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The relationship between differential inclusion of workers migrating for employment internationally and the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous people and lands is a growing area of study within critical migration studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to how (im)migration policies that foster migrant worker precariousness also extend settler colonial practices. Scholars situated in the transdisciplinary fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies have long theorized nation-state building as exclusionary to Black and Indigenous life, and reliant on limited mobilities and dispossession of Black and Indigenous peoples. Bridging this scholarship with critical migration studies, in this article we explore how policies regulating international migration for employment to Canada on temporary bases reflect and sustain the settler-colonial context in which they operate. We outline three logics of settler colonialism that underpin policies governing temporary migration for employment to Canada: (1) the racialized hierarchization of life and knowledge; (2) the reliance on technologies of governing, which foster unequal administrative burdens; and (3) the disruption of people’s relationships to land and livelihoods. Analyzing Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy, we illustrate how migration policies reinforce and replicate settler colonial practices.
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This article examines the history of, and legal precedent set by, Four B Manufacturing v. United Garment Workers of America, a 1980 Supreme Court of Canada case involving an Indigenous-owned manufacturing firm that resisted the efforts of its Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers to form a union on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a reserve in southeastern Ontario. The employer, Four B, contested the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and argued, unsuccessfully, that as an "Indian enterprise," its own operations were a matter of federal jurisdiction. We return to the case of Four B for three interrelated reasons. First, we argue that Four B remains relevant because of the ways that the political economy of settler-colonial Canada continues to structure Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment as ongoing sites of tension. Second, as the inaugural case dealing with the "core of Indianness" – a contested legal concept used by the courts to determine federal jurisdiction over Indigenous labour – this case both set the legal precedent and shaped the subsequent political terrain of Indigenous labour relations. Third, the issues addressed in Four B contextualize recent jurisdictional struggles over Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment in what we term the "Indigenous public sector" – namely, health care, social services, and First Nations government administration. The article reviews the case history of Four B, setting this against the backdrop of deindustrialization in southeastern Ontario during the period, before tracing how the case influenced the juridical and political landscape of Indigenous labour relations. We close by considering the potential tensions between Indigenous self-determination and the exercise of collective bargaining rights by Indigenous workers.