Douglas Todd: Low-skill guest workers toil longer hours, with fewer absences, for less pay than Canadian domestic workers, which means wages go down for everyone, says a peer-reviewed study.

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By: Douglas Todd

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Rarely a week goes by without a small or large Canadian company declaring how desperate it is to hire foreign guest workers.

The country’s “labour shortage” is brutal, they say. Business survival is impossible without willing workers from offshore, complain the owners of hotels, fast-food restaurants, security firms, supermarket chains and construction companies.

While’s it’s true that in some cases Canadian corporations struggle to find workers willing to plod away for low wages, especially in the agricultural sector, there is also no doubt many of Canada’s roughly three million highly motivated foreign guest workers toil for lower wages and demand fewer benefits than domestic workers.

A revealing study by three Canadian economists explains exactly why foreign guest workers are preferred hires by so many companies.

“Temporary foreign workers work longer hours, are less absent and are less likely to be laid off than domestic workers,” say the professors of economics, Pierre Brochu, Till Gross and Christopher Worswick, in their peer-reviewed analysis.

Foreign workers put out more effort for lower earnings than domestic employees, the scholars found.

One big reason they’ll grind away for less is that most come from countries with extremely low wages. A London School of Economics study found temporary migrants from