Proposed changes to Manitoba’s Employment Standards Code will help attract and retain farm workers in a competitive labour market, says Labour and Immigration minister Nancy Allan.
“The new regulation balances the positions of employers and labour and is the first significant change in over 50 years,” said Allan.
“It provides many of the same basic protections that Manitoba workers in almost every other industry now take for granted, while recognizing the need for flexibility.”
Effective June 30, agriculture workers in the province will be divided into two groups based on the type of work and employer.
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Staff in climate-controlled operations such as hog or poultry barns and greenhouses, and those in agricultural services such as custom combining or feedlot cleaning, will be given the same coverage as other workers, including overtime and paid holidays.
Grain or vegetable farm workers will gain most of the same benefits, except for overtime and paid holidays.
But workers employed on family farms won’t be affected by the changes and will be excluded from the new regulations.
Ian Wishart, president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, said the province’s decision to treat controlled and non-controlled environments differently might create an uneven playing field.
“I don’t think they understand the industry well enough and they’ve gone with a split that doesn’t make a lot of sense to anybody,” he said.
For example, hog producers who farrow their sows in a climate-controlled conventional barn, but finish pigs outside in biotech shelters, might not fit neatly into the new categories.
“It doesn’t fit nicely in any sector, such as dairy. There are also some people in the horticulture industry who are caught sideways on this one.”
Most of the changes to the labour regulations incorporate provisions that most employers have already been offering as they seek to recruit and retain workers in a competitive market, he said.
“Employers are already doing a lot of these things anyway,” said Wishart, who added that the extra expense of complying with the regulations could affect local operations competing with imports from countries with much lower labour standards.
He hoped the minister’s recognition of the need for flexibility would allow some sectors that would be negatively affected to be exempted. For example, seasonal landscaping operations are allowed to schedule longer work weeks during the summer.
“If these types of creative solutions are available to us, perhaps we can find solutions that work for all sectors,” he said. “We will be pursuing them with great vigour.”
Darlene Dziewit, president of the Manitoba Labour Federation, said that her group had been lobbying hard for equitable treatment for all workers, noting that the present regulations had remained unchanged since 1957.
Many complaints had been heard over the years from farm workers about the lack of a minimum wage, bereavement leave, termination notice or vacations with pay.
“Agriculture has changed a lot since 1957,” she said. “You have to have work breaks and days of rest, otherwise people get so tired that they end up hurting themselves or others.”
The differentiation for climate-controlled environments such as hog barns brings the regulations up to date, she added, without putting undue hardship on smaller operations.
“I recognize that family farms are a different creature, where you’ve got mom and dad, the kids, and maybe the odd hired hand, so I can see the government’s logic in the exclusion of those folks. But we’d hoped that anyone who got a T4 slip was covered.”
Wayne Hanley, national president of United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, also applauded the new regulations.
UFCW will be launching a March 30 court challenge to overturn Ontario’s exclusion of farm workers from the right to collective bargaining.
“Manitoba has done the right thing. Ontario should follow its lead,” he said in a news release.
