Via CTV News: Migrant worker who got COVID-19 says he was fired from Ontario farm for speaking out. Excerpt:
TORONTO -- After migrant worker Luis Gabriel Flores Flores tested positive for COVID-19 following an outbreak at an Ontario produce farm, he turned to journalists to share his fears over what he described as unsafe working conditions.
A few weeks later -- only one day after his bunkmate had died of COVID-19 -- his employer came looking for Flores at the bunkhouse where the workers lived. He was told that he, and three others who were suspected of speaking to press, were being fired.
They told Flores they would be “sending [him] back to Mexico at dawn,” he said.
These allegations, which the farm in question denies, are described in an 8-page legal complaint to the Ontario Labour Relations Board, and in a letter Flores delivered this week to the office of Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino in downtown Toronto.
The complaint alleges that Flores’s employment was terminated unjustly in a reprisal against him for speaking out about the poor working conditions his employer subjected him to. As part of his complaint, Flores is seeking $28,000 in damages for direct and future earning losses, as well as $10,000 for emotional pain and suffering he endured.
Flores and the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC) held a press conference on Thursday to let the public know that Flores’s experience is one of many.
And they are raising an alarm in the hopes that the federal government will hear them.
“We’re here because we’re calling on the federal government of Canada to give full and permanent immigration status for all,” Syed Hussan, Executive Director of MWAC, said in the press conference.
“Migrant workers want to protect their health, want to protect their safety, but it’s federal immigration rules that make it impossible for them to do so.”
Three migrant workers have died of COVID-19 in Canada so far, Hussan said, and 1,100 are sick.
