Author: Daniel Tseghay

Vancouver’s Trayvon Martins

Trayvon

It’s Sunday early evening and we’re at Victory Square, a park in Vancouver, holding a Vigil for Trayvon Martin. We’re here to mourn Martin’s murder and express our outrage with the system that made it happen.

Martin, 17 years old, was simply walking home one day when George Zimmerman spotted him, called 911, assumed he was “up to no good,” confronted him, and eventually shot him dead. In the aftermath, Martin’s character was analyzed and condemned. Many believed Zimmerman’s story that Martin attacked him. Many accepted that Martin was a menace. Many clung to “damning” reports that he had marijuana in his system, that he’d been suspended from school, and that he, like so many young kids, had a habit of macho posturing in photos.

Few of them lingered on the fact that Zimmerman has a history of violence and paranoia. He was once arrested for fighting an officer, his former fiance filed a restraining order for domestic abuse, and he’d made 46 separate 911 and nonemergency calls between August 2004 and the day he murdered Martin. One relative even accused him of sexual assault.

Read Full Article →

REVIEW | Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest — Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada

migrantworkers

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.”