Over the past decade, the Canadian economy has become increasingly dependent upon exploited temporary foreign workers, in large part through the Canadian government’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), an arm of the government’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. A new book, titled Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy, explores with scholarly attention and detail many of the problems inherent in this program.
Written by Leigh Binford, professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, this timely book weaves together compelling evidence from the past ten years to show how the SAWP scheme has created an economy based on oppression — providing Canadian employers with a steady stream of cheap labourers who are themselves silenced by the constant possibility of capricious deportation.
In addition to being denied labour and political rights, temporary workers are forced to endure unsafe conditions. Binford points out that SAWP participants “are sometimes poorly housed, frequently overworked, occasionally maltreated, exposed to dangerous chemicals without adequate training and/or protective gear, socially excluded from active participation in community life, and told to “aguantar” (endure) by the very officials charged with defending their rights.”
