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In early January, the International Students and Skilled Workers Union (ISSU) held a one-day picket outside Winnipeg chain restaurant My Indigo, demanding that it repay over four months of stolen wages to workers there.
ISSU had met with the employer in mid-December and had him agree to repay wages. However, the employer has since stopped responding and up to ten workers are still left unpaid.
The North Star spoke with a representative of ISSU who explained that, for workers who are newcomers to the country, the issue of wage theft is widespread, echoing a conclusion similar to that reached by the UN Special Rapporteur in its final report on Canada's Temporary Foreign Workers Program published in the summer of 2024.
“I’m not going to pay you a single penny”
The ISSU representative explained that the employer “made fake promises, like ‘I will pay next week,’ ‘I will pay someday’ … [the workers] were planning to visit back home [in India] so they set a meeting with him, and he was so rude to them.”
“The agreement was made for him to pay half the money before the workers go to India to visit [their families] and half he can pay in two months. He agreed on this situation, but he didn’t pay anything. He was not responding back.”
The workers could make an Employment Standards Complaint with the provincial government. However, ISSU explained that “the person who is running a business here, he has the money to afford these things but the workers who are not being paid, how can they afford it? They have to go to court dates, they have to [take time] off their work, so they will suffer more.”
Four workers at My Indigo decided to speak up and reached out to ISSU with proof of wage theft affecting them and several others over two periods, before and after August 2024. During this time, there was a change in management and the new employer told the workers, “I am only liable for the wages when I took over the business.”
ISSU explained, “We are fighting for both these time periods, before August and after August.”
“It’s not an issue of a single restaurant or a single corporation”
The representative from ISSU told us, “A lot of immigrants and newcomers … they’re not going to take a stand because they’re worried about their immigration status, because they work with their employer to get paperwork to file their permanent residency, and they’re being pressurized … ‘If you gonna take any action we will not provide you with the proper paperwork.’”
The ISSU representative explained the purpose of their organization, “We’re trying to educate more workers, immigrants and newcomers, like ‘it’s your right to have the particular paper you’re working for. It’s not [the employers] who are providing it for you, it’s a right you have.”
The representative expressed his frustration with the federal government's recent changes to Canada's immigration policy, which will restrict many newcomer's ability to stay and work in the country. He said that newcomers “didn’t have enough time to be prepared for that.”
“The government just plays with people … They just need themselves in power, every political party, and maybe every politician, just needs to be in power, you know? … The economy is going down, and international students are being blamed for everything. But everyone was following a legal path to stay in Canada. They invested their time, being far from their families, invested five years [on education], invested their whole life savings.”
“I think workers are the same everywhere. We should not divide the workers into citizen or immigrant. It’s like the government is [doing] this word play. Workers are the same, all contributing to the Canadian economy, to run that system.”