2015
Andrew Geddes, Andrew Taylor , and Leah Vosko
This article illustrates how blacklisting can function as a modality of deportability among temporary migrant workers participating in a programme touted as a model of ordered migration internationally, with attention to sending state action. In 2010, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union applied successfully to British Columbia's Labour Relations Board to represent a group of circular migrants engaged under Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme. Yet less than a year later, the union complained of unfair labour practices on the part of not only the host state employer and certain employees but sending state officials who select and assign workers to Canadian employers, contending that they blocked the visa reapplications of union members eligible for recall and improperly interfered in a decertification application. On account of the unique empirics available through this case, its analysis offers a window into practices which are routinely obscured but nevertheless central to how deportability operates.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
41
Taylor & Francis
foreign workers, temporary migration, labour rights, collective bargaining, Deportability, blacklisting, sending states
Agriculture and horticulture workers and Harvesting labourers
Systemic/state violation of right/freedom
(Im)migrants workers
British Columbia
Agriculture
English