Doing Work Canadians Would Not Do: Labour in Ontario's Fruit and Vegetable Industry, 1880–1966 (McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History #228)

By the early 1900s, Ontario’s fruit and vegetable industry was controlled by large canning companies, who set harsh contracts with growers and drove wages down. Low pay and gruelling conditions in fields, orchards, and canneries made jobs in the industry undesirable, prompting reliance on imported labour. In this important book, Carmela Patrias shows how the racialization of “non-preferred” Europeans and Indigenous workers formed the basis of recruiting and confined those workers to seasonal employment, limiting their social and economic prospects for generations.

Through analyzing industry pressures on agricultural growers and labourers from the turn of the century to the mid-1960s, Patrias reveals the state’s role in recruiting workers into an industry that perpetuated a vicious cycle: the racializing of immigrant, Indigenous, and interned Japanese employees as primitive, indolent, and unclean to justify their consignment to seasonal labour, while their concentration in such work reinforced perceptions of their inferiority. Documenting Indigenous Peoples’ role in Ontario’s fruit and vegetable industry, Doing Work Canadians Would Not Do also illustrates how gender compounded racial and economic inequalities, with immigrant and Indigenous women’s labour valued less than men’s – and paid accordingly. Workers and unions resisted and fought back against employers to improve wages and working conditions, highlighting the striking contradiction of racialized practices continuing to shape Canada’s labour force even as the country fought a war against the ideals of Nazi racism.

This book provides essential context for understanding the development of contemporary government programs that import needed workers – most of whom are people of colour from the Global South – to do the work that most Canadians are unwilling to do, while denying them permanent residence and access to citizenship.