VANCOUVER—Everyone knows that before a perfectly ripe blueberry gets to your breakfast table, it starts off on a farm. But in between, it’s churned through an intense production process involving round-the-clock harvesting and packing that often leaves agricultural workers in vulnerable positions.

Gil Aguilar has spoken to many migrant workers in his time as an organizer with the Migrant Worker Dignity Association, travelling from farm to farm throughout the Lower Mainland to help workers access services and talk about issues. He said many of the workers, who come to Canada with the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program, tell him that the high pressure to harvest as much as possible leaves them in a vulnerable state.

“It’s a super intense time,” Aguilar said. “They are working long hours, and all the blueberries have to be picked in a period of time — so some will tough it out and do as much as they can.”

However, the urgency and intensity of the harvest isn’t the only issue.

Under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), workers from Mexico and the Caribbean are hired to work on farms in need of labour. The demand is growing, with the number hired in British Columbia rising from 4,984 in 2012 to 6,981 in 2015.

Many of these workers come from low-income backgrounds and send the money back to families in need — leaving them more vulnerable to workplace abuse.

Noe Barrientos-Benitez is one of them. In August, Barrientos-Benitez quit his job on a Surrey blueberry farm after his fourth season in the SAWP.

Barrientos-Benitez held a news conference on the front steps of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada building in downtown Vancouver, alleging that he was not allowed breaks to buy groceries and had parts of his wages withheld. He detailed similar issues at previous farms he had worked at.

“I can’t continue like this without money, without my dignity, and I’m tired,” he said.

While the owners of the Surrey farm deny the allegations, these types of complaints aren’t rare. A report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that, based on interviews with 200 migrant farmworkers between 2007 and 2009, many reported unsafe working conditions and fears of raising issues with employers. Since workers don’t qualify for permanent residency status, they depend on employers to sign off on work permits.

Global economic pressures have made life difficult for workers like Barrientos-Benitez. Hailing from Tepetitlan in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, he worked in agriculture until the pay wasn’t enough to provide for his three children.

“I started looking for other jobs in Mexico, and there wasn’t many options or they paid very little,” he said in an interview translated from Spanish by Aguilar.

He thinks his lack of job prospects was likely influenced by the NAFTA agreement. Signed in 1994 between Mexico, the United States and Canada, the trade agreement was expected to boost Mexico’s economy. But studies show that the Mexican real GDP per person has had slow growth: only 0.9 per cent between 1994 and 2013, compared to almost double that rate for the rest of Latin America. Unemployment has also increased since that time.

“I then learned from the state of Mexico that coming to Canada was a great option, that I would earn a good salary,” Barrientos-Benitez said.

He said the first year in the SWAP was good, and he was able to send back $1,000 every paycheque — but soon his employers would start to cut his pay. After four seasons, in which he worked at three different farms, the problems became too much.

Aguilar said that Barrientos-Benitez’s problems aren’t unusual. In his visits to farms in B.C., he’s heard that the urgency of getting blueberries harvested and shipped during their short growing seasons — and the need to send money back home — has spurred workers to exert themselves far longer than is healthy.

“We visited a farm in the Okanagan. We had a circle with 30 workers, and as soon as we started building a bit of trust, every worker started pouring out horror stories about how they have been treated. They were suffering from working 12-, 13-hour days … They all had red eyes from being so tired and overworked.”

There is enormous pressure to harvest quickly, he said.

“When it’s in season, they want to harvest the fruit in one sweep so they can sell it for a better price, because it’s in its prime ... They have to time it super tight.”

First, the fruit must be picked, he said. While this is done by hand on smaller farms, the larger ones are using machines. Workers walk behind them, gathering and then packing the fruit into boxes. These boxes are then packed and loaded into trailers headed for stores and markets.

The repetitive tasks and pressure has resulted in health concerns, Aguilar said, such as tendinitis from repeated movements.

Juanita Sundberg, a geography professor at UBC who studies migrant workers, said the system leaves them vulnerable because they do not have the same options to seek protection as Canadian citizens.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“The system leaves workers at the discretion of employers to enforce the law because there really isn’t very much monitoring,” Sundberg said.

While there are worker protections built into the SAWP and the temporary foreign worker program, Sundberg said that workers are afraid they could lose their jobs if they complain. Under the SAWP, workers must apply through an employer, so if they leave their workplace they will likely have to return home.

“Many workers don’t want to report injuries because they’re afraid that they will then be seen as unqualified to work and sent back to Mexico. And they don’t want to be forced to miss days of work.”

Sundberg said she was surprised to learn about the difficulties for workers in light of the local food movement in Vancouver — a key reason she teaches about the issue in her classes.

“What was interesting to me is that there is a lot of hype in Vancouver about local food, about locally produced fruit and vegetables. I was curious to find out, what does it mean for the food to be grown locally, but the workers to be imported?”

Iglika Ivanova, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said that while the SAWP is managed federally and includes protections for workers, enforcement isn’t always followed adequately.

In B.C., workers can report issues to WorkSafeBC, but the temporary foreign workers program is managed federally by Employment and Social Development Canada. Ivanova said there is a lack of communication between governmental bodies.

“There is not a lot of overnight,” she said.

In 2017, the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities published a report detailing worker issues in the SAWP. It recommended that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada review the current pathways to permanent residency for all workers under the temporary foreign worker program, so that workers who are needed in the labour market can gain immigration status.

Already, there have been small changes to the program, such as a confidential tip line to report misuse of the program and an end to the “four in four” policy in which workers could only work for four years at a time.

But Ivanova said more needs to be done.

“Things have not changed. The interviews of farm workers found people still weren’t given breaks,” she said.

Now living in Vancouver, Barrientos-Benitez has successfully obtained an Open Work Permit, an unexpected win that allows him six months to find an employment sponsor. But with very little education, he is not sure if he will find an employer willing to keep him past the six-month window.

“Despite all the challenges, I still have hopes of staying here. I want a job, I want to keep working to be able to provide for my family and to offer them a better life,” he said.

Read more about: