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Cheated treeplanters face long wait for payment

A group of workers who planted trees and did other rough work in the bush for Khaira Enterprises will have a long wait before they see the money the Employment Standards Branch ruled was owed to them, The Tyee has learned.

This despite the Branch officer’s January ruling that Khaira owed the workers close to a quarter million dollars in back pay and benefits that had been improperly withheld from them by the Surrey-based contractor that did work for the provincial government.

Different ministries of the BC government seem to have different versions of how swiftly, if at all, the 57 Khaira workers, mainly immigrants who are reportedly living in dire poverty now will see any of the money the ruling assigned to them. At least one of the workers is facing eviction while waiting for the money owed.

In the wake of the scathing Employment Standards Branch ruling in January, BC Forests, Mines and Lands Minister Pat Bell told the Canadian Press that the workers would get their money promptly.

"We're confident we can now ensure that the employees are paid the amounts of money that are owed to them," Bell said at the time.” I’m not expecting this to take a long time to have it resolved. I'm hopeful that the employees will be paid up quite quickly and be able to go on their way."

A spokesperson at Minister Bell’s ministry referred questions about when the payout to Khaira’s workers would occur to the Ministry of Labour. On February 23, a Ministry of Labour spokesperson told The Tyee in an email, “Distributing the funds could prejudice the employer’s rights in this case because if the appeal was successful, there would likely be no way to recover funds that have been distributed.”

The spokesperson said the Employment Standards Branch believed there would be an appeal filed challenging the ruling on the Khaira file before the March 14 deadline, and that there would be no payout until all appeals had been exhausted.

"Some of the workers are owed $12,000 according to Employment Standards. For someone living in poverty, that amount could be their only income for the entire year," Ros Salvador, a lawyer at the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, which has acted on behalf of the Khaira workers, told the Tyee in a Feb. 23 email.

"So far workers have been waiting seven months for wages and EI they are fully entitled to receive. The Ministry of Labour has the authority to release the money held by the provincial government, and the only just course of action is for the money to be paid out immediately to alleviate the poverty of the workers.”

“The system failed these workers on the job and now it’s failing them again,” BC Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair told the Tyee. “This is a systematic failure that sends a message to employers that it’s OK to abuse workers.”

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