Nations in the global North are struggling with labour shortages dubbed in the media as ‘the great retirement' and ‘the great resignation'. Unemployment rates are running at near-record lows. As a result many nations are letting more temporary migrant labourers in to fill the gaps. Is this a good idea?
In this episode we'll hear from someone on the frontlines in the fight for migrant workers’ rights: Syed Hussan, executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, a group in Toronto, Canada, that comprises farmworkers, domestic workers and refugees, many of them are undocumented.
Then host Maggie Prezyna speaks with two experts will share insights on the complexity of the labour shortage and how the migrant labour piece fits into the economic puzzle. Armine Yalnizyan is an economist and Atkinson Foundation Fellow on the Future of Workers, a regular media contributor and adviser on economic policy to the Canadian government. And Martin Ruhs, is the Professor of Migration Studies and deputy director of the Migration Policy Center at the European University Institute in Florence. He is a migration policy advisor for various governments and international institutions.
Maggie is a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration & Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University and this new podcast is Borders & Belonging. Maggie will talk to leading experts from around the world and people with on-the-ground experience to explore the individual experiences of migrants: the difficult decisions and many challenges they face on their journeys.
She and her guests will also think through the global dimensions of migrants’ movement: the national policies, international agreements, trends of war, climate change, employment and more.
Borders & Belonging brings together hard evidence with stories of human experience to kindle new thinking in advocacy, policy and research.
Top researchers contribute articles that complement each podcast with a deeper dive into the themes discussed.
Borders & Belonging is a co-production between the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration & Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University and openDemocracy. The podcast was produced by LEAD Podcasting, Toronto, Ontario.
Show notesBelow, you will find links to all the research referenced by our guests, as well as other resources you may find useful.
Art and documentary‘El Contrato’, by Min Sook Lee, National Film Board (2003)
‘Migrant Dreams’, by Min Sook Lee, Cinema Politica (2016)
‘This is Evidence: Re-picturing South Asian migrant men in Greece’, exhibit curated by Reena Kukreja (2019)
Donate or get involved!Migrant Rights Alliance for Change
Media‘Canada and the U.S. both face labor shortages. One country is increasing immigration’, by Julia Ainsley, Joel Seidman and Didi Martinez, NBC News (7 January 2023)
‘Contending with the pandemic, wealthy nations wage global battle for migrants’, by Damien Cave and Christopher F. Schuetze, The New York Times (23 November 2021)
‘How the labour shortage got so bad’, by Armine Yalnizyan, Maclean’s (11 August 2022).
‘Immigrants could be the solution to Canada’s labour shortage, but they need to be supported’, by Rupa Banerjee, The Conversation (12 December 2022)
‘Nobody wants to work anymore’ and other falsehoods on Labour Day’, by Armine Yalnizyan, Toronto Star (5 September 2022)
‘The pandemic aggravated labour shortages in some sectors; the problem is now emerging in others’ by Eurofound (20 July 2021)
Research projects and policy‘COVID-19 and the demand for labour and skills in Europe’, by Terence Hogarth, MPI (February 2021)
‘Immigration as a source of labour supply’, Statistics Canada (22 June 2022)
‘Labour shortage trends in Canada’, Statistics Canada (18 November 2022)
‘Publications’, by Armine Yalnizyan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
‘The post-COVID-19 rise in labour shortages’, by Orsetta Causa, Michael Abendschein, Nhung Luu, Emilia Soldani, Chiara Soriolo, OECD Economics Department Working Paper Series (7 July 2022)
BooksRuhs, M. (2013). ‘The price of rights: Regulating international labor migration’. Princeton University Press.
Ruhs, M. and B. Anderson eds. (2010). ‘Who needs migrant workers? Labour shortages, immigration and public policy’. Oxford University Press.
Ruhs, M., Tamas, T. & J. Palme eds. (2019). ‘Bridging the gaps: Linking research to public debates and policy-making on migration and integration’. Oxford University Press.
Ide, T.R, Yalnizyan, A. & A. Cordell. (1994). ‘Shifting time: Social policy and the future of work’. Between the Lines.
Academic worksAnderson, B., Poeschel, F. and M. Ruhs. (2021). “Rethinking labour migration: Covid-19, essential work, and systemic resilience”, Comparative Migration Studies.
Bauböck, R. & M. Ruhs. (2022). ‘The elusive triple win: Addressing temporary labour migration dilemmas through fair representation’. Migration Studies.
Martin, P. & M. Ruhs. (2019). ‘Labour market realism and the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees’. International Migration.
Ruhs, M. (2018). ‘Labor immigration policies in high-income countries: Variations across political regimes and varieties of capitalism’. Journal of Legal Studies.
Ruhs, M. (2017.) ‘Rethinking international legal standards for the protection of migrant workers: The case for a ‘core rights’ approach’. American Journal of International Law.
Ruhs, M. (2016). ‘The rights of migrant workers: Economics, politics and ethics’. International Labour Review.
TranscriptMaggie Perzyna
Welcome to Borders & Belonging, a podcast that explores issues in global migration, and aims to debunk myths about migration based on current research. This series is produced by CERC Migration and openDemocracy. I'm Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Post pandemic, nations in the global North are struggling with labour shortages dubbed in the media as the 'great retirement' and the 'great resignation'. Unemployment rates are running at near record lows. Employers are clamoring for workers. Many nations are increasing the number of temporary migrant labourers allowed to work in their country to stem the tide. An outlier, Canada's looking to migrants on two fronts. On the one hand, by relaxing rules around which industries can employ temporary foreign workers. On the other hand, by raising immigration levels to unprecedented levels, Canada plans to welcome 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025. Today's episode will explore the question of whether migrant workers are the answer to the labour shortages we're hearing so much about. Two experts will share insights on the complexity surrounding the labour shortage and how the migrant labour piece fits into the economic puzzle. But first, we'll hear from someone on the frontlines in the fight for migrant workers’ rights.
