Ian Jackson

Thomas Daub and his family have to return to Germany on Thursday after two years of working in Alberta as a master cabinetmaker. His is here under a foreign worker visa.

Temporary foreign workers Thomas and Melinda Daub left Edmonton for Germany Thursday, two years after they uprooted themselves and their three children to move to here in search of a better life. Financially drained and now in debt, the family sold its furniture and borrowed money to buy plane tickets home.

“There was an enormous amount of work here and then in one second, everything ended for us,” Thomas Daub says through an interpreter.

The 48-year-old master cabinetmaker was recruited at a job fair in Germany and told there was plenty of work in Alberta. He started work at an Edmonton company, sending for his wife Melinda and their children a couple of months later. By the middle of 2007, they had sold all their possessions in Germany and with a few suitcases in hand, started a new life in Canada where they intended to stay for good.

“It’s very hard when you come over and you have to buy everything,” says Melinda Daub. “You don’t even have a pillow under your head.”

Their start-up costs included a car, security deposits on their rental home and utility services, and minimal contents for their home. Their monthly income covered their cost of living but there were no savings left over.

Melinda Daub worked as a cabinetmaker’s helper, and the couple toiled long hours at the same company, often from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week. Their 12-year-old son looked after his younger sisters.

In October, the couple was laid off. They found employment in the same line of work but were laid off yet again last January — Melinda after six weeks, and Thomas shortly after. Despite applying for jobs in several other industries, they were unsuccessful finding work.

“Yes, there are layoffs happening, there are slowdowns happening, a reducing of hours, but in a lot of cases it’s really specific,” says Jennifer Raimundo, spokeswoman for Alberta Employment and Immigration. She says some sectors, such as health care, still need workers, whereas others, such as construction, do not. Of the 57,843 temporary foreign workers who were counted in Alberta in December 2008 (13,007 of them in Edmonton), she is not sure how many have left due to layoffs.

According to Raimundo, temporary foreign workers are entitled to Employment Insurance (EI) benefits as long as they have worked the required number of hours in their province of residence.

But the Daubs are past that point, and have lost hope they’ll see a penny of the EI benefits they paid into when they had jobs. They applied for EI benefits but only after receiving conflicting information about whether or not they qualified. Now that they have gone weeks without receiving any financial assistance, they are choosing to cut their losses by returning to Germany. “Two years of hard labour, for what?” Melinda asks.

Jim Gurnett, executive director of the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers, says he has seen a surge in laid-off temporary foreign workers. These workers can only work for companies approved by the federal government to hire temporary foreign workers, via a Labour Market Opinion (LMO). And finding another employer with an LMO is difficult.

“This is one of the absurdities of a badly designed program,” Gurnett says. “There’s no public list of which employers have LMOs.” (Raimundo says she’s not sure why such a list isn’t readily available.)

As well, Gurnett says, the existence of a class of low-paid workers depresses the entire labour market. “Had the government not allowed the temporary [foreign] worker program,” he explains, “and hadn’t caved into employers on this and said no, those employers that are now bringing in temporary workers would instead have to be paying several dollars an hour more so that people like us would take their jobs, and that would be good for everything.”

Although the Daubs will return to Germany with little more than the possessions they can carry, they will at least qualify for social assistance there. And they know there are many other temporary foreign workers in Edmonton in situations as theirs.

“Unfortunately, what happened to us, I don’t believe we are the only ones,” says Melinda Daub. “They just don’t open their mouths.”