New Union Alliance Demands Ottawa Stop Big Telcos From Offshoring Jobs

A newly formed alliance of Canada’s largest unions is sounding the alarm over the disappearing workforce in the country’s telecommunications sector.

The new Canadian Telecommunications Workers Alliance is a coalition of Unifor, the United Steelworkers and CUPE, which are three of Canada’s largest unions.

The group, representing 32,000 telecom workers, claims that major service providers have moved nearly 20,000 jobs out of Canada over the last decade. These positions have reportedly been relocated to countries like India, the Philippines, Egypt, and the United States.

The coalition warns that this trend does more than just hurt the local job market; it also raises serious concerns about the security of personal data. When work is handled by subcontractors outside of Canada, those workers are not subject to the same privacy laws and government oversight that protect Canadians at home.

“We cannot build a resilient economy while shipping essential work overseas,” said Lana Payne, National President of Unifor, in a press release earlier this week. “Offshoring telecommunications jobs isn’t just a blow to workers; it undermines our digital sovereignty.”

The alliance is now calling on the feds to pass new laws that would stop the “hollowing out” of the industry. They argue that because telecommunications is a critical part of Canada’s national infrastructure, it should be operated and secured by workers living within the country to ensure better accountability and data protection.

The Canadian Telecommunications Workers Alliance is demanding that Ottawa prioritize keeping essential infrastructure jobs on Canadian soil to protect both the economy and the privacy of citizens.

Besides the outsourcing of jobs overseas, let’s not get started on how long it takes to wait on hold to access a human for customer service. Reddit is full of threads on increasing wait times to get support from big telcos.