This thesis examines two intimately related topics. First, it analyzes the practices of temporary employment agencies and employers in using the vulnerabilities of migrant and immigrant workers ...across different precarious labour sectors in Montreal. Second, it aims to understand the knowledge production, learning and non-formal education linked to action that occur in the course of organizing im/migrant agency workers by the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) and the Temporary Agency Workers Association (TAWA). The discussion of agencies is located in a broader context of the global and Canadian neoliberal model which includes attending to racism and racialization, flexible labour and labour deregulation, labour precarity, the defensive position of trade unions, austerity and immigration policies. The study uses longitudinal research and interviews with 42 im/migrant agency workers in precarious jobs, as well as interviews with IWC and TAWA activists and members. It employs an ethnographic and activist approach informed by Global Ethnography and the Extended Case Method. The analysis entailed the description of local experiences of im/migrant agency workers and the ways that agencies manage their vulnerabilities to optimize labour exploitation. It relates IWC and TAWA organizing processes to the growing activity and importance of workers' centres as alternative organizations to traditional trade unionism. The study found that systematic violations of im/migrants' labour rights through agencies also impact their private lives. It argues that the Canadian and Quebec states are complicit in structuring this super-exploitation through their immigration policies and their disengagement from the conditions of im/migrants in the labour market. In response, the IWC and the TAWA have developed an organizing model for agency workers based on five pillars: community organizing, knowledge production, popular education, and leadership development. This includes provision of services infused with education for collective action, arts-based activism, and diverse ways of spreading information and knowledge. Participation in bigger campaigns and partnership with engaged academics has also resulted in important strategies leading to the IWC and the TAWA organizing workers and making visible the problems associated with agencies.
This article describes the labour conditions of asylum seekers and other precarious
migrant workers before and during the pandemic. Although this group’s labour conditions were
already precarious ...prior to the pandemic, we show how those conditions worsened during the
COVID crisis because of their racialized condition and precarious migratory status. We also
discuss the systemic impacts these negative conditions had on their personal lives, families
and communities in spite of measures implemented by the provincial and federal governments.
The article describes the resilience and resistance shown through the actions of grassroots
community organizations, with immigrant and migrant members denouncing the hardships in
their working environments and their community life. A mixed-methods research approach was
used to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data. The discussion and
conclusions recognize the crucial social contributions of precarious immigrants,
highlighting both their individual and political and collective resistance to their
racialized condition and the negative effects they suffered during the pandemic.
Leah Vosko, Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2019) Leah VosKo's Disrupting Deportability focuses on two legal defence experiences ...of Seasonal Agricultural Work Program (SAW?) workers by the United Food and Commercial Workers (uFCw) Local 1518 in British Columbia (BC). The book also offers new knowledge regarding systemic barri-ers workers from the SAWP face to assert their labour rights even though they have a collective agreement (ca). ...intergovernmental agreements must ensure the adherence of all the involved parties to the labour law and labour protections of the host state.
For newcomers to Canada, placement agencies (or temp agencies) are a common path into a labour market that is difficult to access. It is widely documented that temp agencies are linked to precarious ...work conditions, dangerous occupational health conditions, racialized and gendered division of labour, and the exploitation of precarious immigration statuses. Our study shows that gender plays out strongly in (im)migrants' experiences of temp agency work. Regardless of their previous education or experiences it is their immigration status, race and gender that seemed to dictate the types of work available to them. We discuss five elements of workers' experiences that were strongly shaped by gender: their sectors of work; their tasks within the workplace; gender-normative bullying; sexual harassment and assault; and their management of work-life balance.
