tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/migrant-farm-workers-85932/articlesMigrant farm workers – The Conversation2023-08-30T19:12:37Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2123272023-08-30T19:12:37Z2023-08-30T19:12:37ZMigrant workers facing the dangers of wildfires need support<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/migrant-workers-facing-the-dangers-of-wildfires-need-support" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/report">Wildfires continue to burn across Canada</a>, destroying hundreds of structures and displacing thousands of people. However, while many have been able to evacuate and receive help, migrant workers have been coping with the effects of the fires with relatively little support. </p>
<p>Temporary migrant workers in the Global North are already highly vulnerable to abuse in the workplace and hazardous working conditions. That vulnerability is often drastically increased in times of crisis. </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.54394/GTRM8209">Studies</a> have revealed how crises like COVID-19 impact migrant workers around the world, including in <a href="https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2020.093.016">Canada</a> and the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.23209">United States</a>. Our research team has found that migrants have also been significantly affected by the recent <a href="https://www.castanet.net/edition/news-story--101-.htm">wildfires in British Columbia’s Okanagan</a>.</p>
<p>We are part of an ongoing research project looking into the ways COVID-19 affected migrant workers of precarious legal status called Collective Care, Renewal, and Resurgence for the Post-Pandemic Future: Learning from the Migrant Justice Movements in Rural Canada.</p>
<p>Shortly before the wildfires erupted, our research team was travelling across the Okanagan Valley meeting with migrant workers and interviewing community organizations and farmers. We were there to hear about the challenges that migrant workers in Canada faced during the COVID-19 crisis, and to document how those challenges have been addressed.</p>
<h2>Poor working conditions</h2>
<p>Migrant farm workers in the Okanagan valley shared the many challenges they face. Many workers in the region continue to deal with abusive employers who refuse to pay for worked hours and who continue to refuse to offer them basic health and safety protections in the workplace.</p>
<p>Migrant workers also reported bad and unhealthy housing conditions and major obstacles to accessing health care. Some also said they feared reappraisal and dismissal if they refused the hazardous working conditions and strenuous days. </p>
<p>Many <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/temporary-foreign-worker.html">temporary migrant workers</a> were classified as essential workers during the COVID-19 lockdowns and continued to work during the worst days of the pandemic. However, since lockdowns were lifted things have sadly just gone back to normal for many. As one worker we spoke to said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“During the pandemic we were considered essential, and then we were given masks and some other protections in the workplace and in the house we live in. But now, when that moment is gone, we are all treated like we were in the past, or probably worse, as many of the places we work for are trying ‘catch up,’ and we are the ones doing the heavy work.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We were about to leave the region to continue our fieldwork in Vancouver when the wildfires in the region <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-wildfires-august-28-2023-1.6949509">reached West Kelowna</a>. As the crisis was unfolding, we reached out to the migrant workers we had interviewed a few days before the wildfires. We wanted to know how they were doing, what their needs were and to offer them support. </p>
<p>Some migrants reported receiving support. For example, some temporary foreign workers from Mexico said they were given masks in some farms to avoid being affected by the heavy smoke, as well as being asked to pause the work and remain in the house they were assigned as protective measures.</p>
<p>Local community organizations quickly assisted those who had been evacuated, and provided support (food, housing, groceries) to the approximately <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/9911579/b-c-wildfires-temporary-foreign-worker-safety/">more than 600 migrant workers</a>.</p>
<p>We also heard from migrant workers with precarious legal status that they were receiving support from the emergency response programs set in place by local authorities regardless of their legal status.</p>
<p>Javier Robles, a community organizer with KCR Community Resources in Kelowna, said of the migrant workers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“They are the backbone of our economy. Vineyards, fruit and vegetable farms in the Okanagan Valley would not run without the work provided by the migrants who come here every year to plant and harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat and export to the world. They are also part of our society. Why would we not provide help whatever their legal status is?”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Unfair immigration policies</h2>
<p>The vulnerability of the migrant workers in Canada is directly linked to the immigration program through which they are hired, which provide them few legal protections and rights. </p>
<p>Most migrant workers in the Okanagan come through the Temporary Foreign Worker program. The program allows workers to come to Canada with a closed work permit, meaning they are not allowed to change employers. This means that employers can have significant, and often detrimental, control over the lives and well-being of their workers. </p>
<p>Despite the examples of support some workers had during the wildfires, <a href="https://ici.radio-canada.ca/ohdio/premiere/emissions/phare-ouest/episodes/755288/rattrapage-mercredi-23-aout-2023">most of the workers our research team spoke to</a> reported challenges:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Many workers have reported not receiving masks or any other equipment to protect them from the bad air quality.</p></li>
<li><p>Most workers said they were not given breaks to rest from the harsh outdoor and smoky conditions. They reported that even with sore throats, difficulty breathing and, in some cases for older workers, fainting, lots of employers ignored their demands to have breaks. In many cases, when they are allowed more breaks, the time was deducted from their salary.</p></li>
<li><p>Several workers said they asked for shorter work days, longer breaks and easier access to fresh water. But all those requests were denied. Workers who persisted in their requests had their work days cut. Others were threatened with not having their contract renewed. </p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://ici.radio-canada.ca/ohdio/premiere/emissions/phare-ouest/episodes/755288/rattrapage-mercredi-23-aout-2023">Some workers said they had not been paid for weeks</a>, and were dismissed from the workplace without pay and with no explanation during the wildfire crisis.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Migrants we spoke to said they felt they have been ignored by the public response and media coverage of the fires. One Mexican worker told us: “We remain invisible here. Or perhaps people think we do not have anything to say?”</p>
<p>Migrant workers in Canada are sadly not alone in not being heard. Migrant workers in Hawaii are now in limbo after <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/immigrant-workers-lives-livelihoods-and-documents-in-limbo-after-the-hawaii-fire-1.6527449">wildfires devastated the historic city of Lahaina</a>. Many faced similar challenges after the 2017 <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718520301925">Thomas Fire</a> in southern California.</p>
<p>When natural disasters occur, emergency and recovery plans must include the voices and needs of all those affected — especially those most vulnerable. Governments must urgently revise immigration policies to ensure that migrants, regardless of their legal status, are able to ask for and receive the support they need during times of crisis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212327/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eloy Rivas-Sánchez receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Athabasca University. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Geneviève Tousignant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Natural hazards like wildfires are adding yet more challenges to the difficulties many migrant workers face.Eloy Rivas-Sánchez, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Athabasca UniversityGeneviève Tousignant, Master's Student, Interdisciplinary Studies, Athabasca UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2048712023-07-31T12:25:16Z2023-07-31T12:25:16ZSexual violence is a pervasive threat for female farm workers – here’s how the US could reduce their risk<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539593/original/file-20230726-15-t8cqps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C7%2C4764%2C3102&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mexican migrant workers harvest parsley on a farm in Wellington, Colo.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/mexican-migrant-workers-harvest-organic-parsley-at-grant-news-photo/129068134">John Moore/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Television crime shows often are set in cities, but in its third season, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3488298/">ABC’s “American Crime</a>” took a different tack. It opened on a tomato farm in North Carolina, where it showed a young woman being brutally raped in a field by her supervisor. </p>
<p>“People die all the time on that farm. Nobody cares. Women get raped, regular,” another character <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/the-disciplined-power-of-american-crime">tells a police interrogator</a>. </p>
<p>The show’s writers did their research. Studies show that 80% of Mexican and Mexican American women farmworkers in the U.S. have experienced <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801209360857">some form of sexual harassment at work</a>. Rape is common enough for some to nickname their workplace the “<a href="https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/thcsj/TheEEOCandImmigrantWorkers.pdf">fields of panties</a>.” For comparison, about 38% of women in the U.S. report experiencing <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/21/587671849/a-new-survey-finds-eighty-percent-of-women-have-experienced-sexual-harassment">some kind of workplace sexual harassment</a>.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en?details=cc5343en">recent report</a>, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization called for transformative changes to the formal and informal social systems that disempower women who work on farms and in the food sector around the world. While violence against women in agriculture may seem like an issue mainly experienced in developing countries, the truth is that it also happens all too often to women and girls on farms in the U.S. </p>
<p>As we see it, sexual exploitation perpetrated by men in positions of power instills fear that <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429199752-30/gender-precarious-work-agriculture-kathleen-sexsmith-megan-griffin">keeps farm laborers obedient</a>, despite precarious working conditions – and keeps fruits and vegetables cheap. </p>
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<h2>Vulnerable workers</h2>
<p>In our research on <a href="https://pure.psu.edu/en/persons/kathleen-sexsmith">rural development</a>, <a href="https://aese.psu.edu/directory/far5137">agriculture</a> and <a href="https://sites.psu.edu/redesigningmodernities1/megan-griffin/">rural gender inequality</a>, we have found that gender-based violence against female workers is frighteningly common on U.S. farms.</p>
<p>According to the U.N., <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/women/gender-based-violence-against-women-and-girls">violence against women and girls</a> includes “any gender-based act that creates sexual, psychological, or physical harm or suffering.” Men and boys can, of course, experience gender-based violence on U.S. farms, but to our knowledge no corroborating research exists. </p>
<p>Most often, sexual violence against women is <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/05/15/cultivating-fear/vulnerability-immigrant-farmworkers-us-sexual-violence-and">committed by men in positions of power</a>, such as foremen, farm labor contractors, farm owners and co-workers. Unfortunately, farm workers often <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1059924X.2020.1825245">buy into the myth</a> that women bring sexual harassment on themselves. This belief makes it difficult for victims to get support.</p>
<p>Immigrant women farm workers are vulnerable because of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12788">power imbalances</a> in their male-dominated workplaces. Women represent <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#employment">28%</a> of the nation’s farm workers, making them a minority on many farms. Most are immigrants from Latin America, and <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#employment">many are undocumented</a>. </p>
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<p>Female farm workers also face a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13202">gender wage gap</a> of about 6%, partly because of parenting responsibilities that limit the number of hours they can work. Researchers have documented how men in positions of power <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1059924X.2016.1143903">take advantage of this vulnerability</a> by offering hours and job perks in exchange for sexual favors and threatening to fire women if they refuse.</p>
<h2>The role of child labor</h2>
<p>Girls under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse on farms. While much-needed reporting has generated a public outcry against <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html">arduous work conditions for migrant child laborers</a>, migrant children have worked in agriculture in the U.S. for decades – legally. </p>
<p>Agriculture holds a special status under federal labor laws, which permit farm owners to <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/31/us-congress-should-protect-child-farmworkers">hire children as young as 12</a>. Facing <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#employment">low wages</a> and <a href="https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/blog-post/farmworkers-low-wage-rates-have-risen-modestly-now-congress-may-pass-a-law-to-lower-them/">high poverty rates</a>, farm worker families often rely on income from children’s work. </p>
<p>Experts say young girls may be <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/05/05/fields-peril/child-labor-us-agriculture">especially vulnerable</a> to sexual harassment and violence on farms because they are less likely to recognize and report abuse. Currently, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-agriculture-human-rights-congress">children as young as 12</a> can be hired on farms without a cap on the number of hours they work, as long as they don’t miss school. </p>
<p>Democrats in Congress have repeatedly introduced versions of the <a href="https://ruiz.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/dr-ruiz-introduces-legislation-raise-labor-standards-and-protections">Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety (CARE) Act</a> since 2005. The bill would help address the vulnerability of young girls in farm work by aligning the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-agriculture-human-rights-congress">legal farm working age</a> with other industries.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">U.S. labor law allows children as young as 12 to work in agriculture, putting young girls at risk of sexual violence.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Are guest worker visas the answer?</h2>
<p>Since one major driver of the threat of violence against female farm workers is the fact that many of them are undocumented, could expanding the national <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2a-temporary-agricultural-workers">H-2A agricultural guest worker visa</a> program be a solution?</p>
<p>The H-2A program has exploded in popularity among farmers as a way to address <a href="https://s.giannini.ucop.edu/uploads/giannini_public/67/33/673330c9-c5a1-4664-ade5-6e9b406b8ef3/v10n5_3.pdf">agricultural labor shortages</a>. The number of U.S. farm jobs certified for H-2A workers increased <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#employment">from 48,000 in 2005 to 371,000 in 2022</a> as farmers pressed Congress to allow more foreign nationals into the U.S. to fill temporary agricultural jobs.</p>
<p>This program, at least in theory, addresses several of the structural vulnerabilities of female farm workers. A visa confers a legal right to enter the country, alleviating the severe risk of <a href="https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-03-07/the-reality-of-migrant-women-en-route-to-the-united-states-raped-and-unable-to-access-a-hospital.html">sexual assault</a> during clandestine border crossings. Legal status should also eliminate fear of deportation, which would bolster women’s courage to speak up against sexual violence in the workplace.</p>
<p>But the key word here is “should.”</p>
<p>Concerningly, migrant labor advocates have charged that the H-2A program promotes “<a href="https://cdmigrante.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ripe-for-Reform.pdf">systemic sex-based discrimination in hiring</a>.” Only <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/readingroom/NI/NonimmigrantCOAsexage">3.3% of H-2A guest workers</a> admitted in 2021 were women, a level that reflects historical trends. Some foreign advertisements for H-2A workers explicitly state that recruiters are looking for <a href="https://cdmigrante.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ripe-for-Reform.pdf">capable male workers</a>. </p>
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<p>When female farm workers are few in number, they have less collective capacity to protest or report sexually abusive conditions. Moreover, <a href="https://cdmigrante.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ripe-for-Reform.pdf">one 2020 report</a> on labor conditions among H-2A workers found that 12% of participants – including women and men – had experienced sexual harassment. The authors believed this figure represented a gross undercount.</p>
<p>Guest worker visa programs can actually make workers more likely to tolerate abusive situations, because the workers’ legal status in the U.S. by definition is tied to their employment. Guest workers are often particularly <a href="https://cdmigrante.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ripe-for-Reform.pdf">fearful of employer retaliation</a> if they complain about sexual abuse. In our view, guest worker visa programs <a href="https://doi.org/10.48416/ijsaf.v26i2.57">institutionalize workers’ uncertain position</a> instead of solving it.</p>
<h2>A path forward</h2>
<p>We agree with the U.N. that sweeping change is needed to empower women, raise farm productivity and promote human rights in the global food system. As U.S. lawmakers <a href="https://theconversation.com/these-four-challenges-will-shape-the-next-farm-bill-and-how-the-us-eats-202555">craft the next farm bill</a>, they could do enormous good for women around the world by setting an example in American fields and farms.</p>
<p>As a first step, we believe lawmakers should pass the CARE Act, which would raise the legal working age on farms to 14, reducing the number of young girls who are vulnerable to abuse. </p>
<p>Second, legalizing the nation’s approximately <a href="https://cmsny.org/agricultural-workers-rosenbloom-083022/">283,000 unauthorized farm workers</a> would make those workers less vulnerable to sexual abuse by expanding employment opportunities outside of the agricultural sector. </p>
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<p>Third, in our view, efforts to legalize farm workers – most recently through the <a href="https://lofgren.house.gov/media/press-releases/bipartisan-members-reintroduce-farm-workforce-modernization-act-2023">Farm Workforce Modernization Act</a> – should strengthen labor law enforcement and provide well-funded channels for reporting abuses and changing jobs when abuse occurs.</p>
<p>Bills proposing a pathway to legalization for agricultural workers have focused on providing enough labor for farm employers. For example, some proposals would expand the H-2A program and require workers already in the U.S. to continue working in agriculture for a number of years to receive a green card. </p>
