Abstract
This study examines information-sharing practices within the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), focusing on the program as it is administered within Ontario. I analyze 61 documents for their content, codification of stakeholder relationships, and discourse regarding the program. Documents were selected based on their creation, use, or circulation within Ontario, and based on the likelihood that at least one stakeholder group would look to the document for (what they perceive to be) reliable information. Documents include, for example, SAWP contracts, webpages describing program requirements, and e-pamphlets on workplace safety and accessing services. Document analysis was supplemented by interviews with industry and service provider experts, which guided interpretation of documents’ significance. I argue that documents function as material actors, alongside (and sometimes beyond) human actors, and make physical impact on SAWP bodies and realities. Documents construct and uphold neoliberal structures surrounding the program by contributing to the creation and sustaining of incomplete, labour-centric individuals. Through consistent sharing of narrow, “work” information, and the rare inclusion of more well-rounded, “non-work” knowledge, documents subtly discipline the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable communication. In doing so, material actors (alongside other SAWP actors) perpetuate a foreign worker program which does not consider the varied, complex needs of whole persons but, instead, treats them as disposable labouring bodies.
Highlights
This article examines information-sharing within Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as it relates to long-standing flaws within the program’s ability to foster effective communication with workers and other SAWP stakeholders
Through discourses of economization spread throughout all spheres of life, neoliberalism enables the production of subjects in the form of these disposable, labouring bodies (p. 21)
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) results for categories program representation, stakeholder representation, and information topics will be presented
Summary
This article examines information-sharing within Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as it relates to long-standing flaws within the program’s ability to foster effective communication with (and among) workers and other SAWP stakeholders. Documentation perpetuates de-collectivizing and the minimizing of laboursocial intersections (McLaughlin et al, 2017; Paz Ramirez, 2013) through its representation of relevant program stakeholders, needs, and dimensions of life These representations invariably favour labour and industry concerns over social, familial, and communal wellbeing. SAWP workers are concentrated predominantly in Ontario and Quebec, with British Columbia and Alberta holding the highest populations (McLaughlin, 2009; Preibisch, 2012) The majority of these workers travel from Mexico; in 2013, 18,499 enrollees from Mexico worked in Canadian provinces (Consulado General de México en Toronto, 2016).
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