Chris Alexander, Minister of IMPs and ICTs

When Jason Kenney grandly announced his new temporary foreign worker program reforms last week - Putting Canadians First! - he slyly handed off the greater part of his troubles to Chris Alexander - Minister of Gollumization, Citizenship, and Immigration - and now also Minister of IMPs and ICTs.  

We don't hear much about IMPs (outside of childrens' books) - the International Mobility Program under which the majority of workers enter Canada. They do not have to pass a labour market test (LMIA) to determine whether they will be putting Canadians out of work because, as our new MinIMP explained, the program is intended to benefit not individual businesses by filling specific jobs, but rather "Canada as a whole".

Via Kenney's ministry, Employment and Social Development Canada :

Of the 221,273 foreign nationals who entered Canada in 2013, 38% came in under the TFWP, but 62% came in under the IMP - 83,740 vs 137,533

Then there's the ICTs - Intra-Company Transfers - also not reliant on LMIAs to safeguard Canadian jobs because they were created to allow multinational corps to move their skilled workers easily from country to country.

You may recall this whole TFW fiasco first blew up in the public eye because the Royal Bank farmed out part of its IT work to iGATE, a company that straddles US, Canada and India, who then cycled its workers in and out of Canada for training by RBC staffers they would later replace under an intra-company transfer. 
As RBC CEO Gord Nixon explained at the time, only one of them came into Canada as a TFW, and besides, RBC "does not get involved in the hiring practices of the companies it hires."

In BC, eight US construction workers were granted entry to BC by the CBSA under an ICT after a US company got the contract to build a wood-waste storage building near Prince George. These "specialized workers" included a former rancher and an apprentice roofer and produce clerk. Yea NAFTA! and all that, but don't we have enough ranchers, apprentice roofers, and produce clerks looking for any kind of work in Canada already?

Asked about the union-backed court case protesting import of the eight US workers, Kenney referred reporters to Chris Alexander, but a year ago he stated : "The obligations we have have for intra-company transfers are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

G&M, May 17, 2014 :

"The final text of the much-vaunted Canada-European Union free trade agreement (CETA) is expected to include a list of occupations that can be fast-tracked into Canada and would allow European firms to bring European workers into Canada through inter-company transfers ...  

The Conservative government has described the deal’s provisions for temporary entry of labour as “the most ambitious ever in a free trade agreement.”

Still you can't please everyone.

B.C.’s deputy premier and natural gas development minister Rich Coleman is worried Canada is going to "fail" if companies cannot hire temporary foreign workers for the 100,000 jobs needed to develop LNG export projects on the coast.

The Kitimat LNG project is co-owned by Canadian branches of U.S. energy giants Chevron Corp. and Apache Corp. Will they be bringing in their own workers?
TransCanada, once billed in the US as "an American company with operations in Canada", is slated to build a $1.9-billion pipeline link for Kitimat LNG project. 

In February Mr. Coleman announced there was "no question the industry will be looking to foreign workers to get up and running", and in March he touted the importance of being on 

"a continent with a lot more people south to us ... so we have access to other skilled labour on the continent and there are people who are very good at doing certain jobs - specialized welders." 

One presumes he isn't referring to the TransCanada welders on the southern leg of the Keystone XL Canada to Texas project : 

"Over 72 per cent of welds required repairs during one week. In another week, TransCanada stopped welding work after 205 of 425 welds required repair.

Inspections by the safety agency found TransCanada wasn’t using approved welding procedures to connect pipes, the letter said. The company had hired welders who weren’t qualified to work on the project because TransCanada used improper procedures to test them."

So. PM-hopeful Jason Kenney's TFW Program "will now refer to only those streams under which foreign workers enter Canada at the request of employers following approval through a new Labour Market Impact Assessment." 
For everything else - the difficult politically damaging bits - there's the guy wearing the IMP ears.
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Fast-tracking fucking over Canadian workers

Fort McMurray Today reports that 270 unionized welders and pipefitters contracted to the Husky Sunrise tarsands project were laid off and replaced by cheaper temporary foreign workers from Mexico, Ireland, Portugal and Italy.

