What Gets Hidden in the Shine

Hey there, Standing on the Ledge. How are y’all today?

Today I want to talk about something that sits in the dark corners of commercial cleaning in Canada, and too often stays there because the floors still get done, the garbage still gets emptied, and the building still looks clean enough for the people upstairs not to ask hard questions.

That is part of the problem.

When people talk about abuse of migrant workers in Canada, most of the headlines go to farms, food processing, or caregiving. Fair enough. That is where a lot of the public attention has gone. But commercial cleaning belongs in this conversation too. The public record is thinner here, but not because the risk is lower. It is because commercial cleaning is one of those industries where exploitation can hide in plain sight: spread across night shifts, subcontractors, private contracts, and workers who are easy to ignore as long as the building shines by morning.¹

The Canadian Senate’s 2024 report on temporary and migrant labour did not mince words. It said employer-specific work permits are the “single most egregious condition of vulnerability” for migrant workers, and heard evidence that tied permits make it almost impossible for workers to leave bad situations. The same report linked employer-tied status to higher risks of abuse, wage theft, harassment, trafficking, illness, injury, and death.² That matters for commercial cleaning because this is already a labour-intensive industry under constant price pressure, where direct labour costs are the biggest expense and where contracts can be short, unstable, and easy to flip. Put those two systems together and you do not get efficiency. You get vulnerability on sale.

SEIU Local 2’s 2024 submission on the commercial cleaning industry in British Columbia says the quiet part out loud. It describes an industry shaped by downward wage pressure, volatile contracting relationships, and a tendency to exploit workers, particularly new immigrants, by leveraging vulnerabilities tied to employment status.¹ It also says commercial cleaning companies may subcontract further to reduce labour costs.¹ That is not a side issue. That is the business model at its ugliest edge. If a worker’s right to stay in Canada is tied to the job, and the job is buried in a low-bid subcontracting chain, then the worker is not walking into a fair negotiation. They are walking into a trap with a mop bucket beside it.

And yes, there are concrete cleaning-related examples. In January 2025, the federal government announced that an employer in janitorial maintenance had been fined $124,000 and banned from the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for five years because of improper pay and working conditions.³ That is not a rumour. That is Ottawa publicly confirming that abuse serious enough for major penalties existed in janitorial work itself.

There is also the older British Columbia janitorial case reported by the Toronto Star, where a temporary foreign worker in cleaning alleged underpayment, illegal recruitment fees, and threats of deportation if he complained.⁴ The article reported that the worker received an open work permit for vulnerable workers after an immigration officer found reasonable grounds to believe he had been abused or was at risk of abuse.⁴ The employer and recruiter denied the allegations, and the paper noted that the allegations had not yet been proven before a tribunal at the time of publication.⁴ That distinction matters. But so does the structure underneath it: a janitor, a tied permit, alleged underpayment, alleged recruitment charges, and fear of deportation. None of that is random.

This is where people need to stop pretending the problem is just “a few bad actors.” Canada’s own institutions keep pointing back to the same structural fault line. The UN Special Rapporteur said Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs are a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery” specifically because employer-specific permits make workers afraid to report abuse.⁵ The Senate report reached the same general conclusion in more bureaucratic language.² When a worker’s status, paycheque, housing, and future all sit on the same employer’s say-so, abuse does not need to look theatrical. It can look like unpaid hours, threats, pressure, silence, retaliation, illegal fees, and a worker deciding it is safer to endure than to speak.

And commercial cleaning is fertile ground for that kind of abuse precisely because it is so easy to hide. The work is often done after hours. The workforce is fragmented. The buyer is often far removed from the person doing the work. The building owner blames the contractor, the contractor blames the subcontractor, the subcontractor blames the labour market, and somewhere at the bottom a cleaner is told to be grateful they have a job. Meanwhile the entire service depends on labour, but labour is still the first thing everyone tries to squeeze. That is the industry disease, and migrant workers are often where the disease bites deepest.¹²

Now, before anybody twists this into something stupid, let me be clear: this is not an attack on migrant workers. It is not even an attack on every employer. It is an indictment of a system that too often profits from vulnerability. Canada’s own open work permit for vulnerable workers exists because the government knows abuse happens. The same guidance says workers may apply if they are being abused or are at risk of abuse, and it lists unsafe work, stolen pay, threats, intimidation, unsanitary housing, and illegal job fees as examples.⁶ But the Senate report also heard that this remedy still puts the burden of proof on workers and can expose them to reprisals, blacklisting, and impossible evidence demands.² So even the “escape hatch” tells you something ugly about the room it was built into.

What is wrong with commercial cleaning in Canada is not just that it is underpriced. It is that the whole low-road version of the industry is built to reward invisibility. Invisible labour. Invisible corners cut. Invisible injuries. Invisible fear. Invisible workers. If you want abuse to flourish, you do not need chains on the floor. You just need a closed permit, a low-bid contract, a subcontracting maze, and a workforce that knows speaking up may cost them everything.¹²

So no, this is not just a migrant-worker story. This is a commercial cleaning story. It is about what happens when a country wants spotless buildings but keeps looking away from the hands that make them possible. It is about what happens when “efficiency” becomes a prettier word for pressure. And it is about the moral rot of an industry that can depend on vulnerable workers while pretending vulnerability has nothing to do with the price.

That is what gets hidden in the shine.

Godspeed.

---

Notes

1. SEIU Local 2 and Justice for Janitors, Advancing Centralized Bargaining in the Commercial Cleaning Industry (2024).
2. Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Act Now: Solutions for Temporary and Migrant Labour in Canada (2024).
3. Government of Canada, “Penalties doubled compared to last year for non-compliant employers using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program” (January 17, 2025).
4. Alex McKeen, “First he mopped floors. Then this B.C. janitor put Canada’s potentially abusive employers on notice,” Toronto Star (November 9, 2019).
5. OHCHR, “Canada: Anchor the fight against contemporary forms of slavery in human rights, a UN expert urges” (September 6, 2023).
6. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Open work permit for vulnerable workers: Who can apply.”