Caregivers want landed status

Caregivers want landed status

Campaign demands equal treatment with Canadian workers

TORONTO–The Live-in-Caregivers Program (LCP) must be changed into a new program that provides caregivers permanent residency status upon landing.

This is the first of 10 recommendations coming out of the renewed campaign to protect the rights and advance the interests of caregivers in Canada.

The recommendations are the result of a series of consultation meetings with live-in caregivers who came out to tell their own stories of difficult living and working conditions. These consultation sessions held in the past two months were triggered by serious concerns by caregivers over their situation, following the tragic murder of Jocelyn Dulnuan.

Dulnuan was a 26-year old live-in caregiver found murdered at her employer’s mansion in Mississauga last Oct. 1, 2007. Two men allegedly involved in her killing are now in custody

This time, the caregivers have gained the active support of major organizations in the Filipino community, as well as other ethnic communities, the labour sector, and some parliamentarians, as they prepare to bring their recommendations in an organized way to the attention of the federal and provincial governments.

The recommendations — formulated during the various consultations and other evernts, and presented to subsequent caregivers forums held in Greater Toronto Area (see page 35)– were firmed up and finalized, and unanimously approved by caregiver and community participants during the Community Leaders’ Lobbying and Advocacy Training, held Jan. 20, 2008 at the OPSEU Membership Hall in Toronto.

The well-attended training event that had attracted about 100 participants from various sectors, more than half of them caregivers currently in the program, was organized by the Coalition for the Protection of Caregivers Rights (CPCR). The Coalition is composed of three major community alliances that have consistently pursued the LCP campaign – The Community Alliance for Social Justice (CASJ) (composed of 27 member organizations), Migrante Ontario, and the Jocelyn Dulnuan Support Committee.

Among the supportive organizations based in the Greater Toronto Area that have helped in the campaign in various ways are the Philippine Independence Day Council (PIDC), the Filipino Canadian Association of Vaughan, the Markham Federation of Filipino Canadians (MFFC), and the Kalayaan Community Cultural Centre.

Also at the forefront of the campaign and the coalition are leaders of Kababayan Community Centre and Silayan Community Centre, the oldest two of the community centres in the Filipino community in Toronto.

Training Highlights

The half-day training session included a discussion of the history of domestic work in Canada, by Pura Velasco, CASJ board member, who was a former caregiver under the Foreign Domestic Program. Velasco has worked to protect the rights and promote the welfare of domestic workers during her time, up to the present, as a women’s and workers’ rights and social justice advocate.

Velasco stressed that seeking landed status for caregivers is not anything new, as history shows that caregivers sometime in Canada’s past, were allowed to come in as landed immigrant caregivers.
Three live-in-caregivers in the program gave their testimonials:

Menchie Cuaresma spoke, among other things, of the sexual harassment she experienced from her lady employer, married with children. One morning, when the husband and children were already out of the house, her female employer summoned Cuaresma to her room. Upon entering the room, Cuaresma recounted how shocked she was to find her employer facing her, completely nude. “How do I look?” her employer asked her. Still shaken, and feeling so disrespected, Cuaresma replied: “Disgusting.” When her employer asked why, she explained that Filipinos are not used to seeing people in the nude, and no matter their status in life, they have respect for each other. “Kahit nga mismong kapamilya namin, hindi kami sanay na nakikita namin na nude. (Even with our own families, we are not used to seeing them nude.)” Whatever her employer’s intentions, Cuaresma chose to ignore them by attending to her usual chores. After that incident, things had changed in terms of the way she was treated, and learning that she was being let go, she eventually left to work with other employers.

Jesusa Habiling worked in Hongkong for three years and chose to come to Canada where there was an opportunity to acquire landed status after three years under the LCP, spending a lot of borrowed money to pay an agency in the process, only to be told by the same agency upon arrival in Toronto that she did not have an employer. Without any relatives or friends in the City, she however managed to find work, grabbing the first opportunity that came, even if it entailed caring for six children. She was made to work from 7 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. the next day but she chose to suffer in silence for she needed money to pay her debts. However, she could no longer take the grueling long hours of work as she felt aches in her body. She went from one employer to another, and finally attained landed status, but not before she was given a run around by her previous employers, Human Resources staff, Revenue Canada, and all the other agencies involved, that she had to seek the intercession of a lawyer to help her.

