National sovereignty and transnational labour: the case of Mexican seasonal agricultural workers in British Columbia, Canada

• Date: 01 November 2013
• Author: Leah F. Vosko
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12033
• Published date: 01 November 2013

National sovereignty and transnational

labour: the case of Mexican seasonal

agricultural workers in British

Columbia, Canada1

Leah F. Vosko

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the experience of recently unionised Mexican seasonal agricul-

tural workers in British Columbia, Canada, whose visa reapplications were blocked

by Mexico and a concomitant complaint to the province’s labour board. Illustrating

the signif‌icance of this sending state’s actions, it reveals the growing disjuncture

between nationally based labour relations systems and transnational labour.

1 INTRODUCTION

In 2010, after a protracted organising campaign, a group of migrant agricultural

workers in British Columbia (BC), Canada—all Mexican nationals who work sea-

sonally under the Canadian Seasonal Agriculture Workers Program (SAWP)—

successfully unionised and secured a collective agreement (CA) guaranteeing them

seniority and recall rights. Shortly after this agreement came into force, however, new

union members’ visa reapplications were blocked by Mexican off‌icials who oversee

the process of selecting workers and assigning them to Canadian employers, meaning

they could not return to Canada.

In response, starting in 2011, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial

Workers’ Union (UFCW), Canada, the union representing the migrant agricultural

workers, f‌iled a complaint with the BC Labour Relations Board (BCLRB), claiming

❒Leah F. Vosko is Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy

of Gender & Work, York University. Correspondence should be addressed to Leah F. Vosko, York

University, 618 YRT, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3; email: lvosko@yorku.ca

1I am grateful to Corey Ranford and Kim McIntyre for their research assistance as well as to the two

anonymous reviewers of this article and Peter Nolan for their helpful comments. I also thank one of the

anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to a Master of Laws thesis prepared by Heather Jensen

considering the overarching drive to organize agricultural workers in British Columbia conducted by the

United Food and Commercial Workers, and encompassing the grower at the centre of the controversy

considered here, starting in 2007 and Heather Jensen for permitting me to read and cite this otherwise

unavailable work. I f‌irst presented this research to the theme project on ‘Immigration: Settlement, Inte-

gration and Membership’ hosted by Cornell University’s Institute for the Social Sciences during my tenure

as a Visiting Fellow at Cornell’s ILR School in 2011/2012. I thank participants in this project, especially its

organiser Michael Jones-Correa, and Maria Cook, my host at Cornell, as well as Gerald Kernerman, John

Grundy, and Lance Compa for their helpful comments. Finally, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada for funding this research under its former standard research grants program.

This article covers the period up to October 10, 2013.

Industrial Relations Journal 44:5–6, 514–532

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2013 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

that Mexico and its Vancouver Consulate had engaged in anti-union tactics. The thrust

of the complaint: the blacklisting of migrant workers by the Mexican government is a

violation of BC’s Labour Relations Code (BCLRC), ‘which protects all union members

and supporters...migrant worker[s] or not’ (Neufeld as cited by Hansen, 2011).

However, Mexico countered with a claim of immunity relying on Canada’s federal

State Immunity Act (1985) (SIA), arguing that the BCLRB has no jurisdiction over

the actions of the state of Mexico and its consular off‌icials abroad. After a protracted

set of hearings, the Board ultimately accepted Mexico’s claim while f‌inding that this

sending state’s actions are relevant to the union’s allegations of improper interference

on the part of the BC-based employer and certain employees in relation to an attempt

to decertify the union.

This article tells a story of a sending state’s efforts to limit labour rights and

protections among migrant workers on behalf of employers in a host state. Focusing on

Mexico’s representations to the BCLRB, counterarguments of UFCW Local 1518 and

Board rulings, it illustrates how this sending state successfully used its national

sovereignty to defend its efforts to block otherwise admissible migrant workers per-

ceived to be union supporters from re-entering Canada, thwarting unions’ inroads into

mitigating workers’ insecurity by regulating transnational aspects of their employment

situations. The analysis underlines the contemporary salience of a foundational insight

of scholarship in migration studies for industrial relations scholars studying interna-

tional migration for employment—namely, that the same conditions that make nation

states political units of global capitalism cultivate international migration for employ-

ment (e.g. Sassen-Koob, 1981)2—while drawing attention to the underexplored actions

of sending states. It is well acknowledged that both employers and host states benef‌it

from international migration for employment. Employers use migrant labour to reduce

costs of production directly through the provision of lower wages and organisational

f‌lexibility and host states benef‌it disproportionately from this labour supply as they

may use their sovereignty to institutionally differentiate migrant labour’s reproduction

and maintenance and to legitimise specif‌ic forms of marginalisation.3Host states also

normally have at their disposal the possibility of deportation, although this possibility

may be curtailed by institutional mechanisms. Yet Mexico’s actions, buoyed by an

unprecedented BCLRB ruling absolving this sending state of culpability, offer a rare

window into how sending states, heavily reliant on remittances and positioned to

provide migrant workers to support the extraction of surplus labour in host states, can

also perpetuate limited labour rights and protections among migrant workers, specif‌i-

cally, how they can use their sovereignty to undermine unions’ efforts to alleviate

workers’ insecurity through the negotiation of CAs containing provisions meant to

transcend national borders.

To develop this argument, the analysis unfolds in three parts. Section one describes

the SAWP, the program under which the workers concerned migrated to Canada,

2That is, national borders support capital accumulation by fostering the international division of labour

through international specialisation and high returns on capital and their selective enforcement, typically

in the interests of extracting surplus labour to support capital sectors relying on migrant labour, contributes

to the marginalisation of particular parts of the world and the designation of particular workers as a labour

reserve (Sassen-Koob, 1981, 70).

3In the case of migrant workers, intergenerational reproduction occurs in the sending country and daily

maintenance takes place only partly in the host state. Host states externalise the costs of labour supply

renewal in various ways (Burawoy, 1976). They generate short-term ‘savings’ from limiting costs associated

with unemployment and labour protection and long-term cost reductions from ‘exempting the [host]

economy from the need to build the kinds of infrastructure and service organisations that would be

required by an equal number of national workers’ (Sassen-Koob, 1981, 71).

515National sovereignty and transnational labour

© 2013 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd