Farmers in Solidarity with Justice For Migrant Workers’ Harvesting Freedom Campaign
Posted: October 7, 2016
Categories: Food in the News / GoodFoodBites
On World Decent Work Day, several Canadian farming organizations wanted to express their strong support for the recent Harvesting Freedom campaign led by Justice for Migrant Workers. Check out our 2015 research project and blog series to learn more about some of the challenges migrant farmworkers face, along with opportunities for the food movement to promote healthier and more equitable farmworker livelihoods.
Let us know if you’d like to add your farming organization’s signature (communications@sustainontario.ca)!
Letter of endorsement for Harvesting Freedom campaign:
Farmers in solidarity with Justice for Migrant Workers’ Harvesting Freedom campaign
Many of us champion the local food movement, but few of us realize that much of this food is grown on farms using migrant workers.
As farmers, we believe everyone engaged in the vital work of growing food to nourish other humans should have fair access to conditions allowing them and their families to thrive. All food producers deserve dignity and respect.
Tens of thousands of workers hired every year through ‘low-skill’ agricultural streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, however, often fall far short of this baseline.
Migrant farm workers’ temporary visas are tied to their employers, creating a stark power differential that makes it hard to leave abusive workplaces. If they become ill or injured on the job, workers may be ‘medically deported’ against their will, and access to workplace insurance often becomes a nightmare. Unlike many white European families, especially after World War II, who began their lives in Canada as farm labourers, migrant workers from the Global South can labour in Canada each season for decades with no chance of obtaining permanent residency or even gaining formal job seniority. As starkly illustrated in the new documentary Migrant Dreams, an increasing number of migrant workers are vulnerable to extortion by private recruiters.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, Canada’s main migrant farm worker stream, migrant workers and allies with Justice for Migrant Workers have just completed a 1500-km caravan from Windsor to Ottawa. The Harvesting Freedom caravan’s fundamental demand has been permanent resident status on arrival.
Some employers want to maintain the status quo for migrant workers.
An increasing number, of us, however, feel the status quo is appalling and avoidable. We don’t buy the zero-sum logic that the viability of Canadian agriculture can only be achieved by keeping migrant workers in precarious situations. No human being is entitled to another person’s unfreedom; if we need to address chronic farm labour shortages and cost-price-squeezes for farmers, then let’s develop dignified, long-term and imaginative policy solutions.
Initiatives like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program in the United States show the practical possibilities for improving wages and working conditions simply by requiring retailers to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes and stipulating a human rights-based Code of Conduct on farms. At the policy level in Canada, the Leap Manifesto helps to connect the dots between climate justice, migrant justice and policy supports for sustainable agriculture.
Obviously, abusive employers should be held to task, but fixating on so-called bad apples or model employers misses the point. No matter how fabulous we are as employers, migrant workers face structural inequities that can only be addressed by structural solutions.
Most white European immigrants who came to Canada as farm workers after World War II had the opportunity to gain full immigration status. We are calling on the federal government to provide full immigration status on arrival for migrant workers now.
In solidarity,
National Farmers Union – Brant/Hamilton/Halton Local
National Farms Union – Ontario
Young Agrarians
FarmFolk CityFolk
Gordon Neighbourhood House
Vancouver Urban Farming Society