immigrant workers.
The study followed hundreds of former employees of Progressive Mould Products (PMP) over a five year period to determine whether or not they were able to achieve any semblance of a middle class life after their plant declared bankruptcy in 2008. Sadly those interviewed reported that they were much worse off now as compared to when they arrived in Canada. The reported entitled “An Immigrant All Over Again? Recession, Plant Closures, and Older racialized immigrant workers: A case study of the workers of Progressive Moulded Products” profiles the experiences of immigrant workers who arrived in Canada in the ’70s and ’80s. The researchers found that:
– Only one third (34 per cent) of participants secured permanent full time employment, two thirds of former workers were either precariously employed or unemployed;
– 77 per cent of workers wages were worse off than what they earned from PMP;
– 36 per cent of male workers and 37 per cent of women workers reported a wage drop of $5 an hour or more;
– 52 per cent or women workers and 42 per cent of men reported that it was difficult to make ends meet since PMP went bankrupt;
– 49.4 per cent of workers felt their health worsened after the plant closures;
– 85 per cent of workers felt age barriers was the primary reason while they could not find permanent work;
– and 67 per cent felt that they were racially discriminated in the labour market.…
Thank you to the event organizers for inviting ACLA to bring greetings and for organizing this annual gathering to recognize the contribution of Chinese railroad workers. In the Chinese community, Canada is known as “Gold Mountain” meaning land of opportunity and prosperity. Generations of Chinese have looked to Canada as a place of hope and…
June 27, 2013 Via Email: Jean-pierre.blais@crtc.gc.ca Jean-Pierre Blais Chairman and Chief Executive Office Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Les Terrasses de la Chaudière Central Building 1 Promenade du Portage Gatineau, Quebec J8X 4B1 Dear Mr. Blais: Re: Cuts to OMNI Television’s Multilanguage Programming by Rogers Communication The Asian Canadian Labour Alliance is a…
Friday June 28th, 2013 9:30 am to 4:30pm (Tribunal hearing) 12:30 Noon time Rally 655 Bay St, 14th Floor (intersection Bay and Elm St.) OHRT Final Hearing for Ned Peart June 28-2013 Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) invites the community to attend the closing day of the historic Human Rights Tribunal examining the workplace death…
Once again the temporary foreign worker program has erupted in controversy where it is being used to pit workers against each other.
News reports point out that the Royal Bank of Canada has decided to move its information technology department abroad. To do so, it has brought in temporary workers from India that will learn the ropes from their Canadian counterparts. Following this training, the Canadian workers will be laid off, and the Indian workers will transition the IT department to India and return there.
This is not a story of so-called “foreign” workers coming to replace “Canadians”. It is a story of broken immigration laws where workers can be brought in to do short-term dirty work that no one else wants to do and can then be removed at the whim of the employers.
Many facts are yet unknown: how much are the migrant workers being paid? Did they have to pay fees to get these jobs? Were they promised citizenship? Will they be able to get basic services while here? All this needs to be determined.
What we do know is that 45 bank workers are being laid off to be replaced temporarily by migrant workers. This sort of ruthless denial of work to everyday people is deplorable and not surprising.
The Canada Centre for Policy Alternatives believes that Federal government layoffs of public servants will result in nearly 70,000 job losses by 2014-15. This past March, Canada lost over 54,000 net jobs because of Conservative policies. Getting rid of workers is what the Tories do best.
At the same time, Employment Insurance has been cut so that people are forced to go back to work sooner, at lower wages, and further away from their homes. Add to this mix a free-for-all season on migrant workers whose labour and immigration rights are being trampled upon and we have the perfect recipe for the downward spiral of wages.
Responding to any one of these concerns will result in incorrect solutions. The answer cannot be banning migrant workers from entering Canada.
We must emphasize an expansive, robust and inclusive immigration framework with full citizenship rights and benefits for migrants coming to work in this country. This must be done with corresponding labour reforms that protect the rights of all workers — migrants and Canadians. Doing so will mean an upward push on wages, and the ability for more people to safely fight and organize against the Harper agenda.…
Who: Migrant Worker, allies and community groups
What: Human Rights Tribunal into death of migrant worker Ned
Livingston Peart
When: April 17th, 18th, 24th, 25th 26th and June 28th 2013
Where: Ontario Human Rights Tribunal 655 Bay (between Dundas and College) 14th Floor
Time: 9:30-4:30pm
Human Rights Tribunal Hearing on April 17th, 18th, 24th, 25th 26th and June 28th, 2013 (655 Bay street 14th floor from 9 30 am to 4 30 pm)
The Peart case concerns the refusal of the Office of the Chief Coroner to grant an inquest into the death of a Jamaican farm worker, Ned Peart, brought to Ontario through the Commonwealth Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP) at an Ontario tobacco farm in 2002. The worker’s family sought to have a coroner’s inquest held into the death of Mr. Peart because of concerns regarding the safety of Mr. Peart’s working conditions. The applicant, the brother of the dead worker, brought a complaint to the Human Rights Commission in the summer of 2005 asserting that s. 10(5) of the Coroners Act, which provides that a mandatory inquest will be held for certain types of workers while excluding others, violates the Code because such provisions have an adverse impact on the applicant and migrant workers in Ontario.
No death of any migrant worker has ever been the subject of a coroner’s inquest.
The application, which seeks an inquest into Mr. Peart’s death and broader systemic reforms of the manner in which the Office of the Chief Coroner investigates the deaths of migrant agricultural workers, seeks to ensure a safer worker environment for all migrant agricultural workers in this province. More broadly this application permits the HRTO to consider the status of migrant agricultural workers within the context of the requirements of the Code, which potentially could positively impact the status of workers in the CSAWP and other temporary migrant worker programs because of the intersection between the Code and the harassment, discrimination and exclusion inflicted on such workers.
The Peart family’s central argument is that because of the unique vulnerability faced by migrant workers brought to Canada under the CSAWP, migrant workers like Ned Peart are adversely affected by the exclusionary structure of the Coroner’s Act.…
The President of the Korean Government Employees’ Union (KGEU), Kim Jungnam, launched a hunger strike in the streets of Seoul outside the offices of the Presidential transition committee on15 January. He is protesting the sacking of 137 workers, among them the union president and general secretary, who are being punished for their union activities. They…