student

Guest worker programs and Canada

Towards a foundation for understanding the complex pedagogies of transnational labour

Peter H. Sawchuk and Arlo Kempf Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto,

Toronto, Canada

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contextualise historically transnational labour experiences within guest worker programs in Canada and to provide a conceptual foundation for analysing work, learning and living relations with special attention to agricultural workers.

Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a critical review of the literature as well as secondary analysis of existing research on agricultural guest workers in Ontario, Canada.

Findings – The authors argue that the structural conditions for these particular forms of work, learning and living relations have a long historical trajectory that dates back in North America to the nineteenth century. They outline a long trajectory of convergence of American and Canadian policies in this regard. In terms of work, learning and living experiences we show how shaped by race, class and citizenship relations, as well as by the learning that infuses their reproduction, intensification and contestation.

Originality/value – The article sheds light on a system of transnational labour that is emerging in a wide range of economies around the world, but which has not, to date, been widely analysed in work and learning literature.

Keywords Migrant workers, Learning, Labour, Agriculture, Race, Canada

Paper type Research paper

Introduction The subject of guest worker programs (GWPs) has been emerging in diverse scholarly literatures for some time. By different names, these programs refer to the importation of temporary labour under specific conditions. In various forms, they are increasingly prevalent in core capitalist countries. Across North, Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, the role of GWPs in national economies is poised to explode. Over the past 40 years, the challenges of immigration and guest work in an evolving European Union have been fundamental to national and regional understandings of ethno-racial and class relations. Despite the recent focus of debate around such issues in the Americas and Europe, however, various forms of labour transnationalism have been around a long time, producing networks that have touched virtually every region of the globe.

Although scholarship from the fields of migration studies, international human geography, international labour market economics, post-colonialism and others have touched upon discipline specific implications of GWPs in various contexts, the topic remains virtually invisible within work-based learning literature. For those committed to the notion that work and learning do not take place in a vacuum, the development of

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Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 20 No. 7/8, 2008 pp. 492-502 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626 DOI 10.1108/13665620810900319

an understanding of GWPs from a work-based learning perspective is overdue, and requires deep and specific efforts at contextualisation.

Superficially, it may be arguable that the work and learning relations of GWPs hold few mysteries: they simply represent a highly exploited form of labour and learning which involves little, if any, skill, knowledge or learning of consequence to the evolving future of work or workers in the twenty-first century. How, it might be asked, can guest work – with its echoes of the twentieth century (and nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries) – be considered a relevant topic in the twenty-first century in an epoch characterised by advanced knowledge work, expansive technologies, globalised production and trade? In a rapidly globalising yet polarising world, transnational labour in general, and guest work specifically, are every bit as definitive of the twenty-first century as they are of any previous time period. As all work and learning relations are deeply shaped by the cultural, political and economic histories, relations, realities and struggles of a given context, and as skill, learning and knowledge can remain very well hidden in the occupational lives that constitute peripheral labour markets, we are compelled to seek out the learning dynamics within activity and experience so raw and basely human that it is easily conflated with the sheer act of surviving.

Below we begin with an historical contextualisation, which reveals a long pattern of infrastructure building. This long building process has established, in our view, the virtual inevitability of the – albeit contested – expansion of guest worker programs across the Americas. Moreover, we claim that the situation in Canada cannot be adequately understood without a vision of its military, political and economic origins with regard to hemispheric relations. We then establish some of the relevant dimensions of transnational work and community and learning relations. Finally, we undertake a brief secondary analysis of popular education materials based on Mexican guest workers in Southern Ontario, Canada.

The historical trajectory of guest worker program expansion By identifying the context and historical trajectory of GWP expansion, we establish a firm ground for first understanding the nature of this evolving formation, and second for setting the stage for a deep understanding of the dynamics of the work, learning, domination, resistance and social reproduction, and their reverberating effects across a range of economic sectors, as well as host/origin country communities. In Canada, guest worker programs were originally established with the Caribbean vis-à-vis the British Commonwealth colonial networks. Since the 1980s, however, Canadian GWPs have increasingly come within the orbit of US-dominated policy across the Americas which, as we shall see, has shaped in particular the growth of absolute and proportionate numbers of Mexican workers. Here we seek to assess the nature of this long wave of synchronisation.

