RACIALIZED IN JUSTICE: THE LEGAL AND EXTRA-LEGAL STRUGGLES OF MIGRANT AGRICULTURAL WORKERS IN CANADA

Abstract

Considerable attention has been directed at the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2011 Fraser decision regarding the constitutional right to freedom of association of agricultural workers in Ontario. While these interventions rightly tend to chastise the Court’s ruling denying meaningful associational rights, a marked indifference exists toward the racialized dimensions of the ruling and of agricultural labour production in Canada more broadly. But an application of the insights of critical race theory, while necessary to addressing the limits of contemporary jurisprudential and scholarly legal analysis, fails to sufficiently confront the particularities of labour exploitation embedded in Canada’s temporary labour migration regime. Striving to deepen the study of racialization, labour and law in Canada, I situate the legal and extra-legal struggles of migrant agricultural workers within an anti-racist class analysis of law attentive to the ways racialization and racism infuse labour migration. The racialized class construction of migrant labour -- a “structural necessity” within agricultural production -- occurs through the imposition of politico-legal impediments organized through global capitalism and the system of national states. The analysis ends by advocating a turn away from prevailing approaches to the study and practice of labour law to a transgressive agenda concerned with openly contesting capitalist exploitation in all forms including racialized legal regulation of migrant agricultural labour.