Local Produce,Foreign Labor: Labor Mobility Programs and Global Trade Competitiveness in Canada*

Abstract Temporary visa workers are increasingly taking on a heightened profile in Canada, entering the workforce each year in greater numbers than immigrant workers with labor mobility rights (Sharma 2006). This paper examines the incorporation of foreign workers in Canadian horticulture under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). I argue that foreign labor supplied under the SAWP secures a flexible workforce for employers and thus improves Canada's trade competitiveness in the global agrifood market. Using multiple research strategies, I track the evolution of Canadian horticulture in the global market and the transformation of labor in this industry. I outline the steady growth in the employment of temporary visa workers in the horticultural industry and show how they have become the preferred and, in some cases, core workforce for horticulture operations. The benefits of SAWP workers to employers include the provision of a workforce with limited rights relative to domestic workers and considerable administrative support in selecting, dispatching, and disciplining workers provided at no cost by labor supply countries. I conclude that the SAWP is a noteworthy example of the role of immigration policy in regulating the labor markets of high‐income economies and thus ensuring the position of labor‐receiving states within the global political economy.     

A Model for Managed Migration? Re‐Examining Best Practices in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program

This paper situates Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) within the policy and scholarly debates on “best practices” for the management of temporary migration, and examines what makes this programme successful from the perspective of states and employers. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative study of temporary migration in Canada, this article critically examines this seminal temporary migration programme as a “best practice model” from internationally recognized rights‐based approaches to labour migration, and provides some additional best practices for the management of temporary labour migration programmes. This paper examines how the reality of the Canadian SAWP measures up, when the model is evaluated according to internationally recognized best practices and migrant rights regimes. Despite all of the attention to building “best practices” for the management of temporary or managed migration, it appears that Canada has taken steps further away from these and other international frameworks. The analysis reveals that while the Canadian programme involves a number of successful practices, such as the cooperation between origin and destination countries, transparency in the admissions criteria for selection, and access to health care for temporary migrants; the programme does not adhere to the majority of best practices emerging in international forums, such as the recognition of migrants’ qualifications, providing opportunities for skills transfer, avoiding imposing forced savings schemes, and providing paths to permanent residency. This paper argues that as Canada takes significant steps toward the expansion of temporary migration, Canada’s model programme still falls considerably short of being an inspirational model, and instead provides us with little more than an idealized myth.     

Trafficking,Exploitation and Migration on the Thailand‐Burma Border: A Qualitative Study

Migrant workers from Burma 1 often experience exploitation, abuse and violations at various stages of travel to and within Thailand and in workplaces in Thailand. Guided by Zimmerman et al.'s conceptual framework, which identifies the potential risks associated with trafficking process, this article presents findings from in‐depth interviews with 61 migrant workers living and working in and around Mae Sot, Thailand, on the Thailand‐Burma border, to describe the broader context of irregular migration from Burma to Thailand, and trafficking‐related risks in this context. Results demonstrate that use of transporters (“carries”) and brokers in order to travel to Thailand and find employment can enable trafficking. Moreover, migrant workers are exposed to a range of exploitative experiences in workplaces in Thailand, including violence, coercion, and economic exploitation. This article explores dynamics of migration that can enable trafficking in this context, as well as exploitative working conditions consistent with forced labour.     

The Evolution of Worker Connect: A Case Study of a System of Systems

We discuss the rationale, development, deployment, and evolution of Worker Connect, a federation of agency systems that is used by authorized health and human services workers in New York City. We show how Worker Connect evolved with HHS-Connect, the organization that enables the integration and synergy of interagency health and human services systems. We show how the system of systems framework provides a way to understand issues encountered and lessons learned in developing and deploying Worker Connect and similar interagency human services systems. The first part of this article provides a history of the Worker Connect project in the context of a case study on achieving interoperability. The second part of this article introduces the framework of system of systems, and describes Worker Connect and HHS-Connect within this framework. The third part of the article describes future work, and offers some lessons for others wanting to implement a system of systems project for human services.     

