Labourers in canada’s migrant worker scheme have finally decided to take the government to court for the institutional abuses they face within their industries. Three Toronto-based law firms have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Canadi an federal government for $500 million on behalf of migrant workers. If the suit is successful, it could be the first step in radically transforming Canada’s exploitative migrant worker system to enfranchise migrant workers into Canada’s political and economic communities.
The $500 million the lawsuit claims was stolen from migrant workers is based on the amount of employment insur ance deductibles that migrants in the system and their employers have collectively paid since 2008.
“You see a different dichotomy in the 50s and the 60s … with Black and brown workers from Trinidad, Jamaica, and Mexico in the 70s,” Ramsaroop says. “[Canadian farmers] could never hold a threat of deportation [over migrant workers’ heads] for working on a farm in the 60s.”
“Workers are paying into the system, and they are not receiving benefits,” says Chris Ramsaroop, a migrant rights activist and instructor at the University of Toronto. Beyond just financial loss, experts, including a UN special rapporteur, have called out the slavery-like abuses migrants face in Canada’s migrant scheme. Embracing a radical movement in the country to politically empower migrants will not only allow Black and brown farm workers to represent their interests; it could also lead to the beginnings of a decolonized and more sustainable agriculture system based on Indigenous principles.
Agricultural exploitation
Tied employment is a form of labour contracting that links an employee’s residency status to their employment contract. Throughout history, tied employment has been used to control and lower labour costs and work land. Most famously, Europe an feudalism was a top-down societal hierarchy where agricultural labourers, or serfs, also had tied employment contracts known as feudal contracts. By the 1600s, serfdom slowly faded in western Europe as chattel enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples increased.
By the 1960s, Canada’s steady influx of European immigrants began to run dry, and the federal government looked to racialized communities in the Global South to fill labour gaps. This increase in available racialized labour coincided with the institutionalization of tied employment. In 1966, the office of Minister of Citizenship and Immigration was abolished and on October 1, the office of Minister of Manpower and Immigration was launched. That year, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) was also introduced. The following decade saw a continued shift in migrants to Canada, with more coming from the Global South than from Europe.
“You see a different dichotomy in the 50s and the 60s … with Black and brown workers from Trinidad, Jamaica, and Mexico in the 70s,” Ramsaroop says. “[Canadian farmers] could never hold a threat of deportation [over migrant workers’ heads] for working on a farm in the 60s.”
The SAWP has worked with officials in Mexico and the Caribbean to hire farm workers. In most situations, contracts last for a maximum period of eight months, from January 1, and migrants are forced to leave by December 15. Over the years, the program has grown to include more countries in the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico.
The shift in ministerial oversight in 1966, at the same time the SAWP was introduced, is not simply coincidental. The name change seems to highlight the government’s changing focus from citizenship to labour just as more racialized groups were entering the country.
Tomoya Obokata, a UN special rapporteur, declared in September 2023 that employer-specific work permit regimes like tied employment create conditions for contemporary forms of slavery, as they make migrants reluctant to report abuses for fear of deportation. This is especially dangerous considering that many migrants take out loans to work in Canada. The imbalance of power created by the country’s migrant worker permit system reduces workers’ ability to bargain wages and conditions with employers.
Migrant worker resistance
Justice/Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) is one of the main activist groups working to empower migrants in Canada. They call for an end to tied employment, along with residency status for all workers, and increased health and safety regulations. They, along with many other activists and migrants, are not calling for an end to the SAWP, but a change.
“We’re not calling for the abolition of workers paying into the EI system. What we’re trying to say is workers should be getting EI access when they return to their home country,” says Ramsaroop. In an open letter to the Ontario government, J4MW called for further regulation of the migrant workers program, including increased water breaks and shade. As former members of the SAWP and activists fighting on the ground, acknowledging that opportunities that SAWP can provide is a genuine attempt at pragmatism. However, while policy and regulatory changes would immediately improve migrant working conditions in Canada, they do little to address the power imbalances that the SAWP has institutionalized. Ending tied employment would allow migrants to find other work in Canada within the agricultural industry. While this reform could prevent specific employers’ abuse of workers, it would not end overall labour exploitation by the industries that employ migrants, nor substantially rectify the power imbalances between workers and employers. Like many Canadian sectors, the agriculture industry is highly centralized.
