#temporary migrant workers

[walrusmagazine]

Government Efforts to Help Vulnerable Workers May Be Retraumatizing Them

Exploitation and abusive bosses plague Canada’s temporary foreign worker program

Workers who apply for the open permit program fear reprisals if their employers find out. Many applicants require legal support and translation services to prepare their applications, but such services are not always accessible. Immigration officers might not recognize workers’ experiences as abuse at all, even with clear violations of provincial employment and health and safety laws. Workers might lack computer access, or transportation from their isolated farms, to complete the applications. To qualify, applicants must outline the nature of the abuse they’re experiencing, or risk experiencing, and gather enough evidence to satisfy immigration officials. This can be difficult—workers may not know they need to collect proof, witnesses to abuse may be scarce, and psychological harassment doesn’t usually leave a paper trail.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick (mary-kirkpatrick.com)

[yegactivist]

Edmonton: It's Time to Win Regularization! by Paula Kirman

[xtruss]

Canada Foreign Worker Program A ‘Breeding Ground’ For Slavery – UN Expert

The United Nations has called on Ottawa to guarantee the rights of tens of thousands of migrant workers who enter the country annually

Migrant Workers remove weeds surrounding Strawberries Plants at a farm in Markham, Ontario, Canada, on July 30, 2023 © Getty Images/Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, under w hich up to 60,000 people arrive in the country each year, is leading to Modern Forms of Slavery, a United Nations expert has warned.

Following a two-week fact-finding visit to Canada, UN Special Rapporteur for contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, said on Wednesday that he was “deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse” he was informed of by migrant workers.

“Employee-specific work permit regimes, including certain Temporary Foreign Worker Programs (TFWPs), make migrant workers vulnerable to contemporary forms of slavery, as they cannot report abuses without fear of deportation,” Obokata said in a statement posted to the UN Human Rights office website.

The controversial program sees between 50,000 to 60,000 foreign laborers arrive in Canada each year, but has for several years Faced Accusations of Systemic Exploitation. Foreign workers across various sectors, including agriculture and meat processing, have complained of sub-par conditions, as well as having only limited recourse to address instances of abuse.

The UN investigation comes a little over a year after a group of Jamaican Farm-Workers Complained in a letter to their country’s labor minister that work they were being compelled to perform at two Ontario Farms was Akin to “Systemic Slavery.” The letter detailed accusations that they were “exposed to dangerous pesticides without proper protections, and our bosses are verbally abusive, swearing at us.”

Canada’s foreign worker scheme permits employers to Hire Laborers From Mexico and Eleven Caribbean Nations for up to eight months of the year.

In his statement, the special rapporteur also called on Canada to offer a “clear pathway to permanent residency for all migrants, to prevent the recurrence of abuses.” He added that foreign workers “have valuable skills that are critical to the Canadian economy” and called upon lawmakers to push forward legislation to protect the rights of overseas workers.

A 2014 study from the Canadian Medical Association Journal Open said that 787 Migrant Farm Workers in Ontario were repatriated to their home countries after suffering injuries in the course of their work – some of whom were transported with little prior notice, and without having been granted access to medical treatment.

— RT | September 07, 2023

[ladydeath-vanserra]

Inequality + Slums in Velaris

kinda 👀 at the people who think slums and designated Poor™️ areas are supposed to be normal, especially in acotar w Velaris. They *shouldn't* to be normal especially for VeLAriS

The UN Definition of a slum:

.... individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, housing durability, and security of tenure

Slums form and grow in different parts of the world for many different reasons. Causes include rapid rural-to-urban migration, economic stagnation and depression, high unemployment, poverty, informal economy, forced or manipulated ghettoization, poor planning, politics, natural disasters, and social conflicts.

Rural–urban migration

Many people move to urban areas primarily because cities promise more jobs, better schools for poor's children, and diverse income opportunities than subsistence farming in rural areas.

this doesn't really apply to Velaris as it is a closed in separated city from the rest of the night court

Urbanization

Some scholars suggest that urbanization creates slums because local governments are unable to manage urbanization, and migrant workers without an affordable place to live in, dwell in slums.

Rapid urbanization drives economic growth and causes people to seek working and investment opportunities in urban areas.

