Worker Rights

Every workplace runs on labour the system would rather not pay for. Migrant workers are on the farms and in the fields, behind grocery store tills, delivering food and packages, driving for apps that call us contractors so they can avoid calling us employees, in hospitals and long term care, in classrooms and labs, cleaning and maintaining buildings, staffing the nonprofits and charities that pick up where the state leaves off, and in public service jobs that keep this province running. What we get back is closed permits, stolen wages, unsafe conditions, and the constant threat that speaking up means losing everything. These aren't one off accidents. This is precarity built into the system, and precarity is profitable. The people profiting are the rich and the state, not your coworker and not you.

We don't accept that bargain. At the Migrant Action Centre we organize for power on the job, because rights that depend on a boss's goodwill are not rights. They are permissions, and permissions can be taken away.

We call for:

• Status for all now: Tying a permit to one employer is how a boss keeps you compliant. Full and permanent status for every migrant (workers, students, refugees, undocumented people) takes that leverage away. No one should have to choose between their safety and their status.
• The freedom to organize and to refuse: The right to unionize, to bargain together, to walk off an unsafe job, and to change employers without losing status. Real power on the job comes from each other, not from filing a complaint and hoping.
• A living wage that is indexed and enforced: Not a minimum that keeps you poor, but a wage that covers housing, food, care, and other things necessary for a comfortable life in every community, with real consequences for the bosses who steal it.
• An end to the carve outs: Migrants are the only people in Canada for whom whole kinds of work are criminalized or off limits. Decriminalize migrant labour, including sex work, and let people work in dignity.
• No more discrimination: Migrants protected from discrimination based on status, with the same protections and the same remedies as anyone else. Not because the state is generous, but because we are people.

The rich, the bosses, and the powerful want us grateful and afraid. We would rather be organized. We keep this economy running, and we intend to have a say in how it is run, on land that was stolen, and never ceded for any of us to profit from. This fight belongs to every worker who has ever been told to be grateful for less. Solidarity, not charity.