Historicizing Precarity: A Labour Geography of ‘Transient’ Migrant Workers in Ontario Tobacco

So-called ‘transient workers’ from Quebec and Atlantic Canada made up a significant proportion of Ontario’s tobacco harvest workforce in the postwar era, though there is no existing research on this migrant population. Based on analysis of an unexamined archive, the article explores the relationship between seasonal transient workers, Ontario tobacco growers, and the federal Canadian government during the 1960s and 1970s. Migrants harnessed strategic forms of mobility or marketplace agency in precarious, unorganized and seasonal tobacco work. Further, the deepening of migrant precarity in Ontario agriculture can in part be traced back to this period of conflict between transients, tobacco growers and different levels of the Canadian government. Migrant precarity did not go uncontested among this population. Managed migration programs, still operational today, reflect the attempt to undermine migrants’ informal mobility agency. Transients travelled to find tobacco jobs with few constraints or pressures other than the compulsion to gain wages, using their relative freedom of mobility strategically, especially in public spaces, to disrupt local micro-hegemonies in tobacco areas. Government programs to manage farm labour migration were unveiled during this period in part to displace transients and solve a widely reported “transient problem” in tobacco.