Your search
Results 4 resources
-
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 has intensified its reliance on temporary foreign workers, including migrant agricultural workers (MAWs) who have contributed to its agriculture sector, rural economies, and food security for decades. These workers live and work in rural communities across Canada for up to two years. Thousands of MAWs engage in recurring cyclical migration, often returning to the same rural communities in Canada for decades, while others are undocumented. Yet MAWs do not have access to the supports and services provided for immigrant newcomers and pathways for permanent residence. The exclusion of these workers from such entitlements, including labour mobility, reinforces their precarity, inhibits their sense of belonging, and reflects the stratification built into Canada’s migration regime. This article draws on interviews with 98 MAWs in three migrant‐intensive regions in southwestern Ontario to examine how workers construct and describe support in relation to co‐workers, employers, residents, and community organizations. Drawing on conceptualizations of support as an important vehicle for social connection and inclusion that comprises social and citizenship belonging, we document how the strategies MAWs employ to forge connections are enabled or undermined by Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, community dynamics, and the broader forces of racialization, gender, and exclusion. This article contributes to the limited scholarship on the support landscape for MAWs, whose experiences foreground the contested nature of belonging and inclusion among migrant populations across smaller cities and rural areas.
-
Migrant agricultural workers employed through Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program face serious occupational health and safety hazards, with compounded difficulties in accessing workers’ compensation (WC) if they are sick or injured by the job. Little is known, however, about their ability to return to work (RTW) upon recovery—a fundamental right included in the conception of WC, but complicated by their restrictive work permits and precarious immigration status. Based on interviews with injured migrant workers in two Canadian provinces (Quebec and Ontario), our research suggests that workers’ RTW process is anything but straightforward. This article highlights three key issues—pressure to return to work prematurely, communication and bureaucratic challenges with WC agencies, and impacts of injury/illness and failure to return to work on workers’ long-term well-being. Consequences and opportunities for reform are discussed.
-
Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that the article co-authors presented during the annual Contract negotiations between Canada and sending states in 2020. The article then explains why these recommendations were not accepted, situating the negotiation process within the structural context that produces migrant workers' vulnerability, on the one hand, and limits the capacity of representatives of sending and receiving states to expand rights and offer stronger protections to migrant farmworkers, on the other hand. We argue that fundamental changes are required to address the vulnerability of migrant agricultural workers. In the absence of structural changes, it is nevertheless important to seek improvements in the regulation of the programme through any means possible, including strengthening the Contract.
Explore
Resource type
- Journal Article (4)