Paper versus Practice : Occupational Health and Safety Protections and Realities for Temporary Foreign Agricultural Workers in Ontario
Abstract
Over 20,000 temporary foreign agricultural workers come to Ontario each year, primarily from Mexico and the Caribbean. Agricultural workers are exposed to a number of occupational health and safety (OHS) risks. This article discusses the various OHS protections available to workers and their limitations, and analyzes the specific challenges that temporary foreign workers face in accessing rights, such as language and cultural barriers, information gaps, and precarious employment and immigration status. It also analyzes the limitations with respect to OHS training and the provision and use of personal protective equipment, arguing that these protections are under-regulated and inconsistent. The article concludes with recommendations to improve shortcomings, including standardized and specific OHS training, random OHS inspections, and full inclusion of agricultural workers in provincial legislations. Findings are based primarily on interviews with 100 migrant farmworkers who reported injuries or illness, as well as with key stakeholders such as employers and government officials.
... Agricultural work is inherently dangerous, and yet SAWP workers labour under a lesser set of employment rights and protections than Canadian citizens (Dabrowska-Miciula and de Lima 2020; Vosko et al. 2019). As a result, they are vulnerable to several health issues, including occupational injury (Mayell 2024;Mayell and McLaughlin 2016;McLaughlin 2009;McLaughlin and Hennebry 2013;McLaughlin et al. 2014;Mysyk et al. 2008;Narushima et al. 2016). In Canada, SAWP workers have a legal right to health care for the duration of their contracts, but they depend on employers to get the health cards needed to access services, and they experience numerous barriers to independently accessing care (Cole et al. 2019;Hennebry et al. 2016;Pysklywec et al. 2011). ...
A form of indentured labour, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) hires thousands of Jamaican farm workers each year on temporary contracts that bind their employment and immigration status to a single Canadian employer. Hazardous working and living conditions in Canada render SAWP workers vulnerable to poor health outcomes, and injured workers are often repatriated before they can access health care or workers’ compensation. In this context, SAWP workers are typically reluctant to refuse unsafe work, report injuries, or seek health care for fear of losing present or future employment in Canada. This research conceptualizes the SAWP as a necropolitical system of unfree labour wherein Jamaican workers are racialized, dehumanized, and refigured as disposable instruments of labour through mechanisms commensurable with those employed in the plantation slavery system. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Jamaican SAWP workers, this paper focuses on the experiences of workers who are physically injured in Canada and explores the challenges they encounter attempting to recover their health and income. To discuss these experiences, I present what I call the triple violence of injury under the SAWP: (1) the pain and debility caused by physical injury; (2) the structural violence that injury both exposes and makes workers vulnerable to; and (3) the necropolitical legacy of slavery and ongoing dehumanization through which Jamaican workers experience their bodies as racialized and vulnerable. In foregrounding the experiences of Jamaican workers, this study addresses the dearth of research on the experiences of migrant farm workers from the Caribbean.
... This figure indicates that the agricultural sector is more exposed to risks compared to other industries (Ovchinnikova et al., 2016). Therefore, taking measures to keep agricultural workers healthy and protected is extremely important (McLaughlin et al., 2014). In addition to agriculture, work-related fatalities are higher than in other sectors in forestry, fishing and hunting. ...
ABSTRACT:
Agricultural activities are fundamental to societies, including the planting, growing, harvesting
and processing of agricultural crops. However, there are a large number of occupational risks
that can arise during the course of agricultural activities. These risks could result in serious injury
or even death. This requires introducing and providing the relevant bodies and workers with
knowledge, perception and awareness of the risk. The present study assessed the available reports
on occupational health and safety using a bibliometric analysis and dimension reduction
approach. Briefly, the reports were extracted from SCOPUS database. We identified 943 relevant
and available peer-reviewed publications from the Scopus database. These were published
between 1956 and 2022. The retrieved documents were analysed with the R-studio based
software Bibliometrix. For the analysis, co-occurrences of networks, thematic maps and trending
topics were analyzed. The results of the present study show that the time span of the documents
ranges from 1956 to 2022 and these documents, including journals, books, book chapters and
conference papers, were disseminated in 313 different sources. The estimated annual growth rate
of these documents is 6.35%. Even the first paper dates back to the 1950s, the average age of the
documents are 10.7. Considering the spatial distribution of the documents, USA topped at the
list and was followed by Australia, Brazil, Italy, Canada, UK, and China. It is interesting to note
that 'confined spaces' were found to be the trending topic according to the trend topic analysis of
the keywords. Also, after the basic keywords (occupational health and safety and agriculture) of
the study, ergonomics was the core keyword of the relevant analysis. Critically, the level of cooperation between countries was very low, with a rate of 0.025-0.207 for co-operation between
countries (MCPs). For Turkey, the MCP was found to be 0.000. According to the thematic map,
the motor theme is composed of two major clusters. One relates to food safety, risk analysis,
knowledge and awareness and hygiene. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its
kind to identify the key issues in occupational health and safety in the agricultural industry.
Therefore, the study has potential to contribute to the field.
