Tanya Basok

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen/permanent resident workers in receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada, it also underscored that many workers in occupations and sectors deemed “essential” enough to be exempt from stay-at-home orders and other public safety measures are migrants, a sizeable number of whom sustain Canada’s food supply through their work in its agricultural industry.This book explores the dynamics behind the pandemic’s deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers, highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy, society, and the world of work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrants without legal status employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational employment strain, the authors derive insight from the employment strain model, a framework for understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers, and expand it to account for migrants’ relationships across transnational space.

Questioning the notion of transit migration, the book examines factors that shape Central American migrants' mobility and immobility in the transnational space, comprised on Central American countries, Mexico, and the US.

Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's demand for their labour is related not only to economic need but to the rigid control exercised by the Mexican Ministry of Labour and Social Planning and Canadian growers over workers' participation in the Canadian guest worker program, as well as the paternalistic relationship between the Mexican harvesters and their Canadian employers.

Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's demand for their labour is related not only to economic need but to the rigid control exercised by the Mexican Ministry of Labour and Social Planning and Canadian growers over workers' participation in the Canadian guest worker program, as well as the paternalistic relationship between the Mexican harvesters and their Canadian employers.

Basok rejects the theoretical models traditionally used in development studies for analysing the non-capitalist forms of production in the capitalist economy, arguing that these theoretical models place too much emphasis on external aspects of production. Instead, she proposes that internal aspects such as technology, labour relations, and organization of production need to be examined to allow an understanding of how informal petty commodity producers survive competition with capitalist enterprises. In her research with members of small urban enterprises -- including shoemakers, bakeries, carpentry shops, street vendors, seamstresses and tailors, and market and handicraft shops -- she demonstrates that these enterprises can be viable when their production is organized in such a way that they become resistant to competition with the capitalist sector.