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Originally Posted by chemgear
All the cheap imported labor is having the expected effects on unemployment and reducing wages across the board.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business...D19%20pandemic.
It’s getting harder for young Canadians to find a job. A post-pandemic influx of cheap foreign workers in restaurants and retail stores may be making it tougher.
That’s contributing to a soaring rate of youth unemployment. Two years ago, the jobless rate for people 15 to 24 years old was a little over 9%. Now it’s 14.2% — the highest level in more than a decade outside of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For younger immigrants — those who’ve landed in Canada in the past five years — the unemployment rate is around 23%.
An analysis of government data by Bloomberg News shows explosive growth in the number of temporary foreign workers in food and retail over the past five years. The number of them approved to work in those two sectors jumped 211% between 2019 and 2023.
“In a sense what we’re doing is we’re subsidizing those activities by allowing them to bring in low-wage workers rather than make them pay a competitive wage,” said Christopher Worswick, economics department chair at Carleton University in Ottawa, who co-wrote a peer-reviewed report showing firms prefer temporary foreign workers due to their higher efforts for the same wage. |
What was keeping wages in the fast food industry low before the TFW program?
I’m torn between hoping that you don’t plan on arguing that fast food and retail workers were way better off before the TFW program was introduced and hoping that you do because it might be entertaining to read.
Your arguments, and those used by the media, to vilify immigrants are paper thin. Youth unemployment isn’t a very strong indicator because TFWs aren’t just doing jobs that only youths would otherwise be doing.
In the case of both fast food and retail jobs, ignoring a few outliers those industries historically have generally paid minimum wage. There hasn’t been much pressure on those industries to pay more because workers in those industries don’t have any leverage to deter their employers from not paying them more.
Workers are getting exploited all over this country and all you want to do is try and angle that into a way to criticize a government that doesn’t even regulate the industries you claim are doing the exploiting. I find that to be pretty insulting to the workers who want and deserve better. One could even say that politicians and their supporters who do this are exploiting them.
If you’re ok with allowing legislation that gives employers the ability to exploit, coerce and intimidate their employees regardless of their status as a citizen with essentially impunity, why are you acting so surprised when it happens at all? Worse yet, you’re actually blaming the people working for them as if it’s what those workers want.
You know what workers say when they are presented with an option to address poor conditions of employment? “My boss says they’ll fire anyone who tries it.” You know what a TFW says when presented with the same option? “My boss says they’ll cancel my work contract and I’ll be sent back”. Which is the exact same thing, only worse because they lose the ability to even find another crappy low wage job.
These disingenuous studies and arguments you bring forward might convince the average person who doesn’t know or speak with low wage workers and/or TFWs on a regular basis, but for anyone who actually does it just comes off as asinine.
So on behalf of the exploited, please knock it off and instead go educate yourself on what issues workers are really facing that are having a detrimental effect on them. Or if you want to double down, please provide us with your explanation for how Amazon workers would stand to gain more from the elimination of the TFW program than they would if they could realistically form a Uknowwhat at their workplace.