Local businesses suffer from lack of employees

Heidi Aguilar is starved for people.

The manager of St. Albert-based Sleep Inn Motel said she went through 19 employees in one year. To fill the much-needed positions more permanently, she hired foreign workers.

“For the longest time we didn’t have anybody that stayed and after a while we had one woman, she was here for six years and that was the last one we had before hiring foreign workers,” she said.

“They consider it a career. They are proud of their work.”

Aguilar is only one of many local employers who struggle to fill positions. Across the city, restaurants, hotels, health-care providers, retail stores and construction companies are scanning job banks and holding employment fairs – often with little success.

As the government looks to tighten its regulations on the temporary foreign worker program, hiring abroad may soon become more difficult and expensive, a concern for many local employers.

On Friday, more than 20 business owners and members of the Chamber of Commerce met local MP Brent Rathgeber, to discuss their concerns about the proposed changes to the program.

Rathgeber said the government was running the risk of putting employers out of business and punishing them for the mistakes of those who misused the system, a reference to the recent controversy in which the Royal Bank replaced 45 domestic employees with lower-paid temporary foreign workers.

The government should enforce the regulations, not change them, Rathgeber said.

“We have an economy in Alberta that is strong, that is operating at peak efficiency and is largely leading Canada out of an economic recession,” he said.

“And to not allow employers to grow and expand first of all, it threatens those employer’s livelihoods but it also threatens the Canadian recovery.”

Rob Chiasson is one of the local entrepreneurs who attended the meeting with Rathgeber.

Chiasson is the owner of the McDonald’s outlets in St. Albert. He said a regular McDonald’s restaurant will hire 90 to 120 part-time employees. But at his outlet on St. Albert Trail, Chiasson said he only employs 50 people, part-time and full-time. He would hire more part-time workers, but he can’t find them.

“The only reason we are able to survive is because we have full-time workers,” he told the Gazette in a recent interview.

Since September 2011, Chiasson has run ads for cleaning, and full-time and part-time staff on Kijiji and at local job banks.

He put up road signs and runs a program that pays employees a bonus for referring someone to the restaurant. He also gives talks at local schools to recruit and teach students about management.

Most children in St. Albert can get a job pretty easily, he said, if they want one.

Last April, McDonald’s ran hiring days at their restaurants across Canada. Chiasson said he had staff ready to take applications and do interviews on the spot. The outcome was meagre, to say the least.

“The last (hiring days) we had in Canada, they got 7,500 applications. In Alberta, we got 100. I got seven out of four restaurants,” he said.

“The thing about Alberta is … there are more jobs than there are people and so we have a very unique challenge because the economy is quite strong and we just don’t have the personnel that we need to run our restaurants.”

He added the problem is not specific to St. Albert. Other franchise owners in Sherwood Park or Spruce Grove have the same problem.

While McDonald’s prefers to recruit Canadians, he said he cannot compete with jobs in the oilsands that pay $20 an hour. To operate his business, he hired temporary foreign workers.

Now he worries how changes to the temporary foreign workers program will affect business operations in the province.

“I am very concerned about our ability to function without (the program) and I am concerned that the average consumer doesn’t really understand what the impact of not being able to hire people is,” he said.

“When people do come (to Alberta) they want goods and services. But if you can’t staff the retail outlets that provide goods and services we have a pretty big problem.”

Jason Brisbois, director at the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta, said foreign workers are only a short-term solution to labour shortages in the province.

In the long run, he said employers will have to raise their wages if they want to hire Canadians, or close their doors.

“The fact is, Canadians don’t want to work for that wage level and if you look at the traditional pattern of employment in those industries it’s usually younger people,” he said.

“And younger people have a much higher unemployment rate than older people and particularly people with higher education. But the fact is that people will just not work for those low wages. So they go on unemployment.”

Brisbois said Canada’s immigration system does not allow low-skilled foreign workers to become citizens as easily as skilled foreign workers. Once their permit expires, instead of leaving the country, they often remain in the country illegally, he said.

If Canada continues to rely on these workers to fill cheap labour positions, he said it not only opens itself to abuse by employers but also to distortions in the labour market.

“In the short term (hiring foreign workers) is not such a bad thing because it fills the jobs and having someone work in those jobs and keep those establishments going is good for the economy,” he said.

“But in the longer term you don’t want to become a country like Germany or the United States that make a policy of importing cheap labour which they cannot get rid of when you don’t need the labour anymore.”

On Friday, Rathgeber said he could see that being a concern in regions with higher unemployment numbers where employers may displace domestic workers with foreign ones.

But Alberta’s unemployment rate was statistically about four per cent and practically non-existent compared to many of the Eastern provinces, he said.

Local employers simply had no access to the type of lower skilled worker they were looking for. If they raised their wages, they would go out of business but in many cases Canadians simply did not want to do these types of jobs, he added.

“I don’t know why we can’t have a temporary foreign worker program that reflects that,” he said.

“So that in regions of the country where unemployment is essentially zero I think they might be able to have shorter waiting periods and shorter times for processing the LMO’s (Labour Market Opinions) because you have higher demands for workers.”

A Labour Market Opinion is an application that requires an employer to show that he needs a foreign worker to fill a job and that there is no Canadian worker available.

A local construction company, Standard General has been in the community for over 40 years. Out of the 400 employees the company hires each year, eight per cent are foreign workers.

Louise Seaman, manager of human resources, told the Gazette earlier this month that the company runs a weather-driven, seasonal business that requires long hours of work. That turns many Canadians off, she said.

“Our biggest concern is in our business we bid on jobs so we never know how much work we will get first of all, how many jobs are we going to bid on,” she said.

“So that’s a challenge. So we don’t know how many people we need.”

Seaman said she is worried about filling positions in coming years. Many Canadian workers leave the construction business after a few weeks of being hired or find employment in the oilsands.

She said the company tries to hire Canadians but applies for the labour market opinion as a back-up plan.

“We have contractor obligations we have to meet and we also try to grow our business. So we have to have something that we can rely on,” she said.

Aguilar said she hired two full-time employees through different agencies. The guidelines are strict, she said and just because you ask for them doesn’t mean you get them. Their work permits have to be renewed every year.

“We had to go through a few rejections before they were allowed to stay. I guess it depends on how determined I am,” she said.

“But there are a lot of hurdles to jump through when you hire unskilled workers.”

She said the workers are frustrated when Canadians say they are stealing their jobs and that they are paid less. The government’s pay scale requires her to pay them almost $1 more than the Canadians.

She added that compared to Canadians, the foreign employers work harder and consider the job a career. Many local employees only stayed for a while before they moved on or found a better paying job.

“Some don’t bother to show up, some are just waiting until they find another job and some are just fulfilling the mandated employment,” she said.