Husky says their work was over but a commenter under another article who was a worker on the site disputes this :

"The work contracted to Black and McDonald was no where near complete. We had to conduct a handover to Saipem (a mostly Italian workforce), detailing to them where we had stopped work so that they may continue. In the final week, Saipem foreign workers were actually in the facility working side by side with us; a very uncomfortable situation for those of us about to be laid off."

Six months ago, we learned that employees of Royal Bank - and all the other banks - were being forced to train and work alongside the outsourced foreign temporary workers who were to replace them at their jobs, while HD Mining, a BC mining company based in China, imported 201 Chinese workers after their ad to hire Mandarin-speaking miners in BC failed to turn up any candidates. ***

CitImm Min Jason Kenney promised a fix, the Accelerated Labour Market Opinion process was temporarily cancelled, and Kellie Leitch, then parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, did such a bang-up job on Power and Politics saying they'd already fixed this  - repeating talking points about Canadian jobs for Canadian workers five times in as many minutes - that Steve made her Minister of Labour.

PostMedia Oct 10, 2013 : Program for foreign workers could be restored

Employment Minister Jason Kenney says the government could soon resurrect a fast-track scheme that allows companies to bring temporary foreign workers to Canada more quickly.  

"highpaying, high-skill jobs, not fast-food franchises in booming Alberta that need foreigners to peddle burgers and doughnuts to oil workers.

Of course not everyone has to apply for a ALMO first :

For example, the federal government has an agreement with Alberta to exempt welders, heavy-duty mechanics and iron workers from the process due to a shortage of skilled workers in those fields.

A point I'm sure was not much comfort to the the welders and pipefitters at Husky Sunrise who were laid off this past Labour Day.


So what changed in the intervening six months?

Nothing. Kenney is right on schedule.

A Wall St Journal article in July reported corps were just waiting for the public backlash to blow over : 

 "To be sure, the halt in outsourcing is expected to be temporary, with experts and IT service providers expecting outsourcing projects to resume after six to eight months. 

CGI Group signed $12 billion in outsourcing contracts with various Canadian corporations, and IBM - $7 billion.

" 'After the RBC controversy, companies are waiting for things to die down. Banks are slowing down projects—they are keeping a low profile, while the tension over offshoring jobs blows over," said an executive from an outsourcing advisory firm who requested anonymity.'  "

And how is iGATE, the company that kicked off the Royal Bank controversy, faring ? 
"Strong Second Quarter Results; Profits Up 136% " and they're planning on opening a new centre in Halifax.


*** Meanwhile the BC Liberals' love affair with HD Mining, the Mandarin-only-speaking Chinese mining company in BC, continues unabated.
Jody Shimkus, former BC assistant deputy minister of mining and "the main point person for the Chinese mining companies in B.C.",  left her government job in January 2012 to join HD Mining. 

Blair Lekstrom, former BC Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, joined her there two months ago.

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Royal Bank and iGATE : "Business as usual"

A LiveMint/Wall Street Journal article reported three weeks ago that Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal and CIBC have temporarily halted their hiring of workers from outsourcing firms like iGate, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), and Infosys Ltd, while they wait for the public backlash to blow over   :

"The backlash against outsourcing jobs comes at a time when the unemployment rate in Canada stands at 7.2% and remains above the levels that were seen before the 2008 recession. The Canadian banking and financial services (BFS) outsourcing market is estimated to be worth more than $5 billion. "

The article also mentions that IT services provider CGI Group has signed $12 billion in outsourcing contracts with various Canadian corporations, and IBM - $7 billion.

"To be sure, the halt in outsourcing is expected to be temporary, with experts and IT service providers expecting outsourcing projects to resume after six-eight months. 