<p>But without steps to improve labor protection systems, such changes could make workers even more vulnerable to sexual and other labor abuses, and have the counterproductive result of making them more likely to want to leave agriculture as soon as they can.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204871/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kathleen Sexsmith receives funding from the United States Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania State University, Rural Sociological Society, American Mushroom Institute, Oxfam America, and the Sociological Initiatives Foundation. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Francisco Alfredo Reyes and Megan A. M. Griffin do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the US, with workers exposed to vehicles, chemicals and heavy equipment. Women working on farms face another risk: sexual assault.Kathleen Sexsmith, Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology, Penn StateFrancisco Alfredo Reyes, Ph.D. Candidate in Rural Sociology & International Agriculture and Development, Penn StateMegan A. M. Griffin, Student Community Engagement Specialist, Connecticut CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2068442023-06-07T12:23:43Z2023-06-07T12:23:43ZPeaches are a minor part of Georgia’s economy, but they’re central to its mythology<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529633/original/file-20230601-27-qeid50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=32%2C16%2C5351%2C3567&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Peach Drop celebration marks the new year in Atlanta on Jan. 1, 2023.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-of-the-peach-drop-during-the-peach-drop-2023-news-photo/1453573488">Paras Griffin/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 2023 Georgia peach harvest is looking bad, although the details are sketchy. By some accounts, it’s the <a href="https://www.wabe.org/georgia-peach-crop-decimated-by-bad-weather-warming-climate/">worst since 1955</a>. Or maybe <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/worst-peach-season-in-georgia-since-2017-experts-say/vi-AA1bqnPy">since 2017</a>. There are estimates that a mild winter and late spring frost have cost Georgia growers <a href="https://www.foxweather.com/lifestyle/peach-price-hike-georgia-south-carolina-2023">50% of their crop</a>. Or <a href="https://www.fox5atlanta.com/weather/georgia-mcdonough-peaches-freeze-inflation">perhaps 60%</a>, or <a href="https://www.wabe.org/georgia-peach-crop-decimated-by-bad-weather-warming-climate/">85% to 95%</a>. Consumers, say the growers, should expect less fruit, though what’s produced may be “<a href="https://www.wabe.org/georgia-peach-crop-decimated-by-bad-weather-warming-climate/">fantastic and huge and sweet</a>.” And they should expect to <a href="https://thetakeout.com/peaches-facing-crisis-bad-harvest-2023-grower-shortage-1850372985">pay quite a bit more</a>. </p>
<p>As ominous as this may sound, the unpredictability of Georgia’s peach harvest has been predictable since the industry’s earliest days. So has public hand-wringing about it. It can be hard to say what a “normal” year is. In 1909, growers produced just over 826,000 bushels. In 1919, it was up to 3.5 million, then 4.4 million in 1924, then back down to 1 million in 1929. </p>
<p>There may be plenty of peaches on Georgia license plates, but according to the University of Georgia’s <a href="https://caed.uga.edu/publications/farm-gate-value.html">2021 Georgia Farm Gate Value Report</a>, the state makes more money from pine straw, blueberries and deer-hunting leases. It has 1.21 million acres planted with cotton, compared with 11,582 acres of peach orchards. Georgia’s annual production of broiler chickens is worth almost 50 times as much as its peaches. </p>
<p>Why do Georgia peaches loom so large when they account for only <a href="https://caed.uga.edu/publications/farm-gate-value.html">0.58% of the state’s agricultural economy</a>, and Georgia produces <a href="https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/">only between 3% and 5%</a> of the U.S. peach crop? The answer is that the Georgia peach is a cultural icon as well as an agricultural commodity. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-georgia-peach/714FA4E59376F142CD71F9E2742E6C61">As I have documented</a>, its story tells us much about the relationship between environmental uncertainty and commercial agriculture.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Georgia peach farmer Lee Dickey explains why 2023 is shaping up as a disastrous harvest year.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Easy to grow, hard to protect</h2>
<p>Peaches (<em>Prunus persica</em>) were introduced to North America by Spanish monks around St. Augustine, Florida, in the mid-1500s. By 1607 they were widespread around Jamestown, Virginia. The trees grow readily from seed, and peach pits are easy to preserve and transport. </p>
<p>Observing that peaches in the Carolinas germinated easily and fruited heavily, English explorer and naturalist John Lawson <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lawson/lawson.html">wrote in 1700</a> that “they make our Land a Wilderness of Peach-Trees.” Even today, feral <em>Prunus persica</em> is surprisingly common, appearing along roadsides and fence rows, in suburban backyards and old fields throughout the Southeast and beyond. </p>
<p>Yet for such a hardy fruit, the commercial crop can seem remarkably fragile. This year’s heavy loss is unusual, but public concern about the crop is an annual ritual. It begins in February and March, when the trees start blooming and are at significant risk if temperatures drop below freezing. Larger orchards heat trees with smudge pots, or use <a href="http://www.aces.edu/pubs/docs/A/ANR-1057-B/index2.tmpl">helicopters and wind machines</a> to stir up the air on particularly frigid nights. </p>
<p>The Southern environment can seem unfriendly to the fruit in other ways, too. In the 1890s many smaller growers struggled to afford expensive and elaborate controls to combat pests such as <a href="https://entomology.ca.uky.edu/ef204">San Jose scale</a> and <a href="http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/help-for-the-home-gardener/advice-tips-resources/pests-and-problems/insects/beetles/plum-curculio.aspx">plum curculio</a>. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs1T3LEssjr/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link\u0026igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>In the early 1900s, large quantities of fruit were condemned and discarded when market inspectors found entire car lots infected with <a href="http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/help-for-the-home-gardener/advice-tips-resources/pests-and-problems/diseases/fruit-spots/brown-rot-of-stone-fruits.aspx">brown rot</a>, a fungal disease that can devastate stone fruit crops. In the 1960s, the commercial peach industry in Georgia and South Carolina nearly ground to a halt because of a syndrome known as <a href="https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/peach-diseases/">peach tree short life</a>, which caused trees to suddenly wither and die in their first year or two of bearing fruit. </p>
<p>In short, growing <em>Prunus persica</em> is easy. But producing large, unblemished fruit that can be shipped thousands of miles away, and doing so reliably, year after year, demands an intimate environmental knowledge that has developed slowly over the past century and a half of commercial peach production. </p>
<p><iframe id="x3CD9" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/x3CD9/6/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>From windfall to icon</h2>
<p>Up through the mid-19th century, peaches were primarily a kind of feral resource for Southern farmers. A few distilled the fruit into brandy; many ran their half-wild hogs in the orchards to forage on fallen fruit. Some slave owners used the peach harvest as a kind of festival for their chattel, and runaways provisioned their secret journeys in untended orchards. </p>
<p>In the 1850s, in a determined effort to create a fruit industry for the Southeast, horticulturists began a selective breeding campaign for peaches and other fruits, including wine grapes, pears, apples and gooseberries. Its most famous yield was <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=S85WDgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA59#v=onepage&q&f=false">the Elberta peach</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Watercolor image of whole and half Elberta peach." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530169/original/file-20230605-27-scuw76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Prunus Persica Elberta,’ by Roy Charles Steadman (1926), from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/POM00005227">USDA, Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Introduced by Samuel Henry Rumph in the 1870s, the Elberta became one of the most successful fruit varieties of all time. Other fruits flourished for brief periods, but southern peaches boomed: the number of trees increased more than fivefold between 1889 and 1924.</p>
<p>Increasingly, growers and boosters near the heart of the industry in Fort Valley, Georgia, sought to tell “the story” of the Georgia peach. They did so in peach blossom festivals from 1922 to 1926 – annual events that dramatized the prosperity of the peach belt. Each festival featured a parade of floats, speeches by governors and members of Congress, a massive barbecue and an elaborate pageant directed by a professional dramatist and sometimes involving up to one-fourth of the town’s population. </p>
<p>Festivalgoers came from all across the United States, with attendance reportedly reaching 20,000 or more – a remarkable feat for a town of roughly 4,000 people. In 1924 the queen of the festival wore a US$32,000 pearl-encrusted gown belonging to silent film star Mary Pickford. In 1925, <a href="http://scribol.com/anthropology-and-history/history/rarely-seen-photos-national-geographic-archive/8/">as documented by National Geographic</a>, the pageant included a live camel. </p>
<p>The pageants varied from year to year but in general told a story of the peach, personified as a young maiden and searching the world for a husband and a home: from China, to Persia, to Spain, to Mexico, and finally to Georgia, her true and eternal home. The peach, these productions insisted, belonged to Georgia. More specifically, it belonged to Fort Valley, which was in the midst of a campaign to be designated as the seat of a new, progressive “Peach County.”</p>
<p>That campaign was surprisingly bitter, but Fort Valley got its county – the 161st and last county in Georgia – and, through the festivals, helped to consolidate the iconography of the Georgia peach. The story they told of Georgia as the “natural” home of the peach was as enduring as it was inaccurate. It obscured the importance of horticulturists’ environmental knowledge in creating the industry, and the political connections and manual labor that kept it afloat. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1014887134308765704"}"></div></p>
<h2>Politics and work</h2>
<p>As the 20th century wore on, it became increasingly hard for peach growers to ignore politics and labor. That was particularly clear in the 1950s and 1960s, when growers successfully lobbied for a new peach laboratory in Byron, Georgia, to help combat peach tree short life. </p>
<p>Their chief ally was <a href="http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/richard-b-russell-jr-1897-1971">U.S. Sen. Richard B. Russell Jr.</a>, one of the most powerful members of Congress in the 20th century and, at the time, chair of the Subcommittee on Agricultural Appropriations. The growers claimed that an expansion of federal research would shore up the peach industry; provide new crops for the South – jujube, pomegranate and persimmons, to name a few; and provide jobs for Black Southerners who would, the growers maintained, otherwise join the “already crowded offices of our welfare agencies.”</p>
<p>Russell pushed the proposal through the Senate, and – after what he later described as the most difficult negotiations of his 30-year career – through the House as well. In time, the laboratory would play a crucial role in supplying new varieties necessary to maintain the peach industry in the South. </p>
<p>At the same time, Russell was also engaged in a passionate and futile defense of segregation against the African American civil rights movement. African Americans’ growing demand for equal rights, along with the massive postwar migration of rural Southerners to urban areas, laid bare the Southern peach industry’s dependence on a labor system that relied on systemic discrimination. </p>
<p>Peach labor has always been – and for the foreseeable future will remain – hand labor. Unlike cotton, which was almost entirely mechanized in the Southeast by the 1970s, peaches were too delicate and ripeness too difficult to judge for mechanization to be a viable option. As the rural working class left Southern fields in waves, first in the 1910s and ‘20s and again in the 1940s and '50s, growers found it increasingly difficult to find cheap and readily available labor. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="African American men and women sitting and standing on the back of a truck." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529646/original/file-20230601-18228-rw2791.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Peach pickers being driven to the orchards in Muscella, Ga., in 1936. The workers earned 75 cents per day.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/peach-pickers-being-driven-to-the-orchards-they-earn-news-photo/1400608997">Dorothea Lange, Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For a few decades they used dwindling local crews, supplemented by migrants and schoolchildren. In the 1990s they leveraged their political connections once more to move their undocumented Mexican workers onto the <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2a-temporary-agricultural-workers">federal H-2A guest worker program</a>. </p>
<h2>Not so peachy</h2>
<p>Climate and weather clearly play important roles in peach production. But the more interesting story is not just about the changing climate, but how growers of specialty crops like peaches have navigated that unpredictability, with help from government programs like H-2A and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s <a href="https://www.ars.usda.gov/">Agricultural Research Service</a>. </p>
<p>At times, producers have actually welcomed that unpredictability. Good harvest years can produce market gluts that make it hard to turn a profit. A bad harvest year generally can be a good financial year for individual growers because they can charge more for whatever peaches they produce.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/ripley-clements-and-katharine-ball-ripley/">Clement and Katharine Ball Ripley</a>, moderately well-known authors in the 1930s, tried peach growing in North Carolina in the 1920s. In a memoir about their experience, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Sand_in_My_Shoes.html?id=uoftPQAACAAJ">Sand in My Shoes</a>,” Katharine reflected that although they had been unsuccessful as farmers, they had learned “to gamble, the pleasantist life in the world.”</p>
<p>Variable weather and environmental conditions make the Georgia peach possible. They also threaten its existence. But the Georgia peach also teaches us how important it is that we learn to tell fuller stories of the food we eat – stories that take into account not just rain patterns and nutritional content, but history, culture and political power. </p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-georgia-peach-may-be-vanishing-but-its-mythology-is-alive-and-well-80262">article</a> originally published July 20, 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206844/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Thomas Okie has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council. His father W. R. Okie III was a USDA peach breeder from 1980 to 2011. </span></em></p>A 90% crop loss in the Peach State may sound like a disaster, but Georgia isn’t actually the Big Apple of peach production that it claims to be.William Thomas Okie, Professor of History and History Education, Kennesaw State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1984892023-02-01T20:20:30Z2023-02-01T20:20:30ZNew regulations on migrant farm workers should tackle employer/employee power imbalances<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507219/original/file-20230130-22-no2r8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4247%2C2810&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A temporary foreign worker from Mexico works on a berry farm in Mirabel, Que., in May 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The government of Canada recently <a href="https://canadagazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2022/2022-07-06/html/sor-dors142-eng.html">amended the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations</a> to include new employer obligations. These amendments are intended to enhance protections for migrant workers and ensure the integrity of the government’s <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/temporary-foreign-worker.html">temporary foreign worker program</a>. </p>
<p>While a step in the right direction, the changes side-step the root issues that make temporary foreign workers vulnerable to abuse in the first place.</p>
<p>More than 61,000 migrant workers were employed in Canada’s agriculture sector in 2021, an <a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220613/dq220613d-eng.htm">increase of almost 12 per cent from 2020</a>, marking the greatest proliferation since 2016. </p>
<p>In fact, migrant workers comprised nearly one-quarter of all agricultural workers in 2021.</p>
<p>Migrant agricultural workers are exposed to various <a href="https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-022-01692-7">physical and psychosocial health risks</a> that are compounded by the precarious circumstances they face in Canada. </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-022-01692-7">Our research</a> shows that the conditions of employment under Canada’s temporary foreign worker program generate <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16152643">significant challenges</a> to <a href="https://doi.org/10.4337/9781784714789.00024">workers’ health</a>, the protection of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13027">their rights</a> and even their survival.</p>
<h2>Repatriated if injured, sick</h2>
<p>Workers are hired on temporary contracts that bind them to a single employer, and these contracts include a repatriation clause that allows employers to terminate and deport workers without a grievance process. Injured and sick workers are often repatriated before they can access health care and/or workers’ compensation.</p>
<p>Consequently, migrant workers are often unable to refuse unsafe work and are <a href="https://www.canadian-nurse.com/blogs/cn-content/2020/03/02/nurses-role-in-improving-health-care-access-for-mi">reluctant to raise health concerns</a> or report situations of abuse. </p>
<p>While acknowledging some of the issues facing migrant workers in Canada, the amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations fail to address the power imbalances at the heart of the temporary foreign worker program. In fact, they risk further cementing some of these systemic problems.</p>
<h2>Employers as health mediators</h2>
<p>First, the federal government continues to entrench the role of the employer as an informal mediator of basic health care for workers. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1420774294901215238"}"></div></p>
<p>Migrant workers in Ontario are eligible for provincial health care, but they experience many <a href="https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.090736">barriers to accessing such services</a>, in part because of a reliance on employers. </p>
<p>Under the new amendments, the government of Canada once again normalizes this role. Employers are obligated to cover the waiting period before provincial health care eligibility by providing private health insurance to migrant workers upon arrival. </p>
<p>By imbuing the responsibility of “reasonable access to health care services” to employers when a worker is injured or becomes ill at the workplace, the government is wilfully denying the power imbalance and obvious conflict of interest posed by such an arrangement. </p>
<p>Consider, for example, the <a href="https://doi.org/10.9778/cmajo.20140014">history of medical repatriations</a> faced by this workforce, in which injured and sick workers are prematurely deported. At minimum, workers need <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.13088">independent access to health care</a> that is unmediated by employers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A person works in an asparagus field next to a green tractor." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3600%2C2452&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507217/original/file-20230130-26-9q3qva.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A farm worker tends to asparagus plants near Vittoria, Ont., in Norfolk County in June 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Labour abuses</h2>
