The Transatlantic Slave Trade began 502 years ago, when the first ship carried enslaved people from Africa to the lands the Kuna people of Panama and Haudenosaunee Confederacy called Abya Ala (South America) and Turtle Island (North America), the groups. This voyage and the thousands like it that followed in its wake fed the creation of the plantation slave system, and with it, firmly entrenched a color-coded caste system among the "new world" society's Indigenous groups, enslaved Africans, European settlers and their descendants. This history cannot be divorced from the tied employment migrant workers are now subjected to in Canada.
In his work History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, historian Lewis C. Gray defines plantations as "large-scale agricultural enterprises that primarily focus on the production of cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar. These plantations were characterized by their extensive use of enslaved labour and their significant role in the economic and social structures of the Southern United States."
The racial nature of forced labor in the Americas is based on a complex network of ordinances, pacts, and conflicts. Chattel slavery in Canada was first codified with the Raudot Ordinance of 1709. The statement racially segregated the nature of chattel labor across New France:
"All Panis and Negroes who have been purchased and who will be purchased, shall be the property of those who have purchased them and will be their slaves"
While French colonists initially enslaved more Indigenous Americans than African people (2:1 ratio respectively), Indigenous conflicts against colonial oppressors like the Yamasee War of 1715 made colonizers fearful of Indigenous alliances and revolts. This, along with the fact that Enslaved Africans demonstrated a relative resistance to European diseases than their Native American counterparts made them more desirable for plantation work, and Black labor by extension, more valuable as the trade increased. By 1760 the majority of enslaved persons in British North America were Black. Brought from distant shores, enslaved Africans in the Americas, unlike their European and Indigenous counterparts, had no political state, tribe or grouping to legislate on their behalf nor represent their interests via compromise or war. With enslaved status barring them from citizenship status and access to representation, Africans, and many indigenous groups were placed at the bottom of the caste system in the Americas.
Despite the historic enfranchisement of Black and Brown persons into state subjectivity in nations like Brazil, Canada and the United States, the plantation system persists until today. In place of the old pre-abolition system, modern governments use contemporary institutions like Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) to exploit plantation labor from migrant workers in the Global South. Through these policies, Canada and other labor importing countries are continuing the same systemic oppressions that have ravaged Black and Brown communities for centuries.
The roots of Canadian migrant worker exploitation can be traced back to the first ships that left the shores of West Africa, carrying captives bound for the "New World," where they would be forced into servitude. The state deals and raids among European states and sometimes African elites excluded the enslaved people, who had no say in determining their destinies in the aftermath of these conflicts.
Canada's Migrant-Led Class Action Lawsuit
Defendants in a class action lawsuit filed by Toronto-based law firm Goldblatt Partners, in conjunction with Koskie Minsky and Martinez Law, are suing the Canadian federal government over the SAWP. This lawsuit alleges that under this program, migrant workers have been systematically discluded from accessing federal employment insurance benefits. Louis Century, a lawyer close to the case, is quoted stating:
"Because of tied employment, the moment of job loss makes the worker ineligible for EI (employment insurance), because under the EI scheme, you need to be both ready and available to work to get EI benefits."
The lawsuit calls for an end to tied employment in order to allow migrants to access their benefits. Tied employment is the practice of conditioning a migrant worker's status in a country on their employer. In 1966, the SAWP was introduced to fill Canada's agricultural labor demands with workers from Mexico and the Caribbean region. According to the policy, agricultural employers can hire foreign workers for a maximum of eight months from January 1st to December 15th of each year, at which point workers must be repatriated back home. The lawsuit contests the part of this policy that holds that migrants cannot activate the benefits accrued from their wages within the time frame they are legally allowed to stay in Canada. This exclusionary practice removes a worker's ability to bargain with employers, by forcing migrants to stay contracted to one employer if they want to stay in Canada. Under the SAWP's tied employment system, migrant workers claim that their employers have far too much power, which they use to withhold their benefits, wages, and access to safe working conditions.
The UN and other activists have cited multiple labor abuses in the system including unpaid wages, debt bondage and unsafe working conditions. The imbalanced power distribution in the SAWP system muzzles migrant workers from filing formal complaints out of the fear that employers will retaliate by firing them and having them deported. Since the program began, migrant workers—almost solely Black and Brown—are claimed to have lost out on half a billion dollars of wages.
While seeking financial restitution is a helpful step to redress the harmful exploitation of the SAWP system, in order to fully eradicate its rampant abuse, and address the historic underdevelopment plantation agriculture has caused Black and Brown communities we must work to abolish tied employment, and all other institutions that actively disempower migrant workers. But abolition faces several barriers.
Climate Catastrophe and the SAWP Program
In his book Harvesting Freedom, Gabriel Allahdua explains how the successive climate disasters, including a massive cyclone that wiped away his farm, left him with few opportunities in his homeland of St. Lucia, forcing him to migrate to Canada and join the SAWP program. His account of withheld wages, and severe mistreatment—including among other things subjection to working without adequate COVID protocols—show just how common transgressions are among migrant workers. For many native citizens of the Global South, climate change has become the main driver of poverty, and along with it, increased South-to-North migration. As a result of this, millions of migrants like Mr. Allahdua have lost their livelihood at home to a climate catastrophe and have moved to the Global North to make a living. As a byproduct of Western Hegemony and capitalism's uneven geographies of dominance and exploitation, climate change preys on the vulnerability of the Global South, much like the imperialists and raiders of the past that launched the settler colonial epoch. The West has enjoyed the spoils of decades of industrial production, while at the same time making increasingly larger swathes of the Global South unlivable. As a result, the citizens of these southern nations have been forced into desperate conditions, and Canada's migrant labor scheme has taken advantage of these disasters to fuel its modern exploitative economy.
