“We are like broken vessels; we get thrown out”: the triple violence of injury among Jamaican migrant farm workers in Canada

A form of indentured labour, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) hires thousands of Jamaican farm workers each year on temporary contracts that bind their employment and immigration status to a single Canadian employer. Hazardous working and living conditions in Canada render SAWP workers vulnerable to poor health outcomes, and injured workers are often repatriated before they can access health care or workers’ compensation. In this context, SAWP workers are typically reluctant to refuse unsafe work, report injuries, or seek health care for fear of losing present or future employment in Canada. This research conceptualizes the SAWP as a necropolitical system of unfree labour wherein Jamaican workers are racialized, dehumanized, and refigured as disposable instruments of labour through mechanisms commensurable with those employed in the plantation slavery system. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Jamaican SAWP workers, this paper focuses on the experiences of workers who are physically injured in Canada and explores the challenges they encounter attempting to recover their health and income. To discuss these experiences, I present what I call the triple violence of injury under the SAWP: (1) the pain and debility caused by physical injury; (2) the structural violence that injury both exposes and makes workers vulnerable to; and (3) the necropolitical legacy of slavery and ongoing dehumanization through which Jamaican workers experience their bodies as racialized and vulnerable. In foregrounding the experiences of Jamaican workers, this study addresses the dearth of research on the experiences of migrant farm workers from the Caribbean.