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Article

21 Aug 2017

Author:
Dan Levin, New York Times (USA)

Canada: Temporary farms workers fear deportation if they denounce labour abuses or living conditions

“Foreign farmworkers in Canada fear deportation if they complain”, 13 Aug 17  

…British Columbia — Desperate to provide for his family, Hilario Mendoza leapt at the chance to leave Mexico to pick cherries on a farm in British Columbia. But bad weather left him so idle that he often worked just three hours a day — far less than the 40 hours a week he said he had been promised under Canada’s program for temporary farmworkers. While he waited to go to the fields, he found himself crammed with 34 other laborers into a small house…Months of complaints went nowhere — and then he was abruptly sent back to Mexico…[C]ritics say the program is poorly supervised, leaving workers vulnerable to exploitation by employers, often denied the Canadian labor benefits they are entitled to and at risk of deportation if they complain about employment conditions…