My April 10 post on high food prices said one of the many reasons given for the high prices was COVID-related “labour shortages”. From fall 2021 headlines like “Labour shortages to become the new norm in future” to the Government of Canada saying in November 2022 that it was, “Solving labour shortages in key sectors like health care, construction, and transportation” to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business stating in Nov. 2023 that Labour shortages cost Canadian small businesses over $38 billion in lost revenue opportunities, certain groups have been sounding the labour shortage alarm for years.
However, panelists on the May edition of rabble’s Off the Hill political panel, which I co-host with former NDP member of Parliament Libby Davies, challenged the labour shortage idea. The panelists – NDP MP Matthew Green, economist Jim Stanford, Ontario Federation of Labour president Laura Walton and researcher and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives policy analyst Véronique Sioufi – all challenged the assumption that Canada has faced and continues to face a “labour shortage”. They said what Canada has is a shortage of bosses who want to pay fair wages and provide good working conditions. Stanford added that it’s employers who have been complaining of a labour shortage – especially in low wage industries like retail and hospitality – and suggesting “solutions” like delaying the retirement age, reducing employment insurance and other income security benefits (saying they’re a disincentive to work) and bringing in more temporary foreign workers.
Referring to Ontario’s education sector Laura Walton said there was a “labour shortage” because education workers aren’t paid enough. “It’s not a lack of people wanting to work. It’s a lack of bosses wanting to respect workers for the labour they provide”, she said. People saying no to low wages is, “workers using their collective power to say we will not be disrespected as workers”. But she added that a real labour shortage is being created as people are more reluctant to go into the education field because of low wages and poor working conditions.
Véronique Sioufi said the impacts of the labour shortage myth are felt disproportionately by Black, Indigenous and women of color, particularly by recent immigrants and temporary migrants who are over-represented in sectors like retail, accommodation and food services.
A January 2024 Calgary Herald opinion piece said “an increasing proportion of TFWs [temporary foreign workers] are working at fast food counters and in hotel lobbies. Perhaps the most well-known instance of this is our national coffee icon Tim Hortons, which has been at the centre of a number of controversies surrounding its extensive use of the TWF program.” The article cites a story highlighting a link between the fabricated labour shortage with the real housing shortage. “Most recently, D.P. Murphy Inc, which operates Tim Hortons restaurants across Prince Edward Island, found itself in hot water when it bought an apartment building in the small seaside town of Souris – and promptly evicted the tenants to make way for TFWs.”
Sioufi says that if there was an actual labour shortage in these low wage sectors dominated by women we’d see wages going up to attract more women to the sector or maybe they’d be investing in training women to upskill them – but that’s not happening. Instead, she says what we’re seeing is job vacancies supposedly increasing while wages stagnate or even erode. And she says wages are below the living wage. In Vancouver, where she lives, the living wage is $25/hr – not what Tim Horton workers are making.
The Calgary Herald article said that, according to Statistics Canada, there were 111,000 temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in Canada in the year 2000 and that this number had ballooned to 777,000 by 2021.
The federal government tried to address the “labour shortage” in Oct. 2022, announcing the temporary lifting of the 20-hour-per-week cap on the number of hours that eligible post-secondary international students are allowed to work off-campus while class is in session.
That was before people starting blaming international students for Canada’s housing and health care crises. Professors Leah Hamilton and Yvonne Su pushed back against this blame game in their Jan. 2024 article International students cap falsely blames them for Canada’s housing and health-care woes. Their article was in response to the federal government announcing its plan to decrease the number of new international student permits issued to approximately 360,000 for 2024, a decrease of 35% from 2023.
