Farm Labour Abuses

Canada's marketing boards are squeezing Canadian consumers dry (or so the argument goes) because it's possible to pay less for farm produce in the USA. The fact that lower prices for food often times stems from abusive conditions, corporate farms pumping the earth full of poison, and exploitative big food processing corporations ripping-off farmers, and etc., is of no consequence to these shit-head simpleton arguments.

Farm gate prices are really pretty low and that, in part, explains some of the terrible working conditions that foreign workers endure on Canadian farms:

Overseen by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, the program is supposed to safeguard workers from exploitation, but critics say there’s little federal accountability. Complicating the matter is the fact the program is administered by a private, non-profit organization in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island called FARMS – Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services. (Its Francophone equivalent in Quebec and New Brunswick is known as FERME.)

The CSAWP “really suffers from a lack of government oversight by the Canadian government in terms of monitoring working conditions and living conditions, regulating them and sanctioning abusers,” said Kerry Preibisch, associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph.

Migrant workers are housed in a variety of different accommodations. Most live on the farmers’ properties in bunk houses, barns or trailers. Some live away from the farms in motels or apartment buildings. Generally, accommodations are paid for by the employer.

Preibisch has documented a litany of substandard living conditions, from mould in bedrooms, a lack of indoor toilets and standing water to a gas leak that one employer refused to fix.

I attended the Toronto rally for the Justice for Farm Workers movement. Another small group of weak people speechifying to uncaring buildings and moving traffic. As with most other things, if your average Canuck isn't directly affected by some injustice, even if it registers with them, they do little more than shrug. I worked on a farm once. Outside of Delhi Ontario. Those Jamaican guys worked like sunzobitches. Three-times as fast as us Ontario-raised white boys.