<p>Second, the risk of labour abuses and exploitation are addressed only through paperwork, and again, delegated to employers. </p>
<p>To illustrate, the new amendments require all employers to provide migrant workers with an employment agreement on or before the first day of work, and they are to be drafted in English or French. </p>
<p>The agreements must match the initial offer of employment and include information about the job offer, wages, including overtime pay, and working conditions. Many migrant workers do not read English or French. <a href="https://doi.org/10.4000/pistes.3844">Our research</a> has also shown that workers’ rights on paper are almost never recognized in practice. </p>
<p>Therefore, there is no substitute for meaningful oversight and regulation.</p>
<p>More promisingly, the definition of “abuse” under the new amendments has been updated to include “reprisal.” </p>
<p>We support this definition, as we have <a href="http://www.migrantworker.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Aug6_MWH-EWG-Response-to-Federal-Government_06.08.21-1.pdf">previously advocated</a> for this and other actions to address workers’ risk of reprisal. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An agricultural worker picks cherries from a cherry tree" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=70%2C0%2C6639%2C4436&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338706/original/file-20200531-78845-1py587f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A seasonal migrant worker picks cherries at an industrial cherry orchard in British Columbia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Vulnerable worker permit</h2>
<p>As has been the case <a href="https://canadagazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2019/2019-05-29/html/sor-dors148-eng.html">since 2019</a>, if a worker can prove they’re being abused, they may have access to an <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/work-canada/permit/temporary/vulnerable-workers.html">Open Work Permit for Vulnerable Workers</a>. </p>
<p>However, that permit is an <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/laws11030036">ineffective mechanism</a> to report workplace abuse because it places the burden of proof on the worker. What’s more, it doesn’t guarantee future re-employment via the temporary foreign worker program, nor does it provide workers with the housing or support they require to find new employment.</p>
<p>To seriously respect the rights of migrant workers, Canada needs to transform the structure of the temporary foreign worker program to curtail the power and impunity of employers and embed rights and protections for workers. </p>
<p>This can only be done by providing truly structural changes, such as open work permits and <a href="https://theconversation.com/canada-must-grant-permanent-immigration-status-to-undocumented-residents-187415">permanent status</a> — measures long called for by migrant workers and their allies. </p>
<p>To do any less is merely making cosmetic changes to a fundamentally flawed system.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198489/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Mayell receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She is affiliated with the Migrant Worker Health Project, and the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group (MWHEWG).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>C. Susana Caxaj receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She is affiliated with the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janet McLaughlin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). She is affiliated with the Migrant Worker Health Project and the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group (MWHEWG).</span></em></p>Amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations fail to address the power imbalances at the heart of the temporary foreign worker program.Stephanie Mayell, Doctoral Candidate, Medical Anthropology, University of TorontoC. Susana Caxaj, Assistant Professor, Nursing, Western UniversityJanet McLaughlin, Associate Professor of Health Studies, Research Associate, International Migration Research Centre, Wilfrid Laurier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1979102023-01-19T19:13:11Z2023-01-19T19:13:11ZReaping what we sow: cultural ignorance undermines Australia’s recruitment of Pacific Island workers<p>Alice and Scott* have been running their two-storey pub-turned-backpacker hostel in Queensland’s Wide Bay region, north of Brisbane, for more a decade. Over the years they’ve provided accommodation for thousands of backpackers and itinerant workers who come to the region for fruit-picking jobs.</p>
<p>Before the pandemic, the hostel bustled with backpackers – “mostly from Europe, some Asian backpackers” too, Alice explains. Now they cater exclusively for Pacific Islanders on temporary visas.</p>
<p>We’re sitting in the hostel’s backyard watching a group of men still in their high-vis work gear, barbecuing their dinner. They’re from Vanuatu, Scott says. They’ve been at the hostel for many months. The yard is enclosed by a high wooden fence now. “We had to put that up to stop people looking in, abusing our workers,” Alice says. “People still think these foreigners are taking Aussie jobs.” </p>
<p>They’re not. Australia has had a huge shortage of farm workers since borders were closed in March 2020 and backpacker numbers dried up. Backpacker numbers have not rebounded since the border reopened. In 2019, <a href="https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/visa-working-holiday-maker/resource/1838d35d-8523-45e4-945a-11c584f3324b">more than 140,000</a> young people on the Working Holiday Maker visa flocked to Australia. In 2022, less than half that number had arrived. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-borders-are-open-so-where-are-all-the-backpackers-192614">Australia's borders are open, so where are all the backpackers?</a>
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<p>In response, the federal government has been offering more and more work visas under the <a href="https://www.palmscheme.gov.au/">Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme</a> (PALM), a federal government program that allows farmers (and other eligible employers – in July 2022 the federal government expanded the scheme to the services sector) to recruit workers from nine Pacific Island nations as well as Timor Leste.</p>
<p>In 2019, under the PALM scheme’s predecessor policies, there were <a href="https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/temporary-entrants-visa-holders">6,753 temporary migrants</a> from Pacific Island nations in Australia. By the end of 2022 it was almost <a href="https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/temporary-entrants-visa-holders">24,000</a>. By the end of this is year it is expected to be <a href="https://minister.agriculture.gov.au/watt/speeches-and-transcripts/interview-kieran-gilbert-sky-news-0">40,000</a>. </p>
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<p>But the switch from dependence on backpackers to Pacific Islanders has been bumpy. </p>
<h2>Cultural differences fuel misunderstandings</h2>
<p>For a <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0026/1686104/Turbulent-Times_The-state-of-backpacking-and-seasonal-farm-work__2023-report.pdf">new report</a> published by Griffith University on the state of seasonal farm work in Australia, I interviewed more than 40 stakeholders in business, government and the community sectors about the challenges of farms shifting from backpackers to Pacific Island workers. </p>
<p>It’s a familiar story of the problems that arise with the arrival of a new group of migrants into a community. </p>
<p>Assumptions about “cultural differences” fuel misunderstandings in regional communities. Several pubs in farming towns have imposed blanket bans on Pacific Islanders (on the grounds of excessive drinking and unruly behaviour), whereas backpackers and other workers are still allowed. </p>
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<p>Shifting cohorts of migrant workers also change the role of accommodation providers like Alice and Scott. Backpackers would stay for no more than a few months, and could move on when they liked, being free to chose who they worked for. PALM workers can stay for up to nine months on “seasonal” visas and up to four years on long-term visas, and they are bound to their sponsoring employer. This means they need long-term accommodation. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-pacific-australia-labour-mobility-scheme-offers-more-flexibility-for-employers-172385">New Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme offers more flexibility ... for employers</a>
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<p>With this change, hostels like Alice and Scott’s are also providing more than just housing. They often facilitate the daily transport, supermarket runs, airport pick-ups, as well as providing social activities, general care, and what Alice called “lending an ear”. </p>
<p>“When they first arrive we have to show them everything,” Alice said. “Settle them in, show them how things are done here in Australia. It’s totally different to where they’re from.”</p>
<p>Another hostel manager told me: “We take them to church – there’s three different churches we drop them to at the weekend. Then they go to the local rugby team.” </p>
<h2>Informal responses</h2>
<p>These informal support services filling a void in formal services. </p>
<p>The PALM scheme does require sponsoring employers to provide “<a href="https://www.palmscheme.gov.au/worker-support">cultural support</a>” – vaguely defined as cultural, social and religious activities – but there are no formal provisions to ensure those employing Pacific Islanders understand the type of cultural support their workers need. </p>
<p>My research indicates those signing up to the scheme are unsure about their obligations and are fumbling through the process.</p>
<p>“There’s no induction, you just get a bunch of Islanders arrive at your doorstep, fresh off the plane,” one hostel operator said. “I had no idea what church they go to, or even how I should refer to them. Can I say ‘Islander’? Is that appropriate?” </p>
<p>With Pacific Islanders becoming an increasingly crucial component of Australia’s rural workforce, building cultural awareness shouldn’t be an afterthought. My report argues that making cultural education part of the PALM scheme can help mitigate tensions and misunderstandings. </p>
<p>Training, awareness and information should be implemented by Pacific people here in regional communities. They know their cultural and social responsibilities, and can ease local Australian businesses and newly arrived Pacific Island workers into meaningful, long-term relationships. As one support service representative said:</p>
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<p>Leadership must come from Pacific people themselves, not Australians. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If we are serious about nurturing our “<a href="https://devpolicy.org/pacific-family-what-does-it-really-mean-20220615/">Pacific Family</a>” we can’t expect local businesses to erect high walls around their backyards, sealing off these workers from divided communities. </p>
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<p><em>* Names have been changed.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197910/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Kaya Barry works for Griffith University. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE220100394) funded by the Australian Government.</span></em></p>Australia is rapidly expanding visa programs for Pacific Islanders to fill labour shortages. More needs to be done to overcome cultural tensions in local communities.Kaya Barry, Senior Lecturer & ARC DECRA Research Fellow, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1860432022-07-12T17:00:22Z2022-07-12T17:00:22ZFor migrant farm workers, housing is not just a determinant of health, but a determinant of death<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473223/original/file-20220708-15-6bkhj8.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=116%2C0%2C2878%2C1854&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Migrant farm workers were disproportionately affected by COVID-19 because of poor housing conditions. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/for-migrant-farm-workers--housing-is-not-just-a-determinant-of-health--but-a-determinant-of-death" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Imagine if, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — before vaccines were available — you had to share a cramped bunkhouse with a dozen co-workers. Imagine if your employer forbid you from having personal visitors, or if you had to ask your boss for permission to visit the doctor. </p>
<p>Agricultural workers hired through the <a href="https://doi.org/10.48416/ijsaf.v26i2.57">Temporary Foreign Worker Program</a> regularly confront these dynamics while they leave their families behind in countries like Mexico and Jamaica for months or even years at a time to work in Canada. Frequently, they live <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-018-0583-z">on their employer’s property</a>. These housing conditions are <a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/08d0341f5c6078fd91a2d53da293df5a/1?cbl=43874&pq-origsite=gscholar">inconsistent</a>, often <a href="https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2020.093.016">overcrowded</a> and sometimes <a href="https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1430">grossly substandard</a>. </p>
<p>But this month, <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2022/04/government-of-canada-announces-workforce-solutions-road-map--further-changes-to-the-temporary-foreign-worker-program-to-address-labour-shortages-ac.html">the federal government is holding a roundtable</a> to improve migrant farm workers’ employer-provided housing. This is a crucial opportunity to tackle persistent problems.</p>
<h2>COVID-19 revealed dangers of poor housing</h2>
<p>When COVID-19 hit migrant farm workers disproportionately hard in 2020, many Canadians <a href="https://www.tvo.org/article/has-ontario-changed-its-approach-to-migrant-worker-housing">recognized the connection</a> between farm workers’ poor housing and the avoidable health challenges they often face. Our own research shows housing conditions played a major role in the <a href="http://www.migrantworker.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Jan.29_Coroner-Study-Key-Findings-and-Recs_Final.pdf">untimely death of several farm workers</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Rows of green plants with a farm vehicle and a worker with a shovel in the background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473226/original/file-20220708-27-b88nnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Workers do maintenance at an Ontario asparagus farm temporarily shut down after 164 migrant workers tested positive for COVID-19 in June 2020 .</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
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<p>Policymakers are increasingly recognizing that housing is a significant <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112571">determinant of health</a>. But for migrant agricultural workers, housing is also a significant <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2022.2053735">determinant of death</a>. </p>
<p>Before the pandemic, <a href="https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/05/11/a-study-urged-better-standards-for-migrant-workers-housing-nothing-was-done-now-covid-19-has-struck.html">agricultural industry groups pushed back</a> against creating national housing standards for workers. The federal government <a href="http://www.nationalhomeinspector.org/NHICCreportRsum.pdf">commissioned a study</a> in 2018 by the National Home Inspector Certification Council, a <a href="https://nationalhomeinspector.org/index.html">non-profit organization that certifies housing inspection credentials</a>. The study concluded that the quality of housing for migrant farm workers lacked uniformity, and the investigators recommended standardized criteria. </p>
<p>Yet four years later, the government has made sluggish progress towards enforceable national housing standards. </p>
<h2>Key housing issues</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.migrantworker.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Caxaj-Weiler-2022-Research-Brief-Ministerial-Roundtable-on-TFWP-Housing-Standards.pdf">Our research in British Columbia and Ontario</a>, including interviews with over 50 migrant agricultural workers, identified several key housing issues:</p>
<ol>
<li><p><strong>Water, food and sanitation</strong>: Lack of access to clean drinking water and insufficient toilets, showers and handwashing stations are common concerns raised by migrant workers. Inadequate refrigeration, food storage and stoves were also often reported. This has <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12342">serious consequences for the type of food workers can cook and store, and their nutrition</a>. Because of limited laundry, cooking and washroom facilities, some workers spend their days off waiting in line for a turn at these basic amenities. </p></li>
<li><p><strong>Heating, cooling and electricity</strong>: Some workers told us that on a cold winter’s night, they gather around a space heater or oven door to stay warm. In the summer heat, one worker told us that trying to sleep after a long shift is a “living hell” due to a lack of ventilation and air conditioning in the trailer he shares with another worker. </p></li>
<li><p><strong>Exposure to pests, hazards and disrepair</strong>: The 2018 report commissioned by the federal government found that 40 per cent of workers’ housing was reported by employers as “dual purpose.” This means living quarters also functioned as workplace facilities (for example, granaries, garages, etc.). This finding suggests many workers may live in close proximity to agricultural chemicals and other hazards, which echoes findings from <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/610779561?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true">previous research</a>. Lack of maintenance is also common.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Overcrowding and lack of privacy</strong>: One study reported the ratio of workers to functioning toilets on one farm was <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41800632?socuuid=3a6811a3-abd3-42a0-ae76-e360d25a858e">45 to two</a>. Echoing this research, overcrowding and cramped living quarters were among the most common complaints made by participants in our own study. During COVID-19, these cramped living quarters <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2021.0010">amplified uncertainty</a> and anxiety for workers. A lack of personal space also undermines workers’ basic need for privacy and intimacy. One interviewee noted, “you can’t even wish your wife a good night,” without someone overhearing. </p></li>
<li><p><strong>Isolation and employer control</strong>: Migrant agricultural workers tend to live in rural areas <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2016.1202752">far away from basic services and community activities</a> outside of work (such as religious services). <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/fermin-soto-sanchez-1.6491715">Recent</a> farm worker <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1261683">deaths</a> from motor vehicles point to the lack of public and safe active transportation in workers’ neighbourhoods. Workers have told us they may be required to bike one- or two-hour round trips to access services or participate in social events. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Workers also face <a href="https://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/22448">explicit restrictions on their freedom</a>. Among the rules some workers are expected to conform to while living in Canada include curfews, prohibitions on visitors and being locked into their living quarters. Workers are often hesitant to report illegal behaviours by their employer for fear it may put their <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16152643">livelihoods in jeopardy</a>.</p>
<h2>Action to ensure safe housing</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A line of people wearing face masks" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473227/original/file-20220708-24-2iih28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Migrant workers from Mexico maintain social distancing as they wait to be transported to Québec farms after arriving at Trudeau Airport in Montréal in April 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Migrant agricultural workers deserve to live with the same health, safety, and dignity owed to any Canadian worker. The federal government should take the following actions immediately:</p>
