Friday, February 24, 2012

Seasonal agricultural workers

With seasonal agricultural workers in the news recently, I thought I'd share something interesting I learned from some texts I was translating a while back.

The workers I was translating about live in shared huts, shacks or trailers in the fields where they work. They work 12-16 hour days, for which they are paid basically minimum wage with living expenses deducted. They rarely, if ever, leave the farm. I don't know if this is an actual rule imposed by the farmers so much as a result of logistics, but the fact of the matter is that the existing model is not compatible with having one's own life outside of the farm.

There's no provision for picking your kids up at daycare. There's no provision for getting a book out of the library. There's no provision for a bit of time alone or with your partner.

When people talk about seasonal agricultural workers, they tend to say things like "Canadians aren't willing to do this work", as though Canadians don't want to work hard or something. But it isn't about that at all - it doesn't get as far as thinking about the difficulty of the work. The key point is that if you're going to give up your life for several months to do a job under all-consuming conditions, you're going to want to make enough money to support you for the rest of the year. Work all summer and make enough to pay for the next year's university tuition and living expenses. Spend a few months away from your family and be at home to take care of them the rest of the year.

But minimum wage - even at 80-100 hour workweeks - isn't enough to do this if you're living in Canada. However, it is enough to do this if you're living in the countries where the seasonal agricultural workers come from, because of the differences in currencies and economies and costs of living. That's why they're willing to give up their lives during farming season when we aren't. They get more money than they could ever make at home, but we get just as much as we'd make at any other job where you don't have to give up your life.

Rather than bemoaning Canadians' alleged lack of work ethic, people who want Canadians to be doing farm work should look at either a) how can we make farm work more compatible with having a life? (Shift work maybe?) or b) how can we tweak our economy so we can afford to buy food farmed by workers who are paid enough to give up their lives during farm season?

2 comments:

laura k said...

Migrant farm workers live a brutal life. I read about working conditions that are nothing short of Dickensian, in both Canada and the US. Conditions should be improved for simple moral reasons, and the cost should be born by agribusiness.

I understand small family farms may not be able to afford increased labour costs, but do small family farms use migrant labour? (I don't know the answer to that.)

impudent strumpet said...

I don't know the answer to that either. The business models of the farms didn't come up in the texts I was translating, and the farms didn't have websites.