Transnational Employment Strain in a Global Health Pandemic

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Leah F. Vosko, Tanya Basok, Cynthia Spring

   Pages 1-23

3. Rethinking Employment Strain Through a Transnational Lens: Centring Migrant Workers’ Lives

   • Leah F. Vosko, Tanya Basok, Cynthia Spring

   Pages 25-47

4. Transnational Employment Strain: A Longstanding Feature of Migrant Farm Work

   • Leah F. Vosko, Tanya Basok, Cynthia Spring

   Pages 49-77

5. Transnational Employment Strain in Pandemic Times: Magnified Strains and Insufficient Resources

   • Leah F. Vosko, Tanya Basok, Cynthia Spring

   Pages 79-109

6. Mitigating Transnational Employment Strain Among Migrant Farmworkers: Principles and Practical Strategies

   • Leah F. Vosko, Tanya Basok, Cynthia Spring

   Pages 111-134

7. Back Matter

   Pages 135-157

   PDF

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen/permanent resident workers in receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada, it also underscored that many workers in occupations and sectors deemed “essential” enough to be exempt from stay-at-home orders and other public safety measures are migrants, a sizeable number of whom sustain Canada’s food supply through their work in its agricultural industry.

This book explores the dynamics behind the pandemic’s deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers, highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy, society, and the world of work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrants without legal status employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational employment strain, the authors derive insight from the employment strain model, a framework for understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers, and expand it to account for migrants’ relationships across transnational space.

• guestworker
• migrant labor
• COVID-19
• SDG 10
• UN global goals
• transnational employment strain
• migrant farmworkers
• Canada
• migration studies

“Combining ethnographic research with comprehensive policy analysis, Vosko, Basok, and Spring reveal the systematic violence that migrant workers endure in the provinces’ greenhouses, fields, and associated work sites and labor camps. Refusing to restrict themselves to simplistic economic explanations, they illuminate the complex, dynamic relationships among workers’ experiences, the failures of provincial and home governments, and the probability that working conditions will worsen with increased privatization of foreign worker programs.” (David Griffith, Professor, East Carolina University, USA, and author of The Cultural Value of Work: Livelihoods and Migration in the World’s Economies (2022))

“In this concise and original book, Vosko, Basok, and Spring offer a rich analysis of the first-hand experiences of migrant farmworkers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada – and, convincingly, make the direct link between these experiences of hardship and the structural vulnerabilities that existed pre-COVID. This book is an important contribution to the labour migration scholarship.”(Adam Perry, Assistant Professor, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada)

“This book adopts a multiple method approach to highlight the insufficiency of policy interventions in producing meaningful protections for essential migrant farmworkers. While employment demands increased for them, employment resources remained limited and their employment strains increased. The authors also discuss several important policy interventions that could ameliorate the farmworkers situation. This book offers a novel vision interesting for further discussions and research.” (Gustavo Verduzco Igartúa, Professor-Researcher, El Colegio de México)

• York University, Toronto, Canada

  Leah F. Vosko, Cynthia Spring

• University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada

  Tanya Basok

Leah F. Vosko is Professor of Political Science and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at York University, Canada.

Tanya Basok is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Windsor, Canada.

Cynthia Spring is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Canada.