Sol Pajadura, coordinator of Migrante Ontario, was, like Habiling, a caregiver for six years in Hongkong who chose to come to Canada in the hope of earning money and becoming a Canadian citizen so she could be reunited with her family. Also like Habiling, she paid an enormous amount of money to an agency just to be able to come to Toronto, leaving her in great debt. Like Habiling, her agency did not have an employer for her upon arrival, so she had to look one for herself. She worked in a family with three kids, doing all the household chores – laundry, cleaning, preparing the baby’s food – from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. She worked in a very rigid environment, where all her movements were monitored with a camera connected to her employer’s computer in the office. Moreover, she had to endure verbal taunting from her male employer for every little mistake she made. She tried to endure the abuse just so she could continue to ear money to support her family, but when her health started to suffer, she told her employer she wanted to quit. With the help of a friend, she was rescued from the household, but not before she was subjected to what she considers the worst verbal abuse in her life. To help others not to go through her sad experience, she resolved to get involved in the fight for caregivers rights. She joined friends who organized Migrante Ontario – an alliance of different organizations fighting to protect the rights of migrant workers.

The highlight of the Jan. 20th afternoon event was the training in lobbying and advocating – crucial actions in the campaign for caregivers’ rights.

Arnold Minors, co-coordinating associate of Arnold Minors and Associates, an organization effectiveness training firm, was the event’s guest trainor. Minors, who had provided the first anti-oppression training to the CASJ Board of Directors during the alliance’s formative stage in 2004, revealed useful tips to effective lobbying and advocacy. He has conducted anti-oppression and anti-racism work in the many organizations he has been involved in, among others, founding director and past Chair of the Board of the African Canadian Legal Clinic; commissioner on the seven-member Metropolitan Toronto Police Services Board; past chair of Across Boundaries, a mental health centre for people of colour; former president of Central Neighbourhood House; and board member of Dr. Roz’s Healing Place, a shelter for women who have experienced abuse.

Among Minors’s advice were: prepare the documents to be used; find the right timing for presenting them; know who your allies and your enemies are; prepare yourself to be patient and to persevere; tell your stories to your grandchildren and great grandchildren so they can continue your campaigns.
However important advocacy documents may be, Minors emphasized that “those documents are likely by themselves the least effective in making the change.”

“Change almost always happens through people doing something, through people having face to face interaction,” Minor emphasized.

Minors cited CASJ as “one of the best examples that I really like…this group of people that came together and they were in their separate organizations…(with) some individual differences that they brought (doing) marvelous work in the area of social justice, lobbying, advocacy.”

Minors’s parting shot: “Keep your eye on the prize and don’t’ say “I didn’t get the whole thing,’ and stop…If something feels wrong, something’s wrong. In lobbying, if what you’re doing is causing you to win, continue; if it’s causing you to lose, change. Just pay attention to what you define as winning and losing.”

Connie Sorio of Kairos and CASJ shared her experiences in advocacy work, having participated in successful human rights campaigns in the House of Commons, as in the campaign for justice for “comfort women”. “We need to get the support of the wider community … to make this campaign really successful,” she said. “There is an urgency for us to really agree on the recommendations that we are putting forward because there are Members of Parliament who are just waiting for us to tell them what exactly it is we want to change in the policy.”

The event’s audience participation exercise put into work some of the principles learned about lobbying and advocacy. The LCP campaign’s recommendations, which had gone through a series of consultations and meeting with caregivers in previous sessions, was discussed once more, then went through a point-by-point approval.

Then came the lobbying and advocacy exercise, where participants were divided into four groups, each group assigned to play out an advocacy situation involving the LCP recommendations. Situations were played out, involving meeting with parliamentarians; setting up a conference call with an MP; and even marching as a big group to Parliament, and meeting with the MP as one delegation.

To many, it was an overall empowering experience. The serious learning, powerful testimonials, stories told through tears and laughter, and the encouraging support from the community and labour organizations present, the seminar ended with a sense of readiness on the part of many participants to pursue the campaign, this time to win.