In many ways, the establishment of the contemporary North American guest worker program infrastructure begins with US continental action in relation to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) (Chacón and Davis, 2006). Massive expropriation and annexation at the close of this conflict established direct subjugation, a redrawing of the map of nine US states[1] and the strengthening of US capacity for establishing peripheral labour market conditions. A pattern soon emerged that would shape the economic as well as cultural fabric of the USA, Mexico, and more recently Canada. This

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pattern would establish a range of unique methods of overt/covert control over labour conditions and labour markets.

This patterned trajectory featured active state experimentation throughout the twentieth century: from the First World War, to the inter-war period, to the Second World War/Bracero[2] era, and continuing through to the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)[3] with its resulting Maquiladorisation of the US-Mexican border (Chacón and Davis, 2006). These latter actions have increasingly incorporated Canada directly through NAFTA, as well as through Canada’s support of Mexican debt restructuring via the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its ongoing support for the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

This historical trajectory demonstrates shifting forms of official and unofficial policies and public proclamations, including:

. general open-border policies allowing passage of labour from Mexico to the USA;

. official guest worker programming; and

. unofficial policies that actively encourage the growth of undocumented workers.

While the US government has varied its method over time – responding to levels of unemployment, the strength of the US economy, the strength of the US labour movement, and the xenophobic and racist backlash – it has not strayed from its objective of sustaining peripheral labour markets. This notion of nativist racism cannot be overlooked within these phenomena. Public denunciations of Mexican workers and increased deportation activity at different points throughout the twentieth century can be correlated with US citizen outcry in the face of social/economic conditions at three distinctive points:

(1) the 1930s;

(2) the 1950s; and

(3) at present in the USA.

It is instructive, for example, to note that since the discontinuation of the US’s most ambitious guest worker program – the Bracero Program – government policies have allowed the expansion of peripheral labour markets through tacitly supported undocumented economic migration, which until recently was able to meet the standards of plausible deniability – what Richard Vogel (2007) refers to as “official grandstanding to cover an unofficial open border policy demanded by American capitalism” (p. 8).

Economically, the agricultural sector has traditionally been at the centre of these issues. In both Canada and the USA, GWPs have originated within agricultural sectors. In Canada specifically, such programs flourished under long-established labour codes that explicitly excluded farm workers from union organising (codes first legitimised as a form of protection from “Communist” labour incursions onto the “family farm”). Despite the virtual extinction of the family farm over the last half-century, these sections of labour code were until recently, fundamental to establishing viable agri-business/factory-farms. In June 2007, The Supreme Court of Canada overturned the old law with a ruling that allows, in principle, the right to organise labour unions inclusive of farm workers[4].

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Recently, three other sectors have found a home in guest worker policy discussions:

(1) hospitality (e.g. hotels, seasonal resorts);

(2) transportation (i.e. trucking); and

(3) light manufacturing (food processing, plastics and other consumer products).

If expanded significantly into these sectors, the economic effects on broader labour market conditions would likely multiply, spreading well beyond these sectors (Vogel, 2007). The US government’s recent proposals for guest worker program expansion, and similarly its attempts to liberalise cross-border trucking, seek to formalise existing experimentation in these sectors; a move which, in turn, will compel similar discussions in Canada. The contours of the discussion in Canada, however, will most likely differ due to differences in union density and issues relating to the proximity/cost. Absent in Canada for example, is the rapid development of light industry across a range of Southern, “right to work” (i.e. anti-union) states in the USA, reflecting an already high level of integration with Mexican border communities and maquiladora economic zones.

These impending sectoral expansions aside, for now the current phase of this long history requires the completion of the “clampdown” exercise to dismantle the unauthorised migrant labour flows of the past 25-30 years[5]. Again, this is in part a response to US public outcry. According to Vogel (2007), the clampdown phase was initiated by the US Senate in 2003 and slated for completion by 2012. It is closely linked to the “War on Terror” and the establishment of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which allows for the flow of (massive) funding which, justified in terms of national security, easily eludes public debate. In one form or another, the coming of an expanded guest worker program initiative to Canada is, by now, virtually inevitable, in part through US-Canada trade agreement alignment (NAFTA, WTO and GATS). Paster and Alva (2004) note that even among labour, left and centrist circles in the USA, there has been a “quiet softening of the progressive opposition” based on a number of structural “realizations” (p. 92); a trend that is sure to further shape discussions in Canada as well.

