Saturday, April 26, 2014

Good help is easy to find, if you pay for it

The whining from Canadian restaurants over the TFW cancellation is both offensive and insulting to Canada.

Any restaurant anywhere in the country that has to close down because it cannot find enough local teenagers or university students or unemployed people willing to work for them just isn't offering high enough pay.

That's basically the problem, isn't it? The restaurateurs don't want to have to pay a living wage to their staff, they'd rather use desperate immigrants who will work cheap and not demand better.

I'll bet more than one of these upstanding citizens has also been pulling the same kind of scam as this Tim Horton franchisee was accused of doing -- charging back to the employees the costs of their work permits and LPO surveys.  I'll bet he didn't think of doing this all by himself;  I'll bet this is common practice in the Canadian restaurant industry.

Because, you know, this industry is made up of those poor, poor corporations that are being so unfairly persecuted by everybody except the Minister, Jason Kenney, who apparently understands how important it is for Canada that restaurants can hire fry cooks cheap so that they can continue to sell burgers for $1.99.

As CBC dryly notes in its story about the infamous MacDonald's conference call:

At no point during the recording does the CEO mention hiring Canadians instead of temporary foreign workers or go over the rules of the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
It's not about racism, nor is it about the workers themselves.

Its about the Canadian restaurant companies who are screwing them.  And us.

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