On August 11, 2022, workers in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) penned an open letter about their experiences in the program. “As it currently stands,” they wrote, “the [SAWP] is systematic slavery.” The article was written by Jamaican workers, but they asserted that migrants of other nationalities had faced similarly dehumanizing experiences. “It feels like we’re in prison,” they continued. “[Bosses] physically intimidate us, destroy our personal property, and threaten to send us home.” Workers were “treated like mules” by unaccountable companies that the Canadian government had empowered to repress migrant workers’ labour rights and political voice.
The SAWP was created in 1966, a time of labour militancy for much of the Canadian working class – in fact, in the mid-1960s, Canadian workers were striking more than one thousand times per year. The SAWP, which allows Canadian businesses to employ workers from Mexico and the Caribbean on temporary visas, provided Canadian companies with workers who existed in a more precarious position than Canadian employees. Therefore, they were less likely to cause labour disruptions.
From the very start, workers in the SAWP resisted their dehumanization and exploitation. In 1966, a group of Jamaican workers refused to work on Saturday, the Sabbath day of the Seventh-day Adventist faith. One year later, Trinidadian workers engaged in wildcat strikes, hoping to pressure their employer to rectify their poor working conditions and unequal pay between Canadian and Caribbean employees.
Gabriel Allahdua, whose 2023 book Harvesting Freedom is the first published account of the life of a migrant farm worker in Canada’s SAWP program, wrote: “I began to notice the echoes of slavery, indentured labour, and colonialism in my experiences as a migrant farm worker.”
Ottawa launched the SAWP at the same time that Canadian capital was globalizing. While Ottawa was promoting Canadian investments around the world, the Canadian government also spent money in nations like Allahdua’s home country, St. Lucia, to persuade workers into joining the SAWP. Workers were presented with a rosy, misleading notion of Canada’s government and society, bolstered by Ottawa’s funding of education initiatives overseas. With this hopeful image of Canada in their minds, many workers initially felt privileged to join the SAWP. However, even for those who were optimistic about their lives in Canada, there were often early warning signs. Allahdua himself noted that, in the early 1990s, the Canadian government was funding unpopular resource extraction projects in the region. “This was an early red flag about Canada for me,” he wrote.
When Allahdua arrived in Leamington, Ontario, the greenhouse and migrant worker capital of Canada, his preconceptions about the country were “completely shattered.” His employer worked him for fourteen hours or more each day, and there were no mandated breaks. It was, to use Allahdua’s word, an “authoritarian” system. According to Canadian law, migrant workers were not entitled to the following: “daily and weekly limits on hours of work; daily rest periods; time off between shifts; weekly/bi-weekly rest periods; eating periods; overtime pay.” At the same time, companies exercised total surveillance over workers’ lives. All activities were logged so the bosses could track workers’ movements; meanwhile, employers flaunted their power over workers, openly telling Allahdua and his fellow migrant workers “If you only knew how much money I’m making off you” and “We own you all.”
When workers tried to unionize, they were fired, as Allahdua observed when a group of Mexicans who tried to unionize were simply replaced with Guatemalans. “The element of fear is built into the SAWP and serves as a powerful tool for employers,” writes Allahdua. “A populace in fear cannot fight back.”
As Edward Dunsworth explains in his introduction to Allahdua’s book:
…workers in the SAWP are tied to a single employer, unable to freely choose or change who they work for. Those employers wield an immense amount of power over workers, and not only during the workday. Workers live in employer-provided housing, and they often find their social and private lives – where they go, who visits the bunkhouse, and so on – monitored and controlled by their bosses…A further disincentive against rocking the boat is the fact that employers enjoy essentially free rein to fire workers and send them back to their home countries should they be dissatisfied with them in any way. In the SAWP, then, farmers are not only participants’ employers, but also their landlords and immigration agents.
Effectively, the Canadian government has stripped an entire population of their labour and political rights in order to benefit Canadian businesses.
In addition to dehumanizing the migrant workforce, the SAWP is useful to Canadian capital because it suppresses wages. A 2014 study from the C.D. Howe Institute admits as much: “The goal of a temporary foreign worker (TFW) program is to accommodate shortages of labour that otherwise would cause wages to rise substantially or possibly stop production because of the difficulty of finding resident workers.” A 2012 analysis of Canada’s migrant labour regime also notes that the program “has the broader function of regulating labour supply in a fashion optimal for employer bargaining power.” In other words, it serves companies’ profitability by attacking the rights of workers.
“From the standpoint of capital,” write professors Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman in The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, “migrant workers make the perfect worker: obedient, non-confrontational, cheap, unlikely to organize a union…”
Alone in a foreign country, Allahdua and his coworkers lived in low-quality company housing in which visitors were not allowed. Many of his fellow migrant labourers had low literacy rates and did not understand the contracts they had signed. “The program is calling for people of colour,” writes Allahdua.
The program is calling for people who are illiterate, or who are struggling with English, or who have English as a second language. The program is calling for people who are largely ignorant about labour issues and human rights issues. These are the kinds of people that the program is really calling for – people who are easily exploited. To me, this was the slavery and colonial handbook being used in modern Canada…So many of these [injustices] make me think about the conditions of enslaved Africans during the colonial period in the Caribbean (and elsewhere) and of the indentured labourers who came afterwards.
In 2022, the Canadian Migrant Workers Centre interviewed 30 migrant labourers who had fled their workplaces. The results show that racism and abuse are ingrained in the everyday functioning of Canada’s migrant labour system.
29 [of the 30] had experienced financial abuse. This came in the form of unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, excessive hours, forced return of wages to the employer, and extortionate recruitment fees. Seventy percent of the workers experienced employers who were verbally and psychologically abusive. They had faced verbal insults, threats of deportation, and/or racist and discriminatory remarks. Thirty percent of the workers experienced physical abuse by their employer, and 10% experienced sexual abuse.
A United Nations report released in 2024 accused Canada of relying on modern-day slavery. Released by UN investigator Tomoya Obokata, the report notes that Canada’s foreign worker program is a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” In researching the report, Tomoya investigated working conditions in Ottawa, Moncton, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. According to the UN’s findings, Canada’s migrant labour regime “institutionalizes asymmetries of power that favour employers and prevent workers from exercising their rights.”
One year prior to being accused of contemporary slavery, the Canadian government approved the hiring of 239,646 temporary foreign workers, more than double the 2018 total. Despite global condemnation, Canada has continued to impose “contemporary slavery” on migrant workers so Canadian companies can increase their profits. Many employers now use temporary workers as a permanent labour supply.
By promoting neoliberal policies and imperialist interventions abroad, Canadian foreign policy helps create the conditions that force citizens of the Global South to migrate to Canada, where many are deprived of their rights so that Canadian companies can profit. Ottawa’s globalization agenda, aimed at promoting Canadian profits abroad and restricting foreign states’ ability to rein in capital, “directly feeds into the displacement of workers from their countries of origin – and their subsequent migration to countries like Canada,” as Amanda Aziz of the Migrant Workers Centre writes.
When migrant workers displaced by globalization organize to improve their pay and working conditions in Canada, they are often abused, fired, and deported, as many personal testimonies reveal. This needs to change. Canadians must organize to dismantle the system of “contemporary slavery” that our leaders have allowed to grow, in spite of UN warnings, on behalf of Canadian businesses.