Caregiver blues

The precarious employment and living
conditions for foreign domestics are brought
to the fore by a recent study and court case

DISCRIMINATION, EXPLOITATION EXISTS IN CANADA, TOO:
Jill Hanley and Delia Deveyra

by HEATHER ROBB

If International Women’s Day—this year falling on Sunday, March 8—is a time to reflect on women’s struggles for human rights and justice across the world, then it shouldn’t exclude the struggles of women right here in Montreal. Women who come to Canada to be domestic workers often go into debt getting here, face long bouts of separation from their families and take on the kind of work that no one else seems to want to do—with the hope of setting up a life here. But what’s more, they cite discrimination and exploitation as common and pervasive components of their Canadian experience.

For Delia Deveyra, a Filipino woman, the first bump in the road came when she arrived in Montreal in August 2004 and was told by her recruitment agency, J.A. International, that the employer who had signed her work permit already had someone else working for him. Workers are required to complete 24 months of live-in domestic work within a three-year period, according to the federal Live-in-Caregiver Program (LCP), the current channel through which foreign domestic workers enter Canada—and so, for Deveyra, news of a delay was worrisome.

Hazards of time and rent

“On paper, I understood that I would go directly to my employer who sponsored me to come... I was so mad. [The recruitment agency] deceived me and other girls too,” she says. After paying the agency a recruitment fee of $3,265 U.S., Deveyra then had to wait six months for them to find her another employer. LCP workers can also lose precious time if they decide to change employers in that three-year period, as a new work permit can take up to six months to process. Too many delays can result in failure in the program.

John Aurora—the owner of the recruitment agency Deveyra claims mislead her from the start—has emerged in the news recently, this time in court. Aurora rents rooms to LCP workers who are currently without a live-in workplace, and has been suing a number of women for unpaid rent. According to Miki Harrar, a lawyer representing approximately a dozen of the women, Aurora’s claims are based on a clause in the lease, which states that “parties are joint and severally responsible”—in other words, “if your roommate doesn’t pay their rent, you agree to pay the rent for them.” When a woman moved out and abandoned her lease, Aurora would pursue the remaining roommate for the other’s unpaid rent. Harrar says that not only is it ridiculous to ask the women to agree to such terms given that they’ve never met before, but that Aurora deceives the women by leaving the additional clause section of the lease blank, and then filling it in after they’ve signed.

One such case was heard on Nov. 20, 2008, and the Régie recently ruled in favour of the women. They recognized that there were no arrears in rent, and ordered Aurora to pay each woman $1,500 for damages.

Protection, please

Dr. Jill Hanley, a professor at the McGill School of Social Work, and a co-founder of the Montreal Immigrant Worker’s Centre (IWC), recently published a study of the working conditions of LCP workers in Montreal entitled Warning! Domestic Work Can Be Dangerous to Your Immigration Status, Health, Safety and Wallet. The study was based on a survey of 148 live-in caregivers in the Montreal area—a group that is difficult to track down because there is no master list of who and where these workers are, and because they tend to be isolated, given that they are new to Canada, reside in other people’s homes, and often work under the table when they are between work permits.

Hanley was motivated to conduct a survey of domestic workers in part to aid a local campaign led by community groups such as the IWC and PINAY (a Filipino Women’s Organization in Quebec), aimed at getting domestic workers access to compensation for workplace accidents or illness under the Commission de la santé et de la sécurité au travail (CSST). Hanley says the report provides the documentation the campaign needed to prove to the CSST that there are risks of injury involved in domestic work. According to Hanley, up to 30 per cent of respondents reported some kind of injury at work.

“It doesn’t mean their accident was so bad that they couldn’t continue to work, but it does show that there is a risk,” she says. “Why wouldn’t they have the same protection as other workers?”

After the publication of Hanley’s study in November, Quebec’s human rights commission issued a report to the government in December, stating that the exclusion of domestic workers from the CSST constitutes discrimination “based on gender, social status and ethnicity,” according to Diep Truong, the commission’s public information officer.