However, as evidenced by poor urban infrastructure and insufficient housing, the local governments sometimes are unable to manage this transition. This incapacity can be attributed to insufficient funds and inexperience to handle and organize problems brought by migration and urbanization.

again, I don't see thus happening due to it being a private and secluded city unless they're taking in a rapid amount of SA survivors- the only outsiders brought into the city

Poor house planning

Insufficient financial resources and lack of coordination in government bureaucracy are two main causes of poor house planning.

This would mean that Rhysand is not paying attention to evenly distributed wealth or mindful government oversight in poor house planning. If there are low income folks, adequate housing is not being provided

Colonialism and segregation

Some of the slums in today's world are a product of urbanization brought by colonialism. For instance, the Europeans arrived in Kenya in the nineteenth century and created urban centers such as Nairobi mainly to serve their financial interests. They regarded the Africans as temporary migrants and needed them only for supply of labour.

The housing policy aiming to accommodate these workers was not well enforced and the government built settlements in the form of single-occupancy bedspaces. Due to the cost of time and money in their movement back and forth between rural and urban areas, their families gradually migrated to the urban centre. As they could not afford to buy houses, slums were thus formed.

I wouldn't say this qualified for Velaris, internally, but as for the Nightcourt as a whole, the separation of the CoN and Illyria from the golden city that is Velaris is very telling

The citizens of the CoN aren't allowed to leave the city and as we have seen from Rhysand, they will have businesses turn CoN citizens away in Velaris

Illyria is full of war torn camps where inequality thrives and there is not adequate housing or supplies, as we see when Cassian said he fought other children for supplies. We also see it when Cassian brings blankets for the Illyrians

Poor infrastructure, social exclusion and economic stagnation

Social exclusion and poor infrastructure forces the poor to adapt to conditions beyond his or her control. Poor families that cannot afford transportation, or those who simply lack any form of affordable public transportation, generally end up in squat settlements within walking distance or close enough to the place of their formal or informal employment.

This overall I feel best exemplifies Velaris. As far as we're made aware there aren't vehicles in Velaris and we don't make notice of any other forms of transportation besides winnowing. The closest we get is flying and we've only seen Cassian, Azriel, Rhysand and Feyre. With Winnowing, it's only Mor and Rhysand and Feyre.

Winnowing is not a common practice ability that all faeries have. There does seem to be a suggestion that there are people who can Winnow, though this is based on Rhysand telling Feyre about his dad being unable to Winnow into the HoW

This leaves many people being unable to have any form of transportation outside of walking.

Informal economy

Many slums grow because of growing informal economy which creates demand for workers. Informal economy is that part of an economy that is neither registered as a business nor licensed, one that does not pay taxes and is not monitored by local, state, or federal government.

There are very few businesses we see in Velaris. We see Rita's, the dive bar and some art studios. There isn't enough shown about legitimate businesses to really show much about an informal economy

Poverty

Urban poverty encourages the formation and demand for slums. With rapid shift from rural to urban life, poverty migrates to urban areas. The urban poor arrives with hope, and very little of anything else. They typically have no access to shelter, basic urban services and social amenities. Slums are often the only option for the urban poor.

Poverty has been witnessed with especially the Illyrians. But within Velaris, it stands to reason that the "grimy part of the city" where Nesta lives, and the bar she frequents, does not have the adequate infrastructure in place for proper wages- which would be Rhysands responsibility to make sure a minimums wage where people could thrive would exist

tldr: Velaris has slums and it's through Rhys' shitty job as a high lord by not creating adequate social systems or infrastructure where poor folks can live without being designated to the "grimy parts of the city"

[allthecanadianpolitics]

In the winter of 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, the Immigrant Workers Centre where I’m an organizer brought together a group of migrant workers for a Zoom meeting. It was a snapshot of the precarious lives of those who make Canada’s economy run.  [...] These stories are not an exception but the norm for temporary foreign workers. These racialized workers generate great wealth for the corporate class inside countries like Canada because they’ve been made exploitable through a restrictive immigration regime designed to ensure they remain vulnerable, docile, deportable and disposable.  Capitalists tend not to be fundamentally anti-migrant but rather seek to control and manage migration for the needs of business. They envision migration to be a kind of kitchen faucet that can be turned on and off according to labour market fluctuations. [...] Corporations in critical sectors like logistics, warehouses and distribution rely on the same strategies in the Global South as they do in the Global North: when the industries cannot be offshored, they rely on a precarious workforce of migrants. 

