[IPSM] Racism in the Tar Sands: exploiting foreign workers and poisoning indigenous people

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Racism in the Tar Sands: exploiting foreign workers and poisoning 
indigenous people
June 12, 2008

By Macdonald Stainsby

The giant corporations that are determined to exploit the Alberta tar 
sands face a major problem — a serious shortage of local labour to do 
the actual work. So the Canadian and Albertan governments have a plan, 
ideal in their eyes, to solve the crunch.

Currently, employers desperate to find needed hands, backs and minds for 
the vast production targets of the “Gigaproject” are flying workers from 
the Maritimes from their homes for shift stretches and then back again, 
but that effort faces limits in terms of workers available. Nary a day 
goes without a business page article somewhere in Alberta bemoaning the 
lack of workers. Many of the Newfoundlanders who would have come out 
this way in the past will now work in Newfoundland premier Dany 
Williams’ new off shore oil and gas ventures, using skills learned in 
Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Besides, flying around people within Canada and luring them in with the 
promise of vast wages is not the best business decision, is it? Why not 
use the real labour shortage for the simply un-real goals of the tar 
sands to make unbelievable profits sending mock oil to the United 
States, mock oil that is leaving behind already one of the greatest 
environmental crimes in history.

The solution — the Alberta Federation of Labour reports that in 2006, 
for the first time, more people under came to Alberta under Temporary 
Foreign Worker (TFW) programs than as landed immigrants.

As of late January 2008, the program had expanded from 12 to 33 
available positions, mostly in construction and trades, that were 
“ready” for hiring in this fashion.

What is a temporary foreign worker? In a word — disposable. They are 
brought in by employer, and at any time the employer can send them back 
to their country of origin — most commonly Mexico, the Philippines and 
China. The ones who work deep in the tar sands (most notably at the 
Canadian Natural Resources Limited [CNRL] Horizon plant) are kept under 
lock and key, away from the unions that have some members working in the 
tar pits and upgrading facilities.

We do not know what these TFWs are being paid, nor much about their 
working conditions. We do, however know that those conditions have 
already begun killing people: last year two workers sent over from China 
were crushed when a container fell over on them due to poor construction 
and rushed conditions. Nameless to the world, the two men were sent home 
to China after a quick meeting between the Chinese consul general from 
Calgary and CNRL executives.

No harm, no foul seems to be the message — neither CNRL nor the People’s 
Republic official had a public word of anything other than passing regret.

These men and women, moved around as products to be used by giant energy 
corporations, do not have the right or means to apply for landed status 
in Canada, let alone for citizenship. They are rightless and 
economically desperate.

The program has come under heat in recent months for acting as the TFW 
equivalent of Snakeheads, demanding outlandish and illegal fees from 
prospective workers in the global South in exchange for helping them 
find placement.

TFWs are being used to undermine unions, bring down costs, escalate 
production, decimate basic human rights levels and assign an entirely 
new category of worker to the workforce, driving down both safety and 
union rights across the country. Escalating racism in hyper fashion will 
suit the Canadian state quite nicely, both in terms of population 
control and divided resistance. With the Security and Prosperity 
Partnership [SPP] slowly being hammered out, efforts to take this modern 
slave pool to new heights are gathering new momentum.

As well, under the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement 
[TILMA] between Alberta and BC, what happens in Fort McMurray also 
happens in Vancouver. TFW’s are “helping” to construct much of 
infrastructure for the Olympics being held in 2010. With the 2010 Games 
being opposed in as colonial programs in the westernmost province, so 
too should the tar sands see opposition in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The Panama Canal killed thousands of workers who toiled to make the 
canal flow for shipping commercially across a continent where 
Christopher Columbus of Spain ran aground centuries before, setting into 
motion a colonial genocide continuing today. In Alberta and B.C. today, 
the same kind of sacrificial workforce is being established, using the 
very same racist weapon that characterized the entire colonial period in 
North America.

This time, the goal is to establish a racialised under-class of 
sub-workers to carry out major projects, a workforce that will employ 
tens of thousands of human beings to create the most Dr. Stangelovian 
ecological nightmare imaginable. This same constructed racism targets 
those whose lands are being dug out, flipped over, spun around and 
dumped back in toxic form.

The often timid Alberta Fed has this to say about the whole process:

     “Alberta unions oppose racism in all of its forms — both overt and 
structural. We have and will continue to speak out against any attempts 
to demean, demonize or discriminate against any identifiable group.…

     “We believe the labour movement has a responsibility to defend 
these workers. We believe they deserve the same rights as any Canadian 
worker. In particular, we believe they should have the right to a fair 
wages and a safe workplace, the right to join a union, and the right to 
remain in Canada and apply to become citizens - independent of the 
wishes of the employer that brought them here.”

In the last year, the community of Fort Chipewyan has finally been able 
to scrape its way into a small corners of public consciousness. Their 
1200-person hamlet is. downstream from the seven operating tar sands 
plants, Rates of cancers and other disorders for the Cree and Dene 
population of Fort Chipewyan are statistically off the charts.

The racism that has been able to ignore their plight for over a decade 
of pleas is now unable to tell us the names of Chinese men exterminated 
in the same hyperdrive to get mock oil from the ground, and send it 
south. The racism directed against TFWs and the racism against 
indigenous people are closely interlinked — so too must the fight to 
shut down the tar sands interlink in non-patronizing solidarity, across 
national lines, whether the originate in nation states or Treaty 8.

The temporary foreign worker program is a capitalist’s dream come true, 
but our mobilized response has to possibility to be their worst nightmare.

Writer and activist Macdonald Stainsby is coordinator of oilsandstruth.org

http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=458