Unfree Labour? Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada

Over the past decade, Canada has experienced considerable growth in labour migration. Moreover, temporary labour migration has replaced permanent immigration as the primary means by which people enter Canada. Utilizing the rhetoric of maintaining competitiveness, Canadian employers and the state have ushered in an era of neoliberal migration alongside an agenda of austerity flowing from capitalist crisis. Labour markets have been restructured to render labour more flexible and precarious, and in Canada as in other high-income capitalist labour markets, employers are relying on migrant and immigrant workers as “unfree labour.” This book explores labour migration to Canada and how public policies of temporary and guest worker programs function in the global context of work and capitalist restructuring. Contributors are directly engaged with the issues emerging from the influx of temporary foreign workers and Canada’s “creeping economic apartheid.”

Aziz Choudry is associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University and visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg. He is author of Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. He serves on the board of the Immigrant Workers Centre, Montreal. Adrian A. Smith is an activist-scholar with interests in the legal regulation of labour migration in historical and contemporary forms. He has published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and Socialist Studies and is currently completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Migration, Law and Development. He is a member of Justicia For Migrant Workers.