Manufactured competition between migrant groups suppresses not only wages but also any regulation of industries that employ such workers. As national economic actors, migrant workers need the political power to effect change in their economic position. For example, giving migrant workers the right to vote in elections is a solution advocated by revolutionary socialists and anti-capitalists. This goes beyond seeking status for all, which would give migrants the right to work anywhere in Canada. Providing migrants with the right to vote could revolutionize our whole system, giving many intersections of disenfranchised individuals and groups access to political action.
By elevating the agricultural practices of Indigenous nations across Canada and Turtle Island, we can grow a democratic confederated alternative agriculture, linked with the global community of racialized labourers who want to work in Canada.
The solutions advocated by J4MW and other activists would end tied employment and increase labour protections. This approach requires the government to properly regulate and punish companies that oppress migrant workers. As a non-voting population, migrants cannot expect accountability from the Canadian federal government, which gains little by advocating for them. However migrants can gain political power without direct political enfranchisement by engaging in collective action. When they can’t vote with their ballot, they vote with their feet. If tied employment ended, migrants could better organize with one another against their conglomerate employers. Through collective action, migrants in Canada can use political actions like protests, strikes, and work stoppages as a unified group to dramatically rewrite power in their favour.
Indigenous farming practices
Collective action can be undertaken from the bottom up as individual workers build their movements. In northern Syria, communities, including displaced migrants from Lebanon, are experimenting with Indigenous forms of co-operation and agriculture to establish their own economic, political, and nutritional sustainability. Rojava, in northwestern Syria, is an in dependent postmodern state based on Kurdish communalism, also known as democratic confederalism. Rojava’s agricultural production supplies food based on the needs of the communi ties rather than profit. Prior to the Syrian civil war, the Ba’ath regime built massive dams to introduce large-scale irrigated monocropping to an area that traditionally used arid-land agricultural methods. Irrigated agriculture best served the mass production of crops like wheat, cotton and barley, which have high export prices but damage local ecologies. When the central state administration in the region disintegrated in 2012, hundreds of initiatives at the local level worked to increase crop diversity to sustainably manage Rojavan markets, ecosystems, and diets, and communities confederated to become Rojava. Since that time, production of export crops like cotton has fallen and vegetable, lentil, and spice production have increased.
Canada’s agricultural industry can learn from Rojava. By elevating the agricultural practices of Indigenous nations across Canada and Turtle Island, we can grow a democratic confederated alternative agriculture, linked with the global community of racialized labourers who want to work in Canada. Before European colonization, the region now known as southern Ontario was dominated by the Iroquois Confederacy, a political union of five separate polities frameworked on pacts that supported community sufficiency, crop diversification, and environmental stewardship at the time. Indigenous treaties and lifeways like the Dish with One Spoon and the Three Sisters planting tradition have long engaged communities to manage the land as the Rojavans are doing. The reestablishment of Indigenous principles in the context of migrant em powerment is a radical project that would unite global labour with local social responsibility. Whereas democratic councils grew out of Syria’s administrative failure, abolishing the SAWP could see a similar proliferation of confederalized migrant guilds and unions, adhering to Indigenous principles of sustainability and responsibility complemented regional academic and activist expertise. Collectively, these migrants and their allies could work to provide legal services, mutual aid, and social bonds to build political power through collective action.
Connected to migrants by the same history of dislocation and colonization, enfranchised Canadians can work with migrant unions to envision a new food system that is fair to producers and consumers alike. The only way migrants can en joy the fruits of their labour – and that Canadians can ethically consume these fruits – is to end the oppression built into the Canadian agricultural industry.
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