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Craig Harrington at MMFA:

The economic policy provisions outlined by Project 2025 — the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration — are overwhelmingly catered toward benefiting wealthier Americans and corporate interests at the expense of average workers and taxpayers. Project 2025 prioritizes redoubling Republican efforts to expand “trickle-down” tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation across the economy. The authors of the effort’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, recommend putting key government agencies responsible for oversight of large sectors of the economy under direct right-wing political control and empowering those agencies to prioritize right-wing agendas in dealing with everything from consumer protections to organized labor activity. [...]

Project 2025 would chill labor unions' abilities to engage in political activity. Project 2025 suggests that the National Labor Relations Board change its enforcement priorities regarding what it describes as unions using “members' resources on left-wing culture-war issues.” The authors encourage allowing employees to accuse union leadership of violating their “duty of fair representation” by having “political conflicts of interest” if the union engages in political activity that the employee disagrees with. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; National Labor Relations Board, accessed 7/8/24]

Project 2025 would make it easier for employers to classify workers as “independent contractors.” The authors recommended reinstating policies governing the classification of independent contractors that the NLRB implemented during the Trump administration. Those Trump-era NLRB regulations were amended in 2023, expanding workplace and labor organizing protections to previously exempt American workers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; The National Law Review, 6/19/23; National Labor Relations Board, 6/13/23]

Project 2025 would reduce base overtime pay for workers. The authors recommend changing overtime protections to remove nonwage compensatory and other workplace benefits from calculations of their “regular” pay rate, which forms the basis for overtime formulations. If that change is enacted, every worker currently given overtime protections could be subject to a slight reduction in the value of their overtime pay, which the authors claim will encourage employers to provide nonwage benefits but would effectively just amount to a pay cut. The authors also propose other changes to the way overtime is calculated and enforced, which could result in reduced compensation for workers. Overtime protections have long been a focus of right-wing media campaigns to reduce protections afforded to American workers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023, Media Matters, 7/9/24]

Project 2025 proposes capping and phasing out visa programs for migrant workers. Project 2025’s authors propose capping and eventually eliminating the H-2A and H-2B temporary work visa programs, which are available for seasonal agricultural and nonagricultural workers, respectively. Even the Project 2025 authors admit that these proposals could threaten many businesses that rely on migrant workers and could result in higher prices for consumers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

Project 2025 recommends institutionalizing the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of the Sabbath. Under the guise of creating a “communal day of rest,” Project 2025 includes a policy proposal amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require paying workers who currently receive overtime protections “time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath,” which it said “would default to Sunday.” Ostensibly a policy that increases wages, the proposal is specifically meant to disincentivize employers from providing services on Sundays as an explicitly religious overture. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

[...]

International Trade

Project 2025 contains a lengthy debate between diametrically opposed perspectives on international trade and commerce.Over the course of 31 pages, disgraced former Trump adviser and current federal inmate Peter Navarro outlines various proposals to fundamentally transform American international commercial and domestic industrial policy in opposition to China, primarily by using tariffs. He dedicates well over a dozen pages to obsessing over America’s trade deficit with China, even though Trump’s trade war with China was a failure and as he focused on China, the overall U.S. trade deficit exploded. Much of the rest of Navarro’s section is economic saber-rattling against “Communist China’s economic aggression and quest for world domination.”In response, Kent Lassman of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute promotes a return to free trade orthodoxy that was previously pursued by the Republican Party but has fallen out of favor during the Trump era.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda would be a boon for the wealthy and a disaster for the working class folk.

See Also:

MMFA: Project 2025’s dystopian approach to taxes

[veganpropaganda]

‘Oppressive’ child labor found at poultry plant’s kill floor after teen’s death, feds say

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article288585497.html

A U.S. chicken producer is again facing child labor accusations after a 16-year-old worker was killed at its poultry plant in Mississippi last July, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

On May 1, four teenagers, including two 16-year-olds and two 17-year-olds, were found working on the kill floor at Mar-Jac Poultry’s processing facility in Jasper, Alabama, federal court filings show.

With three teens’ shifts starting at 11 p.m. — and a fourth teen’s shift starting at 8:30 p.m. — they were each tasked with “hanging live chickens on hooks for slaughter and cutting meat from the carcasses,” according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.

This violates federal child labor provisions in place to protect minors from dangerous jobs that have proven deadly.

