In recent decades an increasing share of Canada's agricultural workforce
has been made up of temporary foreign workers from the Global South.
These labourers work difficult and dangerous jobs with limited legal
protections and are effectively barred from permanent settlement in
Canada.In Harvesting Labour Edward Dunsworth examines the history of
farm work in one of Canada's underrecognized but most important crop
sectors - Ontario tobacco. Dunsworth takes aim at the idea that
temporary foreign worker programs emerged in response to labour
shortages or the unwillingness of Canadians to work in agriculture. To
the contrary, Ontario's tobacco sector was extremely popular with
workers for much of the twentieth century, with high wages attracting a
diverse workforce and enabling thousands to establish themselves as
small farm owners. By the end of the century, however, the sector had
become something entirely different: a handful of mega-farms relying on
foreign guest workers to produce their crops. Taking readers from the
leafy fields of Ontario's tobacco belt to rural Jamaica, Barbados, and
North Carolina and on to the halls of government, Dunsworth demonstrates
how the ultimate transformation of tobacco - and Canadian agriculture
writ large - was fundamentally a function of the capitalist
restructuring of farming.Harvesting Labour brings together the fields of
labour, migration, and business history to reinterpret the historical
origins of contemporary Canadian agriculture and its workforce.
