Labora photo
Labora co-founder Rene Blanco (in red) outlining the program to seasonal workers at Cedar Rim Nursery in Langley.
The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has solved a lot of labour woes for farmers in Canada … but inadvertently created a financial headache for the foreign workers themselves.
For participants in SAWP, the traditional remittance program is time-consuming, expensive, and complicated. Sending money back to family in Mexico or the Caribbean, or even just sending funds to the worker’s bank, could turn into a bureaucratic nightmare.
That’s where BC startup company Labora comes in.
Labora was founded in 2018 with a very simple mission: to simplify the task of paying seasonal workers, and getting their money back to their own banks in their own country.
The system is good both for the workers and the farmers, saving them time and money. Labora says it enhances the Canadian agriculture ecosystem by helping farm owners securely and easily pay their agricultural workers, while they benefit from the streamlined money transfer process from Canada back home.
Further simplifying the administrative process, Labora assists workers by filing their tax returns and provides online services to farm owners and workers to keep their information up to date at no cost.
If it seems like a small problem, consider what workers and their families have to go through just to receive the worker’s pay.
First, the farmer gives the worker a cheque, which the worker cashes at a Canadian bank. Then, the worker has to take the money to a money transfer company and pay for that transfer. With the money finally in the worker’s country, the beneficiary then has to travel to the money transfer institute for pickup, and only then can the money be deposited by going to the worker’s bank.
For worker’s without family back home, the problem is even worse.
Labora was born when Rene Blanco and Jaspal Brar looked at the problem, and realized they could streamline the
process into a single, simple step.
“The idea was to provide payroll transfer on behalf of seasonal workers, because so far, the current process has been done the same way for 50 years,” Blanco says.
Blanco is a Mexican citizen who fully understood the issues of banking and money transfers between Canada and Mexico, so he and Brar began working on the problem while they were MBA students at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. They later partnered with fellow student Ryan Klatt in 2018, and together they founded Labora Consulting Services.
Blanco says the mission is to create an easier, safer way to handle money for foreign workers, while simplifying paperwork for the farmer.
“Sometimes workers are limited to sending $1,000, so if they want to send more of their paycheque, they have to use a third [party] to collect their money in Mexico,” Blanco explains. With their system, the partners say, the farmer simply transfers the wages to Labora, and Labora directly deposits the money into the beneficiary’s bank account.
It’s easy, safe, and less expensive, but Labora does far more than just transfer money. In addition to letting a farmer transfer wages directly to the worker’s bank abroad, Labora also simplifies the paperwork for both parties.
Labora’s online platform offers access to T4s, tax returns, Canada Pension Plan contributions and records of employment. “Then also, we are helping them with the tax return submission,” Blanco says. “The idea is to provide full financial services to the workers.”
The issue is particularly difficult for workers under SAWP, because they are not living in Canada throughout the year, and they may work for more than one farm in a given season.
Given that temporary workers often return home each year after six or eight months, Labora helps them and their employers keep track of important information.
“All of that is stored when they log in, and it’s accessible by not only the farmers but even the actual employees,” says Brar, a BC-raised Canadian whose family previously owned and operated a farm.
“They sound pretty basic when they’re just on their own, but when you combine them all together, there really isn’t anyone in Canada that we are aware of, or even in the U.S., that’s managing those needs,” Brar adds. “That’s where our niche is slowly developing.”
In Canada alone there are 50,000 to 60,000 seasonal farm workers in Canada, of which half are in Ontario and the rest spread out mainly through BC, Alberta and Quebec. Labora charges 1.5 per cent of the total funds being transferred back home, but that’s less than a third of the five per cent charged under the traditional remittance process in Canada.
The company currently works mainly with workers in Mexico and the Caribbean, but the business is one that could be expanded into the US and beyond.
The idea is also being warmly received by business experts. In 2019 the Labora founders were awarded the Idea Prize at the Coast Capital Savings Venture Prize competition, represented Vancouver at the Startup World Championships in Montreal, and the company was a finalist in the Telus Pitch competition. In 2020 Labora won SFU Alumini’s Founder Award, and was named in the Emerging Rocket Agri-Food List by Ready to Rocket, a a business recognition program for British Columbia's tech sector that “showcases the Revenue Growth Leaders of Tomorrow.”
Labora now has seven team members in Canada and four in Mexico, where they have launched the business, but the founders are already looking at major expansion across Canada and into the US. The company is also looking at broadening their activities beyond the farm by serving temporary foreign workers of all kinds, who number more than 600,000 in Canada alone, and many times that number in the US.
For more information about Labora and how it can help your farming operation, go to labora.ca and email them at rene@labora.ca or phone (236) 868-5465.
