“Today the temporary agricultural workers program has become a model for international cooperation.  For this reason we have taken the first steps to extend it to other sectors of the economy.”

President Vicente Fox, at a formal banquet with the Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, February 27, 2003.  (1)

The facts speak for themselves: the population of developed countries is rapidly aging and there is a need for abundant, cheap labor to keep entire industries from losing vitality.  The United States Chamber of Commerce calculates that in the next 10 years there will be a need for between 10 to 15 million new workers for low income jobs in the US, a labor force that can only be found abroad.  (2)

In Canada an important part of the agricultural sector depends “structurally” on labor from Mexico and other poor countries.  The production of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, bell peppers, tobacco and apples in Canada would not exist, or would have languished, were it not for foreign workers.  Thanks to temporary agricultural workers in Canada, 45% of whom are Mexican, the country is an important world producer of fruit and greenhouse vegetables.

The almost 14,000 Mexican campesinos (rural workers) who arrive each year to work in Canadian agriculture participate in the Mexican Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (MSAWP).  The MSAWP has distinctive features.  On the one hand it is a legal opportunity for poor campesinos to earn in eight months what they might earn in Mexico in five years doing similar work.  But at the same time, the Mexicans who participate in the Program are “unfree”, according to Doctor Tanya Basok, researcher at the University of Windsor in Canada. (3)

This Mexico-Canada Program, that creates legal unfree workers, is what President Vicente Fox would like to see at the negotiating table in his never-ending flirtations with the US government on migratory issues.  Fox likely knows the Program well, since a considerable number of people from his home state of Guanajuato participate in it.  In fact, more campesinos from San Cristóbal (municipality of Irapuato, state of Guanajuato) participate in the program than from any other town.

Should a migratory agreement be reached with the US, similar to the one Mexico has with Canada, it would have the advantage of being legal.  Those who participate in the Program would not be subject to manhunts by the US Border Patrol, since they would cross the border with proper documents and a work contract in hand.  Yet they would become legally unfree workers, precisely the kind that certain industries are looking for, and whose profitability and sustainability depend on available, immobile, and dependent workers.

Mexican campesinos become indispensable

Before the start of the MSAWP in the 60s, Canadian farmers for years practically stood on their heads to convince government officials that there were almost no Canadians who would work the fields, and the few available weren’t worth a dime.  There is within Canadian agriculture a sector of labor-intensive crops that cannot be machine harvested.  Wheat, for example, has relatively low labor intensity because it is reaped by gigantic harvesting machines.  But fragile tomatoes, with variable ripening periods, must be carefully hand picked.  And there are simply not enough Canadians who will stand the type of work that this entails, even if paid “well”.  Today, as in the 60s, there are plenty of anecdotes that confirm this.  Canadian farmers sometimes would prefer to hire their fellow citizens, but there aren’t any around. If one shows up at the farm gate, it’s more than likely that he’ll not stand the heat, hard work, long hours, and insecure or dangerous conditions. Canadians leave, some throw in the towel after a few hours, others in days or weeks, but hardly anyone lasts a month.

Canadian farmers finally convinced their government and in 1966 the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program began “importing” peasants for field work.  At first they came from the Caribbean Commonwealth countries and in 1974 the first Mexicans joined in.

After 30 years the Mexicans have become indispensable, “structurally necessary” for the survival of farms and greenhouses with labor-intensive crops.  And not just because there are many more Mexicans than Canadians willing to work  Mexicans are also better workers...one Mexican in the field is worth two, three and even four Canadians. (4)

At harvest time having Canadians in the field or greenhouses is equivalent to losing millions of dollars.  Not only because they work less, but because right when they are most needed, at harvest time, they are not likely to be around.  And if a ripe tomato is not harvested at the right time, it quickly begins to spoil and its quality rating drops.  It might yet be sent to catsup factories, but its monetary value plummets.  A few more hours and it won’t even make the grade for industrial uses.  Over a very few days, if crops are not harvested, farmers can lose thousands, perhaps millions of dollars.  This is so for many fruits and vegetables.

The Program’s aim, then, is to guarantee that farms and greenhouses have workers when they are most needed, legally hindering them so they cannot enter the wider labor market.  After the agricultural cycle ends as the long Canadian winter approaches, or whenever owners no longer have work, the Mexicans are sent home, whichever comes first.

The structural dependency of Canadian agriculture on Mexican workers means that many products might not be grown in Canada without them.  Small and medium-sized towns and cities would collapse economically, some processing plants would shut their doors, and at least a sector of Canadian agriculture would languish economically.  Canadian consumers would pay more for some agricultural produce, others might disappear from their tables.

