Shady employment agents prey on foreign workers
Seeking work, would-be immigrants are charged placement fees for jobs that don't exist
Joanne Lee-Young, Vancouver Sun // August 31, 2008
Antonio Navarro's story speaks of the uglier side of what is happening as B.C. targets the Philippines as a source of labour to ease its shortages.
In a nutshell, unscrupulous agents are charging some temporary foreign workers like Navarro illegal, but very common, placement fees. Then, in cahoots with employers and other agents, they are duping these workers with bogus job offers, leaving them in a new country with no income, significant debt and precarious visa situations.
Some workers eventually have to leave Canada, returning to the Philippines to start their entire application process from square one, even though, frustratingly, plenty of B.C. companies are eager to employ them.
Navarro, a carpenter from Bulacan just north of metro Manila, paid $4,000 US to a Filipino recruitment agency in return for landing a $27-per-hour job in B.C. through its partner, another recruiting agency in Vancouver.
The B.C. government has said it needs to attract from outside the province some 30,000 workers per year with specific skills. It doesn't have a target number for the Philippines, but Victoria has signed various agreements to ease the way for local tourism, hospitality and construction companies to bring workers from that country.
According to B.C. law, it is illegal to collect any placement fees - regardless of what they are called, or how they are disguised - from these workers. But the issue is almost academic. The B.C. government is unable to enforce the law outside its jurisdiction and in the Philippines there is an accepted culture of paying these fees.
"I always ask, 'Why do you pay the placement fees?'" says Maria Javier, a program manager at Vancouver-based Multicultural Helping House, a community organization that has been counselling some of these workers on their rights.
"In their minds, the $3,000 to $4,000 [in placement fees] is a lot of money. But if they compute the salary as indicated in their contracts, they figure that they can pay it off over time while they are working here," said Javier.
"If the job turns out to be bogus, or it does not pay what the contract says it will, then it's a big problem."
So Navarro, along with eight other workers contracted for a specific project in B.C., each paid the placement fee. They also forked out another $700 US each for airfare and to process documents. Navarro himself borrowed money from a friend in California. He also took out high-interest loans from two separate Filipino companies that specialize in financing overseas employment.
In telephone interviews with Navarro and other workers in his group, and in copies of documents such as contracts and Labour Market Opinions (LMO) seen by The Vancouver Sun, all sorts of players are named in the saga that followed.
(LMOs are the Canadian government's official assessment of the market and its going pay rates. Workers require an approved LMO in order to get a work permit.)
Metro Police Manpower Agency was the agency in Manila. Active Placement Agency was the one in Vancouver. The employer was to be Vancouver-based Span Canada Enterprises, with an address on Fraser Street. The Vancouver agency representative who picked up the workers at YVR and collected envelopes containing $1,000 US in cash from each of them was named Maritas Clark.
But, in the end, all these details would turn out to be meaningless to the workers, disappearing on them as easily as a cellphone account goes dead or a random company becomes inactive.
Week after week, Clark told the workers that their supposed employer at Span was on holiday. When one of them finally contacted the company directly, he was told that there were no jobs at $27 per hour, but that he could make $9 per hour doing some office work.
"She lied to us," said Navarro. "If they pay us $9, how can we repay our debt? She just took the placement fee."
Clark patched some of the workers into jobs in Grand Prairie, Alberta, "doing janitorial work at a Wal-Mart, where they stayed for a month, making $12 to $14 an hour," said Navarro.
Then, later, she just vanished on them completely.
"[Clark] has many phone numbers," said David Barce, another worker in that group. "In my opinion, she is a Filipino lady, she should have helped us. We don't know where she is. Maybe she is still recruiting some Filipinos and bringing them here."
It's not clear whether this was the case here, but, in the most egregious of scams, some of these fly-by-night agencies are approaching employers and offering money in exchange for "offers of employment" that can be used to apply for an LMO even though, in reality, no job exists for workers when they arrive, according to Tom Steele, a Vancouver-based consultant who specializes in helping employers apply for legitimate LMOs.
"There are a lot of players involved. As long as there are vulnerable people out there, there is going to be someone taking advantage of them," said Steele.
The workers themselves, meanwhile, get plunged into a situation where the clock starts ticking on how long they can financially afford to stay in Canada legally.
"[Navarro's situation] isn't an isolated case," Alex Stojicevic, a Vancouver-based lawyer who chairs the Canadian Bar Association's national immigration section.
