COVID-19’s impact on migrant workers adds urgency to calls for permanent status
COVID-19’s impact on migrant workers adds urgency to calls for permanent status
By Fay Faraday
Social Justice Lawyer & Assistant Professor, York University, Canada
February 24, 2021
Migrant workers in Canada have suffered tremendously during COVID-19. Each year, some 85,000 low-wage migrant workers come to Canada under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. They do essential work in many fields including health care, in-home care, agriculture, food processing, cleaning services, delivery services and construction. Thousands more are undocumented.
Just six weeks into the pandemic, documented complaints from over 1,100 migrant farm workers had already identified widespread wage theft, inadequate housing, lack of PPE, inadequate food, coercive restrictions on workers’ movement, intimidation, surveillance and heightened racism.
In 2020, 12 per cent of migrant farm workers — over 1,780 individuals — tested positive for COVID-19 in Ontario alone. Bonifacio Eugenio Romero, Rogelio Muñoz Santos and Juan Lopez Chaparro from Mexico died of the disease.
Comments (0)