PATHWAYS TO PRECARIOUSNESS: CANADA’S INTENTIONAL FAILURE OF MIGRANT AND UNDOCUMENTED CARE WORKERS

Abstract

In this report, we, the research team, are going to consider the policies that come together to create an exploitative and precarious labour conditions for migrant care workers, who are predominantly financially challenged racialized women. We have conducted a systematic narrative synthesis analysis of the policies that are relevant to migrant care workers. In our consideration of these myriad policies, we will present a narrative that emerges in the coordinated design of these policies. The narrative that has emerged presented a journey to precariousness through a heightened likelihood of human rights violations that is facilitated by a network of policies and practices. We identify policies and practices that obscure care workers and the conditions of their labour, as well as the discriminatory impact of various policies and practices that support devaluing and delegitimizing the identities and labour of care workers. Finally, we consider the ways in which multiple policies and practices come together to create significant authorities with the capacity to surveil, restrict, and punish workers. When the erasures, devaluing, and heightened authority come together, a “synergy of failures”1 emerges with the outcome of unreasonable limits to the autonomy and choice-making capacity of care workers, thus paving the way for human rights violations. We have presented the work of care workers, advocates and activists who have addressed the human rights violations which represent the lived experiences of the policies we have studied. These care workers, advocates, and activists have also provided important recommendations for changes in labour and immigration policies. We will present these recommendations through an upstream lens, exploring the root causes that these recommendations are responding to.