On July 14, 2023, Duvan Robert Tomas Perez, a 16-year-old migrant from Guatemala, was killed while cleaning a chicken deboning machine at Mar-Jac’s plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, according to a wrongful death lawsuit, McClatchy News previously reported.

The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration found Perez was fatally pulled into the “still-energized” machine because Mar-Jac Poultry MS LLC “disregarded safety standards.”

OSHA cited the company over his death in January, according to a news release.

Now, the Labor Department is seeking a court order to stop Mar-Jac from selling and shipping “poultry tainted by oppressive child labor” from the company’s plant in Alabama, court filings say.

An “urgent” request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction filed by Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su asks the court to prevent Mar-Jac Poultry of Alabama, LLC, from profiting off products linked to child labor.

Following the request, an evidentiary hearing was held on May 14 and May 15, Mar-Jac said in a May 20 news release provided to McClatchy News in response to a request for comment.

Instead of granting the request, the court ordered Su to submit a brief by May 28 and ordered Mar-Jac to submit a response to the brief by June 4, the release said.

What Mar-Jac says about the child labor accusations

In a response filed May 8, Mar-Jac contends it offered to stop shipping poultry produced on the May 1 shift, when the alleged child labor violations involving the four teens were uncovered by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division.

However, the Wage and Hour Division “rejected that offer and demanded Mar-Jac not ship goods in interstate commerce for the next 30 days,” the filing says.

This would “would put more than 1000 workers out of their jobs for that 1-month period and disrupt the supply chain, adversely affecting hundreds more workers involved in growing and transporting poultry products,” Mar-Jac said in its news release.

Mar-Jac refused the division’s demand and argues that the company was unaware three of the four minor employees were underage.

According to the Labor Department, Wage and Hour Division investigators learned the four teens “had been working at the facility for months,” a complaint says.

The department has declared all chicken produced by Mar-Jac up until May 31 are “hot goods” that are “tainted by child labor,” according to the complaint.

Mar-Jac maintains three of the four teens showed documents that claimed they were older than 17 and were then verified as over 18, according to the May 8 court filing.

The company says it “immediately discharged” the three minors after learning they were underage and denied that they worked on the Alabama plant’s kill floor, the filing says.

As for the fourth minor, Mar-Jac said federal investigators haven’t identified the teen, “making it impossible for Mar-Jac to end the alleged (child labor) violation,” according to the filing.

On May 14, the Labor Department called Mar-Jac’s response a “misguided attempt to persuade this Court to allow (the company) to flout the inherent dangers of oppressive child labor,” court records show.

Mar-Jac said in the release that the company “will continue to vigorously defend itself and expects to prevail in this matter” and that it is “committed to complying with all relevant laws, including but not limited to the child labor regulations.”

Following the death of Perez at the Mississippi poultry plant, Mar-Jac acknowledged he “should not have been hired” because he was under 18, according to a July 19 news release published online by WDAM-TV.

The company said the employee’s age and identity “were misrepresented” on his hiring paperwork, according to the release.

Seth Hunter, an attorney representing Perez’s mother, who is suing over his death, said in a news release provided to McClatchy News in February that Mar-Jac’s “working conditions have to change.”

He said Chick-fil-A “is one of Mar-Jac’s largest customers” and that Chick-fil-A and other companies “should insist on better working conditions or stop doing business with them.”

At the time, Chick-fil-A didn’t respond to McClatchy News’ request for comment from Feb. 5.

A few months after Perez’s death, the company told NBC News in October that “We are reviewing our own procedures for investigation and response as we pursue the steps necessary to effectively hold all our suppliers to our high safety standards.”

Similar to Perez, a New York Times investigative report published in September found many migrant children and teens are working dangerous jobs, including at poultry plants.

Mar-Jac’s plant in Jasper, Alabama, is about a 240-mile drive west of the company’s headquarters in Gainesville, Georgia.

[gatheringbones]

[“Feminism that welcomes police power is called carceral feminism. The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, one of the first to use this phrase, uses it to describe a feminist approach that prioritises a ‘law-and-order agenda’; a shift ‘from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals’.

Carceral feminism focuses on policing and criminalisation as the key ways to deliver justice to women. Carceral feminism has gained popularity even though the police – and the wider criminal justice system – are key perpetrators of violence against women. In the United States, police officers are disproportionately likely to be violent or abusive to their partners or children. At work, they commit vast numbers of assaults, rapes, or harassment. Sexual assault is the second-most commonly reported form of police violence in the United States (after excessive use of force), and on-duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population. Those are just the assaults that make it into the statistics: many will never dare to make a report to an abuser’s colleague.