'After the RBC controversy, companies are waiting for things to die down. Banks are slowing down projects—they are keeping a low profile, while the tension over offshoring jobs blows over," said an executive from an outsourcing advisory firm who requested anonymity.'  "

You're shocked, I'm sure.

So how's poor old iGATE managing this difficult temporary tension in offshoring?

Aside from reporting "Strong Second Quarter Results; Profits Up 136% ", I mean.
July 17, 2013 :

On Wednesday, during a post-earnings conference call, iGate said it did not anticipate any impact on its business due to the immigration laws in Canada and it had not seen any pull-back from any of its Canadian clients after the government probe.

“It’s pretty much been business as usual since we got a clean bill after the audit,” said interim CEO Gerhard Watzinger, an iGate veteran. 

An RBC spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the bank had started shifting work away from iGate and said it would continue to work with iGate if it complied with RBC’s policies on outsourcing.
“IGate is a long-standing supplier and we will continue to work with them provided that they comply, like all our suppliers have to, with our supplier code of conduct,” the spokeswoman said in an emailed reply.

And here's a job posting from a search of the last 30 days at WowJobs iGATE Canada Jobs page :


Apparently the supposed temporary rollback of outsourcing jobs for a few months till the public backlash blows over isn't really all that after all. 
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Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang - Part 4

 "Information technology workers displaced in Canada are being replaced not by cheap Indian workers but by better ones." 

So says CBC's Amanda Lang, senior business correspondent for CBC News and good cop to Kevin O'Leary's bad cop on the Lang and O'Leary Exchange, in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

She wonders if Canadians have returned to 1990 or perhaps to "campaign trail rhetoric in America" - so aghast is she that people are angry about the Royal Bank in-and-outsourcing of Canadian jobs to iGATE in India.  

In her rousing paeon to globalization and "the natural forces of capitalism", she explains :

"a job moved from Canada to India creates a new kind of prosperity. It creates a job in a country we sell goods and services to, increasing the opportunity for our businesses to flourish even more."

If you have $699.00 you can hear more of Amanda's thoughts when she gives the keynote address on April 23 at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE :

"CORE's mandate is to help member organizations maximize the value of outsourcing by providing independent and unbiased information ... "

Also presenting will be 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, providing "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

A list of CORE's extensive corp members here, and no, Royal Bank isn't on that list including RBC Financial Group and you'll recognize the rest of them.  
In May, CORE is running a course focusing on "the transition from insourced service delivery to outsourced service delivery and through to steady-state operations".

About that...

Walkom : Former outsourcer describes how job destruction works.
Informative interview with a 10 year veteran of doing it in Canada.

But here's what I don't get, Amanda. If you bring in foreign workers in order to save money and drive down wages in Canada by paying those indentured foreign workers 15% less in a market that just lost 54,500 jobs last month, who is going to be able to to afford to buy the stuff and pay for the services you sent offshore?  

And who is going to look into fixing this for us? The same guy who set it up for us.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1.  


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3


Sunday update : Great post from Laura K @ wmtc on related issues :
Unpaid labour used to be called slavery. Now it's an internship
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Wednesday update : CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/ iGATE - on the milk carton
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Thursday update :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

May 3, 2013   CBC Ombudsman

March 5, 2014 CBC issues no foul no harm report :
Conflict of Interest and CBC News coverage of RBC and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program
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Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3

RBC executives told managers: “You can only hire a Canadian if you can show that iGATE can’t supply the worker for you,” 

... a current RBC manager told CBC's Kathy Tomlinson.

This only confirms what Marjorie Mong, VP, head of Application Services at RBC, said back in 2008 : 

Originally, RBC viewed iGATE “as an added resource,” says Mong. Now the bank is pushing iGATE “to go out and earn the business from project managers.” The supplier has set up delivery managers for every RBC executive platform “to establish a relationship and get more business.”

