Why the details of your produce matter and why they shouldn’t
Do you ever think about the last person who touched the Canadian-grown pepper you cut up for dinner last time you cooked? Likely, if you bought your produce loose, the high school student stocking the grocery aisle last left their fingerprints on it. However, as Gabriel Thomson points out in his book, Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do, if your pepper was wrapped, it is possible that a migrant worker was the last human contact that little veggie knew. The journey of that pepper becomes an even more complicated story when you stop and consider what country that migrant worker was from – for example, the question of whether the worker who picks your peppers is a Guatemalan or a Mexican really matters. At the same time, it also really shouldn’t matter.
The reason this matters is that the context for each migrant worker who arrives to pick vegetables grown in Canada is very different. Certainly this is the case for any worker in general, but policy changes and different national contexts have the potential to make Guatemalans a particularly vulnerable group. As University of Guelph professor Kerry Preibisch has pointed out, the Human Development Index ranks Guatemala number 133 with an index of 0.58, compared to Mexico, which ranks number 61 with an index of 0.78 (UNDP 2012).
While Mexicans have been coming to Canada as migrant workers since 1974, Guatemalans have only been accepted since 2002; yet, they are quickly becoming the preferred workforce among growers in Quebec. One reason given is that Guatemalans are more compliant to employers’ demands. While we cannot jump to conclusions, their national context and the structure of their newer migration program may have something to do with this fact. When a job is a job, and there are many other people from many other countries lining up for that job, it can take a lot to want to rock the boat. So, it does matter where your pepper picker came from, because it reveals an increasing trend of vulnerability in Canada’s labour and migration policies.
The reason it really shouldn’t matter where a migrant worker comes from is that we should be providing all of them the same standards and opportunities as we do to the grocery boy down the road. Yet currently, Canada’s immigration laws are attempting advantageous labelling to allow for differential treatment.
We do this with food as well. Sometimes labels advertise something as ‘all-natural,’ only for us to discover in the fine print some unpronounceable ingredients. Ironically, the opposite thing seems to be happening with our farm labour. We’re calling migrant workers ‘temporary’ and ‘foreign,’ but when we take a closer read of labour market ingredients, it seems they are more of a permanent complement to our dinner feasts than our favourite salad dressing.
What are the health implications of labelling like this? Consider that a steady diet of apple fritters can’t be good for your heart, and that in spite of their advertised fruit content, the doctor isn’t likely to make an exception. Neither could a revolving door of temporary workers in precarious labour positions be good for the development of the Canadian nation, in spite of the fact that their ‘foreign’ label makes it seem alright to treat them as exceptions to labour rights and protections.
This leads to another issue that really matters, but really shouldn’t matter, and that is in which province or territory your migrant worker picked your produce. For example, Manitoba has much wider potential for low-skilled migrant workers to apply for Canadian permanent residency after six months of work, and an overall more integrative and open labour policy. So, if you happen to be reading this from Manitoba, maybe the worker who picked that pepper was two months away from being your fellow citizen, rather than two months away from a trip back home to warmer weather and a likely more uncertain future.
Now that we’ve touched on the who of your pepper picker, the where is maybe best reserved for another dinner party discussion. And let’s save the why for dessert.