Canada is an important world producer of greenhouse vegetables, also structurally dependent on Mexican peasant labor.  One greenhouse owner said, “I wouldn’t even be here if I didn’t have offshore labour...Everybody’s operation is dependent on them.  It’s come to the point where it’s totally impossible to do without this offshore labour.  I don’t know anybody that does.”  Another owner said, “If you take the offshore program away from this area, you can effectively shut down the greenhouse industry, ‘cause you won’t get the labour force.” (5)

So, there is work, and demand, for Mexican campesinos in Canadian fields and greenhouses.  What then are the MSAWP rules of the game?

The Mexican Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (MSAWP) (6)

To apply for a job with the MSAWP, a campesino must go to the office of the Ministry of Labor in Mexico City, the entity charged with deciding who goes to Canada.  Preferably the ideal candidate is male, campesino, poor, young, but not too young, at least 25 years old, since statistics show that he probably has a family and children and thus has greater economic needs, forcing him to be more “serious” about his job in Canada.  Likewise, it’s preferable if he doesn’t have land, or maybe just a bit.  In other words, ideally he has few income options, apart from the Program.

If chosen, the young campesino will pay for his passport, medical exam, visa at the Canadian embassy, and half a roundtrip airfare to Canada.  Once in Canada, and before he sees a cent of his salary, he’ll have to pay his boss for housing (located at the farm), pay the Canadian government for medical and unemployment insurance, contribute to his retirement pension, and like Canadian citizens, he’ll pay income tax.  By law he should rest one day for every six worked, rest on holidays, receive additional pay for overtime and other supposed benefits.  But benefits are almost always that, supposed, as we shall see.

Typically the campesino chosen will travel to the Toronto airport, in Ontario, where a Mexican consular official will meet him and the other Mexicans arriving for the same reason.  The official will give them an orientation, the telephone number of the consulate, bus fare to get to the farm assigned to each worker, and then it’s off to work.

From that moment on the consulate services of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations will be at the service of the Canadian farm owners.  According to workers, in labor disputes, the consular representatives scold their countrymen for complaining about working conditions, and invariably take the part of owners. The consulate wants no problems with owners or the Canadian government, since it doesn’t want the Program to end.  And it definitely doesn’t want or need more unemployment within a Mexican economy that has been unable to generate sufficient jobs for its people, and that has hemorrhaged campesinos for decades..

At the end of each season, at most eight months after arriving, the Mexican campesino returns home, forbidden from staying in Canada.  He’ll take among his belongings a sealed envelope to be turned into the same office of the Ministry of Labor that hired him.  The envelope contains an evaluation by the farm owner of the worker, perhaps the most decisive factor in the Ministry’s decision to rehire him or not for the Program next year.

Conditions

Mexican campesinos on Canadian farms and greenhouses do what they would do at home, but far from their families most of the year.  They clean the field, plant, take care of crops, weed, harvest and pack.  Many Mexicans work in immense greenhouses several acres in size that grow tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers and other crops.  Summer temperature within the greenhouses reach 40 degrees centigrade (105 Fahrenheit) with 90% humidity.

But it’s the conditions of the Program that turn workers into unfree labor.

For Canadian fruit and vegetable producers the Program is an ideal response to their need for labor that is hardy, fast, skilled, experienced, but even more importantly, available, reliable, “captive and docile”, and unable to leave work.

Basok says that Mexican labor is extremely valuable because it is unfree, in other words completely available to the farm or greenhouse owner. Mexican migrants feel obliged to labor without regard for working conditions, health, fatigue or any other reason.  Because the owner has the final say: his evaluation can mean a job or unemployment next year. (7)

Today there is no ball and chain, yet Mexicans on the farm are “chained” insofar as they are forbidden from trying to find another job on the greater labor market. They cannot change jobs, not even from one farm to another.  If they are poorly treated, humiliated, or simply don’t like working conditions, there is a single option, quit and return to Mexico.  With few opportunities at home the “ideal” candidate chosen by the Ministry of Labor will think twice.  The desire to return to Canada next year leads the migrant to keep quiet, bear it out and, mostly, work hard, even in deplorable, unjust and dangerous conditions.  In spite of daily outrages, most of the time the classic and stoic forbearance of the Mexican prevails.

Under these circumstances conditions tend to stagnate or worsen.  There are long work days.  During harvest there are no rest days and 18-20 hour working days are not uncommon, without compensatory payment for overtime.  If the owner so decides, there are no holidays, no rest on Sunday, no breaks during the workday except to eat.  In order to keep on the right side of the owner, it is not unusual for workers to labor on silently even with serious injuries.  Pesticides are routinely used without adequate instruction or proper protective clothing.  At some farms there is no running water to wash hands of pesticides before lunch.  José Nicolás Pichón, worker for six years in Ontario says, “if you protest or get sick, out you go to Mexico, if you bow your head, you stay.” (8)

Salaries are another area of abuse that occurs with the knowledge of Canadian authorities.  The 7.50 Canadian dollars per hour that Mexican laborers receive is above the minimum wage.  But the stipulations of the contract say that the agricultural worker will receive the greater of either the minimum wage or what is generally paid to Canadian workers doing the same tasks. (9)  Yet most Canadians wouldn’t consider $7.50, or even $8.00, for field work.

