400 demonstrators lend their voice to the invisibles Migrant workers
Protesters demand 'legal status for all'
JAN RAVENSBERGEN, The Gazette, Monday, May 05, 2008
Almost without exception, they spend their days and nights toiling deep in the shadows.
They are among the quiet ones who silently prepare your restaurant lunch, vacuum your office, wash your dirty laundry, mind your children or pick the locally grown carrots or apples on which you snack.
Yesterday, for a change, they weren't invisible.
A boisterous, chanting crowd of more than 400 demonstrators gave them voice in the Montreal neighbourhood where many of them - furtively - work and live.
The marchers paraded through the city's working-class Côte des Neiges district demanding recognition, respect and rights for what organizers said are 40,000 non-status migrants in the Montreal region.
A more widespread term is illegal immigrants.
According to the Canadian Hispanic Congress, an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 such individuals are quietly used across Canada to keep the nation's economic wheels turning.
Without immigration papers or status, however, organizers said, they are largely forced to live and work underground.
Easy targets for exploitation, they survive on the margins with virtually no recourse to the basic protections most in our society take for granted - in a nation built by successive waves of immigrants.
Aside from stoop-or-stretch work in our fields, "they work in restaurants, hotels, cabs, factories and warehouses," said Keetha Mercer, a march organizer with the Solidarity Across Borders group.
"Non-status migrants are the most exploited in the workforce, invisible in our system of capitalism and apartheid," added Jaggi Singh, another organizer and longtime social-justice advocate.
"They are our neighbours, co-workers, classmates, friends and families."
But they are just nobodies, as far as Quebec's Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail, or CSST, is concerned, Tess Tessalona said.
She helped found the neighbourhood's Immigrant Workers Centre eight years ago and is its co-ordinator.
In Quebec, "domestic workers are the only salaried workers who are not guaranteed CSST coverage by their employer," Tessalona said.
She came to Canada from the Philippines in 1988 as a domestic worker.
Domestic workers and care-givers, usually immigrant and female, who care for children, the infirm or aged but do not live in, are not eligible for compensation when they suffer work-related back pain, muscular or skeletal disorders, allergies, burns, cuts or stress.
Tessalona's advocacy group used the march to gather names for a two-pronged demand to submit to David Whissell, Quebec's labour minister, seeking:
- Mandatory CSST coverage of domestic workers, regardless of immigration status or validity of work permit.
- That basic CCST information be available in languages other than French.
During the past five years, Statistics Canada reported Thursday, the economic chasm between native-born Canadians and immigrants has widened.
"That's not news to me, Tessalona said. "I see it every day."
Currently at the centre, "we are working on 500 cases," she said.
The march was billed as part of national day of action "for immigrant justice, and against poverty, racism and racial profiling."
Speakers and marchers condemned recent changes to security-certificate and immigration legislation from the minority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Adil Charkaoui - a Montrealer who remains under a federal security certificate and a form of house arrest that includes an obligatory electronic bracelet - joined the march.
"I want to give a message of hope and solidarity," said Charkaoui, who has been fighting a deportation order since 2003.
"We march to again demand a full, inclusive and ongoing (immigration) regularization program," organizer Singh said, "meaning (legal) status for all."
"We refuse," Mercer added, "to be invisible. We refuse to live in fear."
For more information, visit solidarityacrossborders.org or www.adilinfo.org.