Unfree Labour? Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada eds. by Aziz Choudry and Adrian A. Smith (review)

Migrant labour has arisen as one of the most significant yet misunderstood issues of our age. The growth of migrant worker programs spark heated debate about exploitation, wage suppression, and foreign workers "taking" jobs from citizens. Amid all the protestations, one perspective is often overlooked – that of the migrant workers themselves.

The edited collection Unfree Labour? attempts to address this oversight. Inspired, in part, by a workshop at the Montreal Immigrant Workers Centre that brought together migrant worker advocates and like-minded academics working in the field, the book is intended to incorporate activist and scholarly perspectives for the purpose of drawing attention to the experiences of migrant workers in Canada. The originality of the book, say the editors in their introduction, "derives from its grounding in activist and organizing experiences, its cross-Canada scope, and the interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives that it assembles." (2) Seventeen authors contribute to ten chapters with a roughly equal mix of scholarly and activist focus.

The central argument of the book, and its organizing conceptual framework, is that migrant worker programs, through imposition of restricted and limited citizenship status, construct a contemporary form of unfree labour compelled by the state which creates intensified "hyperexploitation." (8) This unfree labour is, of course, a highly racialized and gendered form of labour compulsion.

The academic chapters seek to place migrant labour in its historical and structural contexts, drawing links to the changing nature of capitalism and the rise of neoliberalism in North America. The contributors are careful to avoid painting migrant workers as a homogenous entity devoid of agency. Chapters look individually at the different streams of Canada's migrant worker programs, including the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (sawp), the Caregiver Program (formerly the Live-in Caregiver Program – licp), and the low-skill stream of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (tfwp). This separation allows the authors to explore in detail the dynamics of each program.

In turn, the activist chapters explore the dimensions of working with migrant workers and discuss emerging models of organizing within their communities. Many raise significant questions about the labour movement's relationship both with migrant workers and with the organizing approaches adopted by advocates.

The chapters are somewhat uneven both in scope and level of inquiry. While this is to be expected in an edited collection, at times I struggled to see how certain chapters related to the central thesis. The chapter by Deena Ladd and Sonia Singh on the organizing models of the Toronto Workers' Action Centre is a useful look into building a movement among marginalized workers but seemed only tangentially connected to migrant labour in Canada. Similarly, Abigail Bakan's chapter comparing the licp to federal employment equity policies is an intriguing line of theoretical analysis but seems to lose sight of the very thing the book is trying to accomplish, surfacing the lived experiences of migrant workers.

There are also some original and valuable insights found in the book. Geraldina Polanco's examination of migrant workers at Tim Horton's reveals both the under-reported stories of these workers and the complex (and troubling) realities of the globalizing of the fast food industry. Adriana Paz Ramirez and Jennifer Jihye Chun do an excellent job of drawing out parallels between the struggles of the Canadian Farmworkers' Union in the 1980s with the more contemporary British Columbia Chapter of Justicia for Migrant Workers.

The book is at its best when it places migrant workers centre stage. Like when Joey Calugay and his co-authors introduce us to Louis, a Filipino who escaped military death squads and now works as a machinist in Québec. Or Neil, who came to Canada to work at Tim Horton's with the hope of becoming a permanent resident and bringing his family only to be used and lied to by his employer. He returned to the Philippines with little to show for his efforts. These are difficult stories...