Migrants Face Threats of Deportation, Illegal Working Conditions and Unpaid Wages

After risking their jobs and legal status in Canada to denounce their employers, migrant workers at Montreal’s biggest supplier of airline food have been laid off without receiving their final pay.

It’s unclear how many of the hundreds employed at the factory lost their job but three workers interviewed by The Rover say they’ve already been replaced by new migrant workers. Now, stranded in Canada with no money and no legal means of earning an income, they risk losing their status and being deported.

The migrants worked in a factory owned by Newrest, which supplies the Trudeau International Airport with over 10,000 inflight meals each day. Newrest is also the target of a lawsuit that alleges the company partnered with a recruitment agency to attract migrant workers and deceive them into working in its Dorval factory without a permit.

One of the world’s largest airline catering companies, the French-based Newrest Inc. has forcefully denied it knowingly broke Canada’s immigration and labour laws. Newrest also announced it would conduct a thorough internal investigation into these claims.

But evidence uncovered by The Rover found that at least two Newrest employees — including the man in charge of its Dorval factory — were aware of the alleged scheme and participated in it.

Three workers provided The Rover with documentary evidence that shows Newrest Montreal’s unit manager and a member of its human resources department acknowledging the company violates immigration and labour laws.

They are among the dozens who provided sworn testimony for the lawsuit, which they filed with the help of the Immigration Workers Centre (IWC). At least one of those who organized their fellow workers against the company was fired and many are still too afraid to come forward. There are an estimated 400 migrant workers who fell victim to the alleged scheme, hailing mostly from Central and South America but also North Africa.

Now that news of the lawsuit is public, the workers’ worst fears are coming true.

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Some have lost their jobs and say they haven’t received their last paycheque. Hundreds more will become undocumented and face deportation orders unless Immigration Canada issues them permits. The federal agency is aware of the lawsuit and working to ensure the migrants are allowed to stay in country until their cases are sorted.

The managers at Newrest worked alongside a Laval-based recruitment agency tasked with supplying their factory with cheap labour through Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The agency, Trésor Inc., lured hundreds of migrant workers to Montreal with the promise they’d be given honest work and a shot at obtaining permanent residency.

But once they arrived on the factory floor, the migrants were told they’d have to earn their permits over a three-month probationary period. When the period was over, they’d be put on a list of people in line to receive permits. Though they worked at Newrest, they were paid and had their immigration status overseen by the recruitment agency, Trésor.

By the time they figured out they were being duped, the migrants who spoke to The Rover said they felt trapped. And if there was any hope the lawsuit might force Trésor and Newrest to play nice, the workers were sorely disappointed.

One worker caught up in the scheme — who we’ll call Sam — says he was fired without cause last week by an employee at Newrest. 

“They told me, ‘I can’t pay you, you don’t have a work permit, so this is your last day,’” said Sam, who came to Montreal from Mexico last spring. “But they knew about the permit the whole time.”

Days earlier, on Oct. 27, when Sam went to collect his pay at a Montreal office run by Trésor, he was told the company had just been robbed. Trésor pays its workers in cash out of a building on St-Hubert St. every second Friday, meaning the company has tens of thousands of dollars on hand. 

In a cell phone video obtained by The Rover, a dozen workers stand outside Trésor’s office as a security guard informs them they won’t be getting paid. When he explains it’s because the company was robbed, one of the workers asks if the police have been called. After his question goes unanswered, the worker calls the cops.

“Trésor had apparently been robbed but didn’t bother calling the police,” Sam said. “It makes you wonder.”

Sam is one of hundreds of migrant workers stranded in Canada, without money or legal job prospects. Two of his colleagues say the only reason they continued working under such dire circumstances was that Mexico is being overrun with cartel violence.

“They used to go after other cartel members but now you’re seeing civilians being gunned down and women being kidnapped and raped,” one worker said. “No matter how bad things are here, I’m terrified of going back to that.”

