Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues. The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.

Migrant workers around the world are subject to exploitative labor practices that give employers extraordinary bargaining power. This book brings together researchers, practitioners, and advocates who explore the many ways that contracted migrant workers are rendered vulnerable in the workplace. In this book, the term ‘21st-century coolie’ is deployed as a heuristic device that foregrounds the deeply unequal structures shaping the transnational flows of short-term, migrant workers. The term ‘coolie’ harkens back to the labor arrangements of earlier centuries that involved conscripted labor, indentured servitude, and contract labor across national borders. Like those of past centuries, today’s ‘coolies’ are subject to legal constraints inside and outside the employment relationship that force them into subjugated positions within the workplace.

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen/permanent resident workers in receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada, it also underscored that many workers in occupations and sectors deemed “essential” enough to be exempt from stay-at-home orders and other public safety measures are migrants, a sizeable number of whom sustain Canada’s food supply through their work in its agricultural industry. This book explores the dynamics behind the pandemic’s deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers, highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy, society, and the world of work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrants without legal status employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational employment strain, the authors derive insight from the employment strain model, a framework for understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers, and expand it to account for migrants’ relationships across transnational space.

The 25th anniversary edition of the NAFTA and NAALC monograph in the International Encyclopaedia of Laws, Labour Law and Industrial Relations is a comprehensive and up-to-date 270-page resource that contains essential background on the structure and operation of labour provisions in North American free trade agreements, including NAFTA, USMCA, CAFTA-DR, TPP, CPTPP, TTIP, CETA, EU-Mexico, and Canadian and US bilateral free trade agreements with partners in Latin America and around the world. It also contains a complete digest of all of the citizen petitions filed under the NAFTA labour side agreement since 1994. The monograph includes early petitions filed about trade union rights at the Honeywell and Echlin plants in Mexico, the McDonald's case in Canada, and the Washington Apple and DeCoster Egg cases in the United States – not to mention recent petitions filed about migrant worker rights under the H-2A and H-2B visa programs in the US. In addition to being the most complete compilation of NAALC cases in existence today, NAFTA and the NAALC Twenty-Five Years of North American Trade-Labour Linkage outlines the internal mechanics leading to the filing of a 2000 NAALC petition with the Government of Mexico about unequal treatment of migrant workers in the US, and describes changes in the treatment of petitions by US, Mexican and Canadian authorities over the last 25 years. It also contains a chapter that compares the NAALC to the OECD Guidelines for Multi-National Enterprises and highlights recent North American cases filed under the OECD Guidelines including the relatively lesser known 2004 Yucatan Markey Tex-Coco Tex petition, which was dual filed under both mechanisms, and dual petitions filed under NAALC and the OECD Guidelines about working conditions at Chedraui grocery stores in Southern California and Northern Mexico. Highlights in 25th anniversary edition include: the first reports issued under labour provisions of Canadian and US FTAs with Colombia; the latest developments in pending cases filed under CAFTA-DR and the US-Peru FTA, including the 2017 decision by the first ever Arbitral Panel established under the labour provision of CAFTA-DR in the Guatemala labour case; addition of the 2006 labour petition filed under the US-Jordan FTA; new sections comparing labour provisions in multi-lateral FTAs such as TPP, CPTPP, CETA, and the proposed TTIP; NAALC petitions filed with the Government of Mexico about sexism in recruitment for temporary agricultural labour programs in Canada and the United States; and a new chapter comparing the NAALC to labour provisions in the signed, but not-yet-ratified USMCA.