Benefits also are generally not granted.  On the farm workers have some type of housing, most of it unsatisfactory, sometimes deplorable, but wages are always garnished to compensate the owner.  Medical benefits are rarely taken.  An injured worker, due either to pressure from the owner or his desire to curry favor with the latter, often ends up protecting the owner by not insisting on medical treatment, which would lead to a legally-required report to authorities.  Workers are prevented from receiving reimbursement for income taxes paid (with complicity from Mexican consular officials).  In spite of paying unemployment insurance, a worker will never see any benefit, since when he’s in Canada he is employed, and when he’s in Mexico, Canadian law doesn’t consider him unemployed. In spite of working decades in Canadian fields, a Mexican campesino is unlikely to receive retirement benefits, nor is he ever allowed to apply for permanent residence.

Although laws regulate labor relations between worker and management in Canada, agricultural workers are afforded the least protection.  As an example, farm workers are prohibited from pressing their demands by striking, a right enjoyed by industrial and service workers.

After years of legal wrangling, the United Food and Commerce Workers union won a battle in December 2001 when the Supreme Court of Canada handed down an opinion that farm workers could not be denied their right to form a union.  But it was a hollow victory.  The Court also ruled that workers could not go on strike, nor was management obliged to recognize workers’ associations, or even negotiate with them.  The UFCW director Michael J. Fraser commented on the contradictory nature of the decision which on the one hand allows workers to form a union, but then prohibits them from striking to improve working conditions and salary.  It’s like giving them the right to join a club, Fraser added. (10)

From a different perspective, the Mexicans who work legally under the Program in Canada are less free than the undocumented Mexicans in the US (or “illegals” in US jargon).  An undocumented worker in the United States is able to quit a job he/she doesn’t like and look for another.  But if a worker in the Program in Canada leaves the job that he was assigned, he is expelled from the Program if he doesn’t return to Mexico immediately. (11)

Indispensable Mexicans in first-world industry

It’s understandable then that President Fox would declare the Program a success, “a model” to imitate.  It’s certainly beneficial to owners and it helps the Fox government hide a fundamental soft spot of the Mexican economy, i.e., its chronically weak job-creating capacity.  Fox’s wish to “extend [the Program] to other sectors of the economy” is logical too, given the large supply of difficult, poorly paid, dangerous and denigrating jobs in North America that citizens eschew.  Yet companies in the North have a constant demand for cheap labor, and Fox’s got the supply.

Mexican workers are increasingly “a structural necessity” not only for agriculture, but for industry as well.  (12)  An interesting example comes from meat-packing plants in Canada and the United States.  Packing plants are part of huge, monopolistic, multinational-food companies, that have taken over the food production chain in industrialized countries.  Cargill and IBP (Iowa Beef Packers), for example, have taken over the meat industry in Canada.  Packers are sophisticated beef, pork, chicken slaughterhouses whose job is to turn live animals into standardized meat shapes, hamburger patties and chicken chunks, for the large junk-food chains.  Slaughterhouses and packers have the most dangerous industrial jobs in the United States.  The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is almost three times that of any other US factory.  Statistics surely downplay reality, since thousands of injuries and illnesses go unreported. (13)

It’s the migrants, many Mexicans among them, who work in the packing plants of first-world North America.  Fast-food researcher Eric Schlosser says, “IBP was a trailblazer in recruiting migrant labor.  The company was among the first to recognize that recent immigrants would work for lower wages than American citizens—and would be more reluctant to join unions.  To sustain the flow of new workers into IBP slaughterhouses [...] IBP now maintains a labor office in Mexico City, runs ads on Mexican radio stations offering jobs in the United States, and operates a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America.” (14)

Slaughterhouses have very high turnover rates, precisely because of their deplorable conditions.  Packing industry spokespersons calculate the turnover rate at between 80-100% per year, meaning that after 12 months it’s not likely that anyone who began the job a year ago is still around.  But the turnover rate is of little concern to these food behemoths.  Their production methods copy faithfully and improve upon Henry Ford’s breakthrough a century ago which transformed the automobile industry by breaking down all tasks to its simplest components.  This method, implemented in US slaughterhouses in the 60s, allows companies to train new workers within hours.  It’s of little concern then if workers leave in a few months, weeks, or even days.  Their replacement can be working the same day that he/she was hired.  There are even advantages to having workers leave quickly.  Arden Walker, head of labor relations at IBP, said in 1980, “we found very little correlation between turnover and profitability...For instance, insurance, as you know, is very costly.  Insurance is not available to new employees until they’ve worked there for a period of a year or, in some cases, six months.  Vacations don’t accrue until the second year.  There are some economies, frankly, that result from hiring new employees.” (15)

