Had a vegetable recently?  Ever think where that came from, what had to be done to get it to your table.  And, here's the big one, did you wonder why it was so cheap?  The short answer to all of that is migrant workers.

Turns out that working in a farmer's field isn't exactly desirable work, especially when wages are a bottom basement levels, so hiring locals is difficult.  This is where migrant labour comes in.

Canadian farmers need people to harvest their crops.  To keep costs low, and profits high, those farmers bring in migrant labourers to do the jobs locals won't.  Low pay, gruelling working conditions with 12-hour work days aren't uncommon.

The working conditions are bad, but they are given space to live that's perhaps even worse.  A pair of reports this month, one in Maisonneuve Magazine, another in the Globe and Mail, detail how the pandemic has spiralled things further into the abyss for the people who have come to preform an essential job.

Crammed into rooming houses and converted shacks, migrant workers have never had it particularly good.  With the onset of the pandemic things have deteriorated.  Stories of workers ill enough to be bleeding from the nose forced to stay on until the end of their shift, a widespread lack of PPE, a culture of keeping people working whatever the cost.

The report in the Globe summarizes it well:

"A lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), an information vacuum and pressure to work, despite symptoms. … Photos, videos and interviews portrayed overrun bunkhouses with broken toilets and stoves, cockroach and bed-bug infestations, and holes in the ceiling."

Strict rules were put in place to isolate workers for the first two weeks upon their arrival.  After that, things deteriorated.  Little oversight was provided and what rules were in place "weren't adequately enforced and failed to consider what life on a farm is actually like for a migrant worker," the Globe report says.

The problem is structural.  Workers who are part of the temporary program aren't guaranteed a minimum wage, overtime, they aren't even guaranteed access to the money they pay into social programs, which they can't access either.  Things you or I might take for granted, like a maximum number of working hours or breaks, aren't party of the deal for them.  Many of the workers come on immigration permits that tie them directly to specific employers.

These are Canadian farmers that do this to workers.  These farmers have the workers under their thumb, unable to leave the job and at the mercy of whatever conditions the agri-food companies force on them.

The Maisonneuve piece starts with a scene from 2018, where the reporter visits a migrant rooming house.  The labourers are kept under close watch, front door of their ramshackle apartment — a running washing machine was enough to shake the floor — was fitted with an alarm set to go off if the door is opened after 8:30 pm.

There is something particularly sinister about this.  A company-enforced curfew, and they not only hold over your head your job, but your home, and your immigration status.

Back in the present, minimal oversight is exacerbating abuse.  Before the pandemic, living quarter inspections were typically only done when the quarters are empty before anyone had arrived.  It's a system not just ripe for abuse, but designed to encourage it.  The start of the pandemic meant that many inspections, such as they were, were now being done remotely.

The Globe spoke to multiple farm workers at Scotlynn Group farms in Norfolk, Ont.  Throughout their operations, 169 workers have tested positive with COVID-19.  The newspaper talked to three workers, all of them who had tested positive and were in isolation.  "We notified supervisors when people were falling ill and they didn't do anything," one worker told the Globe.  "They treated us like animals."  Another said to the newspaper supervisors would push them to work with symptoms, didn't provide necessary PPE, and could have avoided the outbreak at the farm if they had listened to worker's complaints.

The CEO of the company predictably denied these complaints.  "There would be no advantage to us not to tend to a sick worker," Scott Biddle said in the report.

No advantage?  If there was no advantage it's hard to imagine multiple workers getting sick and being forced into isolation, all saying they'd not been given the proper protection.

For all the resources the federal government gave to the agricultural sector— millions upon millions — it seems to be doing little good.  With only virtual inspections, we are essentially relying on the companies being inspected that things are fine.  Scotlynn Group got money for PPE, they say they spent it appropriately and provided their labourers with the necessary equipment.  From isolation, infected workers say otherwise.  And, this is worth repeating, the company has had 169 workers test positive.

Outbreaks have been recorded across the country, with hundreds of temporary workers being infected with COVID-19.  In some instances, it's only when farm workers have been exposed to local workers that they've contracted the illness.  Once one of them is infected, living conditions allow the virus to spread with abandon.

Well, now it's come around on us.  Mexico, where the president isn't one who's taken COVID-19 particularly seriously, has banned a group of several thousand workers from coming north because of insufficient protections put in place for workers.

This puts us in a tight spot.  We've created a system where putting in place the protections necessary to keep people from contracting COVID-19 would go against the system's very construction.  It would require treating, and paying, the migrants coming in at the same level we treat resident workers.  But that would put the underpinnings of cheap food at risk.

The narrow profits in the sector, along with the hard bargains demanded by the country's few supermarket corporations are the very conditions that make migrant labour necessary.

The temporary foreign workers program needs more than tweaks or reform.  It needs a full overhaul.  To be torn down to the ground and built again.  The system exploits the people that are necessary to keep us fed.  Fixing it may mean we pay more for our food.

Hundreds of migrants have contracted the virus.  Two men have died of it.  Killed by working for Canadian farmers, trying to earn a living to send back to their families.  They died alone, thousands of miles from their homes and their families.

That's the cost of your produce.  You pay it with every bite you take.

Photo Credit: Owen Sound Sun Times