Labour Law

connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

This collection of original essays untangles the two stories that are intertwined in the Fraser decision--the story of the farm workers and their union's attempt to obtain rights at work available to other working people in Ontario, and the tale of judicial discord over the meaning of freedom of association in the context of work. The contributors include trade unionists, lawyers, and academics (several of whom were involved in Fraser as witnesses, parties, lawyers, and interveners). The collection provides the social context out of which the decision emerged, including a photo essay on migrant workers, while at the same time illuminating Fraser's broader jurisprudential and institutional implications.

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.

Migrant workers, though long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Marsden shows that people with precarious migration status face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their access to institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards.

In nine essays, contributors look at the origins, work conditions, and precarious lives of farm workers in terms of larger historical forces such as colonialism, land rights, and racism. They also examine how the rights and privileges of farm workers, including seasonal and temporary foreign workers, conflict with those of their employers, and reveal the barriers many face by being excluded from most statutory employment laws, sometimes in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The presence of migrant workers has become a central feature of labour markets in highly developed countries. The International Labour Organisation estimates that in 2013 there were 112 million resident migrant workers in the 58 highest-income countries, who made up 16% of the workforce. Non-resident workers have also increasingly become part of the labour available for employment in other states, often on a temporary basis.