<ol>
<li><p><strong>Consistent national housing standards</strong>. The federal government should co-ordinate among all levels of government so that workers no longer fall through the jurisdictional cracks. <a href="http://www.migrantworker.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Submission_National_Consultation_Housing_MWHEWG_2020.pagenumberscorrected-WEBSITE.pdf">Standards should be significantly raised</a> for physical housing conditions (e.g., no bunk beds), health and safety, freedom from employer control and security of tenure.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Proactive, unannounced and thorough housing inspections</strong> to <a href="https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/docs/parl_oag_202112_02_e.pdf">ensure standards on paper are enforced in practice</a>. Workers need accessible channels to report problems while being protected from employer backlash, alongside the freedom to collectively organize. Penalties for non-compliance should be high enough to promote deterrence.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Government-funded housing</strong> (for example, in residential areas, with safe transportation to farms) would help <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12804">promote inclusion</a> and access to community services, while reducing inappropriate employer restrictions or control.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Permanent residency, open work permits and a fair grievance procedure</strong> before facing deportation would allow workers to refuse unsafe housing and poor work conditions, which often go hand-in-hand. A secure immigration status would also give workers the option of bringing their families with them. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>The federal government’s upcoming roundtable is an urgent opportunity to raise the bar on dignified housing and living conditions for these members of our communities. Canada should stop expecting low-wage, racialized migrant workers to bear the brunt of preventable illness and death.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186043/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>C. Susana Caxaj's research is currently funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Her work has previously been funded by the Vancouver Foundation and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). She is a member of the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anelyse Weiler has received funding from SSHRC. Her work has previously been funded by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. She is affiliated with the BC Employment Standards Coalition, Worker Solidarity Network, and Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group.</span></em></p>Poor housing put migrant workers at risk for COVID-19. A federal government consultation on national housing standards is a crucial opportunity to support migrant workers’ health, safety and dignity.C. Susana Caxaj, Assistant Professor, Nursing, Western UniversityAnelyse Weiler, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of VictoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1770632022-02-23T19:12:28Z2022-02-23T19:12:28ZAustralia is creating an underclass of exploited farm workers, unable to speak up<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447949/original/file-20220223-15-1j4ldz7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=550%2C192%2C2686%2C1586&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a senior official in Australia’s Immigration Department in the late 1990s, I frequently met counterparts in Europe and North America who were exasperated by their inability to make headway against the exploitation and abuse of hundreds of thousands of migrant farm workers.</p>
<p>They also worried about the infiltration of criminal gangs who controlled how the migrant workers were allocated to farmers, profiting from that control.</p>
<p>I walked away from those conversations smug in the view Australia would never introduce a dedicated farm worker visa like the United States <a href="https://www.farmers.gov/working-with-us/h2a-visa-program">Agriculture Visa</a>.</p>
<p>Fast forward two decades, and not only are we about to have an Agriculture Visa, we also have unsuccessful asylum seekers trafficked to work on Australian farms.</p>
<h2>Work without protection</h2>
<p>There are currently about 95,000 asylum seekers in Australia, about 30,000 of whom have had asylum refused at both the initial and by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal stage and are not legally able to work. </p>
<p>Many work on farms, including those not legally able to.</p>
<p>A retired teacher in Mildura recently contacted me to talk about how appallingly they are being treated and how they live in the shadows to avoid the authorities.</p>
<p>They can never complain about their treatment and have to accept whatever work they can get under whatever conditions as those who have been refused asylum have no legal right to work.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/">Hear more: The boss you can’t escape from, ABC Background briefing</a></em></p>
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<p>Last year, at the encouragement of farm lobby groups, Agriculture Minister David Littleproud spoke cautiously in favour of an <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/amnesty-for-undocumented-workers-would-encourage-vaccinations-report-20210305-p5783v.html">amnesty</a> for undocumented migrants (mainly unsuccessful asylum seekers) working on farms.</p>
<p>It would have given them <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nationals-mps-endorse-amnesty-for-illegal-migrant-farm-workers-20210225-p575xy.html">rights</a> and help protect them from exploitation.</p>
<p>The idea was near- instantly <a href="https://www.countrynews.com.au/horticulture/2021/03/25/4033016/illegal-farm-worker-amnesty-gets-torpedoed/">rejected</a> by Attorney General Michaelia Cash, without an offer of an alternative solution. </p>
<h2>Amnesty rejected</h2>
<p>As in North America and Europe, Australia seems to want to sweep the problems of undocumented migrant farm workers under the carpet.</p>
<p>Compounding this exploitation, we have for more than ten years steadily expanded Australia’s <a href="https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/pacific/engagement/pacific-labour-mobility">Pacific Island visa schemes</a> for seasonal farm workers and “<a href="https://www.awe.gov.au/sites/default/files/env/pages/5df395f1-d605-4c20-b75c-e2ccd0e339ac/files/pic-progress-report-2009.pdf">streamlined</a>” their provisions for the convenience of employers and labour hire companies.</p>
<p>At least <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/12/sixteen-deaths-in-australias-troubled-seasonal-workers-program-since-pandemic">30</a> people have died on these visas while in Australia.</p>
<p>The government dismisses this as bad luck, a normal death rate. That’s unlikely. If working holiday makers or students had been dying at such a rate, there would have been more than 1,000 working holiday maker deaths in the last 10 years and more than 1,400 student deaths.</p>
<h2>Absconding workers</h2>
<p>In the last 12 months, more than 1,000 Pacific Island visa holders have “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/05/you-may-bring-shame-to-your-family-australia-launches-campaign-to-stop-seasonal-farm-workers-absconding">absconded</a>” from their employers in the face of exploitation and abuse.</p>
<p>Earlier this month a number of Pacific Island farm workers gave evidence to a Senate committee inquiring into the <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Job_Security/JobSecurity/Public_Hearings">treatment of migrant farm workers</a>.</p>
<p>They showed pay slips with extraordinary deductions for a host of “innovative” reasons that left the workers with not nearly enough money to buy food let alone support their families back home.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1492646479475122177"}"></div></p>
<p>And how did the government respond? It issued warnings to these workers not to abscond. It is threatening the workers who gave evidence with deportation.</p>
<p>How the government thinks that will solve anything is a mystery.</p>
<p>The government in 2019 promised legislation to address exploitation in response to recommendations of its own <a href="https://www.ag.gov.au/industrial-relations/publications/report-migrant-workers-taskforce">migrant worker task force</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447406/original/file-20220220-44643-5i3s0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Posters, instead of support.</span>
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<p>The very weak <a href="https://www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-03/government_response_to_the_migrant_workers_taskforce_report.pdf">draft legislation</a> it developed for consultation, which employer bodies sought to water down, will now not be passed ahead of the election.</p>
<p>Even if the legislation did proceed, the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) would not have enough resources to enforce it. The FWO is drowning in its current workload.</p>
<p>Experience overseas shows that even strong and well resourced regulations have failed to make much impact on the exploitation of migrant farm workers.</p>
<h2>A new Agricultural Visa</h2>
<p>In the second half of 2021, the government announced a new “<a href="https://minister.awe.gov.au/littleproud/media-releases/history-made-ag-worker-visa-created">Agriculture Visa</a>” for people from nearby Asian countries.</p>
<p>The regulations for this visa were introduced in <a href="https://www.dfat.gov.au/people-people/international-labour-mobility/australian-agriculture-visa">September 2021</a>.</p>
<p>Littleproud described this visa as a landmark reform to Australia’s agriculture industry while Foreign Minister Marise Payne said it would build on the strong performance of the Pacific Island seasonal worker visas.</p>
<p>Both ministers seem to think Australia can somehow avoid the near slavery-like conditions experienced for decades by migrant farm workers elsewhere by eventually giving these workers (but not the Pacific Island workers) a pathway to permanent migration.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-new-agricultural-visa-could-supercharge-exploitation-172304">Australia’s new agricultural visa could supercharge exploitation</a>
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<p>They could not be more wrong. The lure of eventual permanent migration will make these workers, most of whom have very little English and few post-secondary skills, even more vulnerable to exploitation.</p>
<p>Employers and labour hire companies will know these workers cannot complain lest this close off the pathway to residence.</p>
<h2>A less egalitarian Australia</h2>
<p>It is not surprising the Department of Home Affairs is struggling to identify how this pathway will work, while the countries with which Australia is trying to reach an agreement are reluctant <a href="https://www.countryman.com.au/countryman/news/no-countries-sign-up-to-australias-new-ag-visa-in-first-three-months-c-5120267">reluctant to sign up</a> to putting their citizens in a vulnerable position.</p>
<p>Even more important is that these visas entrench the view there are some jobs Australians won’t do, fundamentally changing the nature of Australian society.</p>
<p>Once accepted, industry will press for an ever-widening range of low skill and low pay jobs to have their own dedicated visa – meat workers, cleaners, shelf stackers, housekeepers in hotels, the list is endless.</p>
<p>Rather than sleep-walking into this change to Australian society, shouldn’t we be debating this ahead of the election?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177063/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Abul Rizvi was a senior official in the Department of Immigration from the early 1990s to 2007 when he left as Deputy Secretary. He has recently published a book titled Population Shock. </span></em></p>Rather than listening to the grievances of illegal farm workers Australia is threatening them with exploitation while broadening the means by which agricultural employers can bring workers into Australia.Abul Rizvi, PhD candidate, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1723042021-11-29T02:05:24Z2021-11-29T02:05:24ZAustralia’s new agricultural visa could supercharge exploitation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433807/original/file-20211124-17-rrx3xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C693%2C4288%2C2150&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Australian government’s new <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/marise-payne/media-release/joint-media-release-australian-agriculture-visa">temporary visa for agricultural workers</a> is meant to fix labour shortages in the agricultural sector. But it’s a risky approach that could lead to more exploitation of low-skilled farm workers and fewer permanent skilled workers.</p>
<p>The agriculture sector is heavily reliant on temporary visa holders for labour, with the two main sources being “backpackers” doing three months as a condition of further stay and workers from the Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste sponsored by employers to work full-time.</p>
<p>The new <a href="https://www.dfat.gov.au/people-people/international-labour-mobility/australian-agriculture-visa">Australian Agriculture Visa</a> will enable employers in the farming, forestry, fisheries and meat-processing sectors to recruit full-time workers from other countries, with the <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/indonesia-set-to-sign-up-to-agvisa-accord/news-story/fbb4943fb7e4367e7ecb921dd75a6dad">first expected to be Indonesia</a>, and arrangements with other Southeast Asian nations to follow.</p>
<p>This move comes after decades of lobbying by farmers. The immediate catalyst is the new <a href="https://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/negotiations/aukfta">Australia-United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement</a>, which will exempt British backpackers from the requirements of the Working Holiday Visa to complete 88 days of farm work to extend their stay. This is expected to reduce the agricultural labour force by about <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/uk-australia-free-trade-agreement-farmer-reaction-88-day-work-requirement-struck-off-ag-visa-agreed/5f3d0adc-ef8a-455d-8bde-639dea8e6955">10,000 workers</a> a year. </p>
<p>Details of the new visa are still being finalised. Like the existing arrangements for Pacific Island and Timorese workers, visas will be sponsored, so numbers will depend on the scheme’s popularity with employers. </p>
<p>Standard workplace laws will apply, including the payment of award wages. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/loophole-closed-the-minimum-wage-for-farm-workers-is-long-overdue-171291">Loophole closed: the minimum wage for farm workers is long overdue</a>
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<p>But enforcing the rights of migrant workers on farms has proven notoriously difficult. Regardless of what visa people hold, the jobs are low-wage and often in isolated areas. There is also the problem of visas binding workers to sponsoring employers, making it harder to escape mistreatment. </p>
<h2>Opportunities for exploitation</h2>
<p>Stories of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-15/backpacker-farm-workers-speak-of-wage-exploitation/12545294?nw=0&r=HtmlFragment">exploitation of migrant farm workers abound</a>. As the Fair Work Ombudsman reported in 2016, backpackers working on farms have been at risk of being a “black market, exploited labour force”.</p>
<p>The Pacific work visas that have been available under two programs (the Seasonal Worker Programme and Pacific Labour Scheme) are more regulated, with employers obliged to provide a minimum number of work hours at the prevailing award rate, as well as accommodation and pastoral support. </p>
<p>But these rules have not prevented <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/pacific-island-scheme-wages-deducted-high-rent-inverell/12336278">reports of exploitation</a> and mistreatment of workers who often speak poor English, may be unfamiliar with their workplace rights, and have no ability to quit and find a new employer. </p>
<p>Low-wage jobs carry particular risks under employer sponsorship rules. Skilled workers are better able to bargain for themselves and typically have options to move. But workers in entry-level roles have fewer options. The choice is often putting up, leaving the country altogether or “<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-needs-better-working-conditions-not-shaming-for-pacific-islander-farm-workers-171404">absconding</a>”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-needs-better-conditions-not-shaming-for-pacific-farm-workers-171404">Australia needs better conditions, not shaming, for Pacific farm workers</a>
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<p>The Seasonal Worker Program and Pacific Labour Schemes are being <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/marise-payne/media-release/streamlining-and-strengthening-pacific-labour-new-era">rolled into a single scheme</a> – the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme – that the federal government is promising will cut red tape and improve worker protections. But critics are not confident the changes will address the loopholes that facilitate exploitation. </p>
<p>The same concerns also apply to workers recruited under the new agricultural visa. Why would the results be any different for a new visa with fewer protections?</p>
<p>Many farmers want to do the right thing. But their livelihoods will be threatened if weak visa rules allow dodgy operators to mistreat migrant workers.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-pacific-australia-labour-mobility-scheme-offers-more-flexibility-for-employers-172385">New Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme offers more flexibility ... for employers</a>
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<p>Sponsoring employers (typically labour hire agencies) that underpay their workers will gain an advantage, driving down costs and pushing the good guys to the brink. </p>
<p>A widely used agricultural visa risks supercharging these forces, making exploitation of agricultural workers more common.</p>
<h2>Displacing skilled migrants</h2>
<p>The federal government is also considering a <a href="https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/australian-agriculture-visa-fact-sheet.pdf">pathway to permanent residency</a> for workers arriving on the new visa. </p>
<p>But with the total number of permanent visas available each year <a href="https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/migration-program-planning-levels">capped at 160,000</a>, granting permanent residency to agricultural visa holders will likely mean displacing workers with more skills.</p>
<p>Australia could end up swapping migrant workers who can get higher-paid jobs for those who can only get low-paid jobs. Migrants who earn less will also pay less income tax.</p>
<p>The government may yet expand the number of permanent visas granted each year. But increasing the quota for permanent migrants is something the Morrison government is likely to want to avoid, given the politics of population pressures on major cities. The reasons it <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/language/english/audio/government-to-cut-permanent-migrant-numbers-by-30-000-per-year">cut 30,000 places</a> from the permanent migration program just three years ago – housing affordability being the most obvious – haven’t gone away. </p>
<p>If the permanent migration program were to be expanded, lower-skilled agricultural workers should be <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/report/rethinking-permanent-skilled-migration-after-the-pandemic/">well down our priority list</a>.</p>
<p>Australia’s experience with temporary migration shows that once a new visa is established the number of migrant workers can grow quickly. A new agricultural visa could see history repeat.</p>
<p>Instead of rushing ahead, the Morrison government should hit pause and rethink its approach to helping farmers find workers. As it stands this dedicated visa for agricultural workers risks opening a Pandora’s box that will prove impossible to close.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute's activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations and individuals to support its general activities as disclosed on its website. Grattan Institute's work on migration policy is currently supported by a generous contribution from the Scanlon Foundation.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute's activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities as disclosed on its website.
