Lost in Translocation
It’s not just hired hands who are being abused under the ever-expanding foreign worker program. It’s employers too. Before you look overseas to fill the gaping holes in your workforce, read these tales from the trenches
by Fabrice Taylor
THAT BLEAK, COLD DECEMBER DAY should have marked a warming trend in Al Donaldson’s fortunes. The head of a fast-growing security company, Donaldson thought he was about to solve a problem that had plagued him for a couple of years, frustrating his every move like quicksand: a chronic shortage of workers. The security industry, like so many others, has always relied on a pool of relatively unskilled but reliable labour to man its shifts for $10 to $12 an hour. But that pool had long dried up, drained by the richer wages of Fort McMurray and any other place enjoying Alberta’s boom.
Donaldson was trying to enjoy the boom too. There was more work, to be sure, more stuff to protect, more thieves and vandals to protect it from. But a lot of his clients are schools, airports, governments, construction companies – organizations whose revenues don’t automatically shoot up like oil companies’ when commodity prices move higher. So he couldn’t raise his prices too much, meaning he couldn’t raise his wages much either.
He was forced to sit on his hands and watch his profit margins compress while opportunities passed him by. That was supposed to change because on the day in question his latest recruits were showing up: 20 experienced, eager and diligent Sri Lankans.
Donaldson (whose name has been changed) figured there might be a small problem when he saw his squad step off the plane into -30°C weather with plenty of luggage – five bags each – but no winter coats, mitts or hats. They didn’t look particularly daunting shivering their way toward the waiting van. Oh well, nothing a trip to Mark’s Work Wearhouse couldn’t fix.
Back at company headquarters, though, the alarm bells started going off at a slightly higher pitch. Donaldson gathered the men into a room to welcome them and introduce himself. The recruiter he’d engaged to find these workers had promised that they were ex-military or police or at least experienced security officers. As he started in on his pep talk about how well they would all fit in with such relevant resumés, Donaldson couldn’t help notice a slightly perplexed look in their eyes.
So he asked for a show of hands: “How many of you have military experience?” One hand. Police experience? No hands. Security? Two hands. So the boss started to work the room, shaking each guard’s hand and asking what he had done by way of work back home. The first answer: “I was a teacher.”
“Oh,” said the boss. “A teacher of what?”
“Dance.”
In 30 years of security work, Donaldson had never seen a freezing Sri Lankan scare away a vandal in the dead of a Red Deer night by dancing at him. But he was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea to send his new recruits into the harsh world of private security without a lot of training, which would cost him dearly. Rather than finding the long-sought solution to his problems, he had just been introduced to the minefield that foreign worker employment can be.
DONALDSON’S STORY IS NOT UNCOMMON, says Jennifer Wolff, the head of Axis Immigration and Recruitment Services in Edmonton. “There are lots of horror stories about foreign workers being ripped off, abused, or even being killed in accidents because their English wasn’t strong enough to learn the safety code” on an industrial site, she says. “It’s heartbreaking and infuriating.”
But it’s not just the workers who are suffering, says Wolff, who spends most of her time coming to the rescue of business owners who have had poor experiences with foreign recruitment but who understand that in some cases it’s the only solution. There are plenty of business owners who have been led astray, ripped off and lied to by the real perpetrators in the great foreign recruitment pageant: the unscrupulous or incompetent recruiters.
Even foreign worker advocate Yessy Byl, who works with the Alberta Federation of Labour and chronicles the plight of the downtrodden, acknowledges that employers can be hurt. “I do feel sorry for some of the business owners. They also get lied to.” Some employers, to be sure, are just as guilty as the rogues, as Byl can attest to. But most of them are not. They’re like Donaldson: honest business people trying to run a business, create jobs, grow, prosper.
They’re people like Cory Wanner, whose family runs Viking Oil Supply and a number of related companies in Estevan, Sask., and Red Deer. Wanner too has had trouble finding good employees. Like most employers, he was averse to bringing in foreign workers – the risk, the time, the cultural issues – but he finally broke down when he realized that the only resumés he was getting were those of drug addicts or chronic job hoppers. That was four years ago. He’s now on his fifth recruiter – previous ones included an honest priest trying to help Catholic workers get out of the Ukraine – and he hasn’t seen a single worker. He fills out forms, he waits, and waits, and waits – but no one ever shows up, and he doesn’t hear back.
His brother-in-law, also a business owner, had slightly better luck, getting a handful of skilled German workers to work for his industrial concern. But there were problems, resentment from other workers notably. By law, the foreigners had to be paid a market rate, but because they needed a lot of guidance from other workers, especially at the start, there were some ruffled feathers.
