Why work permits won't work

sweetspot · 发表于 2006-4-29 21:30

Madelaine Drohan

Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning author and journalist who has covered business, economics and politics in Canada, Europe and Africa. She is currently the Ottawa correspondent for The Economist.

Canada has a problem. Two-thirds of employers trying to hire workers say they are having difficulty finding people with the necessary skills. We've all heard the stories of coffee shops in Alberta offering iPods to prospective servers, of a souvenir manufacturer in that same province hiring someone "because she has a pulse," and of the oil and gas companies canvassing the country and the world for anyone with oil-and-gas or mining experience.
But with national unemployment at a 30-year low, it's not just the resource sector desperately seeking employees. Retail stores, coffee shops, banks, construction firms, hospitals and technology companies all have Help Wanted signs plastered wherever prospective employees might look. Last month, 44 per cent of companies surveyed by the Bank of Canada said they could not meet increased demand for their product or service because they couldn't find the workers.

That percentage amounts to a lot of frustrated employers demanding an instant solution. And this is where the discussion gets interesting. One idea being mooted is to boost the number of foreigners we let into the country on temporary work permits. They would come for a specific job and when we no longer needed them, they would leave. Canada already issues about 90,000 such permits each year, although the actual number of temporary workers is higher because some U.S. residents don't need to obtain a permit due to provisions in the North America Free Trade Agreement.

Fruit growers in Ontario, Quebec and British Colombia have been using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program at harvest time for years to bring in pickers, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean. Now construction companies, resource firms and others would like to see the permit process speeded up so that they can get the workers they so desperately need. Federal Immigration Minister Monte Solberg has not said "yay" or "nay" to these requests. But he has said that the temporary permit program needs improvement, so there may be changes afoot.

Overhaul the immigration system

At first glance, such a quick fix seems like an excellent idea. But dig a little deeper and the problems become evident.

When a country runs out of the workers it needs, it is a sign that someone has not planned ahead. Some may think that demand from China and India for oil-and-gas and other natural resources – demand that is behind much of the growth in the Canadian economy, suddenly appeared overnight. But that is not the case. Economists have seen this coming for at least a decade and we could have prepared for it better.

How? First, by adjusting our immigration system so that more foreign workers with the right set of skills were allowed into Canada. The points-based system, which scores potential immigrants on education, language skills, family ties and other things, has been adjusted. But it is still biased in favour of holders of postgraduate degrees. This is not something the average bricklayer, carpenter, welder or rig worker has or needs. The current system is also sclerotic. The backlog of applicants is estimated at 700,000. Who knows how many of the right kind of worker are stuck at the back of the queue?

Devote more funds to train skilled workers

Then there is the education system, which has failed to produce the type of worker that companies now need. Construction associations have been complaining for years that training for skilled workers is underfunded. Some governments have been putting more money into training recently, including courses aimed at aboriginal Canadians, but as with immigration, the changes have been badly timed to meet red-hot demand.

While importing planeloads of temporary workers will solve the immediate needs of employers, it will also take the pressure off governments and businesses to fix what's wrong in our immigration and education systems.

It is already stirring up trouble with the unions, who fear that imported cheap labour will keep wages from rising and could lead to poorer working conditions. Alberta unions are deeply unhappy about one oil company's plan to use a Chinese contractor and some Chinese labourers for a project in the oilsands. Canada has been down this particular road before. An estimated 15,000 Chinese workers built the western sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Those who survived (they were given the most hazardous jobs) were allowed to stay.

More recently, the temporary foreign worker program was used to bring in exotic dancers, a.k.a strippers, from Eastern Europe. Human rights groups protested that some of the women were forced into prostitution once they arrived. Canada has not signed the 1990 UN convention aimed at protecting the rights of migrant workers.

"Guest worker" system fuels social tensions

We can look to Europe for a further argument against the use of temporary workers.

"Guest workers," as they are called in many European countries, have been used for decades if not centuries to fill jobs that the citizens either could not or would not do. Think of the Turks in Germany, the Algerians in France or the Indonesians in the Netherlands. The very name implied they were not staying long, although many of them did.

Until recently, many could not apply for citizenship – even if they had been born in the country. They lived apart from their host society. Their treatment has led to increasing social tension. Do we want to have immigrants that we do not immediately accept as fellow Canadians?

Canada has a problem. Employers need some relief. But if we go for the quick fix of temporary workers, without also looking at immigration, education, and how these workers will fit in our society, we are just opening the door to even bigger problems ahead.

[ 本帖最后由 sweetspot 于 2006-4-29 21:32 编辑 ]

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