Capitalist economic imperatives drive this process, but build on a solid bedrock of worker insecurity as well as traditional nativist xenophobia and racism[6]. Its primary goal, beyond establishing a gateway through which to better control the rich natural resources of Central and South America, has for some time been to establish a permanent peripheral labour market from which, first agricultural industry and eventually other business sectors, could profit based on lower labour costs and intensified control. With the addition of workers to the list of extractable resources, the exploitation is near total.

Canadian guest work Without rights to health and safety, social benefits or freedom of movement, and with the help of state enforcement and unceremonious cancellations of contracts with few avenues for appeal, guest workers’ experiences in North America offer perhaps the closest approximation to the US system of chattel slavery. Moreover, guest worker programs, according to Burawoy (1976), function as a parasitic phenomenon: families and communities in origin countries bear the costs of social reproduction while host countries claim the profits and enjoy unfettered labour control.

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For a long time in Canada, immigration policy revolved around the targeting of specific national/racial/ethnic groups[7]. However, by the early 1960s, having experienced increasing wage pressures and against the backdrop of more generalised pressure to reform its immigration system, Canadian agri-business demanded changes. Anticipating the initiation of the immigration “point system” in 1967 that would shift the focus of entry criteria to economic and educational background (and undermine the ethno-racial recruitment), the Canadian government instituted its Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) in 1966. The SAWP brings particular foreign workers to the country for periods of six weeks to eight months. Built on formal agreements with origin countries, it sings from the hymn book of “labour market complementarity and bilateral co-operation that provides benefits to all participants” (Preibisch and Binford, 2007, p. 9). Largest in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, the SAWP is now established in nine of ten provinces, topping 20,000 workers in 2001 (Weston and Scarpa de Masellis, 2003). As indicated earlier, building on its roots in the British Commonwealth, SAWP originally targeted Caribbean, and specifically Jamaican, men to come and work on fixed-term labour contracts on Canadian farms (Satzewich, 1991). Caribbean men constituted the bulk of these workers until the late 1980s when the state, alongside eager growers, established Mexico as the soon-to-be-dominant origin country for SAWP (Preibisch and Binford, 2007). This transformation from Caribbean to Mexican workers has not gone unnoticed. Binford (2002) argues that fuelling this change is a two-part, racialised assumption on the part of the employer regarding the docility of Mexican workers on the one hand and the resistance-orientation of Caribbean workers on the other. Binford points to a culture of (albeit limited) empowerment developed among the English-speaking Caribbean workers, who may demand employer adherence to the contract, and who may be unwilling to work hours not mandated in that contract. Conversely, Mexicans are relatively new to the terms of work and, facing a substantial language barrier, come unprepared and unarmed to negotiate the informal cultural contract that mediates much of the day-to-day life of a guest worker.

Canadian-based scholarship in this area began to emerge about the same time as this shift, and has developed since (Cecil and Ebanks, 1991; Bolaria, 1992; Smart, 1998; Basok, 2002; Binford, 2002; United Food and Commercial Workers Union of Canada, 2002; Sharma, 2006). Early research focused on migratory experiences and the dual social and economic effects on origin and host countries. Joined by both broader international economic analysis that revealed the contradictory, transnational economic compulsions and results (e.g. Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005) and analyses from the field of migrant studies, basic research on guest workers has reached a critical mass as far as an integrated class/race/gender analysis. The work of Satzewich (1991), for example, was one of the earliest to highlight the class but most powerfully, the racial dimensions inherent in the construction of the SAWP program, where the decision to establish the linkage to Caribbean workers was undertaken out of a deep concern for the “social problem” and the disruption to “social order” apparently endemic to Black populations in Canada.

Support for the program is found amongst growers. Local businesses in the host communities also see economic benefit, with some guest workers noting instances of price gouging. Activists and organised labour in Canada see a serious organising challenge, interwoven with concerns for the possibility of general downward pressure

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on wages. The Caribbean and Mexican guest workers themselves are obliged to embrace the opportunity to work and send remittances homeward to family. Although they occasionally make sustained community linkages in host communities and nearby cities, most experience a profound alienation from their surroundings, employers and work. The notion of obligation is, as noted earlier, a direct artefact of the subjugation of the Mexican economy that has increasingly produced new and wider gaps between labour market segments. This has led guest worker activist and scholar Evelyn Enclada Grez (2005) to identify guest work as a form of “forced labour”. Guest work is framed by health risks, loneliness, harsh conditions, instances of poor treatment, lack of citizenship and worker rights as well as pronounced cultural alienation that, not infrequently, erupts in racial violence in communities.

