Wednesday, August 05, 2009

"Temporary Workers"

Carol Goar in today's Star:
When Canada decided to allow employers facing acute labour shortages to hire temporary foreign workers, seven years ago, no one foresaw where it would lead.
That is complete bullshit. Anyone who says they didn't know, is either lying or didn't bother to do even a cursory investigation into temporary worker programs in other countries. If they had spent about five minutes looking into the history of "guest workers (gastarbeiter)" in Germany, they would have realized that "temporary workers" are almost never temporary. There is an economic imperative to their staying in the country that receives them, both on the part of the workers, who need the money to send home to their impoverished families and the employers, who love the pool of cheap labor. As the system matures, the "temporary workers" who stay illegally, after their visas run out, are under even more economic pressure and are ripe for exploitation. As I say, this has all been seen before in other places and is very well documented.

How do I know? I know because it was the subject of my Master's thesis, written almost thirty years ago. Carol Goar's "we didn't know", is designed to cover Liberal asses in a Liberal newspaper, rather than as a reflection of the reality of what people knew when the program was started.
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