What’s important to packers isn’t their employees, but rather keeping the assembly line in movement and transforming animals into hamburgers.  They need a large reserve pool of labor in a country where citizens flee from poorly-paid and dangerous jobs in evil-smelling slaughterhouses.  They need migrants and thus the concerted efforts to recruit Mexicans.  Not even documented migrants, those with the right to remain in the US, want those jobs, since they are free to seek less onerous work elsewhere.  Packing plants need people whose personal situation hovers on malnutrition, misery, hopelessness and lack of alternative opportunities, precisely that of millions of Mexican men and women.

For US companies the Mexican Seasonal Workers Program must sound enticing.  It would solve the problems now associated with “illegal” migrants.  Hiring undocumented labor puts the packing plants at odds with migration, justice, and even Homeland Security authorities.  A raid by migration agents to detain “illegals” could also detain the slaughterhouse disassembly line, bringing huge losses as a result.

Like the Program with Canada, any agreement Fox negotiates with the US government would be advantageous for companies.  For example, for the packing plants (and other firms in similar situations), savings would accrue from not having to recruit personnel, since the participating governments would be in charge, as with the MSAWP.  There would likely be clauses to limit workers to a single job over a fixed period, probably until benefits are set to take effect, at which time they would be sent packing to their countries of origin.

Unfree workers face poverty and lack of opportunities at home.  They want to work but are forced to bear labor conditions that are exploitive and dangerous. They want to keep their source of income, and thus remain compliant, resigned and silent.  Yet today unfree workers are beginning to break their silence, to fight for their rights and improvements in the workplace, and to stop prejudices that consider them second-rate workers.  Workers participating in the MSAWP in Canada are increasingly organizing, protesting and denouncing the abuse they have faced for decades.

We invite readers of CIEPAC’s bulletins to peruse the second part of this bulletin, in which MSAWP workers relate their story and denounce the conditions found in the fields and greenhouses of Canada.

We also invite our readers on this December 18, International Migrants Day, to reflect on the treatment Mexican workers face beyond their borders, but also on the treatment that temporary agricultural workers, from Central America, face in Mexico.

Footnotes:

(1)Quote taken from the office of the president, www.presidencia.gob.mx

(2)Jim Cason and David Brooks, “La reforma migratoria en Estados Unidos: mucho humo y poco fuego”, Masiosare supplement, La Jornada, November 28, 2003.

(3)See the seminal work of Tanya Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2002.  I gratefully acknowledge Dr. Basok’s help in understanding the Mexican migrants’ conditions in Canada.  Invaluable also for this bulletin has been the www.justicia4migrantworkers.org site, created in Canada by activists for migrants’ rights.  See also “Los otros braceros: son legales y pagan beneficios, a cambio de ningún beneficio”, Min Sook Lee, Masiosare supplement, La Jornada,  September 28, 2003.

(4)Not only because they work faster and more efficiently, but because they stand longer hours and are willing to work on holidays and Sundays.  See chapter 7 of Basok’s Tortillas and Tomatoes for interesting anecdotes from Canadian farmers in this regard.

(5) Basok, ibid, p.126

(6) There are several government and activist documents that describe the workings of the MSAWP.  See http://www.justicia4migrantworkers.org/resources.htm

(7)Basok, ibid., p.107.  See also Basok’s study “Free to be Unfree: Mexican Guest Workers in Canada”, published in Labour, Capital and Society, Vol. 32 (2), 1999, p.192-221, that contains the following definition, “Restrictions placed on the workers’ right to dispose of their labour power as a commodity in a host society have prompted researchers to brand them ‘unfree’”. (p.192).

(8)Isabel Inclán, “Campesinos mexicanos se quejan del maltrato en granjas canadienses”, Correo Canadiense, Toronto, Ontario, October 8-9, 2003, p.4.

(9)See the contract signed by workers with Human Resources Development Canada, “Acuerdo para el empleo temporal de trabajadores agrícolas mexicanos en Canadá”, 02-2003 version.

(10)David Adelaide, “Ontario Tories deny farm workers trade union rights”, January 6, 2003, World Socialist Web Site, www.wsws.org.

(11)There are several factors that would make it difficult for a “runaway” Mexican to remain in Canada, among them, and as opposed to the US, the lack of support networks and the relatively few Latinos in the country.  That said, most workers who know working conditions in both countries almost invariably prefer Canada.

(12)What follows on the animal-based food processing industry comes from the excellent study on junk food in the United States and its impact on the diet and environment, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, Perennial, New York, 2002.

(13)Schlosser, ibid., p.172.
(14)Schlosser, ibid., p.162.
(15)Schlosser, ibid., p. 161.

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