Kerry Preibisch

Pick-Your-Own Labor: Migrant Workers and Flexibility in Canadian Agriculture

This paper explores the structures and practices of temporary migrant worker programs (TMWP) as they operate in Canadian agriculture. Acting within highly competitive, globalized markets, agri-food employers rely on the availability of migrant workers to achieve greater flexibility in their labor arrangements, drawing on employment practices beyond those possible with a domestic workforce. Most recently, changes to Canadas two TMWP schemes have provided employers with greater scope to shape the social composition of their workforce. The paper analyzes these changes while exploring their implications for workplace regimes in agriculture.

The Other Side of el Otro Lado: Mexican Migrant Women and Labor Flexibility in Canadian Agriculture

Global restructuring is dramatically reshaping how women and men around the world relate to agriculture. While gender analysis has been central to research on labor‐intensive, corporate agriculture in the global South, it is rarely invoked in the literature exploring these trends in the North. Moreover, research on gender in agriculture in high‐income countries has tended to focus on women in family farms, despite extensive restructuring of the sector that has increased demands for waged laborers. This article speaks to these limitations by tracing the incorporation of Mexican women into the Canadian agricultural sector as temporary migrant workers. In exploring the lived realities of these women, it reveals workplaces characterized by highly gendered, racialized employment relations and illustrates how temporary migrant worker programs further entrench existing structures of labor segmentation in agriculture. While temporary migrant worker programs have brought greater flexibility into the Canadian agricultural labor market by enabling a particular set of employment practices that rest on gendered, racialized subjectivities, these processes are by no means uncontested by the actors they seek to command.

MIGRANT AGRICULTURAL WORKERS AND PROCESSES OF SOCIAL INCLUSION IN RURAL CANADA: ENCUENTROS AND DESENCUENTROS 1 2

Abstract For 38 years, agricultural workers from the Caribbean and Mexico have spent extended periods working in Canada under a guest worker program. In this article I explore worker-community relations in the Canadian rural communities in which they live, examining the ties that have developed between non-citizen migrant agricultural workers and civil society. Although the integration of migrant workers as a social group into Canadian society is characterized by social exclusion, the nature of relationships between the migrant and permanent communities is undergoing transformations throught the development of personal ties, including the emergence of non-state actors who have become increasingly relevant in defending the rights of migrant workers before their employers, their home country government officials, and the Canadian state. The discussions presented here are relevant for debates on international migration, citizenship, civil society, and transnationalism.

Temporary migration, chronic effects: the health of international migrant workers in Canada

See related practice article by Pysklywec and colleagues on page [1039][1] and at [www.cmaj.ca/cgi/doi/10.1503/cmaj.091404][2]. In 2008, Canada admitted 192 519 international migrant workers on temporary work permits — a historical high.[1][3] This number reflects a trend in labour migration:

The impact of agricultural policy liberalization on rural communities in Mexico

Mexico still has more than 24 million of its inhabitants living in poverty, the bulk of these living in rural areas. Since 1982 Mexico has carried out a model programme of structural adjustment and economic liberalization. From 1988 onwards the previously protective and interventionist farm policy has been liberalized. This paper examines the state of rural poverty and the effect of recent policy changes through detailed studies of four villages in central Mexico carried out between 1996 and 1998. In these cases, households maintained a diverse portfolio of income-earning activities, based on farming, salaried and waged work, temporary migration and small-scale enterprises. Incomes varied little between communities, but were highly unequal within the villages-almost as unequal as income nationally. Most of the inequality arose through the concentration of earnings from larger-scale business and salaried work. On the other hand, any additional income from waged work was likely to reduce inequality. Thanks to uneven distribution of incomes, half the households lived in moderate poverty and one third in extreme poverty. The main determinants of incomes were education, access to capital and migration. The chance of being poor was greater for households that had few sources of income and had no migrants. Cluster analysis revealed three groups differentiated by the pattern of their livelihoods. One third had specialized in salaried work or larger-scale rural business, and were rarely living in poverty; just over one sixth of households specialized in farming, also mainly not poor; and the majority who, while farming small plots, depended heavily on wage labouring for their subsistence and who were usually poor. The main changes affecting the economies of the four villages since 1988 were first and foremost changes in macro and external variables-inflation, stagnation of domestic demand, changes in the world coffee price, and knowledge of international migration. Farm and rural policy change-seen in terms of lower real prices for maize, fewer input subsidies and less state assistance to farming-had been less significant. Most of the changes lowered returns to farming and other rural businesses, pushed down real wages, and raised the cost of living. The retreat of the state and economic liberalization had not led to any countervailing entry of private services or capital. Despite harder times for many households, the response was usually to adapt by tightening belts and looking for extra jobs, rather than abandoning peasant life in the villages. Copyright

Migration as Preservation and Loss: The Paradox of Transnational Living for Low German Mennonite Women

Throughout history, conservative groups of Low German-speaking Mennonites have collectively migrated to preserve their religious integrity. However, their contemporary migrations to North America are not collective or church-sanctioned, but primarily economically motivated. This paper explores the intertwined processes of gender and religion in transnational social spaces through the destination experiences of Mennonite women in Canada. The paradoxes of the transnational social field—each simultaneous gain and loss—constitute a double-bind wherein choice is elusive. Caught in the contest between physical and cultural survival, women find themselves in the ‘nothing’ of in-between, as conflicting social fields and systems of capital—secular and sacred—collide.

Between hearts and pockets: locating the outcomes of transnational homemaking practices among Mexican women in Canada's temporary migration programmes

Temporary migration programmes (TMPs) contain features such as reduced costs and the social legitimation of regularized entry that allow women, including the very poor, to access transnational livelihoods. For mothers, taking up opportunities for employment abroad inevitably involves ‘transnational homemaking’, the set practices involved in caring for family relationships and maintaining household economies across borders. In this article, we examine the transnational homemaking practices undertaken by rural Mexican migrant women employed in highly masculinized TMPs in Canada, tracing how they construct and maintain household economies across borders through a delicate (re)negotiation of reproductive roles and responsibilities with non-migrating kin in Mexico. We find that migration yields material and subjective benefits that enable the expansion of their citizenship across multiple dimensions ranging from the economic to the sexual. At the same time, as racialized, gendered, migrants from the global South, their labour and status in Canada are highly precarious. The advantages derived from transnational migration are thus tenuous, limited, and contradictory.

Pursuing the capabilities approach within the migration–development nexus

ABSTRACT The ‘migration–development nexus’ has become an established development mantra with debate surrounding the ability of migration to promote economic growth and reduce poverty. The optimism of this debate is paired with a push to control migration through the promotion of temporary migration programmes and initiatives considered to support the regular movement of migrants. This dominant paradigm has come under criticism, however, for overlooking the multidimensional costs of migration for migrants and their families. As evidence on the costs of migration gathers, debates within policy and scholarly arenas have turned to how to integrate human rights into migration and development initiatives. The discourse surrounding this debate largely draws on the capabilities approach, which sees expanding human capabilities as the central role of development. In this paper, we analyse the resulting discourse and implementation of this approach to demonstrate how this theoretical framework is utilised to conceptualise diverse outcomes for migrant worker rights within global governance priorities for managing migration. We argue that greater attention is needed in the application of the capabilities approach in order to resonate with policy-makers without compromising the integrity of the approach or separating migrants from their intrinsic human rights.