Meanwhile, the very nature of police work involves perpetrating violence: in arrests or when they collaborate in incarceration, surveillance, or deportation. In 2017, there was outrage in the United Kingdom when it emerged that the Metropolitan Police had arrested a woman on immigration charges after she came to them as a victim of rape. However, it is routine for police to threaten to arrest or deport migrant sex workers, even when the worker in question has come to them as a victim of violence.

Carceral feminism looms large in sex-trade debates. Feminist commentators pronounce that ‘we must strengthen police apparatus’;that criminalisation is ‘the only way’ to end the sex trade; and that some criminalisation can be relatively ‘benign’. Anti-prostitution feminist Catherine MacKinnon even writes with ambivalent approval of ‘brief jail time’ for prostitutes on the basis that jail can be ‘a respite from the pimps and the street’. She quotes like-minded feminists who argue that ‘jail is the closest thing many women in prostitution have to a battered women’s shelter’ and that, ‘considering the absence of any other refuge or shelter, jail provides a temporary safe haven’.

Sex workers do not share this rosy view of arrest and incarceration. One sex worker in Norway told researchers, ‘You only call the police if you think you’re going to die … If you call the police, you risk losing everything’”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[mariacallous]

As Election Day approaches, many city leaders across the United States are wondering what a second presidential term for Donald Trump might mean for their residents and communities. Over the past several months, they have watched as Trump described Milwaukee as “horrible,” New York as a “city in decline,” and Philadelphia as “ravaged by bloodshed and crime.” Trump recently warned (at the Detroit Economic Club, of all places) that “the whole country will be like Detroit” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election, and that “you’re going to have a mess on your hands.” City leaders recall conflicts with the previous Trump administration over issues such as administering the decennial census, ensuring public safety, and providing adequate funding. 

Immigration policy, however, should top their concerns. Candidate Trump signaled numerous ways in which he and his cabinet would seek to reduce the presence and impact of immigrants of nearly all kinds in American life. Recent Brookings analysis quantified the potential national economic impact of this agenda. And as the analysis below shows, these proposed policies would be especially harmful to cities, which have long relied upon immigration for critical demographic, economic, and cultural fuel. 

The GOP wants fewer immigrants—of almost all kinds—in the United States 

While Trump and running mate JD Vance’s recent spotlight on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio grabbed headlines, the GOP’s agenda on immigration reaches much more broadly. Based on Trump’s speeches, statements from campaign officials, and Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” this agenda includes: 

Rounding up, detaining, and deporting an estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants 

Further restricting the entry of refugees and asylum seekers 

Repealing the diversity immigrant visa, which offers pathways to permanent U.S. residency for migrants from countries with historically low numbers of immigrants 

Limiting family-based admissions of immigrants (to nuclear family members only) 

Scaling back the use of H-1B (high-skilled immigrant) and H-2B (seasonal immigrant worker) visas 

Repealing temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants fleeing unsafe situations in their home countries (including 450,000 recent arrivals from Venezuela) 

Ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) protections for minor children whose parents brought them to the U.S. illegally 

Reinstituting the “Muslim ban,” effectively barring the entry of individuals from a range of Muslim-majority countries 

Such policies would reflect Trump’s warning that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, and fulfill promises from policy adviser Stephen Miller that a second Trump presidency “will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” As was true in the previous Trump administration, many (if not all) of these policies would face legal challenges, funding challenges, or both. But such a multipronged policy assault on immigration—likely coupled with continued anti-immigration rhetoric—would undoubtedly have both direct and indirect effects on immigrants’ presence and contributions to America’s economy and society. 

[dertaglichedan]

Biden/Harris Deliver More Migrants than Jobs in October

President Joe Biden’s border deputies invited four times more migrants in October than the number of extra jobs created by CEOs, according to data obtained by NewsNation.

Business groups created 12,000 additional jobs in September, amid an economic slowdown at the strike at Boeing. The 12,000 number was one-ninth of the 112,500 new jobs that were expected.

But Biden’s deputies also invited 49,840 more parole migrants to fly or bus into the U.S. for jobs during October. Those legally contested “parole migrants” are welcomed by the  Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the ports of entry along the border.