Perhaps because of that, and perhaps also because rural Saskatchewan is a lot farther away from Europe than Toronto, Calgary or even Saskatoon, within months most of the workers had found other jobs for more money or for a better lifestyle in a big city. After, that is, Wanner’s brother-in-law had paid to bring them over.
Still, Wanner’s situation is getting critical. “For the last three or four years we’ve had to hire anyone with a heartbeat who passes a drug and alcohol test.” His problem is straight arithmetic: From 1991 to 2002, wages were stable. They jumped in 2002 as the energy boom gathered force. Wage inflation in the stable period was around 2.5% per year. Since 2002, it has averaged more than 5%.
FOR WANNER AND OTHER BUSINESSES IN competitive fields, labour costs just can’t go up any more without destroying the profitability of enterprise. But they continue to go up, despite the dramatic rise in workforce imports. Like most developed countries, Canada has long offered restricted, temporary work visas to foreign nationals to address worker shortages in certain areas, notably seasonal agriculture, domestic care and professional occupations. But in 2002, at the request of the western provincial governments and major employers, the federal government expanded the list of applicable occupations to cover a wide range of blue-collar and service-industry jobs. In 2000, just over 9,000 foreign temporary workers landed in Alberta. By 2007, that number had grown to 22,393. According to a report published in The Economist last November, the number of applications pending in Alberta has surpassed 60,000.
And lest you think the need for temporary foreign workers is, well, temporary, consider that the Conference Board of Canada warns that Alberta will be short 330,000 workers by 2025. The Bank of Canada is ringing the alarm bells too. The bank’s former governor, David Dodge, warned last summer that labour’s contribution to Canada’s overall economic growth will decline as the first wave of baby boomers starts taking retirement in 2009. This mass exodus, coupled with a low birth rate, will eventually spell labour troubles right across the country.
So employers probably don’t have a choice if they want to stay competitive with rivals who have embraced foreign help. Join ’em or they’ll beat you. But how to do it right, that’s the question. It may look like Wanner was luckier than Donaldson, who paid $300 per worker to the recruiter plus airfare, extra training and other costs (including organizing housing). But after some earlier difficulties, Donaldson has workers now, while Wanner is still short-staffed.
He’s trying to fix that by doing something he didn’t want to do: pay a recruiter up front. Wanner’s first experience with foreign workers was with a friend and former employee who, like many others, jumped into the fast-growing recruiting business. The friend had pitched Wanner but he had balked at the idea of paying an up-front fee for workers who might or might not arrive in six months, or maybe more. His subsequent efforts taught him he was right not to pay up front: his workers, as mentioned, never showed up, most of them disappearing into the bureaucratic maze of Service Canada, which has to grant employers a labour-market opinion (LMO) attesting to the fact that they are suffering a real shortage of workers as opposed to trying to take advantage of the system.
But as Wanner got to know the process, he realized that the problem might have been the amateur recruiters, like the priest, who didn’t understand the immigration system. Recognizing that you get what you pay for, he decided to bite the proverbial bullet, hire a recruiter with credentials and pay up. Wolff, of Axis Immigration and Recruitment, got the call.
What made Wanner change his mind, besides necessity? In part, it was her credentials. His biggest problem was recruiters who couldn’t deal with the federal bureaucracy to get the green light. This is an increasing problem for many employers. It can take up to six months to get an LMO in Alberta, despite the labour crunch. Why? Demand is part of the problem. But another is culture, as Calgary lawyer Michael Greene explains.
Service Canada’s culture, he says, “has always been to protect the Canadian work force. They looked at every candidate as a potential abuser.” He tells the story of one of his clients, a multinational oil firm, that wanted to bring in foreign workers. Service Canada demands 12 consecutive months of the applicant’s federal payroll deduction forms to look at an LMO. His client had submitted but not gotten back the two most recent months, so its LMO was rejected.
“It’s the norm that employers can’t find workers but the psychology of the department is slow to change. It’s taking a frickin’ long time to get there.”
Service Canada does have an expediting process – certain occupations are fast-tracked (including, Greene notes wryly, snowboard instruction) – but by and large the delays can be long.
And that’s why it’s so important to deal with people who know how to fill out paperwork and navigate the sometimes bizarre world of Service Canada. Wanner figures his biggest problem was precisely that the recruiters were amateurs. He’s more confident about Wolff because she’s experienced and a member of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, a quasi-governmental designation that’s bestowed only on those who pass rigorous legal and ethical examinations. Only CSIC members and lawyers are allowed to charge fees for immigration advice and services.
