Employment agencies in Montreal and immigrant labour: a component of systemic racism in Quebec?
This article explores the role of temporary employment agencies in Montreal in the exploitation of immigrant labour and their relationship to systemic racism in Quebec. The hypothesis guiding this article is that the deregulation of agencies and the vulnerabilities produced by workers’ immigration status are factors that transform temporary agency work into a component of systemic racism in the Quebec labour market. We seek here to analyse whether the temporary work regime is linked to discrimination based on immigration status and systemic racism. In this article, I first discuss what temporary agency work is and its effects on working conditions, emphasizing the importance of using immigrant labour. I then review the historical patterns of racial discrimination in Canada and Quebec, and present and analyze some experiences of abuse and discrimination in the workplace as well as some agency practices in managing immigrants’ vulnerabilities. These analyses are based on interviews with 42 immigrant workers as well as interviews with organizers from the Centre des travailleurs et travailleuses immigrants (CTI) and the Association des travailleurs et travailleuses d’agences de placement de Montréal (ATTAP).