Abstract
This insightful book on temporary foreign worker programs in the context of neoliberal political economy focuses on Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), the oldest such program in existence (since 1966). On the basis of interviews conducted in Mexico and Canada, Leigh Binford sheds a harsh light on aspects of the SAWP, a program previously heralded as a model by the World Bank. Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest documents that even a managed program such as the SAWP is rife with abuse despite the regulations agreed to by the Canadian and Mexican governments (as well as the central states of some Caribbean sending countries).
The most egregious problem is the legal requirement that ties temporary foreign workers to Canadian farmers for months at a time. While workers return to their home countries at the end of each season, they must complete three full seasons with the same employer before they can request to transfer to another farm. They also happen to live on the employer’s farms in decrepit, crowded, barrack-like conditions. The strictly enforced three-year provision blocks workers from seeking better paying, or better working/living conditions, elsewhere in Canada. In other words, the SAWP and other comparable programs create a twenty-first century form of unfree labor. The coercive aspect derives from the fact that workers know that if they openly question the pace, length, or conditions of work, the state of their on-farm housing, or that if they go AWOL, they will be subjected to “bad” evaluations. When these are given, employers do not “invite back” migrants who, in turn, also risk being blacklisted from the program entirely. In other words, the programs give the migrants the legal right to work in Canada, but the three-year on-the-same-farm stipulation disciplines workers. Migrants understand that they are disposable, since employers are always searching for even cheaper Third-World labor.
The three-year legal provision is, Binford argues, not a vestige of pre-capitalist forms, but part and parcel of twenty-first century neoliberalism. States in developing countries have privatized, deregulated and, with diminished resources, proven incapable of enforcing the very labor regulations that they negotiate with Canada. When this happens, developing states not only abandon their citizens economically at home, but leave them unprotected abroad. Not even the best intended government representatives of the migrants can fully advocate for their citizens given that the central states of the South actually compete with other countries to place their nationals in temporary workers programs. The result is that transnational labor markets are so unfettered (deregulated de facto, if not de jure), that even abuses bordering on human rights violations are legal. What is more, in Ontario migrants are prohibited from participating in strikes or collective bargaining (p. 175). Flexible accumulation, in short, means that workers are treated as if they are disposable, formal rights in their home country or in bilaterally negotiated treaties notwithstanding. And this, he concludes, is part and parcel of global capital requirements for flexible labor in the twenty-first century. Thus, while there is a struggle over expanding rights, neoliberal states in the developing world collude with global capital in such a way as to decrease, rather than increase, individual rights.
Binford’s chapter on individual farmworkers illuminates the economic survival strategy of households, how workers understand their transnational experience, as well as the physical and psychological costs to themselves, their children, and their spouses. Despite the 70 percent satisfaction rates reported by the migrants about Canada’s SAWP, the objective conditions in both their home and host countries make these programs exploitative and costly to themselves and their families. Binford, for example, highlights the abandonment that children of migrants frequently feel. He touches on the behavioral problems (including drug and alcohol use) not uncommon among adolescent males in Mexico, as well as the women’s double-parenting burden.
Despite these hardships, households rely on seasonal migration for survival and it is precisely their “dual frame of reference” regarding wage and other disparities between Mexico and Canada that predisposes farmworkers to evaluate their migrant experiences positively. Farmworkers and their partners accept the sacrifices associated with seasonal migration because the options of Third-World wages or unemployment are worse. The home labor market conditions are so unviable and the poverty so relentless that conditions in Mexico churn out a disciplined and compliant labor force difficult to organize in Canada. For this reason, heartfelt on-the-job grievances do not facilitate unionization but erupt as wildcat strikes. Such resistance results in deportations and/or being blacklisted from the program (p. 177).
In addition to critically unpacking the notion of “complementary” labor markets, Binford debunks the myth that remittances contribute to either economic or human capital development in Mexico. Remittances may be large but the basic needs of families in Mexico are greater and, thus, remittances go toward basic household needs. As such, remittances do not significantly reduce poverty over the long-haul. Further, though the children of migrants are enjoying more years of schooling than did their parents, Binford is pessimistic that these human capital investments will matter where labor market opportunities are closed. His argument here is overly pessimistic and surprising given his insistence on a holistic, not just economic, assessment of temporary worker programs. A more holistic assessment might have been extended to the psychological benefits of increasing educational opportunities, or to the mere potential for better labor market opportunities in major cities or outside of Mexico.
This minor criticism aside, Binford masterfully weaves macro and micro levels of analysis that not only moves us beyond the false opposition posed by structure agency debates, but yields interesting theoretical observations and nuanced empirical results. As noted, he sheds light on how households in rural Tlaxcala (Mexico) become “part of fields of force that articulate relationships between social fields” in Canada and Mexico (p.13). A chapter (with Kerry Preibisch) on the racialization of foreign temporary workers addresses both soft and hard forms of racism. This chapter holds that structural commodity changes led farmers to prefer Mexican migrants to Caribbean workers because employers branded workers as being best at specific labor tasks according to their physical and cultural characteristics. Blacks, for example, were defined as better-suited for heavy lifting and reaching tasks while Mexicans, generally shorter in stature, were branded as suited for bending and stooping tasks. The English language ability and social capital of the former along with the linguistic and social isolation of the latter contributed to the preference of a more docile Mexican labor force, one that was at once defined as less sexual and/or less different from their employers. The racially-based labor market segmentation that resulted was then consolidated by employers who “country surf” for crop-appropriate workers. This racialization divides workers and makes it even harder to unionize them in Canada, a task already difficult since the union trying to organize migrants has no organic links to them.
Given this stark analysis of Canada’s SAWP, it is not surprising that Binford is critical of the post-national citizenship thesis which holds that the new global order creates opportunities for cultural and civic forms of inclusion in host societies. Contrary to the optimistic views of post-national citizenship theories, neither local civic organizations in Canada, nor extant supranational institutions such as the UN, can offer temporary migrants real protections, let alone substantive cultural membership in their host societies. Even though host states in the global North have more leeway to respond to concerns from more of their citizens (not just capital), the demands for cheap, flexible but “invisible” labor, are barriers to meaningful cultural inclusion. Subtle forms of xenophobia interact with the workers’ linguistic and social isolation in ways that even well-meaning activists cannot overcome.
While I might take issue with Binford’s conclusions about the appropriate union stance on such temporary foreign worker programs, others might find quaint his use of such Marxist concepts as “the reserve army of labor.” These, however, would be minor quibbles since the analysis itself is not only well substantiated, but it sheds an important light on the precarity of the migrants’ existence. His observations about a worker whose health suffered from an overexposure to pesticides hit close to home. As a 14-year-old adolescent, I worked in the cotton fields near Hanford, California and during my three-month stint as a farmworker, our crew regularly returned to fields just one day after they had been fumigated with cancer-causing pesticides. But Binford’s rich empirical details go beyond documenting these kinds of workplace horrors that still happen in the agricultural fields of Canada and California. He lays bare the micro-foundations of global inequities that have made the lives of temporary migrants in the global North so precarious. He does so, moreover, with compassion and such urgency that even my undergraduates would be riveted by the book.