The main problem here is that its expensive to do anything in Canada. Labour costs are just one piece of the puzzle.
A shortage of workers in Canada’s meat-packing industry is not new. Companies in Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec and elsewhere have struggled to recruit and retain employees for decades.
In the last 18 months, some have blamed the Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit for making the situation worse as some workers choose to stay at home, but the meat sector is much more concerned about the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and how it is restricting meat processing in Canada.
Now, a plant with 1,000 employees is limited to 100 foreign workers. If the plant is already at 100 TFW, the company must hire Canadians to fill vacant positions. That’s not easy, as few Canadians want to live in rural areas or work at a slaughter plant.
“Our meat processors are having a hard time finding Canadians who are interested in these jobs,” said Marie-France Mackinnon, vice-president of public affairs and communications with the Canadian Meat Council.
The jobs suck, repetitive stress injuries are common, but they do pay well and the hours aren’t crazy. You just might not feel like doing much else once you get home.
All jobs suck. Stop paying people not to work and the problem will go away.
I would say, YES. As someone who has paid many people to work and has fought with unions.
Most of my jobs didn’t suck. Sometimes some of the actual tasks and/or the conditions in which they had to be done did. Sometimes people I worked with sucked, but mostly the people contributed to making the unpleasant tasks or conditions tolerable.
How do you spell the word. union? Been screwing business and the working man since the inception.
Nigeria is a country of what, 200 million desperate people? if that’s not enough, there’s always Somalia. Any s-hole will do, really.
Is Canada not bringing in half a million a year already? Will an even 1 mill hit the sweet spot?
So what’s the problem here?
EFT, Canada will not be Canada much longer. My tribe and their tribes have serious differences. Morality and work ethic being two of them. Keep this in mind. White Anglo Saxons are very dangerous when pissed off and told they are to be slaves to anyone. That includes the pollywog Trudeau from the pollywog province. Do not strep too hard on those who can destroy you. The whu who flu is a step too far.
You accidentally deleted this part of the original article from the middle section of your single block quote:
“In 2014, the federal government (under the Conservative party) restructured the temporary foreign worker program, claiming too many companies were hiring foreign workers instead of Canadians. “By limiting access to the program, tightening the labour market assessment and implementing stronger enforcement with tougher penalties for employers who break the rules, businesses will have to make greater efforts to recruit and train Canadians for available jobs, including increasing wages,” the federal government said in June 2014. As part of the changes, the feds reduced the number of foreign workers that a company can employ.”
An innocent oversight, no doubt.
Anyway, the main problem isn’t that it’s expensive to do anything in Canada, it’s that people want their cake/ribeye and eat it too.
Good for the Conservative party… the temporary worker program needs to be shutdown. Immediately. Oh what you think there aren’t enough new immigrants flooding our cities, driving up the price of housing while simultaneously pushing down wages???
Wow. Who knew Francisco was a commie? I haven’t been on this site for very long so I’m not too familiar with the posters, but if Francisco really did omit that portion then he really is a commie.
As many others have said on this page, it’s about pay not participation.
There are many stock phrases the left uses and once you become familiar with them then you can translate to what’s really being discussed. In this case, the phrase is ‘Foreigners will do the jobs that Canadians are too lazy to do’. The translation is ‘Corporatists and Globalists want to pay third world labor rates for jobs that they can’t export to the third world’. So instead they lobby politicians to import the cheap labor for the few jobs they haven’t already exported.
“The jobs suck, repetitive stress injuries are common, but they do pay well and the hours aren’t crazy. You just might not feel like doing much else once you get home.”
Said almost everyone who’s worked 40 years on an auto assembly line. Yup, the job sucks but you do it cause it puts food on the table and there’s a 30 year mortgage staring you in the face. We don’t have that now I guess.
And probably why there’s a Mexican embassy in Chatham Ont.
Yep, it sure is painful that repetitive work. I hope to hell they don’t find digging in the dirt day after day for their daily bread too exhausting. That is where we are headed.
Oh hey everybody… ‘it’s not easy’ to hire Canadians to do these jobs.. it’s way easier for these massive conglomerates to hire slaves from the third world and fly them here. What do you expect them to do, raise their offered wages!???
Rich, put your fucking mask on and shut the hell up.
Go have your nap, very old white guy. Before you get the Dick Smack treatment.
Lol!
At one time Edmonton had 4 thriving meat packing plants. They were unionized, paid excellent wages, and were profitable. Then the meat packing unions in the US were broken. In Edmonton three plants shut down and only Swifts decided to stay open. Everyone seems to have hated Peter Pocklington as he tried to break the unions to keep his Swifts plant open. He eventually won but shortly thereafter the plant shut down anyway. The market was controlled by factors in Chicago and St. Louis, not in Alberta. Each of these plants employed 500 – 1000 workers and they left for good. There is no such thing as a labour shortage, only a pay shortage.
