Abstract
In this chapter, we utilize the transnational employment strain model, outlined in Chapter 2, to examine working and living conditions of migrant farmworkers in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, before the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that well-prior to the pandemic migrant farmworkers faced employment demands such as occupational health hazards, including workplace harassment, and workplace pressure to increase productivity and extend their working hours. Separated from their households and communities across transnational space, migrant farmworkers have long been placed in employer-provided housing, often located on farm or adjacent to the worksite and shared with their co-workers. Under these circumstances, housing can be regarded as an extension of worksite, and housing conditions, particularly the overcrowding and substandard conditions, constitute another employment strain. Furthermore, tensions between co-workers flowing from this cohabitation increase employment demands for these migrants. At the same time, we illustrate that the employment resources available to migrant farmworkers to buffer employment demands, such as control over the working environment, broadly conceived, fair remuneration, and employers’ expressions of appreciation, are extremely limited. Finally, government initiatives to address migrant farmworkers’ employment demands in the 2000s and 2010s have a limited impact in light of migrants’ precarious residency status and transnational lives.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the union coverage rate in 2020 in the agricultural industry was 3.3%, such that approximately 4200 agricultural workers were unionized that year (Statistics Canada, 2021).
- 2.
While the AEPA requires that employers give employees’ association “reasonable opportunity” to make representations respecting the terms and conditions of employment (Agricultural Employees Protection Act 2002, s.5[1]) and listen or read employees’ associations’ representations (s. 5[6]), the Agricultural Food and Rural Affairs Appeal Tribunal (AFAART) affirmed in 2018 that “collective bargaining does not apply under the AEPA” (United Food and Commercial Workers International Union v MedReleaf Corp. 2018, para. 13). In phase two of the former case, in which AFAART heard the United Food and Commercial Workers Association’s complaint that AEPA (particularly Section 5, which outlines processes of representation) violates agricultural workers’ associational rights guaranteed under Section 2(d) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the AFAART found that Sections 2(1) and 5 of the AEPA do not violate the agricultural workers’ associational rights protected by the Constitution. See UFCW v MedReleaf Phase 2 2020, para. 6.
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Vosko, L.F., Basok, T., Spring, C. (2023). Transnational Employment Strain: A Longstanding Feature of Migrant Farm Work. In: Transnational Employment Strain in a Global Health Pandemic. Politics of Citizenship and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17704-0_3
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