Immigrant Workers
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You might ask yourself how monopolies come to be. How do they become so rich and so great and have such an abundance of workers? Well behind every great company lies unfortunate truths of exploitation, right refusal and lies all for the unfortunate victims in this case which are migrant workers. Migrant workers are those workers who come to a “first world nation” and are promised jobs with a decent wage in order for them to send the money back to their families and help them live a much more comfortable life. However the majority of the time the promised jobs end up being a less than minimum wage job with no security, long hours of manual labour, terrible living conditions and with a risk of not even getting paid in full of the work. Perhaps it a case of too good to be true for some people, but when an individual is in need and offered an opportunity that could perhaps change the lifestyle of their family, that individual grasps the opportunity blindly without reading the “fine print”.
Exploitation has existed for centuries now. It could very well be rooted down to slavery, in the way that a dominant being or group basically uses the strength and workforce of a weaker being that is in need, for their benefit. This idea can be tied down to the ideology of neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatism is and has been a dominant ideology for years now in which the rich will exploit and keep the poor poor for their own gain and benefit. They will then blame the victim for being a victim and that the fault is solely that of the individual. Relate it to how migrant workers come to be. A migrant worker usually lives illegally or comes in with a work permit. A company will offer to page them a wage which usually is in the form of a cash payment so it is easier to control. The workers are willing to do anything for they promised the loved ones they left they would take care of them by accepting a job in another country. The company in this case being the rich will exploit this migrant worker and pay them very little and take away their rights and in some cases dehumanize them. Once that has taken effect the company can choose to pay the worker if they want to or to fire them altogether. The worker if an illegal has no ability to fight for justice, and if on a work permit they still have very little ground to do anything. The concept of neo-conservatism works favourably in how this concept of migrant workers is perceived.
Who is a migrant worker though? In Canada, migrant workers have been known to come from countries that are from the coined “third world” or poorer nations. Those where families are big, money is scarce and opportunities are not so ample are generally the individuals that accept offers from a richer nation. The majority of migrant workers come from Latin American countries and from Asian nations. Since the conversion rate of the Canadian dollar amounts to a lot, a mere 11 dollars per hour converts to a lot, where in their country of origin that same amount of money would take years to achieve. According to recent studies taken, the amount of migrant workers that have come to Canada from 2002 to 2010 has multiplied at an enormous rate, from a rate of 1,304 in 2002 to a number of 28,930 in 2010 (Abuse of migrant workers endemic in Canada, new study says. Keung, Nicholas. Web Article. 2012). With those staggering numbers it should be no surprise that the number or employers is rising, as well as the number of reports of exploitation and abuse among those workers.
The structure that can be used to explain the way migrant workers are treated would be the iceberg model. The way the iceberg model works is separating the ideologies, structures of power and the individual acts. In this case the structures of power would be the companies or monopolies that do the hiring. The way that the monopolies grow is by hiring workers that they can use for cheap labour. The exploitation comes after when the workers are stripped of their god given rights to be treated equally. No human being should have to be treated in such a way that they have no say or power to change. This can lead to the way the ideology pans in. The ideology following this concept would be that of neo-conservatism, however at the same time it could also include that of capitalism. The reason capitalism would be included here would be the way that the companies are privately owned and they set the prices for the wages and for everything the sell and profit from. The workers never see any of these profits used towards them and the company pockets all of the profit that the workers helped to make. The peak or the iceberg model would be that of individual acts. Now the individual acts that would be taken into effect would be influenced by the ideology and the