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CALGARY – For the past seven years, the mining community of Baia Mare in Romania’s northern interior has eagerly stepped up to alleviate Alberta’s labour shortages. For Joe Giusti, founder and CEO of one of Western Canada’s largest construction companies, it was a long way to travel to search for workers.
It was hard, too, once he found them. His firm, Giusti Group, had to teach recruits basic English so they would understand safety regulations. They had to meet rigid immigration requirements for temporary foreign workers. They had to be moved to an unfamiliar work environment, and sent back home just as they were getting used to their new jobs and way of life.
Yet Mr. Giusti was so encouraged by the enthusiasm shown by hundreds of young people who answered his calls for carpenters, cement finishers and general labourers, and by their performance in Alberta, he led recruitment missions there several times. Meanwhile, he was pleased to notice how the local community’s economy flourished from a steady influx of Alberta oil cash, as people dressed better, bought new furniture and renovated houses.
“When I went to Romania the first time, it brought me back to the 1960s in Italy,” said the builder, who since moving to Western Canada four decades ago from Treviso, near Venice, completed more than 50,000 multi-family units and took on some of the West’s biggest industrial projects, even as he fine-tuned a passion for oil painting using Titian’s colour techniques.
“I looked at them and I said: These are my people, like the ones from my village. I can see it in their hands. They are hard working people. They can do anything.”
Employers in Western Canada, and particularly in the ever-expanding oil industry, have been looking for workers farther and farther afield to fill jobs in resource development. The early favourites decades ago were farm kids from Saskatchewan. Then it was women and First Nations. Then it was Newfoundland. Then they brought in planeloads of workers from northern Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia in elaborate fly-in and fly-out schemes.
Today, with those sources tapped out and more and more projects on the horizon, the new fix is foreign labour.
While the practice is not new, what’s new is how many employers, who seem to be sticking with their growth strategies regardless of the state of the global economy, are looking to struggling countries to replenish their workforces – including advanced economies such as the United States and the U.K.
Mr. Giusti is continuing to tap Romania’s workforce and is looking in other foreign markets such as the U.S. for pump operators and mechanics, who must be fluent in English.
And yet he is watching with anxiety Western Canada’s rising economy. With a staff of 500 and 200 job openings he is struggling to fill, he no longer accepts construction work in Calgary, while his family-owned company doubles down on work already under way, including a 1,500-worker camp and a processing plant for Husky Energy Inc.’s Sunrise oil sands project northeast of Fort McMurray.
“We are creating a mess,” Mr. Giusti laments. “There is a boom, and there are few qualified people. Most of the jobs are done with unqualified people and improper workmanship. I would say lousy workmanship — and for a huge amount of money.”
The push for foreign labour is in part a response to immigration reforms announced two months ago by Jason Kenney, the federal immigration minister, that opened up access to skilled tradesmen and make it possible for them to come to Canada as permanent residents, rather as temporary foreign workers.
For the rest of this article, please go to the National Post website: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/06/22/job-hungry-alberta-scours-globe-for-workers/