Your search

Temporary migrant work is a central feature of labour markets in many host states, and an increasing cause of concern for its potential impacts on workers’ rights and protections. In Canada, as elsewhere, policymakers utilise it as a regulatory device to lower labour standards. In this context, workers labouring transnationally are turning to unions for assistance. Yet they are confronting obstacles to securing access to their labour rights through representation. This article analyses one example involving a group of temporary migrant agricultural workers engaged seasonally on a British Columbian (BC) farm under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) seeking union representation. It considers the question, confronting courts and tribunals in host states across the OECD, of meaningful access to collective bargaining for temporary migrant workers. Focussing on how the BC Labour Relations Board determines an appropriate bargaining unit, the inquiry demonstrates that temporary migrant workers are ill-served by mechanisms aimed at promoting collective bargaining. Although the union involved in the case secured a certification, the outcome was tenuous unionisation. The resulting collective agreement contained provisions augmenting workers’ job security by facilitating their circular movement between the sending and host state. However, the structure of the SAWP, which reinforces workers’ deportability, together with the limits of the prevailing regime of collective bargaining in BC, modelled on the US Wagner Act, contributed to a certification that was weakly institutionalised and underscored labour law’s subsidiarity to legal frameworks governing work across borders.

The Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in thirty-three countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, twenty-seven European Union (EU) member countries and three non-European Union member countries. ...The introduction provides basic information on the CPD’s conceptual approach to precarious employment in a comparative perspective, an explanation of CPD methodology, and an outline of the design principles behind the creation of harmonized variables used in the statistical tables. These principles are further developed and demonstrated in three interactive modules: forms of precarious employment, temporal and spatial dynamics, and health and social care. --Website description

Employment standards (ES) are legislated standards that set minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. In Canada, the majority of workers rely on ES for basic regulatory protection; however, a significant ‘enforcement gap’ exists. In the province of Ontario, this enforcement gap has been exacerbated in recent years due to the deregulation of ES through inadequate funding, workplace restructuring, legislative reforms that place greater emphasis on individualized complaints processes and voluntary compliance, and a formal separation of unions from ES enforcement. The implications of these developments are that, increasingly, those in precarious jobs, many of whom lack union representation, are left with insufficient regulatory protection from employer non-compliance, further heightening their insecurity. Taking the province of Ontario as our focus, in this article we critically examine alternative proposals for ES enforcement, placing our attention on those that enhance the involvement of unions in addressing ES violations. Through this analysis, we suggest that augmenting unions’ supportive roles in ES enforcement holds the potential to enhance unions’ regulatory function and offers a possible means to support the ongoing efforts of other workers’ organizations to improve employer compliance with ES.

[E]xplores the complex ways in which temporariness is being institutionalized as a condition of life for a growing number of people worldwide. The collection emphasizes contemporary developments, but also provides historical context on nation-state membership as the fundamental means for accessing rights in an era of expanding temporariness - in recognition of why pathways to permanence remain so compelling. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, contributors explore various dimensions of temporariness, especially as it relates to the legal status of migrants and refugees, to the spread of precarious employment, and to limitations on social rights. While the focus is on Canada, a number of chapters investigate and contrast developments in Canada with those in Europe as well as Australia and the United States. Together, these essays reveal changing and enduring temporariness at local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels, and in different domains, such as health care, language programs, and security. The question at the heart of this collection is whether temporariness can be liberated from current constraints. While not denying the desirability of permanence for migrants and labourers, "Liberating Temporariness?" presents alternative possibilities of security and liberation. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction: Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion  / Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Melisa Bretón. Part 1: Security, Temporary Status, and Rights. Rethinking Canadian Citizenship: The Politics of Social Exclusion in the Age of Security and Suppression / Yasmeen Abu-Laban -- Permanent Patriots and Temporary Predators? Post-9/11 Institutionalization of the Arab/Orientalized “Other” in the United States and the Contributions of Arendt and Said / Abigail B. Bakan -- Indefinitely Pending: Security Certificates and Permanent Temporariness / Mike Larsen. Part 2: International Organizations and Transnational Dynamics of Temporary Work. Managed Migration and the Temporary Labour Fix / Christina Gabriel -- Institutionalizing Temporary Labour Migration in Europe: Creating an “In-between”’ Migration Status / Tesseltje de Lange and Sarah van Walsu -- The Permanence of Temporary Labour Mobility: Migrant Worker Programs across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand / Emily Gilbert. Part 3: Temporary Status, Social Welfare, and Marginalization. Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour? Conceptualizing Temporariness in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service / Parvati Raghuram -- Language Training and Labour Market Integration for Newcomers to Canada / Eve Haque -- Resituating Temporariness as the Precarity and Conditionality of Non-citizenship / Luin Goldring -- Constructing and “Liberating” Temporariness in the Canadian Non-profit Sector: Neoliberalism and Non-profit Service Providers / John Shields. Part 4: (Re)Framing Temporariness. Mexican Migrant Transnationalism and Imaginaries of Temporary/Permanent Belonging / Marianne H. Marchand -- Temporariness: Other than Permanence, and in the Lives of People - Always… / Deepa Rajkumar -- Temporal Orders, Re-collective Justice, and the Making of Untimely States / Robert Latham.