Rift between migrant workers reinforced by program design and employers, researcher says

During the nine years he worked as a migrant farm worker in Ontario, Sidique Ali-Hosein says he noticed a rift between workers of different cultural backgrounds. 

Caribbean and Mexican workers often kept to themselves, he said, sometimes because of differences like language but other times because the employers grouped workers into bubbles. 

"When a farm worker comes, they're more or less in a bubble … Caribbean workers, they're not sure of what their rights are, [just like Mexican workers] they are kept into a bubble, uneducated," he said. 

Ali-Hosein came to Canada from Trinidad and Tobago for the first time in 2013. He worked at a farm in Simcoe, Ont., before getting an open work permit. He now works at a pharmaceutical distribution warehouse in Toronto.

Looking back, Ali-Hosein said divisions sometimes translated into hostile situations such as workers cutting in line in front others, he said. 

Researchers and advocates say employers and the structure of the federal program itself reinforce divisions between workers, and hope to see more intentional efforts to unite them.

Through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), Canadian employers hire and fly in temporary foreign workers.

The program is open to workers from Mexico or several specific Caribbean countries (Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago).

Kristin Lozanski, professor at the University of Western Ontario, has spent the last eight years travelling to the Niagara Region while researching tourism and farm work in the area. 

She said this divide between workers from Mexico and the Caribbean has been built into the program almost from the start.

SAWP started in 1966 with Jamaican workers, said Lozanski, and was expanded to the Caribbean until 1974, when they decided to include Mexico.

She said the addition was made as a way to take power from Caribbean workers who were advocating for better conditions in the program, therefore making the program "constructed on the premise of competition."

"There was a sense that the Caribbean was building up too much power, and they needed to balance that power," she said.

Workers still compete, Lozanski said, and often over the jobs themselves.