On the Job: White Employers,Workers of Color,and Racial Triangulation Theory

This article offers that Claire Jean Kim's theory of racial triangulation provides an ideal framework to study workers of color, the racialization of their labor and the ways in which actual and potential employers neglect and discriminate against these workers. Specifically, the piece determines that racial triangulation theory bolsters analysis of race‐based power that employers exert in the construction and maintenance of racial inequality in regard to management of labor and employment possibilities for workers of color. A triangulated approach allows for a sharp focus on employer engineered labor market inequality as they oversee, hire, and refuse to be racially inclusive in hiring practices. Most significantly, racial triangulation theory addresses the forces of racial inequity within the meso‐level of U.S. social structure when applied to study of organizational dynamics such as workplaces. I open the article by assaying historical and contemporary studies on workers of color to illustrate white employer domination and the ways in which workers of color are referenced to each other as inferior and superior workers. Subsequently, the article looks to fresh analytical directions in which sociologists can evaluate racism as a triangulated, multidimensional social force in the workplace and other social contexts.     

A Feminist Trade Union Agenda? The Continued Significance of Class,Gender and Race

During the 1990s attempts to identify a feminist trade union agenda have focused on both the content and process of such a potential agenda. In a period in which trade unions have changed significantly, the general national agenda appears to be changing, acknowledging issues of importance to women. UNISON, Britain's largest trade union, has enshrined proportionality and fair representation in its constitution, developing national initiatives aimed at improving opportunities in work and in the union for women, black workers, manual workers, disabled workers, etc. who traditionally have been less well represented. Many issues affecting women generally have moved to centre stage, yet issues affecting women ancillary workers seem as excluded as ever. Through a study of cleaners in the National Health Service this article argues that workplace interests reflect wider social divisions, but in a variety of patterns depending on the social organization of work. Despite thewidening trade union agenda, particular interests — more specifically the workplace interests of working‐class women and black women — continue to be neglected.     

The evolving relationship between casework skills,engagement, and positive case outcomes in child protection: A structural equation model

This paper reports a study that aims to increase the understanding of the relationship between workers and their child protection clients through the development of a client engagement model. A conceptual exploratory structural equation model (SEM) of caseworker skills, engagement and client outcomes is presented. Results indicate that including parents in the planning, not ignoring problems parent identify as important, not asking them to do something they would not find helpful, and locating appropriate services, leads to higher client engagement. Although not directly related, having workers return clients phone calls acted as mediator between other worker casework skills and client engagement. Client engagement was also influenced by satisfaction with the case outcome. Worker engagement was also influenced by whether they included parents in the planning, which in turn was influenced by worker experience. Workers who were kind and considerate were more likely to be engaged. Worker engagement predicted satisfaction with the case outcome and whether workers' believed families would contact the agency in the future. Lastly, client engagement predicted worker engagement although it is our belief that this is an iterative reciprocal process.     

Teaching and Learning Guide for “Gender In/equality in Worker‐owned Businesses”

This teaching and learning guide accompanies the article, “Gender In/equality in Worker‐owned Businesses,” which reviews existing literature on gender in businesses with employee stock ownership plans, worker cooperatives, and communes. Worker ownership has attracted renewed interest as a possible solution to the social and economic problems confronting our society. In worker‐owned businesses, workers have greater control over what they produce, how they produce it, and how they are compensated. If workers ran things themselves, so the story goes, jobs would be better and workplaces would be more equal. What do we actually know about work in alternative organizations? Do women fare better? Can they offer alternatives or solutions to the gender inequality that permeates working life? This teaching and learning guide provides supplemental information to facilitate the use of this article in the classroom. This includes a list of recommended readings, online resources, a sample syllabus, focus questions, and project suggestions.     

In the wake of the wave: globalization,networks, and the experiences of transmigrant seafarers in northern Germany

Abstract In this article we highlight the plight of workers trapped at the interface between the national and the global: able to participate in global labour markets but marginalized within nation‐states and excluded from local communities. We employ ethnographic field work to explore the experiences of transmigrant seafarers who travelled to northern Germany between the 1960s and 1980s in search of work aboard German flagged vessels. We describe how the economic benefits associated with an international labour market for seafarers initially attracted and benefited them but then left them stranded as the labour market changed and became globalized. In the article we draw on Massey's concept of power‐geometry to interpret the dual processes of globalization and exclusion.     

Leaving Science: Gender Differences in Career Continuity Following a Job Loss

This study investigates gender differences in the postdisplacement experience of nonacademic science and engineering (S&E) workers. Using a pooled sample created from the Displaced Worker Surveys conducted between 1994 and 2008, it finds that (1) this S&E work force is particularly vulnerable to job loss and potential career disruption; (2) displaced female S&E workers are more likely than comparable male workers to exit the work force, a gender difference that is conditional on and explained by marital and parental status; and (3) reemployed female S&E workers are also more likely to leave science for non‐S&E occupations, but this gender difference is limited to unmarried workers. A concluding section discusses the implications of these findings for interpreting gender differences in career outcomes.     

