EDMONTON — Joe Delena left a good job as a chef in Dubai for the promise of work, and a new life, in Edmonton.

What he got was an employer who treated him “like a slave.” When he worked overtime, he didn’t get paid extra. Some weeks, he was only given 25 hours of work instead of the agreed-upon 40, but he was afraid to complain for fear he’d be sent back to the Philippines.

At a rally outside city hall Saturday, Delena was among a group of about 80 people who gathered to draw attention to the plight of temporary foreign workers, often unskilled labourers with few rights and little recourse because they are so tied to their local employers.

During the boom years, the number of temporary foreign workers in Alberta more than doubled, from about 22,000 in 2006 to more than 57,000 at the end of 2008.

But as the economy has cooled, the federal government has been allowing fewer foreign workers into the country and has made it difficult to renew the permits of those who are already here, leaving the workers without jobs and fewer prospects, says Yessy Byl, a local lawyer and advocate for temporary foreign workers.

“The government brought those foreign workers here, used them, and is giving them absolutely no consideration now, none,” says Byl. “We really are abandoning people.”

Delena eventually left his first employer and found work with another catering company in Edmonton. But, unhappy with his treatment there, he left and is now unable to find another employer who can hire him legally because of the federal changes. His current work permit expires next September.

MP Linda Duncan, who spoke at Saturday’s rally, says in recent years, the federal government has been bringing in more people through the temporary foreign workers program than through traditional immigration channels that gave people far more rights, along with the chance to eventually become citizens. “Where’s the government representing the interests of these workers and enforcing the law?” she asks.

Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour says the temporary foreign worker program had become “a massive tool for bringing in unskilled workers to work for wages that no Canadian would accept.”

“Now that the economy has slowed, the Tories have turned off the tap and are leaving these workers high and dry.”

Many temporary foreign workers come from the Philippines, Mexico and Central America, often to work in the service industry. People who work as nannies arrive under a separate government program.

Clarizze Truscott, an organizer of the rally who immigrated from the Philippines 17 years ago, says the temporary foreign worker program creates “second-class citizens” who are completely dependent on the goodwill of their individual employers.