An additional 56,580 migrants– including many women and children �� crossed the border illegally and were registered by the Border Patrol. Some will be deported.

Biden’s deputies also welcomed at least 150,000 legal immigrants, foreign temporary workers, and refugees.

The more-migrants-than-jobs news prompted jeers from Americans who want more jobs and higher wages for Americans.

“More illegal aliens crossed our border last week than jobs added for all of October,” said a tweet from Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI). “That’s Kamalonomics,” he added, as he blamed Kamala Harris who dodged an oversight over over migration in March 2021.

[mybeingthere]

Nil Yalter is the recipient of the Golden Lions Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2024.

Nil Yalter is a Turkish artist who was born in Cairo, Egypt, on 15 January 1938, and moved to Paris in 1965, where she still lives. She is widely regarded as a pioneer in the global feminist art movement. Yalter has never received formal education in visual arts, and as a self-taught artist, she has continuously conducted research into her own practices and areas of interest, working in painting, drawing, video, sculpture and installation.

Her artistic career began in 1957 when she held her first exhibition at the French Cultural Institute in Mumbai, India. However, it was during the 1960s that she delved deeper into her practice. After moving to Paris in 1965, Yalter’s work inaugurates a truly radical and pioneering chapter as she begins to address social themes, particularly related to immigration and women's experiences, in a very unique exploration and development of conceptual art practices. In 1973, Yalter created the groundbreaking installation Topak Ev, which was featured in a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

In the following year, she presented The Headless Woman a key video piece addressing women's sexual liberation and the Orientalist objectification of Middle Eastern women. Another extraordinary work from this period is La Roquette, Prison de Femmes, (executed with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset) from 1974, which presents the accounts of a former convict of the famous women’s prison in France. Additionally, her work Temporary Dwellings, first showcased in 1977, delved into the lives of migrant workers, as recounted by women.

In 1980, Yalter had a solo Video projection and conference titled Rahime, Femme Kurde de Turquie at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, where another radical of work of hers was first presented. The 1990s marked a period of creative exploration and recognition for Yalter, during which she embraced digital media.

[yegactivist]

Edmonton: It's Time to Win Regularization! by Paula Kirman

[sororalice]

On the Blessedness of Worms

Homily for the Full Moon, written 3-24-24.

Dearly Beloved,

Happy Full Moon! And such a special Full Moon…a full lunar eclipse and the “Worm Moon”. As such, I am moved today to speak about worms.

As I always remind myself and everyone, as pagans we believe in a naturalized theology. We look to the patterns of nature, the Logos, for our knowledge of both the nature and the will of the Divine, and our current moment in these patterns of nature is that of early Spring. It is this moment, commemorated in the Farmer’s Almanac as the “Worm Moon”, the time of Spring when the earthworms start to churn the Earth beneath our feet, that I wish to speak of today.

Worms are often thought of as lowly creatures. Often a character portrayed as powerful in a story will refer to a character portrayed as weaker as a “worm”. Worms live beneath our feet, in the dirt and underneath the stones. Worms are simple, with a sparse nervous system, and are not known for their intelligence or courage, traits that we humans tend to value.

But worms are amazing.

Worms eat the decaying matter left behind by the amazing and beautiful variety of life produced by nature. Worms break up and allow air to pass into the soil, allowing for the growth of plants that most animals, including ourselves, need to live. Worms transform the world from one full of death and broken things into a world ready and waiting for new life and growth.

Now, many people are disgusted by worms. They squirm around in disturbing ways. Often they are slimy and covered in the soil and decaying matter they thrive upon. For these reasons, often we don’t want to see worms. We want them to stay in the deep, in the dark, underneath the surface. We acknowledge their important work, but we want them to do that important work far away from us.

This meditation upon worms leads me to an important question: what other things, what other people, are we benefitting from that we prefer to stay underneath the surface? In the dark. Far away from us. Who else are we consistently forgetting? The Covid pandemic showed us that the service workers, health workers, grocers, sanitation workers, and so on were “essential workers”; we learned that the world ran on the backs of these humble, underpaid, overworked, and often horribly exploited people. But we didn’t pay these people any more. We didn’t give them better benefits or conditions of labor. We didn’t give them a share in ownership of the means of production. And this is just one example…migrant labor, prisoner labor, volunteer labor, temporary and day labor, service labor, the labor done by the disabled, the labor done by the disenfranchised…all of this labor that is required for our world to live and grow and thrive is often unseen, unacknowledged, and poorly rewarded.

