Amid high youth unemployment and reduced public support for immigration, Tim Hortons committed last week to hire 10,000 new local workers to support regular staff turnover as well as 80 new restaurant openings this year. It cited an ongoing responsibility to hire locally and said that while it had lobbied for greater access to the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program because of labour shortages following the pandemic, only 4,000 or 3.6 per cent of its team members in Canada are from the TFW program and its restaurant owners' use of the program had declined steadily since 2024.
Tims' announcement comes after significant public blowback for its use of TFWs. Last fall, the Conservative Party of Canada proposed eliminating the TFW program and specifically called out Tims' expanded TFW hiring for contributing to lower wages and youth employment. Even after Tims' latest announcement, many right-wingers remain dissatisfied. In Without Diminishment, Alexander Brown argued Tims' hiring strategy shift is not because it is suddenly interested in hiring Canadians, but because it faces heightened competition from the entry of Dunkin' (formerly Dunkin' Donuts) and, besides, the 10,000 hiring target for local workers would include temporary visa holders such as international students.
An article in Rebel News pointed out that despite the announcement Tims still has openings for TFWs, and called for a boycott. Tim Hortons just doesn't like to hire Canadian citizens, according to the article, although Tims certainly employs far more Canadian citizens than Rebel News does. It's outrageous. With so many people unemployed, with youth unemployment at record levels, and with the summer job becoming a thing of the past, does Tims' strategy seem ethically or morally right to you?
My answer? Yes, Tims' hiring strategies seem perfectly fine to me. Tims has no moral obligation to hire local workers, or to hire foreign workers, or even to hire any workers at all if it could get robots to make the doughnuts and pour the coffee more cheaply than humans.
The fact is, the social responsibility of Tim Hortons is to increase its profits. As Milton Friedman famously wrote, increasing profits is the one and only social responsibility of business so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. Hiring locally or reducing youth unemployment has nothing to do with it.
Reducing youth unemployment is a worthy social goal, but there is no reason to especially burden Tim Hortons with achieving it. Or, more accurately, there is no reason to especially burden Tims' millions of Canadian customers, who would be forced to pay higher prices, Tims' many suppliers, who would see their own business reduced, or Tims' shareholders — which again includes many Canadians. (Rebel News' claim that Tims is owned by a Brazilian hedge fund called 3G Capital is misleading. Tims is headquartered in Canada and owned by Restaurant Brands International, whose brands also include Burger King, Popeye's, and Firehouse Subs. RBI is publicly traded and 3G Funds only accounts for 21.7 per cent of its ownership.)