... Surveys conducted in 2011 (Ş imşek, 2012) and 2014 (Uyan Semerci et al., 2014) demonstrated that seasonal agricultural workers work under informal work relations (e.g., without work contracts, low wages, unpaid working hours, long hours of work) without healthy and safe accommodation during working hours (people work in the harvest season mostly between three to six months). They usually have serious difficulties in securing access to clean water and sanitation, healthcare, children's education, and other social services (see McLaughlin et al., 2014 for health and safety protection problems in Canada). They work under severe climate conditions (extreme temperatures) and are exposed to hazardous chemicals and pesticides. ...
The sense of feeling at home by people ‘on the move’ was inquired through an adaptation of the homemaking approach. Two groups of people who make their living by working in agricultural sites (internally mobile seasonal agricultural workers and internationally displaced migrant workers) were reached out to examine associations between feeling at home, social interactions, perceived degradation, and subjective well-being. Results showed that both worker groups (seasonal and displaced workers) felt at home despite precarious working and living conditions. Expectedly, feeling at home was predicted significantly by social interactions with others; however, the type of interactions also determined the direction of the effects. While within-group interaction (binding ties) predicted feeling at home positively, across-groups interaction (bridging ties) predicted it negatively for both groups. Additionally, perceived degradation and subjective well-being moderated the effect of feeling at home partially: the effect emerged for a cross-groups but not for within-group interactions. In conclusion, the notion of binding and bridging ties could help to attain an increased explanatory power rather than contact theory alone in understanding the patterns of feeling at home.
Research has long-documented how Canada's temporary foreign worker programs (TFWP) foster workers' precarity through their status as non-citizens and living and working conditions, ultimately, impacting their health. While studies point to limited supports and services for workers, their role in reinforcing or alleviating the precarious conditions that migrant agricultural workers experience remains largely unexplored. This paper draws on interviews with 35 service providers in three migrant-intensive regions in southwestern Ontario, to explore how service providers describe and construct support. We explore the barriers workers face in accessing services, challenges providers experience in supporting workers, and strategies employed to surmount these barriers. We argue that this multiregional analysis is important to illuminate how support shapes and is shaped by the larger structural context, namely common features of Canada's TFWP. A more comprehensive understanding of support moreover, provides direction for sustainable interventions that can promote the health and wellbeing of this population.
For more than fifty years, Jamaican farm workers have been seasonally employed in Canada under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). In Canada, these workers live and work in conditions that make them vulnerable to various health issues, including poor mental health. This ethnographic study investigated Jamaican SAWP workers' mental health experiences in Southern Ontario. Several common factors that engender psychological distress among Jamaican workers, ranging from mild to extreme suffering, were uncovered and organised into five themes: (1) family, (2) work environments and SAWP relations, (3) living conditions and isolation, (4) racism and social exclusion, and (5) illness and injury. I found that Jamaican workers predominantly use the term 'stress' to articulate distress, and they associate experiences of suffering with historic plantation slavery. Analysis of workers' stress discourses revealed their experiences of psychological distress are structured by the conditions of the SAWP and their social marginalisation in Ontario. This article presents and discusses these findings in the context of SAWP power dynamics and concludes with policy recommendations aimed at improving the mental health of all SAWP workers. In foregrounding the experiences of Jamaican workers, this study addresses the dearth of research on the health and wellbeing of Caribbean SAWP workers.
Canada’s national migration regimes, which are witnessing an increase in temporary foreign workers, underscore the contentious nature of inclusion for migrant farmworkers in smaller communities. While migrant farmworkers are entitled to benefits, their access to services and social support is limited. Even though settlement initiatives that welcome and support immigrant newcomers have shifted and intensified toward smaller towns and communities across Canada, support initiatives and the benefits for which temporary migrant farmworkers qualify have received far less attention and resources. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic not only highlighted the importance of migrant farmworkers to agricultural industries in Canada, given their designation as “essential” workers, but also catalyzed a significant shift in how communities can support workers. This paper focuses on a migrant-intensive region in southwestern Ontario. It utilizes a qualitative constructivist approach to interviews with 30 migrant farmworkers and 32 service providers to examine the support and services available to workers. Employing the conceptual framework of differential inclusion, this study analyzes the nature of support and highlights how temporary migrant farmworkers are embedded in relations of inclusion and exclusion. This study also explores the potential and capacity of community-based support initiatives to foster inclusion for workers in migrant-intensive communities and the emergence of a support framework during COVID-19. Given the rise in the migrant population in smaller cities and rural communities across Canada, this study aims to address the limited scholarship on the support landscape for migrant farmworkers in these regions.
