Tomorrow We're All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy

摘要

Advanced capitalist states have long drawn on the most marginalised members of society to fulfil seasonal farm labour demands, thus keeping food prices and the minimum wage low. Temporary foreign worker programmes in the early twenty-first century, however, represent an effort to legitimise this long-standing practice as a 'win-win-win' scenario for growers, sending and receiving country governments, and migrant workers. Proponents argue that programmes of this kind offer a complementary solution to farmers' labour needs in the global North and poverty for migrants from the majority world. In Tomorrow We're All Going to the Harvest, Leigh Binford critically evaluates the putative merits of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme (SAWP), which has been heralded internationally as exemplifying best practices. When even a supposedly model arrangement is riddled with exploitation and abuse, he queries, what does this augur for other temporary foreign worker programmes?