Extreme wage labor
Abstract
This brief piece is a response to Lee Binford’s work on the Canadian guestworker program.
Looking at reforestation to consider Leigh Binford’s forum statement: ‘Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs Through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They Be Reformed or Should They Be Eliminated’
The hell with abolishing or reforming Canada’s guest workers programs: developing a migrant-centred approach to migration
Response to Leigh Binford’s forum statement: ‘Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?’
Migration or immigration? Commentary on Leigh Binford’s article
Abstract
In this commentary of Leigh Binford’s article, proposing the elimination of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), I will first offer a brief overview of why advanced capitalist countries like Canada must rely on migrant or immigrant workers to sustain economic growth. I will then sum up Binford’s main arguments and analysis. Finally, I will address the question of elimination and replacement of the SAWP based on what is happening on the ground in Canada in 2019. Essentially, what migrant workers’ support groups are demanding is not elimination but a radical reform of all temporary foreign worker programs (TFWP): Granting permanent residency upon arrival. No longer “migrant” workers but new “immigrants,” they would be placed on a truly level playing field with the rest of the labor force.
Working to end farmworker oppression while listening to farmworkers and focusing on root causes in context
Abstract
In this paper, we respond to Leigh Binford’s excellent article “Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?” We offer three clarifying points to Binford’s article. First, in this time of widespread and increasingly aggressive racism and nationalism, we are concerned that calls for closing borders (including the discontinuation of TFWPs) may play further into these violent divisions. Second, TFWPs are not apparatuses that can be extricated from the larger context of transnational racialized capitalism, and ending them would not end the exploitation Binford rightly criticizes within them. Third, we—academics, activists, non-migrants, and non-farmworkers—should pay attention especially to what diverse migrants and farmworkers prioritize, think, say, and do in relation to these programs and in relation to their own well-being more generally. Finally, we highlight union work that has been listening to, and collaborating with, immigrant workers to help them make certain demands of the state normally outside the purview of TFWPs.
“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”?: a predicament for applied anthropology
Abstract
This article takes up a central predicament of applied anthropology: The development of adequate scientific explanatory theory and choosing to do so on behalf of disempowered groups that are themselves incorporated into the design of, and, indeed, the primary purpose of, the research in the first place that goes against traditional research standards. The dilemma, then, is how applied practitioners can remain true to scientific objectives while at the same time make their research relevant to and in the service of marginalized sectors of society. The article begins by considering Karl Marx as an applied theorist, then refers to well-known models of a Marx-inspired applied approach through praxis. A call by anthropologist Leigh Binford (Dialect. Anthropol., 2019) to abolish Temporary Foreign Worker Programs based on his study of Canada’s Seasonal Agriculture Worker Program is evaluated vis-à-vis how this approach theorizes structural determinants such as class formation and social reproduction, how it participates in a reciprocal process of dialog and mutual education with interlocutors and those interested parties affected by the program through research and teaching, and how it activates cooperatively designed revolutionary advocacy.
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