Similar to real crises, the largely fabricated labour shortage has had a disproportionate impact on Black workers as detailed in the July 2023 Toronto Star article Labour shortage narrows the pay gap between white and racialized workers — but for Black workers, things are worse. The article speaks for itself:
“Lower unemployment rates and higher wages in 2022 helped to narrow the employment gap between racialized workers and workers who identify as white, but not for Black workers, according to a new report released [July 5, 2023] by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The report found that the benefits of the pandemic recovery, such as wage increases, have been unevenly distributed for racialized workers, as the wage and employment gap widened between Black workers and their white counterparts. The data indicates that anti-Black racism is a dominant force in the labour market, the report’s authors told the Star. “Despite some progress for racialized workers as a whole, Black workers continue to bear a disproportionate burden of employment inequality,” said Grace-Edward Galabuzi, a professor in the department of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and report co-author…The research found that racialized workers are overall more likely to be working in industries with high employment growth and faster wage growth than Black workers. In lower-wage occupations there is an overrepresentation of Black workers. Fifty-two per cent of racialized workers are in occupations in the bottom half of the wage distribution compared with 48 percent of white workers and 60 percent of Black workers…And though wages increased during the pandemic, racialized and Black men still earn less than their white counterparts, and Black and racialized women face even greater hurdles. Black workers are overrepresented in retail; accommodation and food; and arts and entertainment, which were the hardest-hit industries during the pandemic, said Galabuzi, and are experiencing the most gradual recovery.”
So Black and racialized workers, many of them women, are working disproportionately in low-paid, non unionized work – including in the gig economy like food and parcel delivery and companies in these sectors continue to complain about “labour shortages”. So it appears that some companies have adopted low paid, high turnover workforces as their business model supported by large numbers of largely racialized temporary workers. The 2024 federal budget included measures to address “labour shortages” in health care and construction. I couldn’t find anything explicit in the Budget that appeared to be responding to the “solutions” Jim Stanford says businesses recommend to address “labour shortages”: delaying the retirement age, reducing employment insurance or bringing in more temporary foreign workers. So perhaps, the government isn’t buying the hype.
However, the Budget doesn’t mention the Temporary Foreign Worker Program or the International Mobility Program, or IMP.
Regarding the IMP, the Calgary Herald article cited before says companies looking for cheap labour “are aided by an underreported TFW stream: the International Mobility Program (IMP). The government website Canada.ca advertises the IMP succinctly: “Hire a worker without a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA)”. Whereas for the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), employers need to at least go through the motions of trying to hire a Canadian, the IMP temporary worker stream bypasses this requirement entirely. IMP work permits have doubled from 2017 to more than 470,000 last year, which does not include the 200,000 international students who hold IMP permits. This program is a big contributor to the astronomic growth in temporary foreign worker numbers, and the shift in the proportion of foreign workers towards jobs in food, accommodations, retail, and administrative support.”
The Budget’s silence on the TFWP and the IMP is telling as you can’t solve a problem without acknowledging it. The Budget also doesn’t explicitly mention “racialized women” or “Black women”.
Laura Walton’s assertion that people saying no to low wages is, “workers using their collective power to say we will not be disrespected as workers” applies mostly, and perhaps only, to unionized workers. And recent strikes have been inspiring examples of unionized worker solidarity. But Black and other racialized people working in the gig economy for companies like Uber and Amazon are almost entirely non-unionized and so have far less power to say no to low wages.
But the stories of low wages and poor working conditions get drowned out by the “labour shortage” story being pushed by companies. This is similar to how, during the January/Febuary 2022 Freedom Convoy which occupied Parliament Hill for three weeks, there was no mention of how low wages and poor working conditions have created a “labour shortage” in the trucking industry. Convoy protestors had lots of “F$%^ Trudeau!” signs but there wasn’t one “PAY US MORE!” sign to be seen.
This might be related to the fact that many, if not most, of the Convoy protestors weren’t truckers and the ones that were likely weren’t unionized as only 35% of Canadian truckers are according to Canada’s largest private sector union Unifor.
One of Laura Walton’s final points in the Off the Hill “labour shortage” panel was that we need governments that will remove the barriers to unionization by passing things like anti-scab legislation. More unionization means more workers able to collectively demand better wages and working conditions.
We also need governments to explicitly acknowledge – and address – the problems with the temporary foreign worker programs, especially easing the path to permanent residency for temporary workers. Véronique Sioufi said the best way to address the so-called “labour shortage” is giving folks permanent status. “We must stop this accepted racism of “we’ll take your labour but not your person””.
The Washington Post’s slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Corporate bad behaviour thrives in darkness so we must keep shining the light on it – and telling our members of Parliament to not believe the “labour shortage” hype.