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Contrary to conceptions of the rural workforce as inherently conservative, tobacco workers and small farmers in Depression-era Ontario frequently organized to protest their socioeconomic conditions and to demand a fairer deal from employers and tobacco companies. Led by Hungarian immigrants, but with significant involvement from other groups, working people in the Tobacco Belt built an "infrastructure of dissent," a constellation of formal organizations and informal networks that allowed for the development of radical ideas and provided a platform from which to launch oppositional efforts, both coordinated and spontaneous. Two key moments of 1930s protest are focused on in this article. In 1937, a dramatic growers' movement saw over 1,000 small farmers, with the support of workers, band together to demand higher prices from the tobacco companies for their crops. In 1939, the local forces of working-class opposition were joined by a massive influx of job-seeking "transients," who brought with them the politics of the Depression-era unemployed, establishing the conditions for what would become the greatest moment of tobacco worker resistance in the decade. In both campaigns, efforts were made to unite workers and small growers, but the evidence suggests that growers benefitted more from these collaborations than did workers.
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This article explores the role of race in structuring the movement of seasonal tobacco workers from the Southern United States to Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. Over this period, tens of thousands of southern migrant workers of varying skill levels travelled to Ontario to take up jobs in all aspects of tobacco production. Participation in the movement was limited exclusively to white workers until 1966, when it was integrated at the behest of American officials fearful of contravening the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Methodologically, the article follows Michel-Rolph Trouillot and is an exercise in uncovering silences in the archive, as civil servants in both countries and employer representatives in Ontario were extremely hesitant about mentioning the movement’s racial character on record. Beyond methodology, the findings presented here contribute to a deeper understanding of the uneven nature of the “deracialization” of Canada’s immigration policies in the 1960s and to charting more of Canada’s role in the construction and maintenance of transnational systems of white supremacy.
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This dissertation explores the transformations in tobacco farm labour in Ontario from approximately 1925 to 1990, advancing a significant reinterpretation of the histories of agricultural labour and guestworker programs in Canada. Contrary to portrayals of Canadian agriculture as permanently plagued by labour shortage, this case study demonstrates the heterogeneity of the sector, which included not only labour-starved growers but also farmers like those in tobacco whose high profits enabled them to attract a diverse range of harvest workers each year. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, Ontario’s tobacco sector, located primarily in Norfolk County and the surrounding areas, was the premier destination for seasonal farmworkers in Canada. In the sector’s early decades, tobacco workers enjoyed significant freedom of movement, unusual opportunities for social mobility, and a vibrant culture of worker organization and resistance. However, the opportunities in Ontario tobacco were never equally available to all prospective workers, and incorporation into the sector was always marked by patterns of inclusion and exclusion. For those workers who could gain access to the tobacco labour market, the benefits of working in tobacco steadily declined over the 20th century. By the 1980s, the sector no longer offered opportunities for social mobility and the possibilities of worker organization were greatly constrained. Guestworkers from the Caribbean and Mexico found their labour and geographic mobility much more tightly restricted than any previous or contemporary groups of tobacco workers. These transformations were complex and the result of many contingent factors (in both Canada and migrant-sending countries), including: political economic trends; ideologies of race and gender; the actions of employers, local communities, and workers themselves; and the efforts of multiple levels of the state to exert greater control over tobacco farm labour. The thesis pays particular attention to the transnational dynamics of labour migration systems, guestworker program structures, and worker resistance. By historicizing farm labour in a single crop and single region over approximately seven decades, the dissertation demonstrates that farm labour is not by definition a station of poverty and extreme exploitation, but instead is made so by historical processes.
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