Crisis of Control: Occupational Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the Agricultural Stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP)

Abstract

While agricultural work is hazardous for all workers, migrant workers face additional challenges that make them more vulnerable than domestic workers. The lack of access to permanent immigration status in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) makes workers’ jobs hinge on retaining their employers’ favour and creates a particular type of job insecurity that overshadows their behaviour, decisions, and agency to assert their rights for safe and healthy workplaces and workers’ compensation. While researchers argue that the TFWP competes with the SAWP as employers search for the cheapest and most docile workers, less research has examined whether workers’ health and safety exposures and experiences differ within the two programs. Drawing primarily from interviews with advocates and system stakeholders and participant observation at advocate-organized events, this research will offer preliminary answers to discovering whether the programs pose different obstacles to improving health and safety and access to compensation that affect migrant workers’ experiences in Ontario before and after injury. The research will help gather information about possible avenues to improve the health and safety of migrant workers given how the two programs operate within both federal and provincial frameworks. Advocates’ experience assisting workers in both programs offers important insights about whether differences between the programs create particular vulnerabilities for some migrant workers.