Opinion: Mother’s Day not all celebration for farm-worker women in B.C.

Campbell Heights potato field in Surrey, BC., June 15, 2022. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

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Mother’s Day is supposed to mean celebration. For some B.C. mothers, however, it can mean unpaid overtime, harsh physical labour and conditions that make women feel disrespected.

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Many of these women are growing the flowers that fill hanging baskets we buy to celebrate Mother’s Day.

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The long, unpredictable or inadequate hours worked by South Asian farm-worker women are made more challenging because many women are engaged in a heavy “double shift” of paid labour combined with housework and child care.

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To say it takes a heavy toll is an understatement.

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Since the 1970s, when immigrants mainly from India’s Punjab region became a significant proportion of B.C.’s agricultural labour force, reports have documented the precariousness of their work. Their capacity to act independently may be eroded by difficulty communicating in English, being financially dependent on kin and sometimes immigration status that ties them to their spouse or family.

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Some farm-worker women are concentrated in piece-rate work, which has been described as an “archaic system” with significant discrepancies from B.C.’s regular minimum wage. And many are subject to the Farm Labour Contracting (FLC) system, where their legal employer is a contractor. Even though the contractor is ostensibly regulated by B.C. labour laws, researchers and advocates have repeatedly shown that the FLC system has led to cases of exploitation, wage-withholding and coercion so that workers accept unsafe transportation.

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In our recent report, Growing Justice: Health, Safety and Dignity for South Asian Farmworker Women in British Columbia, women we interviewed said they were proud of undertaking physically arduous work for long hours without complaint, even though many reported bullying and harsh criticism from supervisors or bosses.

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B.C. agricultural workers are excluded from some of the basic rights granted to other workers such as statutory holiday and annual vacation pay. And since the late 2010s, the B.C. ministries of agriculture and labour have acknowledged vulnerabilities facing agricultural workers. But it’s unclear whether commensurate improvements have been made to support workplace rights.

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Our report outlines pervasive health and safety risks, including a lack of clean, accessible washrooms, potable water, chronic and acute physical injuries, unsafe machinery and retaliation for voicing safety concerns. These issues are intensified by weak enforcement and deceptive employer practices such as temporarily installing handwashing stations during WorkSafeBC inspections only to remove them once inspectors leave.

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South Asian farm-worker women who are new immigrants face additional vulnerabilities like language barriers and lack of formal job training. The people who harvest B.C.’s vegetables, grow ornamental flowers and pack berries face low wages. Most women we spoke to earned less than $25,000 annually.