The Gender Politics of Human Waste and Human‐as‐Waste: Indonesian Migrant Workers and Elderly Care in Japan

Significant decline in mortality and fertility rates has led to a rapid aging population in many parts of the globe. Coupled with a decrease in caring for one's senior parents at home, this condition creates a crisis in elderly care. Most studies on elderly care in Japan, the country with the highest percentage of senior people in the world, employ theoretical approaches rooted in the fields of aging and migration studies. This article offers a new perspective by not only focusing on the voices of the Indonesian women migrant care workers in Japan by way of in‐depth interviews, but also intersecting feminist and waste studies in its analysis. This different theoretical approach allows this article to argue that the politics of disposability in the ‘global care chains’ is a gendered and ‘affective’ phenomenon. Drawing from Jaggar's ‘emotional hegemony’ and Saraswati's ‘affective structure’, this article shows that emotions matter in constructing the disposability of these migrant workers and elderly people, particularly within the capitalist currents that drive the gendered supply chains.     

GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION,LAND MARKET,AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM CHINESE CITIES

This article investigates how government intervention in land market affects China's urban development, using data from prefecture‐level cities between 2000 and 2010. We find that government intervention enlarges the impact of positive productivity shocks on housing price appreciation, through mainly the government control over residential land supply. However, we find no significant evidence that high government intervention constrains population growth and leads to wage increase. Such patterns of urban dynamics can be explained by the fact that migrant workers are the driving force behind China's urbanization, but they have limited housing demand and are not well compensated. (JEL P52, R12, H11)     

Women in the Field: Women,Farming and Organizations

One striking feature of farming as an occupation is that there are few women who farm in their own right. The passing of land from father to son means that women rarely own land. Their typical entry to farming is through marriage. Women's route of entry to farming affects interpersonal relationships within the family, and also women's role in the public space of farming. Women are under‐represented in farming organizations, in training programmes, and in the politics of farming. This article focuses on the position of women within farming organizations and the interaction between (male) farming organizations and women's farming organizations. Farmers are an extremely well‐organized occupation and wield considerable political power because of this effective organization. However, farming organizations are almost entirely male. This article examines how women are treated within farming organizations, and also the interaction between (male) farming organizations and women's farming organizations. Drawing on the theory of organizations, I argue that the inclusion of women in farming organizations and the existence of women's farming organizations reinforce gender divisions within agriculture and do not in any way question the understanding of men as farmers, or the political power they hold.     

Small Town,Big Benefits: The Ripple Effect of 7/day Child Care*

Dans cet article, l'auteure présente quelques résultats d'une enquête d'approche qualitative auprès de méres et d'éducatrices visant à analyser les répercussions du programme éducatif québécois (service de garde offrant des places pour une contribution parentale de 7 par jour) sur une ville frontière defavorisée. L'étude, qui présente un échantillon des commentaires de mères et d'éducatrices, constitue la première phase d'un projet de trois volets. l'article démontre comment un investissement dans les enfants au moyen d'un programme uni‐versel a pu avoir un impact d'ensemble sur cette collectivitééconomique‐ment défavorisée, un effet remarqué dans les families et dans la collectivité et, en retour, sur les enfants eux‐mêmes. This paper assesses the impact of Quebec's 7/day child care program on an economically disadvantaged community near the Quebec/Ontario border, using qualitative interviews with mothers of children in the program and with child care workers. A pilot snowball sample of mothers and child care workers marks the first phase of a three‐phase project in the community. This paper shows how investing in children through a universal child care initiative resonates through this economically hard‐hit community, in essence producing a ripple effect through families and the community, and reciprocally back again to children.     

Diversity-The Competitive Advantage

ABSTRACT

There is increasing pressure on social service agencies to produce “results,” and often agency computer information systems are associated with efforts to do so. The current study explores worker characteristics that may interact with organizational factors in influencing data system utilization. A survey of 245 community social workers serving as field instructors was conducted. Worker skill and experience with computers accounted for a large part of the variance on the utilization of information systems followed by the user-friendliness of the system and the workers' beliefs that data are useful in their work. The findings suggest that organizations seeking to increase worker utilization of information systems will need to focus on enhancing worker's computer skills as well as assuring that the information is easy to use and is perceived as useful by workers.     

