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  • The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is a transnational labour agreement between Canada, Mexico, and various Caribbean countries that brings thousands of Jamaican migrant workers to Canada each year to work on farms. This thesis explores Jamaican SAWP workers’ experiences of stress in Ontario, and situates these experiences within a system of power and international inequality. When describing their experiences of stress and suffering in Ontario, many Jamaican workers drew analogies between historic and modern slavery under the SAWP. However, stress discourses also inspired workers to emphasise their resilience, and many workers gave equal attention to explaining their inherent strength as “Jamaicans”, which they associate with national independence and the history of slavery. In this way, I suggest stress discourses are sites of flexibility and resilience for Jamaican workers, and this thesis presents the foremost cultural, political, and historical factors that support Jamaican workers’ resilience in Ontario. Moreover, the predominant coping strategies workers employ in Ontario will be explored within the context of their restricted agency under the SAWP. This thesis concludes with a discussion of stress as an expression of subjectivity that is characterised by strength, faith, and the history of slavery.

  • 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.

Last update from database: 10/18/24, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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