Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program

Client: McGill-Queen’s University Press (2023)

Project: Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program by Catherine E. Connelly

If you believed most of what’s said about the Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker program, you might naturally assume that there is a trade-off between workers’ poor experiences with the program and employers’ significant benefits. In reality, the experiences of workers are far worse than is commonly acknowledged, while employers are not reaping as much benefit as the public might suppose.

In Enduring Work, Catherine Connelly draws on over one hundred interviews with people connected to different aspects of this program, analyzing their experiences from the perspective of organizational behaviour and human resources management. She compares the lived reality of agricultural workers, in-home caregivers, and low- and high-wage workers, showing how and why each group is vulnerable to mistreatment and further explores how employment agencies and immigration consultants contribute to program abuses.

Groundbreaking in its analysis of an issue very much in the news, Enduring Work unpacks the harms within Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program and offers nuanced strategies to improve it.

Service: TEC provided a substantive edit of the manuscript, working with the author to develop the manuscript for submission to the press. TEC also copy edited the manuscript, correcting punctuation, spelling, and grammar errors while editing for consistency and clarity.