Also Jason Trussell, vice president and regional manager responsible for iGATE’s buyers in Canada, again in 2008 :

RBC’s offshore projects have increased tenfold since signing a contract with iGATE [in 2005]. Originally we worked on offshoring projects for two groups in RBC applications. Today every department in the group sends us work.”

Two former iGate workers - who said they were brought in to work at RBC under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program but now have new jobs and permanent resident status in Canada  - told CBC they were among "200 Indian nationals shuttled back and forth between Canada and India between 2008 and 2012." 

In 2008, the U.S. Justice Department fined iGATE $45,000 for discriminating against US citizens by placing 30 ads for computer programmers that “expressly favoured” people holding a temporary foreign worker visa.

Up here in Canada, the Royal Bank evidently performs that service internally on behalf of iGATE.



Update : Table from the Progressive Economics Forum  in 2012: 
Nearly 30% of net new jobs in Canada from 2007 to 2011 were filled by temporary foreign workers.  
In 2012, nearly 200,000 temporary foreign worker positions were approved under 'positive labour market opinions' ; 22% of them went to the food and accommodation industry.

This is what Armine Yalnizyan from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called The Economic McAction Plan.
[edited for clarity]
Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1      Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2
Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
.

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2

Shorter Gord Nixon : Look, they're not your jobs, they're our jobs, and if we choose to move our jobs offshore to another company without you because it's cheaper, that's just business. Besides, only one of the 13 dudes we brought in to RBC came under iGATE's temporary foreign worker application - the rest of them are house guests.

About that one iGATE dude : G&M : 

The federal government is investigating Royal Bank of Canada’s move to outsource technology jobs and reviewing paperwork submitted by its contractor to bring in temporary foreign workers. The probe centres on what the government sees as “apparent discrepancies” regarding RBC’s explanation of the events.
RBC came under fire on the weekend after allegations emerged that Canada’s largest bank contracted iGate Corp. to handle the outsourcing of certain technology jobs, and the firm was using temporary foreign workers to displace RBC technology staff. The bank denied those claims, and said it does not get involved in the hiring practices of the companies it hires. 

“An investigation is under way and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada officials are currently reviewing the labour market opinions submitted by iGate in great detail, based on apparent discrepancies between RBC’s public statement and information which has previously been provided to the government,” said Alyson Queen, a spokeswoman for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley. 

Meanwhile when CBC interviewed Diane Finley's parlsec Kellie Leitch about the bankster issue, Leitch went on and on and on about "very critical labour shortages in Canada". Way to entirely miss the effing point, Kellie. These people had jobs.

But it's not just RBC of course. Two minutes of statements from employees replaced by foreign workers at TD Canada Trust, Scotiabank, and RBC :



Yesterday CBC Go Public reporter Kathy Tomlinson, who broke the RBC offshoring in-and outsourcing jobs story, was on CBC BC Early Edition. She said she also heard the same stories from terminated employees at Bank of Montreal and CIBC. Excerpted transcript :

I'm getting emails from people who are management, that are high in this and who know how it works. It seems to me that the banks essentially have a template and these outsourcing companies have a template too - they know exactly how to present their case for bringing these workers in, and remember it's the outsourcing company that actually brings the workers in. They're the one that apply to the government for permission and they're the ones that get these workers the visas., right? 

But of course the banks are involved - they're a partnership. So it looks to me from what I'm hearing that there's a template that they've developed that's approved by the government." 

Anna Maria Tremonti's show today took on the larger issue of global outsourcing: 

The insourced foreign workers go home to do the work from their own countries where they are paid 50% of what the Canadians they replaced made.

We have had foreign temporary workers for over 40 years but since 2006 there's been an explosion of low skill temporary foreign workers who can stay here for up to four years and be paid 15% less. Not just low skill workers, this has now evolved to include engineers.

Armine Yalnizyan from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives : 

" Importing people to learn the skills so they can take the skills out - what kind of public policy is that? The Economic McAction Plan."

