Transnational Employment Strain in a Global Health Pandemic : Migrant Farmworkers in Canada

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. The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between national workers and migrants, many of whom sustain food supplies far from home through their work in agriculture. Leah F. Vosko, FRSC, is Professor of Political Science and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at York University, Canada. Tanya Basok is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Windsor, Canada. Cynthia Spring is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Canada