At the level of the labour process specifically, traditional divide-and-conquer strategies are virtually universal in the agricultural GWPs in Canada. Roots of these strategies are found in both personal (grower’s) racism, pseudo-genetic, common-sense ideologies which become intertwined with a basic capital accumulation calculus that play out in complex relationships between growers, workers (both new and returning), workers’ families and the local communities of both the host and origin countries. A core feature of divide-and-conquer strategies in practice is spatial-linguistic organisation of production. Workers are separated by virtue of culture and language, which combine with local traditions revolving around the working of specific crop types. Pseudo-genetic formulae are invoked: for example, Caribbean workers for the tree-picking and sustained ditch work versus Mexican workers for weeding and planting and low crop harvesting. Workers are also separated based on their ability to understand and work well with one another. Language use is regularly the object of control in guest work (i.e. employer-controlled “back-chat”), but in general has a long history of manipulation in relation to labour control and worker resistance (cf. Chacón and Davis, 2006; in Canada, see Palmer, 2004; Livingstone and Sawchuk, 2004; Sawchuk, n.d.).

The structures and resources of control in guest work are powerful. However, we can also see that groups of guest workers can and do generate and maintain cultures of solidarity on a local scale, with some dispersed instances of open revolt, as have been seen in each of the core receiver provinces in Canada (British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec). Moreover, with the aid of local community groups and activist organisations such as “Justicia/Justice for Migrant Workers” (J4MW[8]) as well as with the support of organised labour (e.g. the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, or UFCW), there is a developing but still latent potential for expanding cultural alignment and struggle. Although cultural alignment with host certain segments of host communities appears weak, it is increasing in places. This is seen, for example, in relations between the various Caribbean communities in the city of Toronto and Caribbean guest workers.

Deepening the analysis of the labour/learning processes of guest working in Canada We begin by outlining programmatically the basic dimensions of a complex circuit of communication, participation and learning that shape Canadian guest work as a transnational labour process. Organised training in guest worker production is virtually non-existent. Thus, we can begin by noting that ongoing worker-to-worker

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on-the-job training and direct supervisory edict provide the most prominent basis of immediate, production-based learning. The degree to which guest workers are skilled (and to which they become skilled on the job despite the absence of formal training) is recognised concretely by the employers who re-call experienced workers, by name, at a rate of 70 per cent each year (Binford, 2002). But these practices represent merely the tip of the learning iceberg. Intertwined with immediate production learning, there is a second dimension in the form of the dense fabric of “inter-cultural learning” surrounding guest work. This learning is multi-dimensional: it takes place across relations between workers and growers, and also implicates bureaucrats (from both Canadian officials and origin country consulates). It also involves residents of host and origin communities. Each example features some moments of cross-cultural benefit[9], but is more often characterised as conflictual. Third, and again closely intertwined, there is the inter-cultural learning that takes place between different workers within and between ethno-linguistic/national groups (e.g. Mexican and Caribbean workers) as well as learning and communication between those from different regions of the same country. Fourth is the learning and exchanges between host country activists (such as those from J4MW or the UFCW) as well as community and university-based organisations. Finally, and perhaps one of the least understood dimensions of this complex circuit of learning, is the extended, transnational lines of development constituted vis-à-vis family and community units across borders and, with the passage of time, generations. Together, across these five dimensions we see a “curriculum of experience” generated, redeveloped, stored, taught and learned.