p>The production of fruit, vegetables, and other horticultural crops in Canada relies upon the embodied labour of migrant agricultural workers who plant, prune, and harvest these crops. Using a feminist geopolitical lens, I foreground the bodies of these workers as these bodies are situated at the intersection of everyday lived experiences and systems of capitalist production through, in this case, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Drawing on workers’ experiences of their bodies in the context of the regulatory provisions of the SAWP, I highlight the contradictory disembodiment of agricultural workers at the same time that their bodies are necessary to provide the physical labour at the heart of fruit and vegetable production. The disembodiment of these workers is possible because of their status as racialized non-citizens: while Canadians can insist upon the recognition of their bodies, migrant agricultural workers cannot. The disjuncture between embodied labour and embodied subjectivities was exacerbated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected on migrant agricultural workers – through their bodies – while in Canada. Given the relative safety afforded to those who held citizenship (and other permanent) status in Canada, I argue that the active disembodiment of migrant agricultural workers in Canada demonstrates the ways that embodiment is a privilege that is tightly bound to citizenship.</p
This focused critical ethnography aimed to deepen our understanding of the impact of participating in a temporary, cyclical, low-wage migration program on the mental and emotional health (MEH) of Mexican women and their non-migrating family members. Except for global care chains research, the field of migrant mental health has paid limited attention to the importance of transnational family dynamics and the MEH of relatives beyond the workers' children. The current study broadens this framework to examine how family-level changes brought about by migration affect the MEH not only the migrant and her children, but also extended family members. Participants included five women employed in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and an average of five non-migrating members of their families in Mexico. The study combined four data generation methods: participant observation, 'emojional' calendars, semi-structured interviews, and sociodemographic questionnaires. Study participants' MEH was significantly influenced by gendered selection processes and the cyclical pattern of migration. Similar impacts were observed within and across four groups of participants (workers, their children, the children's caregivers, and extended family members) during their periods apart and together. There were significant effects of their relative's migration on the MEH of extended family members, a population group commonly overlooked in the literature. Findings from this study suggest that public health research, programs, and policies using a transnational approach are best suited to effectively address the impacts of migration on the MEH of migrants and their non-migrating families.
While there are positive effects of growing food closer to home and a preference for local produce, there are also negative health implications for migrant workers, including long-term agriculture-related ill health and occupational injuries. Within this chapter, Ewa Dabrowska-Miciula explores the gaps in agricultural safety and immigration policies that have been unevenly addressed across Canada. This research adopts a multi-method approach, incorporating primary and secondary data. Critical analysis of the experience of transnational Latina migrant workers in Canada presented in this chapter infers a Canadian food policy that seeks to achieve sustainable food systems should include a focus on protecting the health and safety of the people who do the work—the human capital of those transnational agricultural workers from the rural ‘global south’.
Migrant workers from the Philippines are ubiquitous to global capitalism, with nearly 10 percent of the population employed in almost two hundred countries. In a visit to the United States in 2003, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo even referred to herself as not only the head of state but also “the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of eight million Filipinos who live and work abroad.” The book investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what it calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Filipino men and women fill a range of jobs around the globe, including domestic work, construction, and engineering, and they have even worked in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. At the same time, the state redefines nationalism to normalize its citizens to migration while fostering their ties to the Philippines. Those who leave the country to work and send their wages to their families at home are treated as new national heroes. Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, the book presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.
Contemporary processes of globalization have had significant implica-tions for food systems around the world. The adoption of neo-liberal policies on a global scale, changing systems of governance in supply chains, and the develop-ment of new technologies have transformed how food is produced and consumed. Although the implications of these changes for the labour sustaining agri-food systems have received scant attention in the literature, research suggests they are profound. In this article, I seek to further our knowledge of how these processes are unfolding in a high income country context through a focus on Canada, ex-amining in particular how changes to immigration policy have rendered work in Northern agri-food industries more precarious. In so doing, I seek to contribute to theoretical debates on the role of the state in regulating work-place regimes and managing capitalist accumulation in agriculture.
NAFTA is part of the evolving entrenchment in globalization and the consolida- tion of the post-Fordist/postmodern era. Globalization is not a new phenomenon, but its intensification since the 70s in the form of industrial restructuring and trade liberalization has created a new set of economic and social conditions that have far reaching impacts for countries around the world. Moody (1995) suggests that the deindustrialization in the Canada-US rust belt gave rise to the "shanty industrialization" in Mexico; formerly well-paid, often unionized workers in the north are replaced or displaced by a growing body of "contingent workers" both at home and in partner countries. A central feature of globalization in the current era is the increased mobility of capital aided by both formal and informal free trade agreements (NAFTA, APEC, EU; ASEAN) and policies of moderniza- tion/development. This increased mobility of capital is driven by and in turn supports a drive towards increased flexibility of production systems (Drache and Gertler 1991) and flexible workforce deployment (Moody 1995) within and across territorial boundaries. In the discussion of the increasing flexibilization of labour in Canada, the primary focus is on the changing work conditions and employment patterns for Canadian workers. NAFTA is said to be the cause of the permanent loss of "hundreds of thousands well-paying, skilled" jobs in Canada as the jobs crossed the line "in droves into low-wage southern states or to the maquiladoras in Mex- ico" (Darcy 1992:x). Canadian workers come under the pressure to accept lower wages and inferior social programmes, while the Mexican workers will remain exploited by multinational capital (Darcy 1992). Many workers, especially women, become an "on-call, part-time labour force" (Bourque 1992:160) like the supermarket cashiers in Deborah Barndt's study (1998). Bourque (1992) suggests