Alberta Federation of Labour, today, on guest worker permits provided by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada :

Between April 25 and December 18, 2012, more than 2,400 Accelerated Labour Market Opinion or ALMO guest-worker permits – which are supposed to be reserved for highly-skilled employment – have been granted to fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations. McDonalds, Tim Hortons, A&W, Subway Sandwiches. Are we supposed to believe that these are ‘high-skill’ employment opportunities? 

More than 54 per cent (2,640) of the ALMO approvals in the country were for Alberta-based employers.  ...  The list of businesses in Alberta who received ALMO approvals included 33 A&W restaurants. 

The ALMO stream, introduced in last year’s omnibus budget bill, is proving to be the latest evidence that the temporary foreign worker program is part of a low-wage agenda on the part of radical Tea-Party Tories.

How are young people supposed to compete for temporary low skill jobs to get the education they need in order to finally not be able to get the IT jobs they trained for because they've all gone offshore? Because the real news here is that good education and a relevant skill level is no longer enough to keep you off the unemployment line. 

Armine Yalnizan is right - this is terrible public policy on the government's part.

And finally, the Cons fundraiser/voter contact company, Xentel/RMG/iMarketing Solutions Group, announced yesterday that it is laying off its call centre workers. (h/t Holly Stick)

Will they be outsourcing those jobs offshore? I ask because the Conservative Party of Canada is currently trolling Creekside reading all the posts on Royal Bank and iMarketing Solutions/RMG.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada, Part 1

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3             Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada

Royal Bank of Canada Chief Human Resources Officer Zabeen Hirji explains here that technically it's not RBC that has hired temporary foreign workers to replace RBC employees. No, rather it's that RBC has hired Indian offshore outsourcing company iGATE to do their own hiring as part of RBC's plan to transition RBC IT jobs overseas to India. 

What about government reaction that this is unacceptable?
Oh, says Hirji, we were already in conversation with relevant government departments last week and besides everybody is outsourcing overseas now.

Indeed.

At left we see iGATE receiving RBC's Outsourcing Excellence Award back in 2008 when RBC only had 500 iGATE employees working for them. 

A few months later, RBC itself received a $25 billion dollar government bailout, or 'backstop' as we prefer to call taxpayer bailouts of corps in Canada, amounting to 63% of the bank's total value. RBC CEO Gordon Nixon took home $10M+ in salary and compensation that same year.

At the time, RBC VP and head of Application Services Marjorie Mong explained :

"The key message to [RBC IT staff] was that offshoring was not about job cuts. It was about augmenting our workforce in a flexible way."

While Canadians were surprised and outraged over the weekend at news of RBC's parasitic behavior, Rochester Institute of Technology public policy professor Ron Hira has spent the last decade studying how "offshore-outsourcing consulting firms" work in the States. 

... consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas.

"What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B [foreign temporary tech workers] program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore."

As RBC's Hirji explained above, it was necessary to bring the offshore workers on-site to RBC in order to learn RBC procedures first hand.

The two companies have been working closely since 2005. There is an "RBC Offshore Development Centre" in the iGATE facility in Bangalore. 

RBC spokesperson Rina Cortese told Go Public several foreign workers from iGATE will be working in the bank’s Toronto offices until 2015. By then, she said, most of the work will be transferred abroad, but a few of the foreigners will remain indefinitely.

[RBC] workers said they were not offered jobs with iGATE and were told this "realignment" might expand to affect more of the bank’s 57,500 employees in Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister and presumed PM-in-waiting Jason Kenney managed to express surprise that the temporary foreign worker program under his purview he has long touted as absolutely vital to Canadian interests would be so abused.

Boycott Royal Bank of Canada as first suggested by blogger Norm Farrell.   Do it.

Yes, that means your Visa card too. Outsource your money to a credit union in your own community instead.

Has anyone called this iGATE-gate yet? Allow me to be the first.

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2           Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3

Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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