This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. VII, No. 7, March 18-24, 2007
MIGRANT WATCH
Advocacy Groups Critical of Changes in Canada’s Migrant Policy The
Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced improvements in its Temporary
Foreign Worker program. But organizations of Filipino-Canadians and OFWs believe
that the new policy of requiring live-in caregivers to remain with one employer
to be eligible for a work permit for three years and three months is a violation
of their human rights. BY
SIKLAB CANADA Vancouver, B.C. - National
organizations of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) and Philippine women in Canada
are very critical of the recent announcement of the Citizenship and Immigration
Canada (CIC) that there would be changes in its foreign worker programs.
© 2007 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
Posted by Bulatlat
The CIC said the changes are “improvements to the Temporary Foreign Worker
program” and that these are meant to “address challenges that Canadian employers
face”.
“These changes are once again a slap in the face of thousands of migrant workers
in Canada especially Filipino live-in caregivers working under the Live-in
Caregiver Program (LCP),” said Glecy Duran, National Vice-Chairperson for
Western Canada of SIKLAB-Canada (Advance and Uphold the Rights of Overseas
Filipino Workers-Canada. Siklab is also a Filipino word referring to a
spark or blaze).
“These changes do not fundamentally alter the LCP in ways that would uphold the
human rights of these migrant workers,” asserted Duran.
CIC announced that live-in caregivers will be eligible for work permits for up
to three years and three months if they remain with the same employer. This
extension corresponds with changes to the Labour Market Opinion’s validity for
the same time period.
Live-in caregivers must complete a strict 24 months of live-in work within a
stringent three-year time limit.
“Many live-in caregivers do not remain working for the same employer over this
two to three year period for various legitimate reasons”, Duran said, “For
instance, some decide to leave their employers to look for better working
conditions with another employer if they suffer severe exploitation and
oppressive conditions while living in their original employers’ homes.”
“The three year and three month work permit is useless to the live-in caregiver
who ends up changing employers. In fact, when a live-in caregiver applies for a
new work permit after changing employers, CIC’s increasingly lengthy processing
time, which may take up to three months, severely impacts on the chances of a
live-in caregiver being able to complete the 24 months of work within the 3-year
period, especially if she ends up changing employers many times.”
“These changes are clearly in response to employers’ complaints about the long
processing time they had to wait in recruiting foreign workers”, said Duran,
“Yet the government chooses to blatantly ignore the plight of live-in
caregivers, the majority of whom are Filipino women”.
Since the early 1980s, nearly 100,000 Filipinos have lived and worked in Canada
as live-in caregivers through the LCP. Over the decades, advocacy groups like
SIKLAB-Canada and the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada (NAPWC)
have been critical of the government’s neglect of Filipino live-in caregivers.
SIKLAB-Canada and NAPWC have maintained that the LCP is an anti-woman and racist
policy that sentences live-in caregivers to a lifetime of domestic work,
cleaning, and other service sector work, stealing their dignity and stripping
them of their previous work experience and education.
“Canada continues to increase its use of foreign workers to fill the growing
labour shortages, including live-in caregivers,” stresses Duran. “Yet Canada
continues to violate these foreign workers’ human rights and discriminate
against them, preferring to keep them as an invisible source of cheap and docile
labor.”
The national groups remain firm in their call to scrap the Live-in Caregiver
Program. “Canada touts itself as a protector of human rights around the world,
yet in their own backyard, thousands of women continue to toil under the LCP
with little protection or services,” asserts Duran.
“If Canada is really serious about its leading role as a champion of human
rights, then the government should recognize the vast contribution that live-in
caregivers have made to Canadian society by removing the live-in requirement and
grant permanent residency to these migrant workers, as well as full
accreditation and reciprocity to foreign trained professionals,” Duran
concluded. Posted by Bulatlat