The Remittance Economy

NL has second highest share of labour force commuting to work in other provs

One of the earliest topics at SRBP was the phenomenon in the early 2000s of men - mostly men - who lived in Newfoundland and Labrador but who commuted somewhere else to work for three weeks or a month at a stretch. Some were gone for upwards of a year.

Simon Lono may have written about it first but it wasn’t too long before a few of us wondered about how many people were involved in what we mistakenly called remittance work. Strictly speaking, remittance workers are men and women who leave their family behind, go to work in a booming economy somewhere else on the planet and then send a chunk of their earnings home to keep the family going.

What’s been going happening in Newfoundland and Labrador is more like commuting but over really long distances and for extended periods. Another chunk of it is actually migrant labour: folks who travel for a season from farm to farm or fish plant to fish plant picking up shifts and living in motels. It’s a gruelling life and as one fish plant fire in Bay de Verde showed a few years ago, we actually have a fair few migrants workers who do that sort of thing within Newfoundland and Labrador.

This phenomenon stands out in large part because the original Our Dear Premier - Chairman Dan Hisself - promised in 2003 that he was going to fix the government’s financial problems by creating jobs, jobs, jobs. It was obvious bullshite, as your humble e-scribbler pointed out in a column in the original version of The Independent, but people believed it all the same.

In 2007, a CBC piece by Rod Ethridge put the number of remittance workers at around 10,000 and that they were typically earning six figure salaries. Some basic math with tell you that 10,000 commuters earning a starting salary of $110,000 is about $1.1 billion in total.

Turns out, Rod was off the mark.

He aimed too low.