So let us look under the rocks. Let us look in the shadows. Let us look in the dark. Let us look for the unappreciated and necessary workers that make our world possible, and raise them up. Let us show them how much we really appreciate what they mean and how valuable they are. Let us celebrate and lift up the worms.

Happy Full Moon.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: “Zoology: Earthworm”, Line Engraving, Granger Collection, (19th Century)

[fatehbaz]

The SAWP is a temporary labour program that brings foreign workers to Canada for periods between six weeks and eight months annually [...], paving the way for the recruitment of Jamaican workers as well as workers from other Caribbean countries like Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados [beginning] in 1968. [...] The SAWP has been a resounding success for Canadian growers because offshore indentured workers enable agribusiness to expand and secure large profits. Being indentured means that migrant farm workers are bound to specific employers by contractual agreements [...]. First, they are legally prevented from unionizing. [...] Additionally, because they are bound to specific employers, they must ensure that the employer is happy with them [...]. For instance, migrant farm workers are forced to agree to growers’ requests for long working hours, labour through the weekend, suppress complaints and avoid conflicts, if they want to stay out of “trouble” [...]. In “Canada’s Creeping Economic Apartheid”, Grace Galabuzi shows that the Canadian Government’s immigration policy is, in reality, a labour market immigration policy [...].

[Text by: Julie Ann McCausland. "Racial Capitalism, Slavery, Labour Regimes and Exploitation in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program". Caribbean Quilt Volume 5. 2020. Paragraph contractions added by me.]

---

A big finding that came out of the oral history interviews was a much richer tapestry of worker protest than has previously been documented. Speaking with workers – including former workers back in their home countries of Jamaica and Barbados – allowed me to hear the types of stories that often don’t make it into archives or newspapers. Interviewees told me stories about wildcat strikes, about negotiating conditions with employers, and also about protesting their home governments’ role in organizing the migrant labour program. [...] [T]hings did not have to be this way; our current world was anything but inevitable. [...] [But] economic forces transformed tobacco farming (and agriculture writ large), [...] leaving mega-operations in their wake. [...] [L]arge operations could afford [...] bringing in foreign guestworkers. The attraction of foreign workers was not due to labour shortages, but instead in their much higher degree of exploitability, given the strict nature of their contracts and the economic compulsion under which they pursued overseas migrant labour. [...] Ontario’s tobacco belt (located in between Hamilton and London, on the north shore of Lake Erie), was from the 1920s to 1980s one the most profitable sectors in Canadian agriculture and the epicentre of migrant labour in the country [...]. In most years, upwards of 25,000 workers were needed to bring in the crop. [...]

[The words of Edward Dunsworth. Text is a transcript of Dunsworth's responses in an interview conducted and transcribed by Andria Caputo. 'Faculty Publication Spotlight: Ed Dunsworth's "Harvesting Labour"'. Published online at McGill Faculty of Arts. 15 December 2022. At: mcgill.ca/arts/article/faculty-publication-spotlight-ed-dunsworths-harvesting-labour. Some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

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Jamaican agricultural workers say they face conditions akin to “systematic slavery” on Canadian farms, as they call on Jamaica to address systemic problems in a decades-old, migrant labour programme in Canada. In a letter sent to Jamaica’s minister of labour and social security earlier this month [August 2022], workers [...] said they have been “treated like mules” on two farms in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. [...] The workers [...] are employed under [...] (SAWP), which allows Canadian employers to hire temporary migrant workers from Mexico and 11 countries in the Caribbean [...]. “We work for eight months on minimum wage and can’t survive for the four months back home. The SAWP is exploitation at a seismic level. Employers treat us like we don’t have any feelings, like we’re not human beings. We are robots to them. They don’t care about us.” Between 50,000 and 60,000 foreign agricultural labourers come to Canada each year on temporary permits [...]. Canada exported more than $63.3bn ($82.2bn Canadian) in agriculture and food products in 2021 – making it the fifth-largest exporter of agri-food in the world. [...]

[Text by: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours. "Jamaican farmworkers decry ‘seismic-level exploitation’ in Canada". Al Jazeera (English). 24 August 2022.]