I remember as a kid smelling that plant somewhere near Mill Creek. My god that place used to stink from time to time. I used to think, “meat doesn’t reek like that, so why does the plant?” I don’t know anything about slaughter houses, so maybe the stench is from burning carcasses and sh*t…
I’m done buying meat from these huge companies. Gonna get it from local ranchers direct and hire someone to butcher it. Support local as much as we can. Might cost a little more but at least we aren’t paying a bunch of woke Liberal corporations to lecture and rob us.
Agreed! Also, bashing multinational corporations and voluntarily paying a market premium to support local businesses over faceless corporations are well established lefty pastimes. Welcome to the team!
Thx for the invite Ted, but I don’t join teams, clubs or cults. Have a great day!
During my time in the Brooks area in the mid-1980s, Lakeside Packers was always having a dispute with its union.
I knew someone who used to get occasional work sub-contracted to him to do demo work on government-subsidized housing for all the Africans who worked at the Brooks plant. It was, naturally, very good money. Note I said “demo” as in demolish. You can’t “repair” or “renovate” what’s already been thoroughly trashed. “I detested that job. It’s like they weren’t human”, he used to tell me.
Do people realize taxpayers were paying to support these workers? How much was given away to subsidize these jobs?
That saddens me. Brooks was a quiet farm town when I lived in the area. Back then, people felt so safe that they often didn’t bother locking their doors at night.
From what I’ve heard, it’s not that way any more.
I worked in a packing plant for 5 months every winter for 5 years back in the 70s. The pay was the same as working on the rigs.(5 times minimum wage) If you had no expenses you could buy an average, not a cheap, car with 3 months salary. I believe 45 years later the hourly wage is only 30% higher (1 and 1/2 times minimum wage). Not a great place to work! I never had a good sense of smell but the smell was the worst. I was young, got off at 4:00 ,unless overtime, so would go home and work on the old house we bought. I sure wouldn’t want that job as a career but as a winter job it was great.
Robots. Someone will develop a robot that can break down animal carcasses … then all those jobs will be gone. And instead (as some senile ex Fed Chief said) Canadians will be hired to program the robots. Canadians will be hired … for their intellect. Oops … sorry. Most Canadians are graduating with degrees in “Cultural Studies” … not computer programming.
Nevermind. Temporary, emergency, Chinese men will be hired to write code.
Something else to consider: Cargill recently reported total net income of $4.93 billion in FY2021, up from $3 billion in FY2020. It’s also the largest privately owned corporation in the US, controlled by 125 families, including at least 14 billionaires, all descended from the 156-year old company’s founder. Guaranteed that most if not all of them have never set foot in a Cargill slaughterhouse, let alone worked a shift wielding a deboning knife or running a dehairing machine.
Which is fine — these folks got lucky, won the birth parent lottery, can structure their company, its profit structure, and their own lives any way they want — but hopefully from this we can at least dispense with the notion that the ultra-rich are ultra-rich simply because they work harder than everyone else. Maybe that was true of William Wallace Cargill and his immediate kin at the turn of the 20th century, but the way that concentration of intergenerational wealth works in America and elsewhere, most of Cargill’s modern beneficiaries are just collecting rent.
As others said, Canadians are willing to do the work if you pay them.
It’s not work Canadians aren’t willing to do, its work that corporations are not willing to pay Canadian wages to do.
If they can’t compete on processing, ship the cattle live to the US or ship carcasses to the US or internationally and import the cut meat back. Far better for Canada than importing the third world / slave labour.
Where I am relatively clean labour jobs are offering wages about the same as slaughter house. Who would choose to work in guts and crap over something decent when the pay is the same?
I moved to Brooks some twenty odd years ago straight from prison and took a job at what was,at the time, called BHP.
If you had a heartbeat they would hire you.I worked there for a couple of months just to get back on my feet.
Long story short …I went on to have an extremely profitable career in the local oil economy.
Brooks has been very good to me and my family.
Beautiful,Bountiful,Brooks Alberta.
Where the water works wonders.
We used to joke about the local water, saying that the stuff that came out of Lake Newell was used for making Jell-O commercials.
I moved out of the area just after the local Macdonald’s had opened in 1986.
We hopefully all rise to work befitting our psyche, self worth. Production work is a step in many.
My daughter just completed the slaughter/ meat cutter program in Alberta. Cargill came recruiting. They don’t pay enough for the job involved. They got no takers.
For those readers slinging around accusations of laziness and so forth: go work there yourself.