Grattan Institute's work on migration policy is currently supported by a generous contribution from the Scanlon Foundation.</span></em></p>Many farmers want to do the right thing. But their livelihoods will be threatened if weak visa rules allow dodgy operators to mistreat migrant workers.Henry Sherrell, Deputy Program Director (Migration), Grattan InstituteBrendan Coates, Program Director, Economic Policy, Grattan InstituteLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1723852021-11-23T06:30:01Z2021-11-23T06:30:01ZNew Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme offers more flexibility … for employers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433309/original/file-20211122-13-1snztkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C485%2C3000%2C1508&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Australian government has announced a major change to its arrangements for migrant workers from Pacific Island nations (and Timor-Leste), replacing two existing temporary visa schemes with a single scheme, to be known as the<a href="https://www.palmscheme.gov.au/"> Pacific Australia Labour Mobility</a> (PALM) scheme. </p>
<p>The consolidated scheme will come into effect in April 2022. It will replace the Seasonal Worker Programme, which has provided visas of six to nine months’ duration to meet employer needs for “unskilled” labour, mostly in farm harvesting work, and the Pacific Labour Scheme, which has provided visas of one to three years for “low-skilled” and “semi-skilled” workers in rural and regional areas. </p>
<p>The consolidation, <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/marise-payne/media-release/streamlining-and-strengthening-pacific-labour-new-era">announced today</a>, comes at time when farmers are crying out for more workers while industry and government are under pressure to address structural issues in the existing schemes that have enabled worker mistreatment and wage theft. </p>
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<p>The PALM scheme seems partly designed to respond to these criticisms. The <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/marise-payne/media-release/streamlining-and-strengthening-pacific-labour-new-era">press release issued</a> by foreign minister Marise Payne and minister for the Pacific Zed Seselja contains vaguely framed assurances of “enhanced worker protections”, including a “compliance and assurance program” (details unknown).</p>
<p>But much clearer is how the scheme will address long-running <em>employer</em> concerns about the existing schemes, by cutting down the paper work and requirements to show they have been unable to fill positions with local workers before applying to recruit migrant workers. </p>
<p>“Flexibility” is the buzzword here – though more for employers than workers. </p>
<h2>What ‘labour mobility’ means</h2>
<p>Back in 2017, pre-pandemic, I sat in a forum hosted by a labour hire agency in the middle of a picking season in north-central Victoria. Speaking to room full of farmers, the agency’s representative talked about how backpackers would leave farms if they weren’t getting paid enough. “This is a challenge”, the representative said. The farmers nodded in agreement. </p>
<p>Farmers I’ve interviewed then and since describe their frustrations with spending days getting a group of workers up to speed, only to have them leave. </p>
<p>This is one reason employers like the Seasonal Worker Programme, which ties the visa holder to the sponsoring employer (typically a labour hire agency). As a packing-shed manager put it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We can get a group of staff and know that they can’t actually go and work anywhere else. </p>
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<p>For workers though, this <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-needs-better-working-conditions-not-shaming-for-pacific-islander-farm-workers-171404">tying of visas to a particular employer</a> has been one of the key problems with the existing Pacific worker visa schemes. It limits workers’ ability to complain about exploitative treatment or to leave and find more favourable work. </p>
<p>While the details of the new scheme are sparse, it seems the PALM scheme won’t substantially change this control mechanism. </p>
<p>The “labour mobility” being delivered is not the worker’s choice, but movement between employers “in response to workforce demand”. </p>
<p>That is, where employers struggle to provide the minimum average of 30 hours of work a week required, they (or more likely, the labour hire agencies managing their workforce) will be able to move workers between employers. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-needs-better-conditions-not-shaming-for-pacific-farm-workers-171404">Australia needs better conditions, not shaming, for Pacific farm workers</a>
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<h2>Flexibility for employers</h2>
<p>This kind of increased flexibility has already been instituted under pandemic revisions to the Seasonal Worker Programme rules. Worker “consent” will be required for these moves, but this is hardly the same as allowing workers the capacity to instigate changes of employers themselves. </p>
<p>Thus, while the changes will likely yield some improvements for workers – through reducing situations in which they remain stuck with farmers who have run out of enough work for them – they won’t address the fundamental power disparity embedded in these schemes. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Employers like the way the Seasonal Worker Programme ties the visa holder to the sponsoring employer (typically a labour hire agency)." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433391/original/file-20211123-17-wyijs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Employers like the way the Seasonal Worker Programme ties the visa holder to the sponsoring employer (typically a labour hire agency).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Another change with PALM will be the capacity for seasonal workers to apply for longer-term visas – up to four years. This too sounds promising. But the framing of the changes again suggests the balance of power will remain firmly with employers. </p>
<p>Workers will be able to apply for these longer-term visas only once they are Australia, and only if recommended by their employers. This will replicate the vulnerability in the existing schemes, by which workers’ chances of staying in the country or qualifying for a future visa are often contingent on the whims of their employer. It’s a powerful disincentive against complaint. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/if-australia-cares-about-pacific-nations-we-should-also-invest-in-their-care-givers-102780">If Australia cares about Pacific nations, we should also invest in their care givers</a>
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<h2>Still a recipe for precarious work</h2>
<p>Strengthening worker protections would involve giving workers increased control over the conditions of their labour, and rights not contingent on their employer’s approval. </p>
<p>So what are the strengthened protections for workers under the new scheme? There is little detail beyond generalised references to “welfare and cultural expertise”, “community connections” and “maintaining the paramount importance of worker wellbeing”. </p>
<p>The most concrete change described is establishing a “24/7 helpline” for migrant workers. Exactly what help this will provide remains unclear. A helpline might assist workers facing illegal exploitation. It won’t help much with the unfairness produced by the system working exactly as intended. </p>
<p>With so little detail, the full implications of the new scheme are impossible to gauge. At this point, notwithstanding some nods to worker protection, it looks to be largely a continuation of established patterns, with intensified “flexibility” for industry – a recipe for precarious employment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172385/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Victoria Stead receives funding from the Australian Research Council (grant ID DE180101224)</span></em></p>The promise of labour mobility in the Australian government’s new temporary migrant labour scheme is mostly for employers, not workers.Victoria Stead, Senior Research Fellow, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1714042021-11-09T18:24:34Z2021-11-09T18:24:34ZAustralia needs better conditions, not shaming, for Pacific farm workers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430977/original/file-20211109-15-15ii1xv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5312%2C2671&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I met Elisabeth the day she learned she was being sent back to Vanuatu. </p>
<p>She had arrived in Shepparton, in north-central Victoria, two months earlier. She was meant to stay for six months, working in a packing shed as part of the Seasonal Worker Programme, which provides temporary visas to workers from nine Pacific Island countries and Timor-Leste (East Timor).</p>
<p>But her employer had decided she wasn’t productive enough. So Elisabeth’s contract had been cancelled. </p>
<p>She had hoped to save a few thousand dollars from her time in Australia, enough to buy a small plot of land on which to build a house and transform her family’s life. Instead she was taking back a plastic shopping bag with chocolate Easter eggs she had bought that afternoon at the supermarket in a nearby town.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/if-australia-cares-about-pacific-nations-we-should-also-invest-in-their-care-givers-102780">If Australia cares about Pacific nations, we should also invest in their care givers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>More that 80% of workers in Australia’s horticultural industry are migrants on temporary work visas (or undocumented). The Seasonal Worker Programme
is often regarded as one of the better pathways to this work. </p>
<p>It is, for example, more highly regulated than the larger (pre-pandemic) Working Holiday Maker scheme, which provides the industry with backpackers. In 2020-21 it provided about 12,000 of the roughly 80,000 strong (formally employed) seasonal workforce. </p>
<p>But the regulations are a double-edged sword, also working as <a href="https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.13491">mechanisms of control</a>.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430982/original/file-20211109-17-gq8rgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>Unlike the Working Holiday Maker scheme, Seasonal Worker Programme visas are typically arranged by labour-hire companies, who recruit and then place workers on client farms. Under the condition of the visa, workers can only work for that employer. Employers in turn are obliged to provide things like accommodation. But this can be become an opportunity to exploitation, through <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/pacific-island-farm-workers-to-launch-class-action-against-labour-hire-firms-over-wage-theft/news-story/a3fc481869f7374b7ac1b6ea4ee156cf">overcharging workers for rent</a>.</p>
<p>If the employer is dissatisfied with a worker, as in Elisabeth’s case, they can be sent home, or refused a place in subsequent years. But if the worker is dissatisfied with the employer, it’s even worse.</p>
<p>Tying workers to their employers stymies their capacity to act in the face of poor conditions. Backpackers who find themselves being <a href="https://mckellinstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/McKell-Institute-Blue-Harvest-Final.pdf">underpaid</a> or exploited at least have the option of leaving. Those in the Seasonal Worker Programme can’t do the same. </p>
<h2>Campaign against ‘absconding’</h2>
<p>This is the context for the federal government’s concerns about seasonal workers “absconding” – a word more typically associated with escaping from custody.</p>
<p>Government figures provided to media outlets suggest <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/05/you-may-bring-shame-to-your-family-australia-launches-campaign-to-stop-seasonal-farm-workers-absconding">1,181 workers absconded</a> in the past financial year, up on 225 the year before. </p>
<p>A campaign warning visa holders not to leave their designated employer and seek work elsewhere warns of consequences including visa cancellation; not being allowed to work in Australia again (“this may include your family and community members”), and bringing “shame to your family’s reputation”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Shame: the Australian Government's response to Pacific Islanders breaching the condition of their Seasonal Worker Programme visa." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430786/original/file-20211108-17-1o9caaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shame: the Australian Government’s response to Pacific Islanders breaching the condition of their Seasonal Worker Programme visa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australian Government</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s a characteristically patronising and insulting message that ignores – and abdicates responsibility for – the conditions that drive SWP workers to abscond. </p>
<p>During the pandemic, <a href="https://unitedworkers.org.au/high-risk-situation-on-our-farms-new-research-released-on-the-risks-for-undocumented-workers-in-covid-19-pandemic/">vulnerabilities</a> for workers have intensified. The experience of Anne, another worker from Vanuatu, is illustrative. </p>
<p>When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, Anne was working in a fruit-packing shed in regional Victoria. This was her sixth placement. She had been due to go back to Vanuatu in July, but had her visa extended under special COVID-19 provisions. </p>
<p>This was not lucrative for her, though. When I spoke to her in October last year she working on a farm in NSW. Her labour-hire agency had placed her there (with no input from her). Crossing the state border, she spent two weeks in quarantine, during which time she had to cover her living costs, eating into the savings she was hoped to take back to her family. Isolated and missing her children, she felt desperate about how little money she had been able to save.</p>
<h2>Shifting responsiblity</h2>
<p>There are indeed, as the government campaign states, unscrupulous labour contractors spreading misinformation and encouraging people to abscond, particularly under these pandemic circumstances. </p>
<p>But this is not the case of a few bad apples. It is the very conditions of horticultural labour that produce vulnerability and insecurity, and drive absconding. Nor are Pacific workers who do abscond dupes; they are people navigating circumstances that often leave them with no good choices.</p>
<p>The government’s campaign obscures these things. It instead places responsibility on Pacific workers themselves. </p>
<p>This moralising and patronising discourse is consistent with an established pattern of Australian engagement with the Pacific. Think, for example, of then Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack’s 2019 dismissal of Pacific Island nation’s concerns about climate change. “They’ll continue to survive,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/16/pacific-islands-will-survive-climate-crisis-because-they-can-pick-our-fruit-australias-deputy-pm-says">he said</a>, “because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit.”</p>
<h2>Meaningful reforms</h2>
<p>Undocumented workers provide as much as <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/business-school/research/work-and-organisational-studies/towards-a-durable-future-report.pdf">one-third</a> of Australia’s national seasonal horticultural workforce. A visa amnesty – something advocates have long called for and a handful of federal National Party MPs <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nationals-mps-endorse-amnesty-for-illegal-migrant-farm-workers-20210225-p575xy.html">have already endorsed</a> – would support and protect these communities.</p>
<p>Beyond this, the Fair Work Commission’s decision last week to guarantee farm workers a <a href="https://theconversation.com/closing-the-loophole-a-minimum-wage-for-australias-farm-workers-is-long-overdue-171291">minimum wage</a> is a good step in improving working conditions. But there’s more to be done. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/loophole-closed-the-minimum-wage-for-farm-workers-is-long-overdue-171291">Loophole closed: the minimum wage for farm workers is long overdue</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>All workers on seasonal visas need a right to return in subsequent seasons. This would enable them to complain about mistreatment with less fear of being punished. </p>
<p>They also deserve to make their own choices about accommodation and other living conditions. There needs to be capacity to move between employers, and meaningful consequences to hold labour-hire contractors to account for mistreatment. There should also be pathways to permanent residency, as there are for other temporary migration visas.</p>
<p>Migrant workers are critical to Australia’s farming sector and food security. What is shameful are the conditions leading so many to abscond.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171404/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Victoria Stead receives funding from the Australian Research Council (grant DE180101224). </span></em></p>Tying migrant workers to one employer as a visa condition stymies their capacity to act in the face of poor conditions.Victoria Stead, Senior Research Fellow, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1622062021-06-21T13:41:43Z2021-06-21T13:41:43ZFood is poised to get a lot more expensive, but it doesn’t have to<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407331/original/file-20210620-22-1u7sohm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1920%2C1270&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Food prices are poised to become higher post-pandemic. But using technology smartly and humanely can put the brakes to food price inflation.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Pixabay)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As we emerge from the pandemic, people everywhere are facing punishing housing costs and stagnant wages. At the grocery store, consumers are also confronting <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/04/business/inflation-food-prices/index.html">rising food prices</a>, a sobering reminder that good food costs too much for too many. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do">Consumers aren’t used to expensive food</a>. Over the past few years, most North Americans have typically spent around 10 per cent of household income on sustenance. In 1900, (when housing was much more affordable), food costs took up <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-america-spends-money-100-years-in-the-life-of-the-family-budget/255475/">42 per cent of incomes</a> in the United States. </p>
<p>By 1950, new agricultural technologies had boosted production, helping slash costs to 30 per cent, but the gains were just beginning. The number fell to <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do">18 per cent by 1960</a>, and has mostly trended downward since. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man in a mask surveys grocery store shelves while carrying a basket." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407329/original/file-20210620-20-39v6j4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">We’re not used to expensive food, because it’s been relatively cheap for so long.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Unsplash)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today, with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/02/economy/inflation-oecd/index.html">inflation on the rise</a>, we need to consider what we can do to ensure the cost of a healthy diet stays within reach. There are two broad approaches. The first is to reduce poverty. The second is to reduce the cost of food. </p>
<p>Both approaches are necessary but we’re focusing on the latter: how to keep food costs down. In particular, we believe that with the right strategies, in the relatively near future, even healthy food may be cheaper than ever. The key will be technology and policy. To the doubters, and we know there are many, consider the following example. </p>
<h2>40-year-old wager</h2>
<p>In 1980, an <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-bet-five-metals-and-the-future-of-the-planet">economist made a bet against an ecologist</a>.</p>
<p>Julian Simon, a business professor at the University of Maryland, wagered Paul Ehrlich, an ecologist at Stanford University, that the cost of raw materials would fall over the decade. Ehrlich chose a set of raw materials and the two agreed to reconvene on Sept. 29, 1990. If prices rose (a sign of scarcity), Ehrlich won. But if they fell (a sign of abundance), Simon would come out on top.</p>
<p>The reason for the bet related to each man’s world view. Simon was a strong proponent that innovation and technology allow us to overcome limits to growth. Ehrlich observed the world’s environmental problems and argued the result of population growth would be famine, scarcity and ruin.</p>
<p>Forty years later, with the spectre of inflation twinned with climate change, a similar debate is emerging. We’d like to advance our notion, more aligned with the optimism expressed by Simon. We believe that thanks to technology, healthy food might actually become cheaper — radically cheaper — over the next 20 years as innovation provides many tools to overcome some of the problems caused by resource scarcity. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/forget-smart-cities-for-a-minute-we-need-to-talk-about-smart-farms-112187">Forget smart cities (for a minute), we need to talk about smart farms</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>How can we do it?</h2>
<p>Today, a wave of technological innovation is sweeping over food and farming systems. <a href="https://www.devex.com/news/better-seed-quality-concerns-over-climate-change-top-agenda-at-world-food-prize-95862">Better quality seeds</a> are helping farmers all over the world remain productive during droughts. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.cropin.com/precision-farming/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwnueFBhChARIsAPu3YkQ4_gPZXnokb-p3qMyYL-U6GseMZbK-s1pM4_brhFj2fm6-W5S1heQaArWIEALw_wcB">Smart tractors</a>, new “green chemistry” platforms and <a href="https://theconversation.com/tiny-nanotechnologies-are-poised-to-have-a-huge-impact-on-agriculture-157839">nanotechnology</a> promise that in the near future farmers will reap record harvests while only applying a fraction of the fertilizers and pesticides they once did. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A giant greenhouse with a sea of green plants." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407332/original/file-20210620-22-1i73s7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Greenhouses could result in fresh fruits and vegetables grown in close proximity to consumers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Erwan Hesry/Unsplash)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://new-harvest.org/what-is-cellular-agriculture/">Cellular agriculture</a>, which involves producing animal proteins in bioreactors or fermentation tanks, is poised to produce an enormous amount of protein. </p>
