FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Migrant farm workers stage wildcat strike to demand thousands of dollars in unpaid wages: Employer responds with deportation
November 23, 2010
(Simcoe, Ontario) Over 100 migrant farm workers employed at Ghesquiere Plants Ltd. are facing imminent repatriation (deportation) after staging a wildcat strike to demanding thousands of dollars in unpaid wages.
The migrant workers from Mexico, Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados came together across racial, linguistic and ethnic lines to organize this wildcat strike and strengthen their collective power. The workers employed by this farm described numerous rights violations and complaints about their living conditions including the following:
In light of this week's tragic incident involving the deaths of 10 migrant workers in southern Ontario, I felt it was finally time to -- at least partially -- take the wraps off of a journal I kept during a two-week trip in early 2004 to investigate the conditions of undocumented Chinese migrant farm workers. I hope this can help shed light on the kinds of conditions faced every day by the people who tend, pick, and process the food we eat.
For more about this week's incident see here.
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As the Peruvian immigrant community in Kitchener-Waterloo -- and families at home in Peru -- mourn the loss of 11 of their own in a deadly highway crash in rural Ontario on February 6, at least one Toronto daily newspaper two days later prioritized instead the highway death a single girl (a white, 19-year-old aspiring model), pushing the 11 Peruvian lives to page eight.
This is but a symptom of a larger problem that suggests that white/Canadian lives are more valuable than their non-white/non-Canadian counterparts.
Scene Otherwise takes a number of artistic conventions and images and re-imagines them in terms of contemporary concerns. The first exhibition of the work of Condé + Beveridge in Toronto in over eight years, it brings together a number of projects that address issues of the environment, economics and politics.
Though the first workshop in this guide is based around the film "Eyes on the Fries", it's not essential to have to hold the other workshops on economic justice in the service industry featured. Try replacing it with your favourite service-industry documentary.
The guide includes tips for facilitators, activities for the workshop and different scenarios of workers for participants to relate to. Some stats may have to be adjusted for a Canadian audience but the goal is the same: to empower service industry employees to organize. The workshop covers:
The importance of the informal economy
Factors that exploit workers