Most of us would like to believe that 19th-century abolitionists banished slavery from the world for good. But as science fiction author Philip K. Dick once observed, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." There are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide to this day, most of them women and children working under the threat of violence and unable to walk away from their bondage.
The relative numbers of slaves to population has declined over the past two centuries; that appears to be evidence for civi-
lized progress. That said, 27 million slaves is 27 million too many, and that number doesn't include all sweatshop workers, or temporary workers flown from one contract site to another like livestock with carry-on luggage.
There is a serpentine line from the collapsing garment building to the shirt on your back, and from the locked-door factory floor to your newest electronic gadget. Many small hands have touched the cat's cradle of electronic components nestled in your fingers, but the fetishization of commodities tends to banish the workers responsible from our imaginations. And we become less curious with every upgrade of our high-tech devices.
It's a kind of tunnel vision that many global corporations do little to address, with their implausible deniability drawn from daisy chains of manufacturing subcontractors. Yet a loss of peripheral vision has close-up consequences in our own labour relations. For instance, for years First World workers have accepted unpaid internships as a matter of course, even though these arrangements can best be described as a soft and fuzzy serfdom, paying out dreams instead of dollars. Whatever happened to the idea that an honest day's work deserves an honest day's wage? Lost to tunnel vision.
This brings us to Canada's temporary foreign worker's permit program. Up to 33,000 companies in Canada have applied to use temporary foreign workers, and there were 338,189 of these workers on our shores on Dec. 1, 2012. This isn't just a minor riff on free trade's promise of a mobile labour force; it's shaping up to be the plutocrats' Trojan Horse for bypassing contractually bargained wages with domestic workers.
When corporations parachute in lower-paid foreign workers to fatten their profit margin, they are not delivering any new goods and services in exchange. Political scientists refer to this as "rent-seeking." Temporary foreign workers don't always get a raw deal, but some find themselves in the position of debt slaves or contract slaves. Debt slaves work for loans in which the time period and work conditions are often unstated. Contract slaves sign off on agreements that are often not honoured by the company.
If you think exploitation of foreign workers only happens in the Gulf states, think again. In April, over three dozen Latin American workers won a wage settlement from SNC Lavalin after the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the infrastructure megafirm discriminated against them in wages, accommodation, meals and expenses during construction of the Canada Line rapid transit line (speaking of tunnel vision).
Even the World Bank withheld a loan from SNC-Lavalin after allegations of bribes involving SNC-Lavalin officials on a Bangladesh bridge project. Not that bad global PR is necessarily a bar to Canadian business. In January, a consortium of companies led by SNC-Lavalin won the provincial contract to build the Evergreen line rapid transit project in Metro Vancouver.
The film director Orson Welles once mused on the likelihood of a civilization based on universal equality. Humanity has been on a path away from state-sanctioned slavery for centuries, yet temporary worker programs - which allow transnational corporations to pit the working class of one country against the working class of another - puts a question mark back onto Welles' words, as do inventive new management techniques for exploiting rank-and-file workers. When U.S. firms take out life insurance policies on their own employees - with the firms named as beneficiary - and internally refer to the practice as "dead peasant insurance," it should scare the Dickens into wageslaves everywhere.
Thankfully, Ottawa recently did one smart thing to address a market dislocation of its own making, by repealing regulations that allow corporations to pay temporary foreign workers 15 per cent less than domestic wages for high-skilled positions, and five per cent less for low skilled positions. It's a start. www.geoffolson.com
