In recent months a couple of incidents have raised the ire of Canadian workers from coast to coast.
In one case, a Chinese-owned mining company operating in the northern mountains of Canada’s west coast, said it had to bring in temporary Chinese workers as no qualified Canadian miners could be found.
In Canada, where coal mining, hard rock mineral mining, and gold mining have been taking place since before they country was even called Canada, many found this claim very difficult to understand.
The HD situation is currently being challenged in the courts by labour unions.
In another more recent incident, the Royal Bank of Canada is still embroiled in a dispute involving temporary foreign workers, and a wider issue of outsourcing jobs. The major Canadian bank has stated it was following all the rules when it hired a foreign staffing firm iGATE to handle its IT programming needs.
That international staffing company brought in workers from India to be trained by RBC programmers. Once they are taught the Canadian operations, the temporary foreign IT workers would then go back to India where they would train others there to take over the computer jobs, formerly held by the Canadian staff. Other IT professionals at other banks and firms have said they too have had their jobs outsourced overseas.
Latest figures indicate there are some 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada working in jobs ranging from computer programming, to construction, to restaurant staff, to farm labour and more.
The issues of how the temporary foreign workers programme is being used, and the issue of outsourcing of Canadian jobs are themes being discussed at a major United Steelworkers conference. The union has also launched legal action in connection with these issues.
Mark Rowlinson is a lawyer and the assisstant to the Canadian National Director of the United Steelworkers of America
RCI’s Marc Montgomery spoke to Mark Rowlinson by cellphone rom the conference in Vancouver, British Columbia
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