Sixteen Vietnamese men were relocated from Port Alberni, a city on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, to a safe location after being found living in deplorable conditions as a result of a ‘high-paying job’ scam, local media reported on Wednesday.

These people said they came to Canada to work for a remanufacturing mill of San Group in Port Alberni with a wage of CAD30 (US$22) an hour along with accommodations, as per a job arrangement, according to news site Nanaimo News Now.

However, this turned out to be a job scam.

The men were paid only CAD18 ($13.20) per hour with no overtime pay. They were crammed into a trailer with two dozen other men and had no access to running water.

In order to have better accommodations, they had to pay a monthly rent of CAD350 ($257.2) for a single bedroll in a shared bedroom.

“This is worse than for an animal,” Kim Tran, a local Vietnamese woman who is trying to help these workers, was quoted by Nanaimo News Now as saying. 

The woman stressed that she has never seen people live like this in Vietnam.

“They don’t have anything to drink. They don’t have anything for the human being,” she described the men’s plight.

Some local social service agencies heard about these workers, the news site said.

Michael Ramsay, from the charity Salvation Army, affirmed that his organization is ready to provide food, shelter, clothing, and safety services to people in need like in this case. 

On Saturday last week, Ramsay and the Salvation Army’s ‘Human Trafficking Unit’ arrived in Port Alberni to move these men to safe accommodations. 

San Group’s technical manager Raz Hanif said he knows nothing about how the 16 workers came here, blaming an immigration consultant who had arranged the worker transfer.

“There was another guy, Don, who is the subcontractor, we deal with him, but I don’t know where the main contract is, like how much they get paid and all the stuff,” the news site cited Hanif. 

The man added that there was no deal with these workers about the group’s provision of “accommodation and other stuff like that.” 

After getting the news, Gord Johns, a local Member of Parliament, has alerted Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller and is requesting federal assistance for these workers.

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