"When [a temporary foreign worker] comes to Canada from the Philippines, they are a visitor who is allowed to work for a very specific employer. They have a status document that allows them to be here, even if that work disappears.
"The problem is a practical one: That most of these people don't come with a ton of money. So, how are you going to survive for three months while you are waiting for your work permit to be switched and for a new LMO to be approved? What happens is that people start working illegally, which can get you removed from Canada."
Even if a worker manages to land a new job, get another LMO and a work permit before he or she runs out of money or overstays a visitor visa, there are other pitfalls.
B.C. companies may need workers, but this doesn't mean that business is predictable or that projects, especially construction, don't start and stop.
Some from Navarro's group bounced on to carpentry and other jobs for Vancouver-based Pacific Western Coastal Contractor, which was building a condo development in Victoria. But when the project was suspended for financial reasons, they were left hanging again.
In a similar, more publicized case, temporary foreign workers from the Philippines hired to work as borers on twin tunnels for a North Vancouver water treatment plant were caught last January when the Germany-based contractor, Bilfinger Berger Canada, had a conflict with Metro Vancouver about the safety of underground workers. The firm was fired from the project.
In June, the Philippines government itself opened a Vancouver-based labour office that it hopes will vet potential employers, streamline applications, and provide support and social services for Filipino workers in B.C.
Bernie Julve, consular officer in charge of labour, said he is still building his network in western Canada, but noted that "in Alberta, there is a newly created office that looks into the conditions of workers and matters concerning the violations of contracts."
He vowed to investigate unscrupulous brokers based in the Philippines, but called on the B.C. government to patrol dealers on its own soil.
Others like Wayne Peppard, executive director of the B.C. and Yukon Building and Construction Trades Council, would like to see a separate advocacy centre, funded by the provincial and federal government, that works in the interest of these temporary foreign workers. He said that many workers are reluctant to report labour or contract violations because they are in desperate need of lining up the next job and securing proper papers. They don't want to jeopardize that process in any way.
"There is a real intimidation factor in coming forward," he said.
For example, even though some local politicians and organizations such as the Multicultural Helping House tried to reach out and help the temporary foreign workers displaced by the Bilfinger project, it was a challenge.
"They have scattered to the four winds," said North Vancouver city councilor Bob Fearnley. "I was in touch with them at first, but have had trouble tracking them."
One of them, Balthazar Palacios, said in a phone interview that, "I was scared to talk about anything to anyone because I didn't have my [new] work permit yet."
Indeed, when Javier, the Multicultural Helping House program manager, tries to help some workers, "They sit there and they cry. But when I give them the employment standards form [so that they can file a formal complaint], they say no, they don't want to sign it."
She thinks that many such workers would be reluctant to formally complain via a government office, and that funding would be better spent on education and counseling to reassure and encourage them to speak out.
In the meantime, the issue is emerging on government radar screens.
Stojicevic, the Canadian Bar Association lawyer, said that at the federal level, administrators at Service Canada (the agency which approves LMOs) "are getting more rigorous in phoning employers directly, instead of merely relying on written applications filled by agencies. ... They are adding an extra step of compliance."
"The federal government is working with provincial and territorial governments to put in place measures, such as information-sharing agreements, that will support closer collaboration to address the vulnerability of foreign workers and to better manage the roles and activities of third party recruiters," Jason Bouzanis, a Service Canada spokesperson, said in an email.
Unfortunately, for Navarro, time ran out. Reached last week by telephone several days after returning to Manila, he could only sigh that "B.C. is great. There are many companies looking for skilled workers. ... I don't know what to say."
He has started again from scratch in Manila, applying for a work visa and LMO. Brenta Construction, a Burnaby company, would like to hire him at $25 an hour, and has actually secured LMOs and new working visas for some others in his original group.
Navarro still owes the original debt he incurred to pay his placement fee, plus about 20 per cent.
It has been a heartwrenching lesson for him to return home empty-handed and still be saddled with costs, and to face a spouse and family who share his financial burden.
Nevertheless, he is determined to persevere. This time around, however, he is working directly with Victoria-based Red Seal Recruiting Solutions, which connected him to Brenta and will not charge a placement fee of any kind.
In fact, Kael Campbell, the head recruiter at Red Seal, hopes that if and when Navarro eventually returns to B.C., he will help brief other potential Filipino workers on this very topic before they make any payments.
jlee-young@vancouversun.com
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