Migrant Farm Workers

For the past 40 years, farmers in Ontario and other provinces have been meeting some of their seasonal labour needs by hiring temporary workers from Caribbean countries and, since 1974, from Mexico under the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP).

Discusses the history and economics of migrant labor, describes the impact of the Great Depression, and recounts the efforts of migrant workers to improve their lot through boycotts and strikes

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are largely Latinx men, women, and children. They work in crop, dairy, and livestock production, and are essential to the U.S. agricultural economy—one of the most hazardous and least regulated industries in the United States. Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the eastern United States experience high rates of illness, injury, and death, indicating widespread occupational injustice. This second edition takes a social justice stance and integrates the past ten years of research and intervention to address health, safety, and justice issues for farmworkers. Contributors cover all major areas of health and safety research for migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families, explore the factors that affect the health and safety of farmworkers and their families, and suggest approaches for further research and educational and policy intervention needed to improve the health and safety of Latinx farmworkers and their families. Among the chapter topics are: Occupational injury and illness in Latinx farmworkers in the eastern United States Mental health among Latinx farmworkers in the eastern United States The health of women farmworkers and women in farmworker families in the eastern United States The health of children in the Latinx farmworker community in the eastern United States Community-based participatory research with Latinx farmworker communities in the eastern United States Farm labor and the struggle for justice in the eastern United States Accessibly written and comprehensive in its scope, this second edition of Latinx Farmworkers in the Eastern United States: Health, Safety, and Justice will find an engaged audience among researchers, students, and practitioners in public health, occupational health, public policy, and social and behavioral sciences, as well as labor advocates and healthcare providers.

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen/permanent resident workers in receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada, it also underscored that many workers in occupations and sectors deemed “essential” enough to be exempt from stay-at-home orders and other public safety measures are migrants, a sizeable number of whom sustain Canada’s food supply through their work in its agricultural industry. This book explores the dynamics behind the pandemic’s deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers, highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy, society, and the world of work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrants without legal status employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational employment strain, the authors derive insight from the employment strain model, a framework for understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers, and expand it to account for migrants’ relationships across transnational space.

An intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants and indigenous people in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of how health equity is undermined by a normalization of migrant suffering, the natural endpoint of systemic dehumanization, exploitation, and oppression that clouds any sense of empathy for “invisible workers.” Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is far more than an ethnography or supplementary labor studies text; Holmes tells the stories of food production workers from as close to the ground as possible, revealing often theoretically-discussed social inequalities as irreparable bodily damage done. This book substantiates the suffering of those facing the danger of crossing the border, threatened with deportation, or otherwise caught up in the structural violence of a system promising work but endangering or ignoring the human rights and health of its workers. All of the book award money and royalties from the sales of this book have been donated to farm worker unions, farm worker organizations and farm worker projects in consultation with farm workers who appear in the book.