Brief on the Live-in Caregiver Program To the Standing Committee on Immigration and Employment

Brief on the Live-in Caregiver Program To the Standing Committee on Immigration and Employment

By The Caregivers Support Services (CSS)

The Live-in Caregiver Program is considered a “special” federal immigration program whose objective is to bring qualified temporary workers to Canada to provide care for children, the elderly, or persons with disabilities in private family households. An important requirement of the Program is that employees must live in the employer’s home, based on the federal government’s assumption that there is a shortage of Canadian workers to fill the need for live-in (but not live-out) care work. There is an intrinsic and self-reinforcing relationship between the “shortage” of live-in caregivers and coercive conditions of migrant live-in workers. In other words, there exists no shortage per se of Canadian resident workers who could engage in, or be trained to engage in child and elder care work. Rather, there is a shortage in the Canadian labour market among those who have Canadian citizenship or permanent residence status willing to work for low wages and submit to the coercive relations involved in live-in household labour. Through the LCP, the federal government has provided employers with the opportunity to recruit a captive and unfree labour force of mostly women from the global South to perform jobs related to the care of children, the elderly, the chronically ill and disabled. As researchers and Philippine community organizations point out, approximately 85% of LCP participants have been of Filipino origins and about 95% have been women.

The two provisions of the LCP that unequivocally create the potential for abuse and exploitation of live-in caregivers are the temporary nature of the visa under which they enter Canada, and the imposition of a mandatory live-in condition.

The LCP allows applicants to apply for permanent residence from within Canada after being employed as a caregiver for at least two years within the three years immediately following their entry into Canada. While the opportunity to apply for landed status is the “carrot” dangled in front of people who wish to migrate to benefit from the opportunities of living in Canada for themselves and their family members, the fear of losing this chance to obtain landed status is also the “stick” that hinders these women from seeking redress for the many violations of their labour and human rights that occur in private family-households. Live-in caregivers are fully aware that employers, who are citizens or permanent residents, and who possess greater status and resources, have the upper hand whenever there may be problems arising in the employer-worker relationship.

The potential for abuse is heightened for workers who are racialized and from another culture, unfamiliar with Canadian law and practice, and isolated from family and friends – conditions that characterize the majority of migrant live-in caregivers in Canada. The case files of migrant advocacy groups, court and human rights records, surveys of live-in caregivers’ conditions, and community and academic research all reveal a pattern of systematic violation of live-in caregiver rights. Among the difficulties experienced by workers as a result of their temporary and mandatory live-in requirement are: non-payment of wages earned, excessive hours of work and inadequate rest, poor and unhealthy accommodation and quality and quantity of food, lack of privacy, inability to take sick leave, and inability to conduct a personal life.

Legal and migration scholars have repeatedly demonstrated how the Live-in Caregiver Program contravenes several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and various international human rights treaties and agreements, including the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention for the Protection of Migrants and Members of their Family. In addition, legal migration scholar Eugenie Depatie-Pelletier (2008) argues that through its low-skilled temporary foreign worker programs, including the LCP, Canada also contravenes the UN 1957 Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, which has been ratified by Canada. The practices mandated by these programs, such as legally authorizing migrants under work permits to live and work on the property of a single employer, qualify these foreign workers as “persons under service status,” or persons under a human condition equivalent to the one experienced by slaves. The concept of “servitude,” for instance, includes the obligation on the part of the “serf” to live on another’s property and the impossibility of changing her condition.

But there is another, again structural, trend that makes it particularly urgent for the Canadian government to reform the provisions of the LCP that systematically lead to the exploitation of live-in caregivers. Households can be viewed as the ‘shock-absorbers’ for the vicissitudes of the global economy, such as the current economic downturn. Households are institutions and sets of social relations that can reorganize to scale back consumption, and intensify unpaid labour to compensate for a decline in household wages. When paid workers are brought into the family-household, crises in the larger economy can lead to an intensification of the exploitation of these non-family members, the most vulnerable members of the household. Thus, in Canada, there are increasing reports of household employees who are forced to work for more than one family or their employer’s family business, practices for which only or most severely the migrant household workers are penalized (i.e., by deportation). The elasticity of what constitutes housework also leads to often harried employers, wishing to decrease their own domestic labour burdens and costs, offloading tasks such as washing cars, pet care, etc. onto live-in caregivers, a form of exploitation that is not mandated by the LCP insofar as these forms of work are distantly related to the LCP care-giving job descriptions. The graying of the Canadian population and the current challenges of the health care system have meant that more families are seeking live-in caregivers to perform in-home elderly and palliative care. The potential for abuse multiplies as migrant caregivers are sought to perform around-the-clock care for critically ill and disabled persons, who may also suffer from dementia (and for whom proper care would therefore require a team of health care professionals, rather than one isolated and extremely vulnerable foreign caregiver).

In sum, the combination of precarious immigration status and compulsory live-in condition constructs a condition of vulnerability of female migrant workers to the flagrant, systematic violation of their human rights. Let us be clear: this disparity in rights and power between employer and employee is a structural one – matter related to the two offending provisions of the Live-in Caregiver Program. No amount of work done by community advocacy organizations and no amount of ‘education’ of workers about their rights, or employers about their obligations, will redress this immense power and rights disparity that exists between employer and worker under the current provisions of the LCP.

Contact: pura_velasco@hotmail.com
Telephone: 416-361-6319
May 12, 2009

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Specifically, the U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. For the text of this U.N. Convention, see http://www2.ohchr.org/egnlish/law/slavetrade.htm

REFERENCE:

Depatie-Pelletier, Eugenie (2008). “Under legal practices similar to slavery according to the U.N. Convention: Canada’s ‘non-white’ ‘temporary’ foreign workers in ‘low-skilled occupations,” 10th National Metropolis Conference, Halifax, April 5.