Dozens of tree planters who endured horrendous labour conditions at Khaira Enterprises work camps – including dirty drinking water, squalid living conditions and a lack of food – have been awarded a total of nearly $229,000.
Fifty-seven people who worked for Khaira between March and July of last year will receive the money in back wages, including overtime and vacation pay, as well as compensation for poor conditions, according to an employment standards branch decision dated Jan. 17.
In his ruling, branch member Karpal Singh noted that the campsites were unhygienic and unacceptable while some employees were not given meal breaks after five consecutive hours of gruelling physical work.
He said the toilet facilities were “grossly inadequate to meet the needs of the number of workers” and noted that many of the workers were underfed.
“Breakfast mostly consisted of tea and bread. There were apples but they were usually rotten,” he wrote, adding that often there was not enough food for dinner and no vegetables were served.
The company also deducted $25 per day from the workers’ paycheques for food and accommodation – even if they brought their own food.
Singh did not provide a breakdown of the award to each employee, citing privacy concerns, but said each worker will receive a separate summary sheet.
The employment standards branch got involved after 25 Khaira workers were found living in squalid conditions in a bush camp near Golden.
Their accommodations were unventilated storage containers, and they had insufficient food, no clean drinking water and worked up to 15-hour days. They also complained of racial slurs, and one man said he had a knife thrown at him by one of his employers.
The branch later expanded its investigation to all Khaira employees who worked before July 22, the date the probe began, and included employees who worked at Golden, Revelstoke, Texada Island, Powell River, Salmon Arm and Kamloops.
Ros Salvador, a lawyer with the B.C. Public Interest Advocacy Centre who represented the workers, called the decision a “monumental victory,” particularly as many of the workers have suffered homelessness because of lost wages and an inability to collect EI because the company did not accurately document their hours.
“This is the first official recognition that there were extreme violations of the workers’ rights,” she said.
The advocacy centre will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. today to announce it has also filed a human rights complaint on behalf of 21 African workers who worked for Khaira.
As part of the decision, Khaira owners Khalid Mahmood Bajwa and Hardilpreet Singh Sidhu, who bought the reforestation company in 2009, were fined $3,500 for at least seven violations of the Employment Standards Act.
B.C. Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair called the fine “a joke” given the deplorable conditions the employees suffered.
“There’s no deterrent here for anyone else,” he said. “If those workers hadn’t found us, if they hadn’t gone to the Public Interest Advocacy Group. If they hadn’t done all of this, the employer would have got away with not paying them … and the penalty for that is $3,500? Tell me how that makes any sense at all.”
The workers testified they weren’t paid for statutory holidays or time spent travelling between work sites, that Khaira gave them conflicting information about hourly rates and that they weren’t paid for overtime.
For instance, in Revelstoke and Golden, Khaira recorded eight hours a day for the majority of employees, yet the workers testified they worked more than 12 hours a day, some up to 15 hours a day.
“It is unlikely that employees would have worked a flat eight hours per day in remote locations during peak tree planting season,” said Singh, in the decision.
Employee pay stubs between March and May 2010 did not show the hourly rate nor the number of hours worked.
Singh found the timesheets Khaira provided for the investigation were not credible and conflicted with the testimony of the employees who said they worked for more days and hours than were recorded by the company. Also, the wage statements that Khaira provided did not match the wage statements provided by the employees.
“We hope that Khaira is finally going to end its … mistreatment and the falsification of documents will end and they will finally pay the workers the wages,” said Salvador.
Sinclair said many of the workers are having a hard time finding work and couldn’t get unemployment insurance because the company had recorded fewer hours than they had worked.
Salvador said the advocacy centre has sent all the evidence to EI in an attempt to get retroactive payments for the workers, but that Service Canada is “still relying on the false numbers from Khaira.”
As is its custom, Service Canada does not comment on individual cases.
Khaira has until Feb. 24 to file an appeal of the decision.
Neither Khaira nor the company’s lawyer were available for comment on Sunday.
Both Salvador and Sinclair asked how the substandard labour conditions were overlooked by officials and are seeking answers.
Sinclair said the province needs a single agency to enforce the labour rules rather than several different agencies, including the Ministry of Forests and the Workers’ Compensation Board.
“Five agencies aren’t going to go to that camp that only exists there for six weeks so someone has to be responsible for enforcing all those rules and making sure they are done and every camp needs to be inspected when it’s set up,” he said.
A 2006 memorandum of understanding from the Ministry of Forests acknowledged widespread violations of employment standards in the tree-planting industry and said the government would take a more active approach. Salvador wants to know why the government didn’t intervene sooner and has filed a Freedom of Information request in an effort to get more information.
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