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In my home country, St. Lucia, we believe in a fair day’s pay [...]. In Canada, we give more than a fair day’s work, but we do not get a fair day’s pay. [...] I worked in a greenhouse in [...] Ontario, growing and harvesting tomatoes and organic sweet peppers for eight months of the year, from 2012 to 2015. [...] In the bunkhouse where I lived, there were typically eight workers per room. Newly constructed bunkhouses typically have up to fourteen people per room. [...] I also received calls from workers (especially Jamaicans) who were either forbidden – or strongly discouraged – from leaving the farm property. This outrageous overreach of employer control meant that workers had difficulty sending money home, or buying necessary items [...]. [O]n a lot of farms, [...] workers’ movement and activity is policed by their employers. The government knows about this yet fails to act.

[Text are the words of Gabriel Allahdua. Text from a transcript of an interview conducted by Edward Dunworth. '“Canada’s Dirty Secret”: An Interview with Gabriel Allahdua about migrant farm workers’ pandemic experience'. Published by Syndemic Magazine, Issue 2: Labour in a Treacherous Time. 8 March 2022. Some paragraph contractions added by me.]

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The CSAWP is structured in such a way as to exclude racialized working class others from citizen-track entry into the country while demarcating them to a non-immigrant status as temporary, foreign and unfree labourers. The CSAWP is [...] a relic of Canada’s racist and colonial past, one that continues unimpeded in the present age [...]. [T]he Canadian state has offered a concession to the agricultural economic sector in the way of an ambiguous legal entity through which foreign agricultural workers are legally disenfranchised and legally denied citizenship rights.

[Text by: Adam Perry. "Barely legal: Racism and migrant farm labour in the context of Canadian multiculturalism". Citizenship Studies, 16:2, 189-201. 2012.]

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Other publications:

Smith. 'Troubling “project Canada”: the Caribbean and the making of “unfree migrant labour”’. Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies Volume 40, number 2. 2015.

Choudry and Thomas. "Labour struggles for workplace justice: migrant and immigrant worker organizing in Canada". Journal of Industrial Relations Volume 55, number 2. 2013.

Harsha Walia. "Transient servitude: migrant labour in Canada and the apartheid of citizenship". Race & Class 52, number 1. 2010.

Beckford. "The experiences of Caribbean migrant farmworkers in Ontario, Canada". Social and Economic Studies Volume 65, number 1. 2016.

Edward Dunsworth. Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Canada’s Agricultural Workforce (2022).

Edward Dunsworth. “‘Me a free man’: resistance and racialisation in the Canada-Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program,” Oral History Volume 49, number 1. Spring 2021.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A United Nations official on Wednesday denounced Canada's temporary foreign worker program as a "breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery." Tomoya Obokata, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, made the comments in Ottawa after spending 14 days in Canada. "I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country," he said. "Agricultural and low-wage streams of the temporary foreign workers program constitute a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery." Obokata's comments echo those of Jamaican migrant workers who, in an open letter to their country's ministry of labour last month, described their working conditions in Ontario as "systematic slavery."

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[oleworm]

Recently I saw a post with very racist comments, about some changes in Canadian immigration law that had affected international students attempting to legally settle in Canada.

Some of the comments were quite mean, but I think the worst were those that said it was a good thing that the changes were being implemented because companies had been hiring temporary foreign workers in order not to pay appropriate wages to Canadian citizens, who would demand more.

Wouldn't it be more just to have equal wages for all, provided they are doing the same type of work, and employ a person according to their ability?

Especially with how well-documented these strategies are, employers taking advantage of nativist and racist sentiments to break up workers' movements or never allow them to form, or cut deals directly with other governments to import foreign workers like any other commodity, who would have little to no legal recourse to protest abusive working conditions, to cut costs and depress the wages of the local workforce.

This is information that is readily available, I could easily find it online and read a book that had a whole chapter about it. The one I read, back in 2020, was Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki, but there are many more cases all over the world. Immigration and labour laws need to be reformed everywhere, not only in wealthy countries. I remember when several years ago the first wave of Venezuelan refugees arrived to my country. Locals blamed migrants for depressed wages and not the local business owners who saw desperate people in desperate situations and decided to take advantage of them instead of paying them the same amount that, until then, had been paid to everyone. It's easy to feel self-satisfied when you think you're better than someone else, and it's extremely hard to influence policy but Come on. At least be aware!