Harvesting Labour

In recent decades an increasing share of Canada’s agricultural workforce has been made up of temporary foreign workers from the Global South. These labourers work difficult and dangerous jobs with limited legal protections and are effectively barred from permanent settlement in Canada. In Harvesting Labour Edward Dunsworth examines the history of farm work in one of Canada’s underrecognized but most important crop sectors – Ontario tobacco. Dunsworth takes aim at the idea that temporary foreign worker programs emerged in response to labour shortages or the unwillingness of Canadians to work in agriculture. To the contrary, Ontario’s tobacco sector was extremely popular with workers for much of the twentieth century, with high wages attracting a diverse workforce and enabling thousands to establish themselves as small farm owners. By the end of the century, however, the sector had become something entirely different: a handful of mega-farms relying on foreign guest workers to produce their crops. Taking readers from the leafy fields of Ontario’s tobacco belt to rural Jamaica, Barbados, and North Carolina and on to the halls of government, Dunsworth demonstrates how the ultimate transformation of tobacco – and Canadian agriculture writ large – was fundamentally a function of the capitalist restructuring of farming. Harvesting Labour brings together the fields of labour, migration, and business history to reinterpret the historical origins of contemporary Canadian agriculture and its workforce.

In recent decades an increasing share of Canada’s agricultural workforce has been made up of temporary foreign workers from the Global South. These labourers work difficult and dangerous jobs with limited legal protections and are effectively barred from permanent settlement in Canada. In Harvesting Labour Edward Dunsworth examines the history of farm work in one of Canada’s underrecognized but most important crop sectors – Ontario tobacco. Dunsworth takes aim at the idea that temporary foreign worker programs emerged in response to labour shortages or the unwillingness of Canadians to work in agriculture. To the contrary, Ontario’s tobacco sector was extremely popular with workers for much of the twentieth century, with high wages attracting a diverse workforce and enabling thousands to establish themselves as small farm owners. By the end of the century, however, the sector had become something entirely different: a handful of mega-farms relying on foreign guest workers to produce their crops. Taking readers from the leafy fields of Ontario’s tobacco belt to rural Jamaica, Barbados, and North Carolina and on to the halls of government, Dunsworth demonstrates how the ultimate transformation of tobacco – and Canadian agriculture writ large – was fundamentally a function of the capitalist restructuring of farming. Harvesting Labour brings together the fields of labour, migration, and business history to reinterpret the historical origins of contemporary Canadian agriculture and its workforce.

Hired seasonal labour forms a significant part of the agricultural workforce in many countries. Key topics covered in this book include: changes in the hired farm workforce; area studies, and community impacts and responses; and the need for community services.

Whether for weavers at the handloom, laborers at the plough, or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialization. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical silence reigned with industrialization, until the carefully controlled introduction of Music While You Work in the 1940s. Continuing the analysis to the present day, Rhythms of Labor explains how workers have clung to and reclaimed popular music on the radio in desperate and creative ways.

This book studies labour conditions in GVCs in a variety of sectors and across several Asian countries.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the enormous increase in agricultural production, unmatched by technical advance in harvesting, drew vast numbers of rural and migrant workers into the harvest that lasted from June to October. This book, first published in 1982, examines the technology, conditions and customs of the harvest and, through that, the life of the rural population of central England from the 1840s until the end of the century when hand tools finally gave way to mechanisation. The economic framework of the period in agriculture is set out and there flows a detailed analysis of hand tools and work methods in the harvest. The population of harvesters, agricultural labourers and their entire families, townspeople and the gangs of migrant workers are studied, as are the crops they harvested.

First published in 1989, this book deals with the impact of cereal production upon the Third World, specifically ‘Modern Varieties’ (MVs). Using evidence from plant breeding, economics and nutrition science, the authors seek to pinpoint what has been achieved, what has gone wrong and what needs to be done in future. Although the technical innovations of MVs mean more employment, cheaper food and less risk for small farmers, the reduction in crop diversity increases the risk of danger from pests and though MVs enlarge cereal stocks, many are too poor to afford them. The book concludes that technical breakthroughs alone won’t solve deep-rooted social problems and that only new policies and research priorities will increase the choices, assets and power of the rural poor.

This textbook provides a comprehensive, systematic treatise on development economics, combining classical political economy, modern institutional theory, and current development issues. Grown out of twenty years' experience of teaching in the United States and Japan, its treatment is global, although the organizing principle is the East Asian development experience. Taking a comparative institutional analysis approach, it also outlines quantitative characteristics of Third World development in terms of population growth, natural resource depletion, capital accumulation, and technological change. Development Economics addresses one major question: Why has a small set of countries achieved a high level of affluence while the majority remain poor and stagnant? One obvious factor is a the ability to adopt and develop advanced technology, due in large measure to the difficulty experienced by low-income economies in preparing appropriate institutions for borrowing advanced technology given their social and cultural constraints. This volume explores the nature of these constraints, with the aim of identifying the means to remove them, and examines countries where the constraints have been successfully lifted—-most notably Japan and East Asian NIEs. This fully revised and updated third edition also incorporates analyses of several recent changes and newly emerged problems relevant to the global economy: recurrent economic crises in Latin America contrasted with the recovery of East Asia from the 1997-8 financial crisis; a paradigm change in international development assistance from 'the Washington Consensus' to the 'the Post-Washington Consensus', with a major shift in its focus from economic growth to poverty reduction as manifested in the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals; and the stalemate in international collaboration on the environment as represented by delays in the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. In exploring these issues, Development Economics provides important lessons on what institutions can promote economic growth, reduce poverty, and conserve the environment through the borrowing of technology.