Search Results

This chapter develops the argument that deportability, as it applies to participants in a temporary migrant work program (TMWP) permitting circularity, is an essential condition of possibility for migration management. Under this paradigm, TMWPs—such as the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP)—which are perceived to represent “best practices” by, for example, offering participants the prospect of return, simultaneously sustain this approach to governing migration and represent its limit, including in contexts in which unionization is permissible. The legal struggle of SAWP employees of Sidhu & Sons to unionize, secure a first collective agreement, and maintain bargaining unit strength gives substance to these claims. It reveals how deportability is lived among temporary migrant workers and the central modalities through which it functions. As such, these SAWP employees' experience provides rich empirical evidence for a grounded critique of migration management revealing that, despite its call for “regulated openness,” this global policy paradigm introduces new modes of control.

This chapter aims at pointing out the need for a more equitable, internationally driven approach to solve elder care staff shortages on the background of the implications deriving from the widespread phenomenon of employing migrant care workers in the Italian elder care sector. It starts with positioning the phenomenon in a European and Mediterranean perspective, then describes how this form of caregiving provision has become so popular in Italy to face the long-term care needs. The chapter’s conclusions focus on the analysis of the opportunities and challenges raised by this phenomenon, trying to catch all involved perspectives: the older care recipients’ families; the migrant care workers; and the receiving and sending societies. Future cooperation agreements in the Mediterranean area should consider how to minimise these risks, in order to promote equitable solutions to solve care staff shortages in some countries without ‘plundering the future’ of other nations.

This concluding chapter reflects on the significance of the legal case of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) employeess at Sidhu & Sons for expanding understandings of the meaning of deportability and its applicability to temporary migrant work program (TMWP) participants laboring not only in Canada but also in other relatively high-income host states embracing migration management and the measures it prescribes. Obstacles to limiting deportability writ large will persist so long as migration management dominates paradigmatically. Nevertheless, in combination with the forward-looking organizing efforts already being undertaken by unions and worker centers, in areas where unionization is difficult to achieve partly because of the still-dominant Wagnerian-styled model of unionization, certain modest interventions in policy and practice hold promise in forging change and curbing deportability among temporary migrant workers. Because the foregoing case study focused on the SAWP, the alternatives outlined in this chapter primarily address this TMWP. Given, however, that the SAWP is often touted as a model of migration management, they seek to provide meaningful avenues toward incremental change in other TMWPs in Canada and elsewhere.

This chapter details the attempts of the union representing Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) employees at Sidhu & Sons to organize, gain certification, and secure a first collective agreement for a bargaining unit encompassing participants in a temporary migrant work program (TMWP) permitting circularity. Through an analysis of the legal proceedings surrounding United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 1518's bid for certification, it explores SAWP employees' two important motivations for organizing: namely, to preempt termination without just cause prompting premature repatriation and to secure mechanisms for recall suitable to workers laboring transnationally. Local 1518, in seeking to represent SAWP employees, came up against tensions arising both from the Labour Relations Board's (LRB) understanding of its role of facilitating access to collective bargaining under the Labour Relations Code (LRC) and from limits posed by the parameters of the TMWP in play. Consequently, the unit obtained certification, but only on a restricted basis. At the same time, it introduced mechanisms aiming to limit termination without just cause prompting premature repatriation and offered novel provisions on recall and seniority.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of temporary migrant work. In the age of migration management, temporary migrant work is a significant phenomenon in many countries where relative labor shortages fuel demands for temporary migrant work programs (TMWPs) that provide comparatively low labor standards and wage levels. In this context, workers laboring transnationally in such programs are turning to unions for assistance in attempt to realize and retain access to rights. Yet even those engaged in highly regulated TMWPs permitting circularity—or repeated migration experiences involving one or more instances of emigration and return—confront significant obstacles tied to their deportability. This book tells the story of Mexican nationals participating in a subnational variant of Canada's model of migration management program, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). It explores how these workers organized to circumvent deportability, but despite achieving union certification, securing a collective agreement, and sustaining a bargaining unit, ultimately remained vulnerable to threats and acts of removal.

This chapter explores challenges to maintaining strong bargaining units posed by threats of attrition, either through formal decertification or by other means producing similar outcomes. It first documents trends in numerical attrition at Sidhu & Sons, in the context of Canada's introduction of other more highly deregulated temporary migrant work programs (TMWPs) operating in agriculture and those programs' subsequent growth. The size of the bargaining unit at Sidhu, comprised of SAWP employees exclusively, shrank after certain employees' attempt to decertify it, despite the fact that the Labour Relations Board (LRB) had refused to cancel its certification. Given the absence of an active attempt to decertify the bargaining unit, it is nevertheless difficult to determine how attrition continued at Sidhu. To demonstrate the how of this often subtle modality of deportability, the chapter then chronicles strategies fostering attrition in the bargaining unit encompassing SAWP employees at Floralia Plant Growers Ltd., which the union originally tried to draw into the foregoing complaint of unfair labor practices and coercion and intimidation directed at Sidhu.

This chapter presents a class-struggle perspective to the question of labor exploitation in the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on the figure of the foreign worker. Both liberal and neocolonial Western representations of the working-class migrant have been central to exceptionalizing discourses. In the popular imagination of many in the Global North/West, the Gulf region is almost automatically associated with hyperexploited, abused workers, primarily from South Asia. While these discourses are not entirely a fabrication—massive exploitation based on the racialization and patriarchal gendering of labor in the Gulf is very real—there is at the same time a disavowal in these Orientalist discourses that is either duplicitous or naive. Seen from a feminist and Marxist class-struggle perspective, the racialized exploitation of foreign workers is perhaps the aspect of Gulf societies that is most similar to the neoliberal societies of the North. The Gulf is least exceptional with respect to its regimes of labor exploitation.

This chapter analyzes how threats and acts of blacklisting impeded the fair application of the collective agreement between UFCW Local 1518 and Sidhu & Sons. The detection and analysis of the blacklisting of bargaining unit members at Sidhu uncover important “truths” about the management of migration among temporary migrant workers with the prospect of return. Broadly, it demonstrates that institutionalized programs' mechanisms, promoted in the global policy discourse embracing migration management as a means of stemming the flow of “irregular migration,” can impede access to and the exercise of labor rights. More narrowly, it shows that SAWP's “best practices” are by no means neutral, but are instead consistent with the dynamics of global capitalism, producing a race to the bottom in conditions of work and employment. This model temporary migrant work program (TMWP) permits state officials to behave in unprincipled ways that can involve, among other things, defying collective agreement provisions by delegating key responsibilities related to readmission—such as recruitment, selection, and aspects of documentation—to those in the interior and posted abroad. It also illustrates vividly how a labor relations tribunal compelled to prioritize national, and thereby sending-state, sovereignty, can be inhibited in—and even prevented from—implementing and enforcing host-state labor laws under its oversight.