This article is by migrant advocate Chris Ramsaroop
My foray into migrant worker organization was accidental. Migrant farm laborers from Mexico staged a wildcat strike in Leamington, Ontario, approximately 300 kilometers southwest of Toronto, in 2001. They were protesting a variety of working and living conditions, including their housing and kitchen facilities.
The workers were returned to their place of origin after their company ended their job rather than addressing their complaints.
The union I was employed for at the time, United Farm Workers, gave me the assignment to put together a delegation to look at the living and working circumstances at farms close to Windsor, Ontario, immediately following the strike. I will always remember my initial visit to Leamington. Dozens of workers were talking over one other in the St. Michael’s church parking lot, raising a long list of issues about anything from overcrowding to living near to raw sewage and long workdays. Hearing about the harsh, harsh reality that people—whom we honor as “feeding our nation”—had to face was bizarre.
The SAWP is an employer-driven initiative that is designed to have a power imbalance from the start. Employees have no influence over how their program is structured or run at work. Workers fear they may be returned home and may not have a job the next year if their work permits are linked to a single business. They are also prohibited from looking for other jobs by the terms of their employment contracts.
I find the SAWP oddly similar. My mother’s family left India as indentured servants and moved to the Caribbean following the abolition of slavery. They belonged to a wider labor movement that originated in that nation and included workers from China, Portugal, Africa, and Indonesia. This movement prevented plantation owners from providing liberated Africans with a livable wage and satisfying their requests for better working conditions. Indentured laborers were despised as “coolies,” viewed as scabs and submissive, easily exploitable. However, there are also tales of community, survival, and resistance.
Legal expert Adrian Smith stated in an essay that “the racialized nature of temporary labor migration to Canada and elsewhere is not a historical accident, coincidence, or twist of fate.”
“Nor is it accidental that exploitation and displacement so crucial to capitalist development takes on racialized class proportions across territorial borders under neoliberal capitalist imperialism.”
The plantation labor system that has destroyed the Caribbean’s landscape is what I see in Canada today. Employers in Canada, however, have the freedom to select employees from a pool of workers from any of the SAWP’s member nations. Employers are always threatening to replace an entire group of employees if their production declines, as a fellow worker once observed. Additionally, during the past 20 years, employees have informed us that, for a variety of reasons, including defending their rights at work, employers have switched out a set of laborers from one nation for another.
At one point, the majority of migrants working under the SAWP were Jamaicans. The two largest countries now are Mexico and Guatemala, with Jamaica in third place. specific workers are hired to pick specific crops is a matter of racist preconceptions. Mexicans are thought to be more suitable for labor in greenhouses and for jobs requiring stooping near to the ground due to their shorter stature, according to Canadian growers and government officials. Conversely, workers from the Caribbean are thought to be superior in harvesting tobacco, apples, and delicate fruits like peaches. As Canada moved away from tobacco production, jobs for the workforce, which is primarily Caribbean, were lost.
Talks on our food system rarely include temporary farm laborers.
Additionally, the program’s structure and the way it keeps migrant farm workers out of the areas in which they live and work are fundamentally based in racism. We support the “big lie” about our farming business when we shop locally, support our farmers’ market, and visit our neighborhood grocery store.
We disregard Black and Brown people’s contributions to our culture and how they provide for their families back home because we only perceive them as bodies.
2010 saw the organization of the Pilgrimage to Freedom, a 12-hour march from Leamington to Windsor by migrant workers. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, more than 150 migrants and their allies gathered to protest poor living and working conditions, workplace harassment, and wage fraud. They also demanded status in Canada.
Families and migrant laborers are letting the government, employers, and the public know that they will not be disregarded. The vitality of our farming sector depends on their acts of collective resistance and the importance of their voices.
Honoring Black resistance throughout the food chain is crucial as we celebrate Black life, particularly among the generations of Caribbean agricultural workers. For further information, I turn to Smith: “The trajectory of these racialized class dynamics extends back at least to the commencement of New World enslavement, and yet it also invites the possibilities of collective resistance struggles of which the Haitian Revolution provides the paradigmatic example.”