Coming to Canada was a dream that meant the family could finally be together. That dream ended on the factory floor.
Enrico Miranda was a trim man with a kind smile who spent two decades working abroad to support his family. After 20 years of separation — Miranda in Dubai, his wife and two children in the Philippines — moving to Canada represented a simple aspiration: to finally be together.
To support that dream, Miranda would spend 10 years as a temporary employment agency worker in Toronto, about five of them at North York industrial bakery Fiera Foods. He would never have the chance to land a permanent job, to put his lengthy experience as an engineer to use, or most importantly, to see the birth of his second grandchild.
Instead, he was crushed to death by a machine as he cleaned it. He was the fifth temp agency worker to die at Fiera or one of its affiliates since 1999.
“Our dream was for our kids, our children, that’s why we are here,” says his wife Tay. “It is hard to believe, you know.”
Tay and Miranda met at Holy Angel University in the Philippines in their early 20s; she was studying business administration, he was a civil engineering student. Miranda’s first job was with the Filipino National Irrigation Authority, a job he loved but that paid poorly. So in 1988, when his first born was 3 years old, Miranda moved to Dubai to work as an engineer.
Tay was determined they would one day unite. In 2004, she came to Canada as a migrant caregiver so she could eventually sponsor Miranda and their sons Richard and Patrick. They followed her to Toronto in 2009.
“I was happy because I reached my goal,” she says. “We all lived together.”
Now, as the family prepares to take 57-year-old Miranda’s body back to Pampanga province, they are still grappling with what to tell his mother and siblings — mostly due to what they call a maddeningly slow quest for answers.
The family says the Ministry of Labour has not reached out. The police have told them Miranda’s chest was fatally crushed in the accident, but little else. Amid the confusion, the family was distraught to hear from workers that the factory didn’t stop production in the wake of his death. (When the Star arrived at the plant on the evening of the accident, employees were still on shift.)
“It’s unbelievable in a very developed and rich country,” says Miranda’s eldest son Richard.
The tragedy is harder still to process because Miranda had recently taken steps he hoped would keep him safer on the job. Three months ago, Richard says he received a phone call from his dad, who had injured himself at Fiera. Miranda, who was working in production at the time, had fractured his ring finger using a dough mixer at the plant. He wanted to know what to do.
Richard, who now works as an accountant in Alberta, could speak from experience. Having just arrived in Toronto in 2009, Richard found a job working 16-hour days at a sausage making factory. In his first few months at the plant, he almost lost an arm after it got sucked into a machine. He submitted a workers’ compensation claim for the injury, and told his dad to do the same.
But according to Miranda, this ran counter to Fiera’s advice. Miranda told his son he was asked not to file a Workplace Safety and Insurance Board claim and to instead take a break from work while continuing to punch in at the factory so he got paid. (It is illegal under Ontario law to prevent or discourage workers from reporting injuries to the board.)
This is a long excerpt but it’s really worth reading the entire article.
Of the five temporary contractors who’ve been killed while working at Fiera Foods, three died because of the company’s abysmal failure to keep their workers safe from their machines, including Enrico Miranda (two others, Aydin Kazimov and another unnamed man, were hit by trucks).
In 1999, 16-year-old Ivan Golyashov, a recent immigrant from Kazakhstan, died inside a dough-mixing machine he had just cleaned. He asked a coworker to unlock the top of the machine to let him out, but the coworker accidentally turned it on instead. Neither of them had received training for the use of the machine.
In 2016, Amina Diaby, a Guinean refugee, was strangled at Fiera Foods after her hijab was caught in a conveyor belt. Because the conveyor belt did not have an emergency stop mechanism, her coworkers could not save her.
As of 2017, non-clerical temp workers “were more than twice as likely to be injured on the job last year than their non-temp counterparts” according to the WSIB.