Having outlined a basic program for addressing the dimensions of labour/learning in guest work, we now turn toward a brief, secondary analysis of these dynamics based on popular education work carried out by J4MW (Hinnenkamp, 2004)[10]. To understand the work and learning dimensions of guest work, it is vital to first address the role of material conditions. Although the materiality of traditional industrial control is in full force here (including divisions of labour, as well as divide-and-conquer/control labour process organisation); additional physical conditions shaped the experiences, interests and learning needs at the centre of guest work – factors absent in a vast majority of work and learning literature. Guest worker programs in Canada are infused through and through with a pedagogy of cold, hot, wet, outdated – a pedagogy informed by sub-standard equipment, clothing, boots, transportation and pesticide protections. Workers in Hinnenkamp’s discussion groups clearly articulate how acute injuries and chronic health dangers stand as a central theme around which their thinking, reaction and strategising revolves. Summarised under a broad notion of health and safety concerns, these challenges deeply shape the directions of learning amidst agricultural production and sub-standard on-site living conditions. Moreover, necessarily implicated in these conditions are underlying relations with the state and citizenship vis-à-vis the virtual absence of legal rights to protection under legislation.

Hinnenkamp’s (2004) Freirean method involved the workers’ selection of images (from magazines, etc.) to facilitate dialogue. One example was the selection of a picture of a marathon runner. This formed the basis for dialogue about the labour process. Gazing upon the picture, one worker commented: “This also represents a job. Some people work in this way and others – the Mexicans – that come here, we do it in a different way, helping Canada to progress”. This statement, Hinnenkamp reports, touches off at least two important work/learning themes for consideration.

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The first theme revolves around the thesis that Mexican workers bring with them specific patterns, orientations and cultural constructions of work-life that are likely distinct from Euro-American labour processes and workers. One way to understand this may be to pursue the notion that in an era of concern over “over-worked workers”, “work/life balance” and so on, Mexican workers have sustained a different orientation that, while clearly not eschewing hard work, nevertheless may subsume hard work within an orientation that sees paid work as only part of the fulfilment of individual and collective needs. Hinnenkamp’s focus groups also reveals a specific understanding that difference among workers in terms of skills, abilities and work interests should be taken into account in the design and execution of the labour process. This challenges the tried-and-true technical and social divisions of labour held sacrosanct in North American industrial design. This orientation, if it exists, would in principle stand as an alternative to the manic, economically conditioned neurosis of segments of North American workers, and would be, assuredly, more complex than it might seem at first blush. It would likely require an elaborate figuring of the relations between self, work, family and society – orientations that must be actively reproduced and learned and which increasingly elude major segments of North American society[11]. Another layer of this first line of inquiry is that there are likely specific forms of work-based knowledge and skill – to this point hidden from academic research – concerning guest agricultural work and the social relations that shape it that are distinct from, if not in conflict with, from what now constitutes Euro-American, industrial-capitalist farming.

The second work/learning theme that emerges from this section of Hinnenkamp’s work deals with the conflict between newer, often younger workers, who in classic industrial sociology would be termed “rate-busters” – working particularly fast to garner supervisory approval. Hinnenkamp (2004) specifically comments on this, noting that workers were hesitant to articulate these dynamics fully. Although the learning of how fast to work, and of how to subtly resist and control production speed, is by no means new to industrial sociology, unique aspects of guest work in Canada further shape and sharpen these dynamics. Growers exercise the right to hand-select workers for return work in following seasons. Were collective resistance to be identified by the grower, she or he may also choose to country “surf” for whole new intake communities. Further shaping and sharpening these relations of course, is the poverty of Mexico, constructed, as we saw earlier, across an almost two-century trajectory of concerted political and military actions in which in the last decades the Canadian state has been both tacitly and actively complicit. Here we see a structure that sets specific dynamics of labour and learning, at once familiar, but also archaic; a work system of the twenty-first century that requires a look back more than a century, to chattel slavery, to understand.

Still too often ignored elements in work and learning research are the skill, knowledge and learning that begin from and with workers’ needs and interests, rather than those of management and production (see Sawchuk, 2006, 2007). The most intense and obvious examples of these are the structures and moments of resistance (both organised and spontaneous). Further fuelling conflict and resistance is the culturally mediated experience of working life for guest workers. One group of workers in Hinnenkamp (2004) argued: “[i]n Canada they like dogs better than they like Mexicans”. Others went on to describe their treatment as “animals”, as “machines”, and so on. Outright racism shapes many of the experiences, both within the production

