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The concept of precarity has emerged in recent years as a useful description of daily life under neo-liberal globalization, as well as a potential banner for uniting various movements in the fight against it. This issue of Briarpatch dives into the shallow end of the labour pool to investigate the increasingly precarious nature of work in Canada, and highlights a number of sites of struggle where workers are beginning to challenge this growing precarity.
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Letter from the Editor
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2007
The good we secure for ourselves
is precarious and uncertain
until it is secured for all of us
and incorporated into our common life.
Jane Addams
Sometimes a term comes along that enables us to name—to make visible—our situation, to better understand the social and economic forces that shape our choices, and to connect various struggles within a broader tapestry of social change. Precarity is perhaps such a term.
By Karl Flecker
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2007
“‘Help Wanted’ signs are everywhere. When it starts to affect our ability to go to Tim Hortons and get a double-double, it ceases to be a laughing matter.”
-Monte Solberg, Minister of Human Resources and Social Development
Since coming to power, the Harper Conservatives have moved aggressively to expand Canada’s Foreign Worker Program, making it increasingly easy for employers to import workers from abroad. In this first segment of our special report on Canada’s invisible workforce, Karl Flecker investigates the impact on workplace rights in Canada, and how the labour movement is responding.
Though they are still largely invisible on the political scene, their impact on the Canadian labour market has been pronounced. They are guest workers, sometimes called temporary workers or migrant workers, or assigned the more alien and marginalizing label foreign workers—which is how the federal government officially refers to them.
By Don Kossick and Rosa Kouri; photos by Don Kossick
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2007
“The live-in caregiver program is an urgent issue that women in Canada need to look at collectively,” says Cecilia Diocson, right.
As part of an ongoing project, Making the Links Radio is conducting interviews and producing radio shows focused on immigrant communities in Canada. From these conversations, we bring you glimpses of three important sites of struggle against the exploitation and marginalization of (im)migrant groups in Canada: the Philippine Women Centres, the Workers’ Action Centre, and Justicia for Migrant Workers.
By Martha Jane Robbins; photos by Trevor McKenzie-Smith
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2007
Former farmers driven north in search of work have found that the rules governing the free flow of capital don’t apply to them–indeed, that crossing borders has never been more difficult.
In a village called Anagua, in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, a young man named Antonio sits at an old school desk and recounts his experience as a migrant worker. Like many thousands of others each year, he paid a coyote, a people smuggler, between $1,500 and $2,000 to take him across the border and into the United States. The journey meant walking for two days and two nights through the desert. He feels lucky to have made it across alive.
By Jim Mulvale
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2007
Illustration by Byron Eggenschwiler
Precarious work is on the rise in Canada. Although the quantity of jobs has increased, often dramatically, during recent years of economic boom, there has also been a strong tendency for full-time, relatively well-paid jobs with benefits and security of tenure to be replaced by part-time, short-term, insecure jobs that pay low wages and provide no employment-related benefits. As a result, the level of economic insecurity of most individuals and households in Canada has increased significantly over the last several years. The National Council of Welfare points out that there were 4.9 million people living in poverty in Canada in 2003, which is 700,000 more than the entire population of British Columbia. Additionally, the Inequality Project of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives documents that “in 2004, the richest 10 per cent of families earned 82 times more than the poorest 10 per cent—almost triple the ratio of 1976.” Adequate nutrition, decent housing, and post-secondary education have moved increasingly out of reach for those caught in the precarious employment trap.
