Message from National President Hanley

As millions of families across Canada celebrate Thanksgiving, the people who put much of the food on the table will be working in fields, barns and greenhouses. Thanksgiving is not a day off for workers in the Canadian agriculture industry

Working in agriculture has always been hard and dangerous work, so given an alternative, fewer and fewer Canadian workers choose to do it. That job is increasingly being left up to the tens of thousands of workers who come to Canada each season under federally regulated programs that deliver these workers to employers but provide little or no oversight to working and living conditions.

Domestic farm workers also face similar challenges, as huge scale, industrial farms and greenhouses have swept aside the traditional small-scale family farm, and transformed agriculture into a factory process.

But while the agriculture industry has modernized, the treatment of many agriculture workers is too often no better than it was a century ago.

In June 2007 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that under the Freedom of Association Rights guaranteed under Charter, all those working in Canada have the right to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining. That right to unionize applies to both domestic as well as temporary agriculture workers. Yet both Alberta and Ontario continue to ban farm unions, as they await the outcome of a constitutional challenge of that prohibition.

Unfortunately, in spite of what the laws says there are still those who believe it’s OK to treat those who work the land like dirt. Most Canadians would be appalled but these workers are out of sight and out of mind.

We celebrate Thanksgiving because we are grateful for the harvest, and a family to enjoy it with. That’s not the case for many of those who make it possible because they are often separated for half a year and by thousands of kilometers from their families, working under conditions that many Canadians would find intolerable.

So let us give thanks, both in words and action, by acknowledging that fairness must be part of the food production system, and that labour rights are human rights for all agriculture workers in Canada.