A source inside the office of federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller says they are working to give the migrants legal protections but that they’re afraid of issuing permits to a company that may have known about the deceptive practices inside one of their facilities. The source claims Trésor has been unreachable since news of the lawsuit broke.

Neither Newrest nor Trésor responded to The Rover’s interview requests.

A worker collects his pay as two men stand guard outside Trésor’s St-Hubert Street office. PHOTO: Chris Curtis

Asked whether Air Canada — one of Newrest’s biggest clients — would continue using the company despite these allegations, a representative from the airline said it was awaiting the conclusion of Newrest’s internal investigation into the matter.

Without the money from his last pay, Sam says he can’t cover his rent. Some of his colleagues say they don’t have enough to pay for a $2 bag of groceries from their local food bank.

At Newrest’s Dorval facility, where the migrants worked alongside Canadian citizens, the company’s response to the alleged robbery was to post a memo reminding the Latin American workers they were under no obligation to pay them. 

“Newrest has just been informed of a very worrisome situation related to the non-payment of salaries of employees under the responsibility of recruitment agencies,” the Oct. 28 memo reads. “Since Newrest is not the employer of these individuals … Newrest is working in the spirit of humanitarian aid to help those affected by this difficult situation. Newrest is committed to finding a solution allowing these people to get the money they are owed.”

Representatives from the company met with investigators with Quebec’s workplace safety board Wednesday and the company has hired an outside law firm to investigate the lawsuit’s claims.

Sam said the gentle tone of the memo contrasts the brutal working conditions he was forced to endure at Newrest.

“When I tested positive for COVID-19, they made me work anyway,” said Sam. “I took a picture of the positive test results and sent it to my boss. They told me I needed to take some Tylenol, come into work and not breathe too close to the other workers.”

Sam’s colleague Helena — also an alias — told The Rover that when she complained about not getting training for her job, her supervisor lashed out at her.

“He told me, ‘You have no rights, I am up here and you are down there,’” Helena said.

Another source spoke of the relentless grind of working at a factory that had to produce thousands of meals a day. She said they were told not to go to the hospital if they got injured on the job, creating a culture where migrants worked through lacerations, burns and chronic pain to keep collecting their paycheque.

“We weren’t allowed to use the bathroom or drink water until our lunch break,” she said. “We weren’t paid overtime, we weren’t allowed to speak to each other, it was awful.”

These are just some of the dozens of testimonials that form the basis of a lawsuit against Newrest, Trésor and Trésor’s president, Guillermo Montiel. In his only public comment on the lawsuit, Montiel told the Canadian Press he was “stunned” by the allegations and that his company never hired someone without the proper permits.

Ten workers interviewed by The Rover say Montiel often dealt directly with them, acknowledging the illegal status of their employment. When one of them started organizing workers to get help through the IWC, he says he was fired.

The IWC would not comment on the latest round of allegations but at a press conference last month, a spokesperson said the evidence against Trésor and Newrest is overwhelming. He added that this alleged scheme was made possible after Canada loosened regulations on the TFWP three years ago. 

Under the Trudeau government, the TFWP did away with the requirement that recruitment agencies had to travel abroad, recruit workers, obtain permits for them and conduct an economic impact assessment before bringing them to Canada. Under the new rules, people already in Canada on a student or tourist visa qualified for the program — dramatically cutting back on costs and oversight.

Most of the workers interviewed by The Rover would not have qualified for the program under its previous criteria.

“In the end, I just want a chance to work and live here,” said Sam. “There is no future for me back home and I’m happy to just live somewhere safe, somewhere where I can work with the public and be productive. That’s all I want.”

About the Author

Mauricio Herrerabarría is a writer, freelance journalist, and media & culture producer. His work aims to connect readers to the many discourses attracting us to the greater abstract that is culture. Two of his primary ambitions are to understand the humanity in art and elevate what is often perceived as ordinary.