Syed Hussan
When people speak up against bad wages or bad working conditions, if they're literally tied to their employer, as certain migrant workers are, then they can be made homeless. They're not allowed to work anywhere else. They're not able to get any EI (Employment Insurance) because the laws prohibit them from working for anyone else – the employer can literally deport them.
Maggie Perzyna
That's Syed Hussan. He's the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. The Toronto-based organization is made up of farmworkers, domestic workers, and refugees, among others, many of them are undocumented.
Syed Hussan
What we do is we support the self-organization of migrants. So, for migrants to gather with each other, based on where they live, where they work, potentially language or immigration status, in the specific sectors and support them to take collective action to win what they need.
Maggie Perzyna
Members of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change come from a wide range of places, including the Caribbean, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Mexico. And while their lived experiences may vary, Hussan says that there are some important common threads that unite them.
Syed Hussan
Whether it's migrant farmworkers and gig workers who hold up the food chain, or migrant healthcare workers and care workers who are holding up the care economy, migrants are at significant choke points of capitalism, as well as being exploited. All of our membership is racialized working class people taking collective action to win changes.
Maggie Perzyna
And their collective action is paying off. Take for example, how they responded to a recent crisis in New Brunswick's lobster and crab industries.
Syed Hussan
These large corporations are taking over from smaller businesses, setting the wages for the fishers. Many fishers from Canada have refused to sell to these [corporations] and have taken various kinds of strike actions in order to increase the pay that they're being given. Now, all of these fisheries that is actually collected is brought in to be processed by migrant workers.
Maggie Perzyna
The consequences of this were dire. But through organizing and advocacy, Hussan says the migrant workers were able to secure their rights.
Syed Hussan
They actually won a contract where the employer has now written a contract out to them to give them the power to get, you know, to be paid, even if they're not working. And so, you know, so this is a story where people were literally starving, using food banks. Not even being able to access food banks, not being able to work actually having to pay to live in the country, who through collective action, won a better, fairer 2-year contract in the future, which they are now traveling across the East Coast training other migrant workers like themselves to take similar kinds of action.
Maggie Perzyna
And while this recent win is encouraging, Hussan says the most important way that migrant workers can safely continue to do their work here is through permanent resident status. It's through documentation, he says, that the migrant workers will be able to access the rest of their rights, including health care and employment insurance. Many thanks to Syed Hussan for sharing his experiences with the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. Joining me to discuss the use of migrant workers to combat labour shortages is Armine Yalnizyan, a Canadian economist and Atkinson Foundation Fellow on the Future of Workers. She is a regular media contributor and government adviser on economic policy. And Professor Martin Ruhs, Chair in Migration Studies and Deputy Director of the Migration Policy Center at the European University Institute in Florence. Martin is a migration policy advisor for various governments and international institutions. Thanks to you both for talking with me today.
Maggie Perzyna
Since the pandemic, it seems like every country in the global North is struggling with labour shortages. Why is this happening now?
Armine Yalnizyan
Every country that had a baby boom after the Second World War is seeing that generation of workers, the biggest cohort of people that entered the labour market, and the first cohort where women thought they were just as good as men. That cohort is aging out of the labour market, sometimes more rapidly because of the pandemic. And we certainly aren't through it yet, but the beginnings of this phenomenon have already raised warning signs to people. You know, demographics is the slowest moving train on the planet. We could see this coming literally 50 years off and have not planned for it. So, everybody's been taken aback. Add to that the pandemic and its effects on reducing migrant workers being able to travel and the pandemic making people more sick now, even when they went back to work. And of course, the pandemic’s effects on some marginal businesses that either failed to stay functioning during the pandemic's long period of reduced demand or are now collapsing under the weight of central banks raising rates in lockstep around the world. So, there's lots of different moving parts to this story. But the big story is demographic.
Maggie Perzyna
Martin, do you have anything to add?
Martin Ruhs
Yeah, I would agree that there's various explanations, but obviously, many OECD economies are rebounding strongly from the pandemic. Labour markets are tight and, you know, obviously, during the pandemic, there was quite strong government support for both companies and workers. And some workers who were supported have perhaps not yet returned to the to the labour market for various reasons, or at least not to employment in some jobs that they were previously in. And I suppose one big question is, and I think this is still being researched, is the extent to which workers' attitudes and preferences to certain jobs have changed. We've obviously had long standing shortages in sectors that offer low wages and poor working conditions, which is one of the reasons why we see migrants employed in those sectors. But the question now is whether citizens, local workers who use to work in those jobs, whether they are perhaps now less inclined to return to those jobs that are low pay, poor conditions, and maybe don't offer a good source of protection.
Maggie Perzyna
While many countries are reluctant to increase their immigration rates, Canada's an outlier. To address labour shortages, Canada's dramatically increasing immigration, while at the same time relaxing rules around the use of temporary foreign workers. Armine, what are the differences between those brought in through immigration versus temporary migrant workers?
Armine Yalnizyan
Maggie, I am so grateful that you include in migration, these two pieces because often people talk about migration as if what we're talking about is immigration. Immigration is about accepting people to come and live, as well as work, in your country.