Temporary Workers Are Permanent? What A Surprise

As those three or four people who read this screed regularly know, thirty years ago, almost, I wrote my master's thesis about labour migration in western Europe. I studied the guest worker programmes, as they were constituted, in France and Germany. My conclusion was not earth shattering, that the policy of using guest workers was wrong headed in that it assumed that temporary workers would go home when the economy turned bad. It turned out that the guest workers wanted to stay even in bad times, because home was in even worse shape. So, they went underground, settled, and even sent for their families. In the process they created a black market in labour and a twilight zone for their illegal immigrant children. Really, the whole system was a mess, with illegal workers stretching back generations, being exploited by employers and resented by the general population. I recommended in my conclusion that the Europeans look at the North American model for immigration. I was so naive. Little did I realize that the Canadian government would look to the European model for inspiration -- with predictable results.

Recommend this Post

"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.

Recommend this Post