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process and within the experiences in the surrounding communities. The ethno-linguistic differences – revolving around the absence of Spanish-language capacity of the supervisory staff and the ethno-centric presumptions that continue to replicate this inadequacy – produce a degenerative feedback loop of events where English-only instructions, half-understood, ineffectively direct work. This is followed by supervisory criticism (and not infrequently racialised claims of laziness and neglect). Workers, meanwhile, become increasingly frustrated, and on it goes. The resulting forms and ruminations on resistance amongst guest workers in Canada, however, appear to express distinct dynamics. Reflecting on poor conditions, a worker comments: “[I wonder] if this is really what the Canadian people or the bosses we have want us to do – hold a demonstration . . . to express what’s wrong with our houses, how we are treated, and the benefits that we should have a right to?” (quoted in Hinnenkamp, 2004). This statement, and the question it poses, express the entirely unique intercultural dislocation and labour subordination so powerfully at play within Canadian guest work. It is instructive to consider where else in the Canadian economy this question might be asked, for surely it is relevant in every sector.

Conclusions Guest worker programs are poised to undergo significant expansion, implicating a host of countries across the Americas. In this paper we have sought to establish a historical foundation for understanding the labour/learning process dynamics that shape these programs in Canada. These dynamics have radiant causes and effects on workers, employers, origin and host communities, and will undoubtedly reverberate across labour markets more broadly in the short and long term.

We have sought to develop a preliminary articulation of the complex circuits of learning as well as the cultural, political, economic forces at play within the core “curriculum of experience” that is contemporary guest work. We have offered a basic program of investigation for such circuits, and have put forth a brief (secondary) analysis of related themes based on previously published, popular education work.

We maintain that these dynamics are as central to the future of work under advanced capitalism as those forms of work/learning that garner the lion’s share of research attention. Although reflective of the labour processes of previous centuries, the implications for the twenty-first century are paramount, particularly as far as these dynamics are shaped by a powerful confluence of race, class and citizenship relations from which reproduction, intensification and contestation flow.

Notes

1. For the low price of troop withdrawal and $15m, this treaty established, redefined and/or enlarged the territories of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Oklahoma – as well as settled contestation over the Texas border (Chacón and Davis, 2006).

2. The Bracero Program (rooted in the Spanish word “brazo”, meaning “arm(s)” – as in manual labour) was the first large-scale, overtly supported, guest worker program in the USA, operating between 1942 and 1964.

3. Indeed, the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is designed to recreate and extend the basic pattern further.

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4. At the time of writing, the Canadian province of Manitoba, under New Democratic Party governance, has been the first provincial jurisdiction to apply this to their own labour code, explicitly extending rights to migrant/guest workers. With a range of court challenges pending, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW Canada) has been particularly active in these terms. In Ontario, which is home to the largest proportion of migrant farm labourers, the Agricultural Employees Protection Act 2002 (Bill 187) was passed on November 18, 2002. It allows farm workers to form associations, though not the right to unionise or the right to strike. Farm workers remain excluded from provincial health and safety legislation.

5. Whip-sawing the American public, it is likely that the current media tour of Mexican ex-President Fox is aimed at precisely this accomplishment in his call for a “rationalised immigration” strategy – an idea entirely in line with the Bush guest worker proposal.

6. In Canada, these dimensions are particularly well laid out in Sharma (2001, 2006), wherein she examines Bill C-11 – Canada’s border security and citizenship law that was actively debated and which laid bare the active racialised and gendered construction of “preferred citizens” and their others.

7. See Sawchuk (2008) for discussion of union perspectives on immigration and underemployment.

8. For more information on the important work of J4MW, see their website at: www. justicia4migrantworkers.org

9. According to Hinnenkamp (2004), learning about Anglo-Canadian culture is one of the enjoyable features of guest work for workers. There are similar examples of enjoyment for host community members. These instances are largely overshadowed, however, by ethno-racial-class conflict.

10. Sessions were held in Southern Ontario and involved Sunday meetings held over the course of four weeks. They involved 18 male and three female farm workers, aged 20 to 60. All were citizens of Mexico and part of the Canadian government’s SAWP. The project eventually produced not simply data but striking artwork, dramatic scripts, and highly informative interpretation.

11. Whether these orientations are link-able to a process of exporting/enforcing the obsessive residues of the “spirit of capitalism” articulated a century ago by Max Weber, is open to debate.

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About the authors Peter H. Sawchuk is a Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto where he researches and teaches in the areas of sociology of work, learning theory, social movements and labour studies. Peter H. Sawchuk is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]

Arlo Kempf is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, where he specialises in the area of anti-colonial thought, anti-racism education and political economy.

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