<p>And extraordinary improvements in artificial lighting and automation suggest that even fruits and vegetables may soon be produced at low costs in greenhouses and <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/08/14/vertical-farming-future">vertical farms</a> close to consumers.</p>
<h2>‘Good cheap’ versus ‘bad cheap’</h2>
<p>But before we get too carried away, there is an important nuance. If food is cheap because the environment is exploited, <a href="https://theconversation.com/silencing-whistle-blowers-on-farms-conceals-animal-and-employee-abuse-141921">or agricultural workers and farm animals are treated badly</a>, then having cheap food won’t solve any problems. </p>
<p>Similarly, if cheap food is low-quality and unhealthy, that doesn’t help either. When it comes to cheap food, we have to distinguish between “good cheap” and “bad cheap.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man near a tractor in a farmer's field." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407330/original/file-20210620-35232-i709vs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Migrant workers do maintenance at an asparagus farming facility in southwestern Ontario that experienced a COVID-19 outbreak.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ensuring we end up on the right side of this equation is where policy comes in. Government regulations must put a price on things like greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution so that farmers who are good stewards of the environment are rewarded. </p>
<p>Similarly, animal welfare must be protected and labour compensated appropriately (both in agriculture and across the economy). If we calibrate the right policies, then the technologies that are giving us new ways of producing food really have potential to lower the cost of healthy, sustainable and affordable nutrition. Good food won’t have to cost the earth.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-shows-we-must-get-serious-about-the-well-being-of-animals-138872">Coronavirus shows we must get serious about the well-being of animals</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Who won the bet?</h2>
<p>The economist won the bet against the ecologist. All of the resources Ehrlich identified declined in price over the 1980s. Simon crowed about the role of ingenuity and innovation. Ehrlich grumbled he’d chosen badly and a recession in 1990 artificially dampened prices. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/13/but-why-did-julian-simon-win-the-paul-ehrlich-bet/?sh=63ac0361b034">Both academics were partly right and partly wrong.</a> Ehrlich underestimated the innovation Simon celebrated. But Simon did not appreciate the importance of strong policy to protect labour and environment.</p>
<p>As we look at the 21st century, a century that threatens both massive disruptions but also promises huge innovations, we need two things. </p>
<p>First, we must capitalize on the technology that can help us change the way we produce food. And we can never forget the importance of public policy to ensure there’s a fair price put on things such as biodiversity, climate change, human labour and animal welfare. </p>
<p>If we embrace both of these principles, there is a very real chance that we will be able to bring the price of producing healthy food down without destroying the ecosystems we all depend on for life.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162206/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Evan Fraser is director of Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, co-chair of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, is vice-chair of the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security, and a scientific advisor to the vertical farming start up Cubic. He receives funding from the Canadian government and is affiliated with the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lenore Newman is the Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, is the chair of the science advisory for Cubic Farms, and receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council </span></em></p>How to keep food prices down? Use technology to change the way we produce food and public policy to ensure there’s a fair price put on things like climate change, human labour and animal welfare.Evan Fraser, Director of the Arrell Food Institute and Professor in the Dept. of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of GuelphLenore Newman, Canada Research Chair, Food Security and the Environment, University of The Fraser ValleyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1532752021-02-24T16:11:08Z2021-02-24T16:11:08ZHow we treat migrant workers who put food on our tables: Don’t Call Me Resilient EP 4<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385567/original/file-20210222-19-57ps8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=162%2C66%2C4721%2C3192&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">COVID-19 has laid bare how migrant workers in Canada are treated. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/xDwEa2kaeJA">(Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)</a></span></figcaption></figure><iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/fb677b1e-ec8e-492f-8975-a16d9e0ac730?dark=true"></iframe>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-572" class="tc-infographic" height="100" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/572/661898416fdc21fc4fdef6a5379efd7cac19d9d5/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Every year thousands of migrants come to work in Canada. From harvesting the food in our stores to caring for the elderly, these workers form a vital part of the economy. Yet despite being critical, they often face harsh conditions, isolation, abuse, injury and even death as a result of immigration policies designed to leave them powerless.</p>
<p>Documentary filmmaker and OCAD University professor Min Sook Lee has been documenting the voices of migrant farm workers in Canada for two decades. What she has to say about the treatment of these workers during COVID-19 shatters any remaining myths about “Canada the Good.” How do we treat the workers who put food on our tables?</p>
<p>For a full transcript of this episode of <em>Don’t Call Me Resilient</em>, go <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-we-treat-migrant-workers-who-put-food-on-our-tables-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-4-transcript-154630">here</a>.</p>
<p>Every week, we highlight articles that drill down into the topics we discuss in the episode. </p>
<p><strong>This week:</strong> </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Fay Faraday explains the <a href="https://theconversation.com/covid-19s-impact-on-migrant-workers-adds-urgency-to-calls-for-permanent-status-148237">history and racist policies that define Canada’s immigration programs</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>Peter Vandergeest, Melissa Marschke and Peter Duker <a href="https://theconversation.com/migrant-worker-segregation-doesnt-work-pandemic-lessons-from-the-asia-pacific-region-155260">highlight the treatment of migrant workers elsewhere in the world and the lessons Canada should learn</a>. </p></li>
<li><p>Raluca Bejan and Kristi Allain write about <a href="https://theconversation.com/profits-trump-covid-19-protections-for-migrant-seafood-workers-in-atlantic-canada-154920">profits trumping COVID-19 protections for migrant seafood workers in Atlantic Canada</a></p></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>And in case you missed it:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/migrant-workers-face-further-social-isolation-and-mental-health-challenges-during-coronavirus-pandemic-134324">Migrant workers face further social isolation and mental health challenges during coronavirus pandemic</a>
(April 2020)</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/canadas-emergency-response-benefit-does-nothing-for-migrant-workers-136358">Canada’s Emergency Response Benefit does nothing for migrant workers</a>
(May 2020)</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-canada-stigmatizes-jeopardizes-essential-migrant-workers-138879">Coronavirus: Canada stigmatizes, jeopardizes essential migrant workers</a>
(June 2020)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You can listen or subscribe on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/dont-call-me-resilient/id1549798876">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9qZFg0Ql9DOA">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/37tK4zmjWvq2Sh6jLIpzp7">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://dont-call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/">wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts</a>. <a href="mailto:theculturedesk@theconversation.com">We’d love to hear from you</a>, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on <a href="https://twitter.com/ConversationCA">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheConversationCanada">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/theconversationdotcom/">Instagram</a> and use #DontCallMeResilient.</p>
<p><em>This podcast is produced by The Conversation with a grant for Journalism Innovation from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It is hosted and produced by Vinita Srivastava. The producer is Nahid Buie. Production help from Ibrahim Daair, Anowa Quarcoo, Latifa Abdin, Vicky Mochama, Nehal El-Hadi. Sound engineer: Reza Dahya. Audience development: Lisa Varano.</em></p>
<p><em>Theme music by <a href="https://sixshooterrecords.com/artists/zaki-ibrahim/">Zaki Ibrahim</a>. Logo by Zoe Jazz. Saniya Rashid is our research assistant supported by MITACS. Our CEO is Scott White. Thanks to Jennifer Moroz for her advice. Launch team: Imriel Morgan/<a href="https://contentisqueen.org/">Content is Queen</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153275/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
For much of its history Canada has encouraged people to come and work in this country. However, racialized migrant workers often face an immigration system designed to leave them powerless.Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don't Call Me ResilientAnowa Quarcoo, Assistant Editor, Audience DevelopmentIbrahim Daair, Culture + Society EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1482372021-02-24T16:11:05Z2021-02-24T16:11:05ZCOVID-19’s impact on migrant workers adds urgency to calls for permanent status<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377231/original/file-20210105-15-352l6s.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=63%2C45%2C5958%2C3963&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Temporary migrant workers in Canada are facing COVID-19 while dealing with an immigration system that leaves them vulnerable.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Migrant workers in Canada have suffered tremendously during COVID-19. Each year, some <a href="https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/360024f2-17e9-4558-bfc1-3616485d65b9">85,000 low-wage migrant workers</a> come to Canada under the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/foreign-workers.html">Temporary Foreign Worker Program</a>. They do essential work in many fields including health care, in-home care, agriculture, food processing, cleaning services, delivery services and construction. Thousands more are <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/leamington-migrant-workers-1.5633032">undocumented</a>.</p>
<p>Just six weeks into the pandemic, documented <a href="https://migrantworkersalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Unheeded-Warnings-COVID19-and-Migrant-Workers.pdf">complaints from over 1,100 migrant farm workers</a> had already identified widespread wage theft, inadequate housing, lack of PPE, inadequate food, <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/migrant-farm-workers-allege-pressure-to-sign-away-movement-rights-amid-covid-19-1.5051299">coercive restrictions on workers’ movement</a>, intimidation, surveillance and heightened racism.</p>
<p>In 2020, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/ontario-migrant-workers-farms-1.5889746">12 per cent of migrant farm workers</a> — <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/01/27/ontario-reports-1670-new-cases-of-covid-19-49-more-deaths-and-9513-vaccinations.html">over 1,780 individuals</a> — tested positive for COVID-19 in Ontario alone. <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/bonifacio-eugenio-romero-wife-speaks-out-1.5620445">Bonifacio Eugenio Romero</a>, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/third-ontario-migrant-worker-dies-of-covid-19-1.5621487">Rogelio Muñoz Santos</a> and <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/migrant-worker-mexico-juan-l%C3%B3pez-chaparro-1.5621866">Juan Lopez Chaparro</a> from Mexico died of the disease. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, migrant workers providing in-home care for children, seniors and people with disabilities documented similar experiences, including overwork, loss of immigration status and a <a href="https://migrantrights.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Behind-Closed-Doors_Exposing-Migrant-Care-Worker-Exploitation-During-COVID19.pdf">third of workers being denied the ability to leave their employer’s house</a> at all since the start of the pandemic.</p>
<p>Low-wage migrant workers are restricted to working for a single employer, which creates the enormous power imbalance that facilitates workplace exploitation. Their ability to remain in Canada is dependent on maintaining their employer’s favour. Resisting exploitative workplace demands typically results in termination and loss of housing. In addition, these workers are subject to <a href="https://metcalffoundation.com/site/uploads/2014/04/Profiting-from-the-Precarious.pdf">predatory recruitment fees and surveillance by recruiters</a>, which pressures them to continue working even in abusive conditions to pay back recruiters. </p>
<p>Academic research, <a href="http://www.migrantdreams.ca/synopsis">films</a> and <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2019/10/10/every-spring-he-left-mexico-to-pick-crops-in-canada-one-year-he-didnt-come-home-we-expose-the-terrible-cost-of-migrant-work.html?rf">investigative journalism</a> have recorded these conditions for decades with virtually no change.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/migrant-workers-face-further-social-isolation-and-mental-health-challenges-during-coronavirus-pandemic-134324">Migrant workers face further social isolation and mental health challenges during coronavirus pandemic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Throughout the past year, migrant workers across the country rallied and demanded permanent status for all as the solution to their exploitation.</p>
<p>In a year of global protests about systemic racism, it is important to reflect on how institutionalized racism shaped Canada’s temporary labour migration programs and how migrant workers’ demands for <a href="https://migrantrights.ca/status-for-all/">#StatusForAll</a> seek to correct that.</p>
<figure class="align-Centre ">
<img alt="A woman carries a sign during a protest for migrant worker rights. The sign reads: full immigration status for all." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368682/original/file-20201110-19-1y2is7x.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Migrant workers’ calls for #StatusForAll aim to end discriminatory immigration policies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Racist policies</h2>
<p>Until the 1960s, Canada’s immigration laws imposed explicit restrictions based on racial hierarchies. <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/cajwol6&div=12&id=&page=">Black and brown people were barred from permanent immigration without special dispensation</a>. Canada’s formal labour migration program for care workers was born in this era. Agreements with Jamaica and Barbados created the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2020/07/west-indian-domestic-scheme-19551967.html">Caribbean Domestic Scheme</a> in 1955.</p>
<p>From the late 19th century until the Second World War, <a href="https://utorontopress.com/ca/not-one-of-the-family-2">Canada had primarily imported care workers from England and Scotland to live and work in employers’ homes</a>. These women arrived in Canada with permanent status as British subjects. But as the economic options of white women expanded, Canada found it increasingly hard to recruit care workers from the U.K. and “non-preferred” countries in central and eastern Europe. </p>
<p>The Caribbean Domestic Scheme allowed a limited number of Black women to immigrate, <a href="https://lawjournal.mcgill.ca/wp-content/uploads/pdf/2428864-Macklin.pdf">while being paid $150 less per month than their white peers</a>. The women risked being deported if they were for any reason deemed “undesirable,” including if they left their employer. While this scheme ended a few years later, it set the template for later migrant care worker programs.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/foreign-workers/agricultural/seasonal-agricultural.html">The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program</a> was created in 1966 in response to Ontario farmers demanding access to seasonal labour from the Caribbean as sources of imported labour from Europe became less available.</p>
<p>The policy rationale of both the <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/cajwol6&div=12&id=&page=">Caribbean Domestic Scheme</a> and the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program was to grant Canadian industries access to temporary migrant labour from the Caribbean while avoiding the increase of Black immigration to Canada.</p>
<p>The assistant deputy minister of citizenship and immigration summed up the government’s attitude in a memo dated Jan. 13, 1965. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-007-0026-8">He wrote that</a> “by admitting West Indian workers on a seasonal basis, it might be possible to reduce greatly the pressure on Canada to accept unskilled workers from the West Indies as immigrants. Moreover, seasonal farm workers would not have the privilege of sponsoring innumerable close relatives.”</p>
<p>Canada’s temporary labour migration programs have expanded in the decades since they were created. Yet the profile of workers doing the low-wage dangerous jobs is the same: overwhelmingly Black and brown workers from the Global South.</p>
<h2>Pathway to permanent residency</h2>
<p>While Canada’s immigration system no longer explicitly restricts migration based on race, the reality remains that a points system for immigration continues to disproportionately exclude Black and racialized working-class workers from immigrating permanently to Canada.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A woman carries a sign that reads: Essential workers deserve permanent residency." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370427/original/file-20201119-15-195f313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">While the federal government has created a pathway to residency for migrant healthcare workers other essential workers have been excluded.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In August 2020 the federal government created a <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2020/08/pathway-to-permanent-residency-recognizes-exceptional-service-of-asylum-claimants-on-front-lines-of-covid-19-pandemic.html">pathway to permanent residency</a> for asylum claimants who worked on the frontlines of healthcare during the pandemic.</p>
<p>But this excludes many of the migrant and undocumented workers on the frontline whose labour was also lauded as “essential” — care workers, farm workers, cleaners, workers who stock grocery shelves and do food delivery and more.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381818/original/file-20210201-13-1g0n3ld.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/ca/podcasts">Click here to listen to Don’t Call Me Resilient</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>COVID-19 has laid bare the expliotation of migrant workers in this country. Exploitation that has intensified in pandemic conditions. Workers calling for #StatusForAll deserve a fairer single-tier immigration system that corrects the history of systemic racism.</p>
<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/fb677b1e-ec8e-492f-8975-a16d9e0ac730?dark=true"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dont-call-me-resilient/id1549798876"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/321534/original/file-20200319-22606-q84y3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=182&fit=crop&dpr=1" alt="Listen on Apple Podcasts" width="268" height="68"></a>
<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/37tK4zmjWvq2Sh6jLIpzp7"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/321535/original/file-20200319-22606-1l4copl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=183&fit=crop&dpr=1" width="268" height="70"></a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148237/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fay Faraday receives funding from the Metcalf Foundation which supports her research on migrant workers in Canada. </span></em></p>The COVID-19 pandemic has brought further suffering to migrant workers in Canada already experiencing the abuses of discriminatory immigration policies and poor working conditions.Fay Faraday, Social Justice Lawyer & Assistant Professor, York University, CanadaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1546302021-02-24T16:10:58Z2021-02-24T16:10:58ZHow we treat migrant workers who put food on our tables: Don’t Call Me Resilient EP 4 transcript<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385869/original/file-20210223-22-1b4rgwk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=85%2C31%2C2910%2C2061&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A woman takes part in a protest in Montreal, Jan. 30, 2021, to demand status for all workers and to demand dignity for all non status migrants as full human beings as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada and around the world. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/fb677b1e-ec8e-492f-8975-a16d9e0ac730?dark=true"></iframe>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-572" class="tc-infographic" height="100" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/572/661898416fdc21fc4fdef6a5379efd7cac19d9d5/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/how-we-treat-migrant-workers-who-put-food-on-our-tables-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-4-153275">Episode 4: How we treat migrant workers who put food on our tables</a>.</p>
