Skilled welders wanted; $16/hour, or how to spot a Temporary Foreign Worker Program scam

An advert to that effect can frequently be seen in major Canadian newspapers.

Not that they're planning to hire any Canadians. The rate on offer is well under what I earned when I retired from welding over twenty years ago.

So why do we see these ads? Because they're not expecting to find any skilled welders reading those papers and calling that number. What those employers, or employment agencies working on their behalf are doing, is establishing the "fact" that suitable candidates for their welding jobs are nowhere to be found in all of Canada.

That's the essential component in getting the thumbs-up from Citizen and Immigration Canada to import foreign workers. If the employer can demonstrate that they couldn't find workers in Canada, the government will issue a Labour Market Opinion, the magic key that opens the door to bringing in foreign workers.

That's why we see those ads.

Welding isn't rocket science. Most people with reasonable hand-eye coordination can become relatively proficient in under a year. Blueprint reading and fit-up competence take a little longer. It's a universal trade. If you can weld in the Ukraine or China or Albania you can weld in Canada.

And you'd be happy to do it for $16/hr.

Which is why our government bends over backwards to facilitate the import of skilled workers instead of training Canadians to do the work.

China to build vocational schools in Canada

China's First Undersecretary of Foreign Development, Wang Flung Dung has announced that China will build vocational schools in Canada to train Canadians how to mine coal and weld pipes together. The program is to be modeled on one being delivered in Africa, where China also has difficulty finding trained workers for its many development projects.

"We find that in many of the backward areas of the world there is a lack of educational infrastructure," said Mr. Dung, "and rather than wait a generation or two for those countries to catch up we find it preferable to build that infrastructure ourselves."

"It's a win-win" continued Dung,  "we get to mine our coal and refine our tar sands and Canada and Africa get some skilled workers!"

The matter of worker-training recently caused some controversy in Canada. While the country generally considers itself a member of the "developed" world, it was recently discovered that none of the millions of unemployed had even the rudimentary fundamentals of literacy and numeracy required to be trained as coal miners and welders, thereby forcing Chinese companies to bring their own workers into the country.

"Temporary Foreign Workers" are the ground troops in the war on Canada's working class

Over the years we've gotten used to the idea of foreign temporary workers in certain industries. The commercial fruit orchards in Ontario have been dependent on imported labour from Mexico and the Caribean for generations. We've become conditioned to think of this as an inevitability. These folks are simply doing jobs that Canadians wouldn't.

Given the fact that Canada has had a million or more "official" unemployed for at least the last thirty years, perhaps one should inquire into the nature of this "work" that Canadians refuse to do. Whatever the characteristics of the work itself, the reluctance of Canadians to pull up stakes and move to Meaford for a three month apple-picking gig is understandable once you realize that this is back-breakingly hard work that will pay less than minimum wage.

Enter the "temporary foreign worker." A couple of thousand dollars for a few months work won't take you far in Canada, but by golly, in some village in the inerior of Mexico or Jamaica that's pretty much going to tide you over for the rest of the year. In order for that to be the case in Canada, the price of a bushel of apples would have to rise exponentially.

As consumers we aren't prepared to pay more in order to make apple harvesting a viable job, so we've managed to avert our eyes from the plantation-style reality of commerical orchards. While our eyes were averted, this phenomenon of bringing third world workers into Canada has spread far beyond the orchards.

Today the Tim Hortons chain relies on Mexican workers to staff its stores in Western Canada. Tar sands contractors have been lobbying for years to bring in trades from Eastern Europe. The Murray River Mine in British Columbia is bringing in hundreds of Chinese workers because there are no Canadians available for coal mining jobs, and even with over a million unemployed, there are none suitable for training.

In every case there is a "shortage" of Canadians to do the work or to be trained to do the work.

What rubbish!

In every case there is a commitment by the employer to drive down wages and take away benefits. How is it possible in a country with a 300 year tradition of coal mining not to be able to train coal miners?  Perhaps because the Chinese are working for at least $10/hour less than prevailing Canadian rates. That adds up to a saving of twenty to thirty thousand dollars per employee per year for the employer, and with an operation the scale of Murray River, you're in the range of millions per year in no time.

Canadians need to wake up to what's going on here.