Goffman's Interaction Order at the Margins: Stigma,Role, and Normalization in the Outreach Encounter

This article considers Goffman's conceptualization of interaction order at the margins of society in encounters between urban welfare workers and their clients. Observations from these encounters demonstrate practices relating to the situated management of stigma and identity, and the accomplishment of role within these service encounters. A reading of Goffman's theoretical contribution lies in revealing how social actors and social structures are realized in situ within the constraints of the interaction order sui generis. The article discusses three aspects of the outreach encounter, namely, (1) the accomplishment of role and motive, (2) the sequential phases of the outreach encounter, and (3) “the normalization ritual,” and introduces the concept of willful disattention.     

“It's the Money,Honey”: The Economy of Sex Work in the Maritimes*

Cet article se fonde sur une série d'interviews menés auprès de 60 travailleurs du sexe dans trois villes des Provinces maritimes. Nous avons trouvé que ces travailleurs prenaient souvent des décisions prudentes entre les choix économiques, notamment le travail a salaire minimal ou le bien‐être social, ou entre le travail sexuel de maison ou de rue. Les interviews révélaient des modèles de résistance à l'endroit des structures économiques dominantes comparables aux modèles d'autres travailleurs des Maritimes. Comprendre les travailleurs du sexe comme travailleurs resistants nous permet de voir que beaucoup de leurs soucis tournent autour du maintien et/ou de l'augmentation de leur indépendance comme travailleurs, de leur capacité de maîtriser le rythme et le prix de leur travail, et de leurs conditions de travail. This paper is based on interviews with 60 sex workers in three Maritime cities. We found that sex workers often made careful decisions between the economic choices–including minimum‐wage work or welfare–and between indoor or street‐based sex work. Patterns of resistance to dominant economic structures that are comparable to other workers in the Maritimes emerged from the interviews. Understanding sex workers as resistant workers allows us to see that many of their concerns revolve around maintaining and/or increasing their independence as workers, their control over the pace and price of their labour, and the conditions of their work.     

Battling for Survival, Battling for Moral Clarity: "Illegality" and Illness in the Everyday Struggles of Undocumented HIV+ Women Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv

Undocumented migrant workers living with HIV/AIDS in Israel, like their counterparts elsewhere, are doubly abject due to their lack of legal status on one hand and their ill health on the other. Unlike Israeli citizens living with HIV/AIDS, who can access an array of state funded treatments and support services, undocumented migrant workers living with HIV/AIDS are marginalized both by the state's exclusive immigration regime and by its efforts to shake off responsibility for their health needs. At the same time, HIV treatment and care are generally unavailable in migrants' countries of origin. Despite the state's exclusionary orientation and in contradiction of official policies, certain forms of HIV treatment are available to undocumented migrants through the day‐to‐day efforts of a small array of activist Israeli NGOs, (state‐employed) doctors, and state officials. The tension between these simultaneous, oppositional processes of exclusion and inclusion generate a “gray area”— a zone of competing values, claims and interests‐ in which undocumented migrants living with HIV/AIDS and these other stakeholders search for new options and possibilities while continually taking pains to protect their own varied, and often competing, interests. Actors thus constantly bargain with laws, health policies, and one another in a collective battle not only over migrants' chances of survival, but also over the rationality and the morality underlying the state's “and their own” decisions and choices. Anchored within this complex, indeterminate zone, the present article draws upon ethnographic field research conducted among undocumented HIV+ migrant women in Tel Aviv to explore some of the stakes, mechanisms, and outcomes of these complicated, high stakes negotiation processes.     

“I'll Scratch Your Back If You'll Scratch Mine”: The Role of Reciprocity,Power and Autonomy in the Strip Club*

l'auteure de cet article étudie les jeux de pouvoir dans un club d'ef‐feuilleuses. En établissant des parallelès avec l'industrie des services, elle explore les stratégies que les travailleurs des clubs d'effeuilleuses utilisent afin d'augmenter leur autonomie au travail et d'accroitre les ressources qu'ils mobilisent pour favoriser des actes de résistance. l'économie informelle des faveurs” (Bruckert, 2002) qui se crée au sein des communications entre les travailleurs et de leurs activités de coopération sert àétablir un environnement de travail plus soutenant et à diminuer les incertitudes inhérentes à leur emploi. This paper examines the interplay of power relations in the strip club. Through drawing parallels with the service industry, it explores the strategies strip club workers engage in to enhance their autonomy on the job and the resources they use to facilitate acts of resistance. The “informal economy of favours” (Bruckert, 2002) that develops, through interconnections between and co‐operative activities engaged in by workers, serves to create a more supportive work environment and to decrease the inherent uncertainties of the job.