
Last week, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal awarded 55 tree planters $700K in relation to the mistreatment and ‘slave-like’ conditions they were forced to endure at the hands of their employer in a reforestation operation in Golden, BC. The Congolese refugees weren’t paid, were segregated from other workers, fed inferior food if they were fed at all, forced to plant on rougher terrain, and housed in shipping containers with no bathroom facilities or clean water. In the ruling—which sees $10,000 dollars awarded to each individual for injury to dignity and self-respect (which they might never see because the company is now bankrupt)—the Tribunal equated the conditions as “comparable to slave-ships” and the workers expressed feeling like prisoners.
This was all uncovered back in 2010, when officials from BC’s Ministry of Forests were visiting the camp to presumably check in to make sure trees were being planted properly, not that people were being treated humanely. So it must have been quite a shock to witness the appalling conditions these men were living and working in. And it begs the question: If a couple of inspectors from the Ministry of Forests hadn’t have stumbled across this abuse, would it have ever been reported? Where was the ministry responsible for labour and employment standards in all of this, and how many similar situations have gone unchecked or are currently being perpetrated in Canada in May, 2014?Migrant workers make up the most vulnerable and desperate sector of the Canadian labour force. It’s within this system that barriers to reporting workplace abuses are palpable, intimidating, and the mechanisms to do so can be deluded and complex. Workers fall through jurisdictional cracks as they’re brought in by the federal government through programs like the currently hot-button Temporary Foreign Worker Program, but then get lost in the blurred oversight of employment standards, labour laws, and complaints or enforcement processes that vary from province to province.As the CBC touched on earlier this week, in provinces like Saskatchewan, where systems exist for migrant workers to complain about poor working conditions, they are hardly ever used. Rather than look at the reasons behind why only 40 complaints have been made in Saskatchewan since 2008, the genius of a minister responsible for immigration there, Bill Boyd, told the CBC that he believes a lack of complaints represents that "the vast, vast majority of employers are extremely responsible when it comes to these types of things."
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