That’s not to say there are any guarantees when dealing with the government. As Greene points out, there’s a certain arbitrariness to the process. The Toronto branch of Service Canada, he says, is far more “facilitative” than the one in Alberta. So you really want to avoid making a mistake because that can delay the process even more.
But there was something else about Axis that appealed to Wanner, who says he runs his business with “Christian values.” It was Wolff’s philosophy: “fair trade.”
IT’S ILLEGAL TO CHARGE FOREIGN WORKERS for finding them employment in Alberta. The provincial and federal governments insist to recruiters and even employers that to do so can land them in hot water. The truth, though, is that it’s very difficult to enforce. Calgary lawyer Jean Munn, an immigration expert who works with foreign workers, among others, points out that Canadian or Alberta law doesn’t apply in foreign jurisdictions, so if the payment is made there to an outfit that’s not related to the domestic recruiter, there’s nothing the law can do. The fact is that most recruiters, even the reliable ones, charge workers in one way or another. For example, they may ask for a resumé-writing fee. Others charge optional settlement fees to get the worker set up once here. It’s pretty tough to make a go of this business as a recruiter if you’re only earning $300 per worker, as Donaldson paid.
“If he’s only paying $300, he knows damn well that the recruiter is charging the workers,” says the AFL’s Byl.
Donaldson’s answer? He didn’t ask, didn’t want to know. Understandably. He just wanted to fix his problem. And anyway, what’s wrong with charging the workers?
“There are a number of problems with it,” says Wolff. “First of all, if you’re making them pay thousands and thousands of dollars, that’s not a resume-writing or paperwork fee. You’re selling them a job, and that’s breaking the spirit of the law.” Some employers don’t care, she adds, because they reason that the more their workers pay, the less they have to shell out. “But that’s not true. Think about it: the more a recruiter charges, the smaller the pool of people who can afford it. That’s a lot of money for someone in a Third World country. So, by definition, you’re not getting the best possible candidates; you’re getting the ones who can afford to pay.”
She uses the example of one of her clients who recruited 25 construction workers through another firm. Before they arrived, the employer had to sign a contract stipulating how much they would be paid. They wrote $25 per hour. But when the employees arrived, the employer found out that they weren’t nearly as qualified as advertised. Their skills were worth maybe $18 an hour. But the contract said $25, and that’s what the employer had to pay. The recruiter? He disappeared, like so many others, and probably resurfaced with a new name and phone number.
And then there are employers who find they have to pay the workers until they’re trained up to the skill level they were promised, like Donaldson. He says that, in retrospect, he would gladly have paid more for more qualified workers.
The other problem, says Wolff, is morale. Do you really want to have an employee on your team who’s massively in debt, being hounded for payment, and who may have been lied to about the work he’d be doing? “They know what’s equitable. They know the value of the dollars they’re paying. And the more they pay, the less loyalty they tend to feel toward their employer. And they’re the ones who tend to quit for a better job across the street,” says Wolff.
WOLFF ARGUES THAT THE EMPLOYERS are getting as much value as the employees and so have just as much of an incentive to pay up as the workers do. And since they’re relatively better off, they should pay. It can be a tough sell, especially for small businesses. And the approach may seem naive. But Wolff has proven that it works. She pioneered the fair trade concept in her other business, a nanny agency called Nannies from Heaven. In fact, that’s how she met Wanner, by finding his family a caregiver.
Nanny agencies, like those that recruit temporary workers, are a dime a dozen. But most of them, just like foreign recruiters, make their money charging the overseas caregiver a lot of money – $3,000 to $5,000 – to find them a job. (It’s legal to charge a foreign caregiver applicant to find a job.) Meanwhile, these agencies charge families little or even nothing. It’s not the job the nannies want, of course. It’s the immigration ticket. Unlike temporary foreign workers, live-in caregivers can automatically apply for landed immigrant status after 24 months. Changing diapers and cleaning up after kids or the elderly for two to three years is a means to an end.
Wolff’s policy with nannies was to charge them less than the families. It wasn’t charity; it was good business. After all, she reasoned, you get what you pay for. Pay nothing and you get nothing. She also figured the fair-trade approach would attract
responsible employers.
“An agency that charges you nothing or next to nothing isn’t going to take your call if something goes wrong,” she says. “They’re not going to be accountable to you. They’ll be accountable to the employee, at least until they’ve collected their fee.”
And of course by charging caregivers less, she attracts the most applicants. The idea resonated with families, most of whom had no idea of the plight of caregivers, although it took some explaining sometimes.
“I’m sometimes surprised to learn how successful people can have a hard time understanding that you get what you pay for. But usually, once I explain it, they understand, especially after they’ve been let down. Fair trade isn’t just for coffee anymore.”
Follow Alberta Venture On: