Disrupting Deportability

F. Vosko Leah

Description

In an original and striking study of migration management in operation, Disrupting Deportability highlights obstacles confronting temporary migrant workers in Canada seeking to exercise their labor rights. Leah F. Vosko explores the effects of deportability on Mexican nationals participating in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP).Vosko follows the decade-long legal and political struggle of a group of Mexican SAWP migrants in British Columbia to establish and maintain meaningful collective representation. Her case study reveals how modalities of deportability-such as termination without cause, blacklisting, and attrition-destabilize legally authorized temporary migrant agricultural workers. Through this detailed expose, Disrupting Deportability concludes that despite the formal commitments to human, social, and civil rights to which migration management ostensibly aspires, the design and administration of this "model" temporary migrant work program produces conditions of deportability, making the threat possibility of removal ever-present.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Movimiento sindical
• Canadá
• Industrial relations
• Trade union
• History of the Americas
• Canada
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501742156
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

DISRUPTING DEPORTABILITY

DISRUPTING DEPORTABILITY: TRANSNATIONAL WORKERS ORGANIZE

LEaH F. VOsKO

ILR PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESSITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2019 by Leah F. Vosko

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2019 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 9781501742132 (cloth) ISBN 9781501742149 (pbk) ISBN 9781501742156 (pdf) ISBN 9781501742163 (epub/mobi) Cover photograph: A temporary migrant worker in a British Columbia raspberry field as the growing season comes to a close. Photo by Cheryl Wiens.

For Sydney & for Gerald

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Tables and Figures List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1.  Deportability among Temporary Migrant Workers: An Essential Condition of Possibility for Migration Management 2.  Getting Organized:Countering Termination without Just Cause through Certification 3.  Maintaining a Bargaining Unit of Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) Employees: The Challenge of Blacklisting 4.  Sustaining Bargaining Unit Strength:The Specter of Attrition

Conclusion

Notes Appendix: Tables Bibliography Index

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1

11

42

65

84

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121 141 145 163

Acknowledgments

When I embarked on the research culminating in this work, I did not anticipate that my investigation would result in a book. However, as I came to understand the nature and depth of the challenges facing workers laboring transnationally, especially those seeking to organize to minimize threats and acts of removal, I realized that what follows is a story that needs to be told. Several institutions and organizations provided me with the opportunity, time, and space to write this book, and a number of individuals supported me along the way. Institutionally, I owe a great debt to the United Food and Com mercial Workers (UFCW) Canada for granting me access to their archive of materials surrounding the legal cases examined herein and to staff members of Local 1518 in British Columbia (BC), as well as Hastings Law, Vancouver, for helping me navigate their immensity. Although I do not list their names here becausemanystaffmembersalsoservedasresearchparticipants,Iextendmy sincere thanks to these individuals whose abiding commitment to improving the situation of migrant workers made a lasting impression on me. One individual, however, a nonparticipant who helped pave the way for my research, deserves acknowledgment: Naveen Mehta, UFCW Canada’s General Counsel and Direc tor of Diversity & Inclusion. For their financial support, I am likewise grateful to the Canada Research Chairs Program and to York University, especially its Office of the VicePresident Research & Innovation and Faculty of Liberal Arts & Pro fessional Studies, which serves as my institutional home. The idea for this book first took shape at Cornell University, where during a sabbatical I had the plea sure of participating in a yearlong weekly research seminar, “Immigration: Set tlement, Integration, and Membership,” attended by Cornell faculty across the social sciences and several scholars from elsewhere. I am grateful to all of the participants in this seminar and especially to Michael JonesCorrea, its conve ner, and to coparticipant Maria Cook, who, along with Lance Compa, also of fered me helpful feedback at an early stage, and invited and welcomed me to Cornell. I initially undertook research forDisrupting Deportabilityin parallel with an other project, a collaborative initiative resulting in the coedited volumeLiberat ing Temporariness: Migration, Work, and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity (2014). In connection with this project, I had countless helpful conversations with my coeditors and close Yorkbased colleagues Valerie Preston and Robert

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