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  • Abstract Temporary visa workers are increasingly taking on a heightened profile in Canada, entering the workforce each year in greater numbers than immigrant workers with labor mobility rights (Sharma 2006). This paper examines the incorporation of foreign workers in Canadian horticulture under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). I argue that foreign labor supplied under the SAWP secures a flexible workforce for employers and thus improves Canada's trade competitiveness in the global agrifood market. Using multiple research strategies, I track the evolution of Canadian horticulture in the global market and the transformation of labor in this industry. I outline the steady growth in the employment of temporary visa workers in the horticultural industry and show how they have become the preferred and, in some cases, core workforce for horticulture operations. The benefits of SAWP workers to employers include the provision of a workforce with limited rights relative to domestic workers and considerable administrative support in selecting, dispatching, and disciplining workers provided at no cost by labor supply countries. I conclude that the SAWP is a noteworthy example of the role of immigration policy in regulating the labor markets of high-income economies and thus ensuring the position of labor-receiving states within the global political economy.

  • This chapter focuses on women employed in labour-intensive agriculture in the global North, specifically women from rural Mexico who take up waged work as migrant workers in Canadian agriculture. It uses the term 'migrant worker' to refer to people employed in Canada under temporary visas who do not hold Canadian citizenship or permanent residency. Global restructuring of agrifood markets has resulted in rising levels of female employment in high value agriculture in the global South. Women tend to form a smaller percentage of the permanent workforce employed in commercial agriculture, often constituting the majority of the temporary, seasonal, and casual workforce that provides the greater portion of labour. The chapter shows the systems of labour control and forms of work organization made possible through these programs rely on multiple, reinforcing and contextual systems of oppression, particularly the power relations based on gender, race, and class, among others. --Introduction Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations in which global processes that reconstitute gender and class interconnect with and take shape in a particular form of locality - the rural. The book is innovative in that it: - responds to calls for more critical work on the rural 'other' - contributes to scholarship on gender and rurality, but does so through the lens of class. This book places the question of gender, rurality and difference at its centre through its focus on class - addresses the urban bias of much class scholarship as well as the lack of gender analysis in much rural and class academic work - focuses on the ways that class mediates the construction and practices of rural men/masculinities and rural women/femininities - challenges prevalent (and divergent) assumptions with chapters utilising contemporary theorisations of class With the empirical strongly grounded in theory, this book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.

Last update from database: 9/26/24, 4:12 AM (UTC)