<p><em>NOTE: Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.</em></p>
<p><strong>Vinita Srivastava (VS):</strong> From <em>The Conversation</em>, this is Don’t Call Me Resilient. I’m Vinita Srivastava. </p>
<p><strong>Min Sook Lee (MSL):</strong> Worker rights under the pandemic have been deeply compromised and we’re talking about a group of workers in which their set of rights were already very precarious. The pandemic has increased the control of worker rights and worker freedoms. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> When COVID-19 first hit, I found myself thinking about the essential workers, like many of us: doctors, hospital staff, those working in grocery stores, that’s where my mind went. What I didn’t immediately think about were the tens of thousands of migrant workers who arrive in Canada every year. These are the folks that make up about one-sixth of the workforce of those who grow, produce and pack the food that we eat and serve to our families. </p>
<p>Today, we’re going to talk about migrant workers, one of the communities hardest hit by COVID-19. You may have heard in the news about the outbreaks on farms and in meat processing plants. But for the most part, migrant workers have been largely invisible in our society. My guest today, Min Sook Lee, calls them “The Unseen.” Min Sook is an associate professor at OCAD University in Toronto, where she examines the intersections of art and social change. But she is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has chronicled the migrant worker experience in Canada for over a decade. </p>
<p>Her feature, <em>Migrant Dreams,</em> explores the story of those who come here under the country’s temporary foreign workers program. It’s a system, she says, that treats them like modern day indentured workers. And she’s got so much more to say on the subject, which is why Min Sook was one of the very first people I thought of when we decided we wanted to talk about migrant workers and their place in Canada today. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Min Sook, I have so much I want to ask you, and so I’m going to just jump right in. What were some of your first thoughts when COVID-19 first hit?</p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> When the lockdown was declared and we witnessed all around us the alarm of the global pandemic and the very first thing I heard was social distancing — that what would protect you from COVID-19 was social distancing. And immediately I knew migrant workers would be in trouble because migrant workers do not have control of their own space. Social distancing is a luxury. It means you can control the space that you live and work in. And migrant workers are regularly housed in very crowded living conditions. Oftentimes I have seen workers living 20, 30 in a garage that has no windows and is used to store farm equipment when workers are not living in the garage, with one or two bathrooms that are accessible. I have also seen that migrant workers work very close, cheek to cheek, elbow to elbow in the greenhouse spaces and factory lines when they’re processing foods, fruits or cutting fish. So I knew that the pandemic, which was sending alarm bells across the world — what was required to protect yourself from the pandemic, social distancing, would be unavailable and inaccessible to migrant workers because they are required to work very closely to each other, number one. But even more concerning, they often are housed in living conditions that are very crowded and they can’t control the spaces that they live and work in because of the laws of Canada’s migrant worker program. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Are you in touch with some of the folks that you have interviewed over the years? Do you continue to hear from them? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Yes, and I’m not going to name names because workers often need to have their identities protected. There were two workers out on the West Coast. They were sent back by their employer because they were in communication with community organizers in the West Coast working on a farm. And they agreed to receive some food and support because community organizers saw that migrant workers were — ordinarily migrant workers are very isolated. They are kept away from the non-migrant worker population. And oftentimes employers ensure that migrant workers do not have very much contact with Canadians. So it’s a kind of isolation that I think most Canadians could not imagine. Where what I have seen is that a migrant worker would arrive in the airport, let’s say, on a 4:00 a.m. flight from Mexico or from the Caribbean. They’ll be picked up by a broker or someone who works in the farm, maybe the employer or supervisor, driven to their living quarters and the next morning they’re expected to show up at work. Then it’s seven days a week of work and oftentimes where they’re working on farms, which are really isolated and rural communities, and getting access to go grocery shopping, to do some banking or to do any kind of activity outside of work, is monitored and requires transportation from the employer, and it requires that kind of organization. So the isolation of migrant workers is extreme. And in the West Coast, when COVID hit, there were workers who were concerned about the quarantine measures that were being applied to them, required of them, and their employer immediately put down measures such as no guest visitors, no leaving premises after a certain set number of hours. And then the workers were also not able to go shopping during the quarantine time or if they were ill. And the food that they were being provided was not adequate. And so they were community organizers that delivered food to the workers. And once the employer found out, the employer sent those two workers back to Mexico because the employer decided that they had contravened the rules of the farm. So workers being punished for speaking out is a frequent occurrence. So I’ll be careful about naming workers. But yes, I have spoken to workers that I have filmed with. One of them was working in a farm, on a mushroom farm in Ontario, and this worker contracted COVID, tested positive, and what the boss did was put them in a house with other workers some were positive and some were negative. So the worker I know who was sick was put in a house with workers who were and were not sick and they were sharing bathrooms. This worker was given no information, and then they were quarantined for two weeks. And for the first week, they actually didn’t even know whether they would be receiving any money, any food, what would happen. And it was mutual aid from their fellow migrant workers that supported them over the very first week, which was really terrifying because they had heard a lot of scary stories about COVID. And then after week one the employer gave them some information that they would be able to apply for some emergency funds, which they did. But during that entire time, the employer was responsible for providing them food because they were under quarantine and also housing. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> There must be fear all around in this case, fear for those who have it and fear for those who don’t, and that must cause divisions as well? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Yeah, there’s a lot of fear and tension on farms pre-COVID fear of a job loss because there’s so much at stake tied to holding on to this job in Canada. But since COVID workers have arrived very afraid of their own health, they know that workers have died in Ontario. They are aware that there are workers who are working alongside each other, some who are sick, some who are asymptomatic, some they don’t know. And they’re aware that their boss isn’t providing appropriate housing. And then when workers are sick, the kind of food that they’re being offered is barely enough. The one worker I know who is sick, he was terrified the entire time and he is very depressed because he is aware that workers alongside him are sick. Workers in the plant were working while they were ill. He knew this and had nowhere to report it to and didn’t believe anyone would believe him anyways. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> And then, as you’re saying, there’s the fear of being sent home or sent away. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> The fear of being sent home is a constant running fear for many workers, because that’s the reality of Canada’s migrant worker program. It’s designed to keep workers in line with a strict control that is exercised by employers. And the control that’s exercised by employers is through the power employers have to send workers back, to repatriate workers. Workers come into Canada under tied work permits, which means that their status in Canada, their job in Canada, is only secure as long as the relationship with their boss is good. I think for any of us to imagine that our boss would have that kind of power over us, our livelihood, our living conditions, who we speak to or any of us to imagine our boss having that kind of control of us — it’s really it’s unimaginable. And that’s why the term we talk about when we describe the program as modern day indentureship. Where workers arrive and they are tied to this one employer, they have no labour mobility. They don’t have the proper protections. I’ve seen workers in greenhouses handling pesticides and chemicals and not having appropriate masks or gloves or the kind of protective clothing you’re supposed to have. And they’re given garbage bags, literally garbage bags, and told, “Make a hole in the top and the sides and put it over your body and shoot your head over the garbage bag.” And that’s going to be your protective layer as you spray these really dangerous chemicals. I know workers who’ve lost eyesight, who’ve gone blind from pesticide exposure, workers who’ve lost fingers and limbs. And so now during the time of the pandemic the worksite has become just doubly lethal for workers. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> It’s tragic that the spotlight is on now because so many workers are getting sick and dying. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> In the pandemic what has happened to workers is that they have been blamed for outbreaks on farms, and that’s exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Employers were able to secure millions of dollars from the federal government for pandemic preparedness, and workers were also working alongside sick workers. So all the kinds of provisions and protections that we were told employers were taking during the pandemic, those failed workers miserably. On top of that, workers were blamed for the outbreak and the social stigma of COVID was applied to the worker when, in fact, industry and employers should have been held responsible. We had Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, shaming workers and blaming workers and saying workers were not co-operating with testing, when that was not true. Workers were very afraid for their lives. They wanted to know that they could be safe while working in Canada, and they were aware they were not being provided the adequate safety protections that were required under the pandemic. And increasingly, what has happened under the pandemic is an increase and intensity of surveillance and intensity of control over workers’ mobilities. So employers have now put on curfews on the farm so workers can’t leave at certain times. There’s been talk in Leamington, Ont., for example, of establishing the zones where workers will be barricaded in and expected to just stay within the approved zones. So the regulation and the restriction of worker movement has been discussed in really problematic ways that conjure up ideas of some kind of labour camp. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> So this is why worker rights under the pandemic have been deeply compromised. And we’re talking about a group of workers whose set of rights were already very precarious. The pandemic has increased the control of worker rights and worker freedoms. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Social distancing, and for a while when we were in lockdown, stay home. What I’m hearing you say is that home is not home. It’s a very dangerous place. It’s overcrowded and there’s no distance. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> We couldn’t feed Canadians without the labour of migrant workers. Many people think we’re talking about family farms with a few chickens and pigs and cows and three generations of farmers working hard out in the sun. That’s not the picture of industrial agriculture or factory farming that’s underway in Canada that produces most of the food that we eat. We’re looking at greenhouses that are 10 football fields in length. These are massive industrial operations and there are hundreds of workers working in these greenhouse operations. And so when we’re talking about the fact that we have an industry that requires a flexible workforce that is controllable and that is factored into the exponential profit that they realize year after year, because they know that the money, the expense spent on labour is manufactured as low. There have been billions of profits made through this industry on the backs of migrant workers who are unfree. They can’t change their employer, they can’t change their job site. And most workers are in Canada without a pathway to citizenship, without a pathway to permanent residency, without a pathway to status. So most workers are here in Canada working and paying taxes, paying into CPP, Canada pension plans, paying into EI, the employment insurance plan. They’re paying basic consumer taxes with everything they purchase. So they’re paying into Canada’s tax system and yet they have no pathway, virtually no pathway to citizenship. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Why do you think that pathway is blocked? What do you think that is about? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> You know, the restricted pathways to citizenship are designed. They’re designed to keep Canada looking the way it does and primarily keeping …. The majority of workers who come into Canada under the migrant worker program come from the Global South. Most of the workers are racialized workers, most workers come to do the jobs most Canadians don’t want to do. The 3D jobs: dirty, difficult and dangerous. </p>
<p>You could say that the picture of Canada as this rosy postcard of Canada as a country that invites diversity from people all over the world. And the doorways are open and the opportunity’s here knock and we’ll invite you in. Well, the reality we know is that the front doors to Canada are blocked. There are long waiting lists and increasingly there are more and more onerous restrictions on immigration pathways to Canada. The back door is wide open for temporary migrant workers to do the essential work that industries need, but that back door ensures that you will remain permanently non-status. So you’re not here under a temporary foreign worker program as a temporary worker because your labour is only needed on a temporary basis. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> But that temporary basis could last for years and years, right? It’s not like — that person could actually be working here for decades. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Right, so the label of temporary is constructed. Migrant workers are not here on a temporary basis. The labour of migrant workers is required constantly. There is a chronic labour shortage in very specific industries. And instead of addressing the immigration backlog in the front doors, our federal government would prefer to use the migrant worker program as a convenient back door entry that addresses industry needs, ensures industry profits, but doesn’t address the critical labour shortage. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> When you talk about this being like a very challenging issue, how much of these attitudes and policies have to do with race, the fact that these are Black and brown bodies doing the work and the labour? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Oh, yes, this is a racist program, undoubtedly. Without a doubt. How is this program designed? I think we have to recognize the history of a program like this began with the settlement of Canada. The colonial history of Canada is very much aligned to and part of the creation of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. So, back from the 1800s, when Canada had to build railroads to connect towns dotted across the landscape, the people that they needed to build the railroads, the labour that was required, Canada set up a migrant worker program to bring in Chinese workers to do the work on the railways, Chinese workers who would do the work for less pay than white workers and do the most dangerous tracts of work using dynamite in the Rockies, for example. So the programs that were set up in the 1800s to bring Chinese workers in were designed to extract labour, but also to deter settlement. They were allowed on a certain period of time and then they were expected to go, never expected to settle. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> You’ve been doing this for a while. You’ve been documenting migrant workers long before COVID, have you seen any dramatic changes in their conditions or any improvement or dramatic changes for the worse? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> No, I think that things have gotten actually even more strikingly concerning. You know, one of the things that you talked about in the beginning in your intro, you said that I called migrant workers unseen. And the idea that workers are unseen, that is deliberate. There’s a constructed way workers are unseen. I’d like to offer that as a thought around the history of migrant worker program and how racist they are and how there’s a design to the migrant worker programs that are steeped in race and racism. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> On this podcast, we’ve been talking a lot about the idea of resilience in the face of things like this. How much resilience do you see in these men and women that you meet? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Quite a bit. Most of the workers are men. I’d say over 90 per cent of migrant workers are men in Canada who work on farms. Then in the 1990s, things shifted dramatically and Canada’s temporary foreign worker program expanded. So now we have over 80 source countries that are participating in the TFWP, but the majority of countries that are sending workers to do the low-paid menial work with very little access to citizenship, those are countries from the Global South and in the TFWP you have private brokers emerging as key players, private brokers that are charging workers $5,000, $10,000, $14,000. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Fourteen thousand dollars? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> This fee is technically illegal, but no one monitors recruiters, the activities of recruiters. And so they operate fundamentally as the middle person between the employer and the worker, they secure the worker their position in the firm, and they also manage the workforce. So they pick the worker up at the airport. They ensure the worker’s got some kind of housing and they are the ones communicating directly with workers. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> If you owe somebody $7,000-$14,000, that’s indentured labour. I’m sure they want to keep close track of you. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Oh, yes. Most workers can’t pay that. So they pay maybe a few thousand upfront and then agreed to pay the rest off of their weekly check. There’s a 10–15 per cent cut that goes to the recruiter for years, years, sometimes three to five years. So workers arrive already indebted to a private recruiter. That’s very common. So they’re bonded labour. Yeah, I would say they’ve gotten worse. I would say that the symbolic gestures of the federal government have gotten more pronounced. And it’s been much more clear that we have an industry that requires the labour of these essential workers. And at the same time, the workers do not have access to the same set of rights that Canadians expect workers in Canada to have. But no one’s taken action to change the living conditions and the working conditions and the very program that designs the vulnerability of the workers. Workers are not innately vulnerable or there’s nothing inevitable about workers being exploited. We’ve designed this program and people benefit and profit from it.
Now, you are asking about resilience of workers and I think migrant workers who come to Canada are incredibly resilient and very creative and very much workers who understand the oppression that’s built into the labour program. And I don’t think workers come in without recognizing how deeply exploitative the program is. But many times workers don’t have a choice. So coming to work as a migrant worker, leaving your family and working abroad is not a choice if it’s about survival. I would say that over the years I’ve seen workers with great courage and insist on their humanity and fight back. Oftentimes workers who fight back are the ones who are targeted by the boss and sent back home and then new workers are brought in. So I’ve seen that constantly play out. There have been many workers who have resisted and fought back and they don’t stay in Canada long. But there are also many who have fought back and they’ve made a difference. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> I’m also wondering about your own personal journey, like what sparked your interest in migrant workers that made you want to devote such a large part of your life to this issue? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> How I got involved was through worker resistance. So back in 1999, I met a friend of mine who was a labour activist, Chris Ramsaroop, and Chris was organizing an information fact-finding tour of migrant worker farms in Leamington, Ont. I ran into Chris in Toronto and he told me that migrant workers were organizing and that some had gone on a wildcat strike in Leamington, Ont. And I remember thinking, one, I didn’t know we had migrant workers in Canada. I wasn’t familiar with that. I thought it was a U.S. problem. And number two, I remember thinking if migrant workers are going on a wildcat strike, then things must be really bad.
