In recent decades an increasing share of Canada’s agricultural workforce has been made up of temporary foreign workers from the Global South. These labourers work difficult and dangerous jobs with limited legal protections and are effectively barred from permanent settlement in Canada. In Harvesting Labour Edward Dunsworth examines the history of farm work in one of Canada’s underrecognized but most important crop sectors – Ontario tobacco. Dunsworth takes aim at the idea that temporary foreign worker programs emerged in response to labour shortages or the unwillingness of Canadians to work in agriculture. To the contrary, Ontario’s tobacco sector was extremely popular with workers for much of the twentieth century, with high wages attracting a diverse workforce and enabling thousands to establish themselves as small farm owners. By the end of the century, however, the sector had become something entirely different: a handful of mega-farms relying on foreign guest workers to produce their crops. Taking readers from the leafy fields of Ontario’s tobacco belt to rural Jamaica, Barbados, and North Carolina and on to the halls of government, Dunsworth demonstrates how the ultimate transformation of tobacco – and Canadian agriculture writ large – was fundamentally a function of the capitalist restructuring of farming. Harvesting Labour brings together the fields of labour, migration, and business history to reinterpret the historical origins of contemporary Canadian agriculture and its workforce.

Hired seasonal labour forms a significant part of the agricultural workforce in many countries. Key topics covered in this book include: changes in the hired farm workforce; area studies, and community impacts and responses; and the need for community services.

Whether for weavers at the handloom, laborers at the plough, or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialization. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical silence reigned with industrialization, until the carefully controlled introduction of Music While You Work in the 1940s. Continuing the analysis to the present day, Rhythms of Labor explains how workers have clung to and reclaimed popular music on the radio in desperate and creative ways.

This book brings together a set of studies on labour conditions in global value chains (GVCs) in a variety of sectors, ranging from labour-intensive sectors (garments, fresh fruits, tourism), to medium and high technology sectors (automobiles, electronics and telecom) and knowledge-intensive sectors (IT software services). The studies span a number of countries across Asia - Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. This book stands out for its grounded and detailed examination of both what is working and what is not working as Asian labour gets more embedded in global value chains. In trying to identify spaces for progressive action and policies in the current GVC-linked global work environment, the book goes against the grain in searching for an alternative to laissez faire forms of globalisation.