2019 CAFLP Annual Conference Panel Recap: “Law and Labour Unfreedom: Access to Justice for Migrant Farmworkers”

"champ mais" by allpneus is licensed under CC0 1.0

The speakers on this panel (Chris Ramsaroop, Shane Martinez and Fay Faraday) have all known each other for a long time, so instead of doing individual presentations, they held a more informal discussion about the topic of access to justice for migrant farmworkers.

When thinking about migrant farmworkers, we need to look at the larger or broader history of how laws governing them have emerged and who holds positions of power in our society. We need to understand slavery, the legacy of indentureship and how these have manifested today in migrant farmworker programs in Canada.

We constantly hear that people do not want to do these jobs and that we need migrant farmworkers for our agricultural sector to survive. Why does this exist? What are the economic and legal conditions that have led to this in Canada?

There have been forms of indentured migrant labour on farms in Ontario since the late 1800s, beginning with orphans and poor children being deported from England to work on Ontario farms, followed by prisoners of war and displaced soldiers following World War I. It was also once a requirement for Indigenous communities to receive financial support to do indentured labour on farms, followed by the formal development of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in the 1960s.

Alongside this, until the 1960s, Canada imposed immigration restrictions based on race and nationality, unless the government deemed them to be exceptional workers. We continue to see this history and the legacy that it has left on migrant farmworkers today in Canada.

Currently there are two main contracts under which someone may come to Canada as a farmworker – as workers from Mexico and as workers from other countries. When these contracts are negotiated, migrant farmworkers are not given a place at the table and they therefore have no say in what is in the contract. There are usually provisions put into these contracts that the worker can be removed from Canada at any time, and they are limited to working only for the employer in the contract. This created a culture of fear and causes workers to endure conditions that they wouldn’t put up with if they had some permanence.

Migrant farmworker programs in Canada depend on maintaining inequities between the Global North and South and keeping groups marginalized. Significant legislative changes are needed to recognize the skills and contributions of migrant farmworkers to Canadian agriculture and to give them a voice at the bargaining table for their employment contracts.