And it’s only four hours from Toronto to Leamington, Ont. We went on a bus and I was so struck by the fact that there was this large population of migrant workers who lived in a parallel universe, almost, I could say, like a parallel universe of Canadians. And there was this active unseen that was practised. Migrant workers walking on the sidewalk alongside Canadians and Canadians would just unsee them. And there were hundreds. If you go to Leamington, you’ll see — or any area where there are migrant workers — but particularly Leamington, because that’s sort of ground zero for migrant worker populations in Ontario. What I saw was there were certain pockets of the parts of the streets where there were little tiendas or the church where migrant workers go on the Sundays. There were areas where migrant workers would congregate and hang around. But much of the townscape actively — there was no connection between the Canadian township and the migrant worker community. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Min Sook I’m looking at the time, so I’m going to ask you one last question. What do you hope for the way forward? But also how can the average person help? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> I think that we need to finally ask ourselves who’s profiting from the migrant worker program as it currently exists in Canada? It’s benefiting somebody, who? And then we can ask ourselves, if you’re not comfortable, if you don’t feel it’s OK, if it doesn’t support your own personal community values, that we have a program in Canada that’s designed to exploit, control, dominate workers and to refuse them a set of labour and human rights that Canadians expect anybody in this country to have access to. If that’s not OK with you, then what do we do with this program? Well, I think the obvious thing is status on arrival. Workers should have access to PR. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> So they they arrive at the airport, or they arrive in Canada, and they immediately get some kind of residency status. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Absolutely. And there are carrots that have been suggested. Many employers in the industry do actually support and argue for PR, but they want it controlled by employers. They want to have it as a pathway that’s long and drawn out for three to five years and that employers control. What happens then is that workers are even more controlled by employers because the employer will say, if you put up, shut up, then you’ll get the carrot at the end of five years. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Right, right. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> And that kind of disproportionate control over someone’s destiny should never be given to one individual. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> No, that’s scary. Yeah, that’s a lot of scary control. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> What you are going to create are citizen tyrants. So I think people need to ask themselves the very serious question of this country that we live in. How do you ensure that the values and the beliefs that we say we support are put into practise? </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> I’m wondering if there’s anything … somebody listening to us talking about this and feeling like they need to do something. What can they do? </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> It’s the political will. I think the political will to change Canada’s migrant worker program must come from people who are activating their voice within systems that we currently have, getting in touch with their MPs and their MPPs and being able to say very unequivocally: the program, it’s from the 1800s. Why do we still have this program? It’s time to redesign a new program that answers our economic and industry needs and that is aligned with the social justice, human rights values that Canadians support. It’s also talking about the program, as you said in the beginning, workers are oftentimes unseen, they’re not unseen because we can’t physically see them. They’re constructed as inconvenient, and so they’re constructed as unseen. So we need to be talking about the migrant worker program with our neighbours, with our family members. Speaking up about it and ensuring that communities in which workers live and work in, that those workers are not isolated or alone. There are many organizations in Canada that have spent decades and decades working on migrant worker rights. So getting in touch with either the volunteer driven grassroots organizations that are fighting for migrant worker justice or the unions, or there are interfaith groups that are also working with migrant workers in many food organizations, food-based food sustainability organizations. </p>
<p>So there’s a broad range of groups that have been fighting for migrant worker rights and getting in touch with those are — there are many across the country from every city in the country, now. I know there are active organizations that have been very vocal on migrant worker rights. And so connecting with one of those, certainly.</p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Min Sook, do you have any last thoughts before we close up today?</p>
<p><strong>MSL</strong>: One of the very basic things we need is access to food. And for Canadians to get through the pandemic by essentially treating migrant workers as disposable in our own food system, in our economic and political systems — we can’t accept that. So I think the one thing that we can take away from this current moment that we’re in is that our existing systems, structures that support how we produce food, how we build our food systems and our labour systems, they’re unjust. And we can’t continue to do that. We did that before the pandemic, but during the pandemic the inhumane treatment of migrant workers has intensified. We have to get through the pandemic by not sacrificing a category of people. We have to get through the pandemic by realizing that the systems of inequities are not acceptable and we can change them.</p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> It does feel overwhelming sometimes, I really appreciate your vision that we can change it. </p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Yes, we can change it, and not only can we but we have to. We don’t have a choice.</p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> Thank you so much for all your time today. I really appreciate it.</p>
<p><strong>MSL:</strong> Thank you for having me, Vinita. </p>
<p><strong>VS:</strong> That’s it for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient. I’d love to know what you’re thinking after that conversation with Min Sook Lee. I’m on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/writevinita">@WriteVinita</a>, also tag <a href="https://twitter.com/ConversationCA">@ConversationCA</a> and use the hashtag #DontCallMeResilient. </p>
<p>If you want to learn more about the migrant worker experience or check out some of Min Sook’s work, go to <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca">theconverstion.com</a>. That’s also where you’ll find our show notes with links to stories and research connected to our conversation today. </p>
<p><em>Don’t Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced with a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me Vinita Srivastava. Our producers are Nahid Buie, Nehal El-Hadi and Vicky Mochama, with additional editorial help from our intern Ibrahim Daair. Reza Dahya is our technical producer and sound guru. Anowa Quarcoo is in charge of marketing and production design. Lisa Varano is our audience development editor and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. Special thanks also to Jennifer Moroz for her indispensable help on this project. And if you’re wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that’s the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water</em>. </p>
<p>Thanks for listening, everyone, and hope you join us again. Until next time I am Vinita, and please, don’t call me resilient.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154630/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
How we treat migrant workers who put food on our tables: Don’t Call Me Resilient EP 4 transcriptVinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don't Call Me ResilientIbrahim Daair, Culture + Society EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1373752020-06-26T12:31:48Z2020-06-26T12:31:48ZRethinking what research means during a global pandemic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343588/original/file-20200623-188916-uocweh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=51%2C0%2C5760%2C3785&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Farmworkers are essential workers who must decide every morning whether they will leave their home to work the fields to provide for their families and the nation.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/health-worker-takes-the-pulse-of-a-mexican-farm-worker-at-a-news-photo/167824121">John Moore/Getty Images News via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Conversation is running a series of dispatches from clinicians and researchers operating on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. You can <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/covid-19-front-lines-84846">find all of the stories here</a>.</em></p>
<p>“Doctora,” a community health worker yelled from across the room. “People are lined up along the fence. Under the sun. Do we have water for them?” </p>
<p>I was standing in the middle of an air-conditioned room in April at a COVID-19 testing site for Latino farmworkers and their families in the eastern part of Southern California’s Coachella Valley. Outside was an ever-increasing line of symptomatic patients, individuals who either reported having a cough, fever or difficulty breathing, or who had been in contact with someone with the virus in the past two weeks. They were all waiting to get tested.</p>
<p>In the days before, a team of promotoras – trusted community leaders with expertise in community organizing who act as connectors to the community – had fielded call after call from concerned community members. The community members were calling about their eligibility to get tested and whether Social Security numbers and health care insurance coverage would be required. Some farmworkers shared that they couldn’t return to work without getting the test and producing evidence that they were COVID-free to their farm managers. Often ineligible for employment benefits, loss of employment can comprise their ability to survive.</p>
<p>As an <a href="https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/acheney">anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside</a>, I have a doctorate of anthropology not medicine. So I never imagined myself as “Doctora Ana,” serving on the front lines of a global pandemic and leading efforts to disseminate public health information and set up COVID-19 testing sites for essential workers. But, when I was asked in April to lead a team of medical students and promotoras in COVID-19 testing, I was ready, thanks to a conversation I had three years prior that inspired me to think about research differently.</p>
<h2>Gaining trust</h2>
<p>I remember vividly the first time I met Conchita, a known advocate for her Purépecha community, an indigenous group from the Mexican state of Michoacán. I had been looking for a trusted member of the community with whom I could partner to carry out a project on health care access among Latinos in farm-working communities in Southern California. Through an existing partnership with a community-based organization serving the Eastern Valley, I had been put in touch with Conchita.</p>
<p>I had traveled nearly 100 miles from the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, to her home in the eastern Coachella Valley. When I arrived, Conchita was sitting outside waiting for me and invited me to sit down under the shade of her carport. It was spring in the desert, and the sun shone brightly. I was anxious. I feared my broken Spanish and the community I represented, the academy, would create barriers to our communication. I worried that she, like so many from indigenous communities, might mistrust research. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344180/original/file-20200625-33569-1je626c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">From left: The author, medical student Cinyta Beltran Sanchez and Congressman Raul Ruiz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As an anthropologist conducting community-based participatory research, the voice of the community guides my work – from the development of research questions and study design to data analysis, interpretation and use of data. My approach is to place the voice of the community at the center of research and create in collaboration with community members meaningful evidence for public health advocacy. While this looks different for each community, in the Eastern Valley, this approach informed the design and implementation of a free clinic.</p>
<p>The Eastern Valley is a 45-mile long rift valley bounded by mountain chains and one of the richest agricultural regions in the world. It is also one of the most impoverished areas of California and home to a large <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30223174">undocumented and underinsured foreign-born Latino population</a> living in poverty and working in the fields. About a third are migrant farmworkers. </p>
<p>The area is also home to the largest Purépecha community in the United States. Many from this community live in rundown trailer parks on Native American lands in the Eastern Valley. While these lands protect the residents from local border patrol agents, it also sets them up for abuses from landowners. Over the years, outside entities such as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/us/21land.html">federal judges</a> have filed lawsuits to shut down trailer parks with makeshift infrastructures that they thought presented extreme public health risks but that were home for the workers. Thus, among the immigrants in this region, there is a general mistrust of outsiders, including researchers, who have flown in and out, taking information from them but never sharing the results.</p>
<p>My biggest concern that hot spring day with Conchita was: Would I reproduce this injustice? </p>
<p>Our conversation was both a “meet-and-greet” and partnership negotiation. We discussed the research at hand, the work involved and the role of the community investigator in engaging community members in the study. Conchita listened attentively and asked questions. As we neared the end of the conversation, it was unclear whether we would move forward. Then, with directness, she laid out her terms for partnership. She agreed to partner on the research, but only if study findings were used to directly benefit the community. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343596/original/file-20200623-188931-17ayu73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At the core of Global Health at Home are promotoras who disseminate information throughout their networks and facilitate access to free health care services via pop-up clinics in safe spaces in the Eastern Valley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fast forward a couple years. The research inspired <a href="https://in-training.org/global-health-home-18397">Global Health at Home</a> (GH@H), a student-led effort to provide free health care to underserved and vulnerable populations in rural farmworking communities in the Eastern Valley. At the core of this infrastructure are promotoras who share information throughout their networks and help people gain access to free health care services via pop-up or mobile clinics in safe spaces in the Eastern Valley.</p>
<p>The students, bilingual UCR medical and pre-med students and California Baptist physician assistant students, refer to the clinic, which is held the third Saturday of every month, as the <a href="https://coachellavalleyfreeclinic.weebly.com/">Coachella Valley Free Clinic</a>. For the past year, I have supervised this team of students and promotoras on the design, implementation and delivery of free health care services based on our <a href="https://healthycommunities.ucr.edu/usmex-united-states-mexico-unidos-por-salud">study’s findings</a> that fear of deportation and limited access to bilingual providers prevent many foreign-born Latinos from seeking and getting health care. </p>
<p>It was this team who saw the need to provide COVID-19 information and how to prevent its spread in both Spanish and Purépecha, the primary languages of our patients. Our outreach efforts have focused on communities in the Eastern Valley with particular attention to the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-21/coronavirus-coachella-valley-farmworkers">Oasis trailer park</a>, located in the community of Thermal, where we hold our pop-up clinic.</p>
<h2>In the wake of COVID-19</h2>
<p>Our patients are essential workers. They must decide every morning whether they will leave their home to work the fields to provide for their families and the nation. They make this decision in the context of increasing cases of COVID-19 in the country and the very communities in which they live. Riverside County, where the Coachella Valley sits, has the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/riverside-county/">second-highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the state</a>. In Thermal, the infection rate is <a href="https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/health/2020/04/29/coronavirus-california-targeted-testing-needed-eastern-coachella-valley-ruiz-says/3029957001/">five times higher</a> than any other city or unincorporated community in the valley.</p>
<p>The infrastructure and network of GH@H enabled us to rapidly organize and engage the community in <a href="https://noticiasya.com/los-angeles/2020/04/30/pruebas-gratuitas-del-coronavirus-en-mecca/">COVID-19 testing clinics</a>. Through a grant to one of our partners, <a href="https://cvvim.org/">Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine</a>, and an anonymous donation, 200 tests were made available to farm workers and their families in the valley, enabling us to hold the first two clinics in May. Within days, the network of promotoras had spread news of the testing site through their social networks, and student leaders organized themselves to assist at the clinics. In May, we held our first two clinics. We have since been preparing for additional clinics and handing out public health material.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history">Pandemics change history</a>. They force us to reconsider what we once thought as natural and normal. In the wake of COVID-19, researchers can become trusted figures of authority who can purposely use their institutional privilege and re-appropriate their research networks, skills and knowledge to better the lives of vulnerable populations during a pandemic. Pandemics can change the meaning of research.</p>
<p>[<em>You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-help">Read The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137375/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ann Cheney receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. </span></em></p>In the wake of COVID-19, researchers can become trusted figures of authority who can re-appropriate their networks, skills and knowledge to better the lives of vulnerable populations.Ann M. Cheney, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Medicine Population and Public Health, University of California, RiversideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1363582020-05-06T12:43:46Z2020-05-06T12:43:46ZCanada’s Emergency Response Benefit does nothing for migrant workers<p>The aim of the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/cerb-application.html">Canada Emergency Response Benefit</a> (CERB) is to offer vital income support to those temporarily out of work as a result of COVID-19. More than <a href="https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/live-blog/covid-19-trudeau-update-april17">7.5 million</a> payments have already been deposited and applications continue to rise. </p>
<p>Yet the CERB stops short of supporting all essential workers. </p>
<p><a href="https://migrantworkersalliance.org/">Migrant Workers Alliance for Change</a> estimates there are <a href="https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/17/news/migrant-and-undocumented-workers-plead-help-during-covid-19">1.8 million</a> migrants and undocumented people in Canada. Present in nearly every area of Canada’s economy, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/799402801/canada-wins-u-s-loses-in-global-fight-for-high-tech-workers?t=1587296749557">from tech</a> to <a href="https://www.columbiavalleypioneer.com/news/high-demand-a-look-into-how-undocumented-foreign-workers-fill-b-c-s-construction-jobs/">construction</a>, they are over-represented in sectors that provide essential services at low pay — sectors like agriculture, in which <a href="https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/15/news/bc-fruit-growers-skeptical-out-work-canadians-will-want-labour-intensive-farm-jobs">few Canadians</a> choose to work.</p>
<p>Each year in Canada, some <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadas-food-supply-at-risk-as-pandemic-tightens-borders-to-farm/">60,000 migrant farm workers</a> plant, prune and harvest fresh fruits and vegetables for domestic consumption and foreign export. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C318%2C3000%2C1890&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330384/original/file-20200424-163110-1vaxkkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Workers prune fruit trees in Pereaux, N.S., on in April 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Others mind the young, elderly and ill in residences and care homes across the country. Many are employed to clean and sanitize our most private spaces. </p>
<p>According to the World Health Organization, <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/31-03-2020-ohchr-iom-unhcr-and-who-joint-press-release-the-rights-and-health-of-refugees-migrants-and-stateless-must-be-protected-in-covid-19-response">migrants share common vulnerabilities</a> that heighten their risk of infection. These include reduced access to health care, unsanitary working conditions and overcrowded housing. They are also frequent targets of racism, xenophobia and scapegoat rhetoric, forms of discrimination that worsen in times of crisis and to which <a href="https://theconversation.com/canadian-politicians-are-playing-a-dangerous-game-on-migration-101668">Canada is not immune</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-is-not-the-great-equalizer-race-matters-133867">Coronavirus is not the great equalizer — race matters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>While not a cohesive group, together they make up some of Canada’s most marginalized workers.</p>
<p>By excluding undocumented people and many migrants who don’t have social insurance numbers, the CERB redraws notions of “essential work” along nationalist lines. This ignores the essential labour and needs of these critical members of Canadian society.</p>
<h2>Out of work and stuck abroad</h2>
<p>The CERB also leaves out many essential migrant workers affected by border closures, administrative delays and flight cancellations. </p>
<p>Perla G. Villegas is an organizer with <a href="https://ramaokanagan.org/">Radical Action for Migrants in Agriculture</a>, a migrant justice collective that I co-founded alongside Amy Cohen in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. In recent weeks, Villegas has spoken to countless workers — long-time participants in Canada’s <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/foreign-workers/agricultural/seasonal-agricultural.html">Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program</a> — whose visas have been delayed as a result of COVID-19. </p>
<p>Despite their temporary status, migrant farmworkers are “<a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/foreign-workers/agricultural/seasonal-agricultural.html">permanently temporary</a>,” returning to Canada each year for decades. Multiple members of a single family sometimes work on Canadian farms, increasing their family’s dependence on the income they generate here.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Imagine having worked 15 seasons, spending eight months of each year in Canada, and being ineligible for income assistance? They have come to Canada for so long that they don’t have stable work in Mexico, so they don’t have a regular income there. It’s obvious that they have temporarily lost their jobs, but while they remain outside of the country, they can’t apply.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>While Canada is not alone in its exclusion of certain migrant populations from assistance during COVID-19, some countries are taking steps in the right direction.</p>
<p>Portugal has been hailed for temporarily granting <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/29/coronavirus-portugal-grants-temporary-citizenship-rights-to-migrants">citizenship rights</a> to migrants and asylum seekers with residency applications underway, but this move <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/coronavirus-portugal-regularize-migrants-citizenship-covid-health">does not include</a> undocumented migrants. Initiatives in California to provide economic assistance to migrants also <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-california-give-payments-undocumented-immigrants-200415210239065.html">fall short</a>, reaching just 150,000 of the state’s two million undocumented people. </p>
<h2>Upholding migrant rights through policy</h2>
<p>Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently <a href="https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/justin-trudeau-canada-coronavirus-april-17-full-transcript/">paid homage</a> to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on its 38th anniversary. “As our country confronts this pandemic, I’m especially grateful that Canadians have chosen to protect each other and care for one another,” he said. </p>
<p>Such words ring hollow while essential migrant and undocumented workers are forsaken by federal policy. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330403/original/file-20200424-163088-1lyksbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Migrant workers from Mexico maintain social distancing as they wait to be transported to Québec farms on April 14, 2020 in Montréal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The CERB provides many Canadians with the economic cushioning they will need to survive the difficult months to come. But its disregard for some of our marginalized workers — those integral to our food production and security, health-care and construction and cleaning industries — reveals just <a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/04/17/canada-needs-its-migrant-workers-but-in-this-pandemic-we-cant-be-bothered-to-value-them.html">how little we value migrant workers</a>. </p>
<p>In its recent news release appropriately entitled “<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25730&LangID=E">COVID-19 does not discriminate; nor should our response</a>,” the United Nations Network on Migration urges that “migrants [be] included in measures that are being introduced to mitigate the economic downturn caused by COVID-19.” </p>
<p>Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. As <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/canadians-ineligible-benefits-coronavirus_ca_5e9a6f15c5b63639081ec068?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHRYOwMwF9Y3iHlEbiXg6hjG_IXBX71fTucpL4g1gW-zK2_XFJPiZTuPg9SpAI-qnCa278_IiiuYup5PKZIknpnmXMZ60XI_R8LkNqOf3jmcKikjMgDc6XIcUK87awFIFTnWzkNs6qqCMgQm-Bb5rn31qWtAjdJy2DLH_FgSM67u">CERB programs are expanded</a>, we must not minimize the labour and needs of migrant and undocumented workers. </p>
<p>Income support must be extended to everyone, regardless of immigration status. Anything less constitutes discriminatory policy and further marginalizes essential migrant and undocumented workers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136358/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elise Hjalmarson is a Research Assistant for the European Research Council-funded project "Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)assessment of the 'Good Life' in Times of Crisis". She is also the co-founder of Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture, a migrant justice collective based in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. </span></em></p>COVID-19 may not discriminate, but Canadian policy does. Income support during the pandemic must be extended to everyone, including migrant and undocumented workers.Elise Hjalmarson, PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.