Workers Who Are Migrants

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together."
Lilla Watson, Australian Aboriginal activist

Quick! Tell me what comes to mind when you hear the term "migrant workers." If you had images or thoughts of pitiful working conditions, cruel treatment and unjust immigration policies, you get five points (okay, make that six). But why not a perfect 10?

It seems our mind plays tricks on us, or maybe our language is inadequate. There is one critical aspect of "global labour migration" that takes a little longer to emerge and seems to compete with the other dramatic elements of the picture. We hear "migrant workers" and right away the word "migrant" pushes away the image of a "worker." But wait: migrant workers are, first and foremost, "workers"! Like all of us, they are people who need paid work; the only difference is that their job search has sent them beyond the usual 10- to 1,000-mile radius from home that most of us travel within to get to our jobs. They are workers who, having been displaced and uprooted from their original workplaces and communities - from their industries and their countries - are now roaming the world looking for that elusive, low-paying job. Yet, as if by magic, we now see and treat them principally as "migrant," with all the sense of alienation and threat that word suggests.

This de-emphasis on seeing migrant workers as "plain old workers" is a critical shift of our conversation in Canada around global labour migration that, I believe, has deep implications to our politics and practice of unionism and class solidarity. With this subtle re-framing, neo-liberal globalization has us exactly where it wants us to be: divided, defensive, and distracted.

Divided: Migrant workers were often rural workers whose jobs and communities in the Global South were ravaged by global capital. Global capital "invested" in the Global South, whether in mining or crops and, in the process, took over and destroyed the local peoples' environment and economies. Workers lost their lands and livelihood; so they went from the countryside to the cities looking for jobs; failing that, they left their country and ended up, some of them, here in Canada. "We are here, because you were [or still are] there," say migrant workers about global capital.

What we are seeing is, in effect, forced migration, with workers pushed farther and farther away from their homes in search of jobs. We see, in the experience of global migrant workers, what neo-liberal global capital wants to do with all workers: reduce us to becoming precarious, dispensable, and compliant. This is the singular fact about migrant labour that must remain central to our understanding: it is simply the complete realization of global capital, not its excesses, nor its aberrations. It is the goal of the system itself, not a "loophole" in the system. It is endemic to the very plan; it does not exist simply because of the abuse of rapacious employers or the incompetence of some bureaucrat.

First the foreign investors upended the South, displacing local communities with the complicity of local governments and elites. And in creating this permanent pool of temporary, migrant workers, global capital also successfully divided the world's working class, making some of us think that migrants' interests are not our interests. We are not migrants, after all. Or are we. (With the so-called EI reform, we are now supposed to accept jobs further away from where we live than before, after having lost our jobs to contracting out, offshoring, and downsizing.)

Defensive: The dilemma of organized labour is that it is afraid to be seen as "anti-(im)migrant." We can't be saying migrant workers are "stealing our jobs." And they certainly aren't! But, the fact is, global capital is making all workers fight over low-waged jobs, dividing and confusing us about who the real enemy is. So, we talk about the miserable working conditions of migrant labour, as we should (you got six points for that, didn't you?). And so we advocate for changes in the legislation that has reduced Citizenship and Immigration Canada into a recruitment agency for temporary workers on behalf of business; and we get "reforms." But we fail to focus our fight on the fact that the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (not to mention the Seasonal Agricultural Workers and Live-in Care Giver programs) is, in itself, an attack on all workers migrant or otherwise, temporary or permanent, full-time or part-time, unionized or wanting to
be. We need to focus on the root cause of global labour migration. People should have access to decent jobs wherever they live.

Distracted: The neo-liberal attack on the working class results in our loss of identity and, from there, we go helter-skelter trying to fight on many fronts, losing our focus and dissipating our energies. Sooner or later, we lose sight of the fact that the current immigration policy, along with outsourcing, is equally nothing but an attack on unions, just as it is an attack on migrant labour.

With the creation of a permanent, cheap and pliant workforce, our labour movement is undermined, it's dynamism diminished. Global capital, in Canada and overseas, can pit one group of workers against another.

To advocate for and support migrant workers is great, but it is not enough. And organizing migrant workers is important, but it cannot be done effectively without an understanding that global migration is a creation of global capital, whose goal is the extinction of unions and the demolition of class consciousness. It is must be done to empower the migrant workers themselves, not primarily to grow the union.

So, here is my proposition: That Canadian policies promoting global migration are an attack on unions; therefore, unions should work with migrant workers as a matter of survival, an act of solidarity rather than charity, re-enforcing the principle of migrant workers' right to self organize as part of the broad working class, whether part of a union or not.

Join us as we move forward with this dialogue on global labour migration, to help bring together the union movement and the migrant justice movement into one anti-capitalist global justice movement. A public meeting on global migration will be held in late August to further deepen the dialogue between migrant workers' groups and union organizations. Find out when and where by following Our Times on Twitter @ourtimesmag and liking Our Times' Facebook page. We'll keep you posted.