Canada, the world's second-largest country by landmass, is also one of the world's biggest per capita carbon emitters . While the government has paid lip service to reducing its reliance on fossil fuels, the nation continues to profit from its massive oil sands and global mining empire. Not only does a significant portion of the industries constituting Canada's GDP continue to actively increase the rate of domestic climate change, they also represent the nation's massive commercial interests in continuing global warming for the sake of profit.
Melting ice in Canada's northern region is expected to provide access to non-renewable energy resources, and their emissions hidden under permafrost, as well as uncover the Northern Passage, a shipping lane near the Arctic that can cut travel times between major destinations like China and Europe. These economic opportunities stand as an incentive for Canadian businesses to continue operating their environmentally ruinous industries even as these anti-environment practices go on to perpetuate climate disasters, such as desertification in Mexico, hurricanes in the Caribbean and flooding in Brazil. These corporations then use these manufactured climate disasters to push workers into exploitative working conditions, adding cruelty into an already vile means of expanding the global labor market.
Economist Naomi Klein interrogates this sort of manufactured disaster as the core phenomenon of concern in her seminal text, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she argues that neoliberal free-market policies often gain traction in the wake of major crises—such as natural disasters, wars, or economic upheavals—when populations are too disoriented to resist effectively. Although the SAWP predates the neoliberal era, the policy has managed to take advantage of the climate crisis forcing migrant workers into unfair labor relations, just as it did for Mr. Alladua. While the climate crisis will take decades, even centuries to undo, abolishing tied employment is a worthwhile step that can bring more power to migrant workers across Canada.
What Does Abolition Look Like?
Under Canada's SAWP program, Canada's migrant laborers are "charged" to an employer. The system's few safeguards fail to protect migrant workers, who can be fired for whatever reason and must leave the country within eight months. This work relationship makes migrants fearful that any transgressions or worker complaints will lead to their firing and subsequent deportation. Unable to permanently reside in Canada, these laborers are legally unable to access employee benefits available to Canadian nationals. These harmful conditions demand an ending to tied employment, and allowing migrants to contract their work with other companies while in Canada is a clear step to the goal of fair treatment and access to citizenship status and its associated benefits for the migrant labor class. Chris Ramsaroop, a migrants rights activist and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, said in an interview with Canadian Dimensions:
"We have met workers who for the last two or three decades have toiled in Canadian fields for upwards of eight months a year. Yet, despite their contributions, neither they nor their families will ever have the opportunity to apply for status in Canada."
Chris, and other members with Migrants for Justice (J4MW) believe in working within the system to change it. The organization has a list of prescriptions that aims to center Canada's migrant population in labor reform. Some of the recommendations include:
- Implementation of the recommendations of the 2004 Arthurs Report on the Canada Labour Code with respect to agricultural workers (section 10)
- More transparent and accountable reporting mechanisms of the detailed information on workers' repatriation, deportation, and medical repatriation, including information pertaining to deaths, injuries and reasons for deportation
- Immediate regularization and status for current participants in migrant workers programs, but also for previous agricultural workers and their families. J4MW supports a broad based approach to status.
J4MWs work is instrumental and necessary, but it does not hide the fact that progressive reforms to a regressive system often work to embolden powerful actors to react in an undesirable manner, often by increasing the repression reformists work to eliminate. While in the short term, the policies advocated for by J4MW are necessary, one must anticipate that large ago conglomerates will find other avenues for exploitation. By law, migrant workers have the same protections as Canadian citizens, but in practise migrants cannot defend and express their rights due to tied employment. Abolition of tied employment is the bare minimum expected by migrants, activists and concerned groups, but should we abolish the SAWP altogether? Maybe foreign labor schemes altogether? Globally, these institutions do actively take advantage of both climate and economic disasters in poor nations, but they provided necessary lifelines for families. According to the IMF, as a share of GDP, remittances flows to Caribbean countries dwarf those received by most other world regions (7.7 percent of GDP). In Haiti and Jamaica, remittances exceed 15 percent of GDP. Ending labor schemes in rich countries right now would increase the poverty and exclusion of these regions. Ending tied employment is important, but migrants would still face the fear of reprisals from the industry at large.
At present, those who lack immigration status cannot properly find work, and those who do have status still lack the political power required to sufficiently affect change in their industry.
From the root to the soil, from the sweat to the toil, all workers should be represented either in a political or economic body within their respective industry. Unionization among migrant workers, and between Canadian citizen workers, is the only viable path towards empowering all workers to organize against employers. If we seriously want to undo half a century of plantation slavery, we need to enfranchise migrant workers as equal participants in our economy and its decision-making processes. By this abolitionist praxis of mass worker's empowerment, we can then remake the entire agriculture industry!