In the last chapter we discussed the family and the inability of necrocapitalism to support proletarian families or offer an alternative form of collective care. In imperialist countries such as Canada and the United States, the entrance of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women into the paid workforce has resulted in a phenomenon that some feminists have dubbed the “care deficit”. In the absence of a robust welfare state that can provide child and elder care and with the majority of unpaid household labour and care work still shouldered by women in most families,[i] women in the workforce has meant that a gap has opened up in the home. Never mind that many bourgeois women did not actually participate in the majority of the household labour during earlier iterations of capitalism or under feudalism––deferring much of the burden to maids, nannies, and house slaves––or that most working class women have always had to labour outside of the home as these maids and nannies but also in the factories, mines, and fields. During the brief years of economic prosperity in imperialist countries following World War II the “privilege” of staying in the home was extended to middle and upper-middle class women of the working class, especially white women who were idealized as perfect wives and mothers in popular culture. When white, liberal feminists began critiquing women’s exclusion from institutions of higher education and the workforce, their lack of historical materialist analysis meant that they took their particular experience at one moment in history and in the imperialist centre as the universal experience for all women throughout history and across culture. Thus, access to birth control and abortion were prioritized as the struggle for women’s reproductive freedom while issues of forced or coerced sterilization of Indigenous, Black, and disabled women were completely neglected, at best and even advocated for by some feminists as a solution to broader social problems such as poverty. Similarly, the rights of bourgeois women to engage in “sex work” by choice took precedence as the struggle for women’s sexual freedom over the experiences of Indigenous, migrant, and trans women of colour who were (and are increasingly) trafficked or economically coerced into a violent and exploitative industry. Moreover, the white and bourgeois biases of a liberal feminist analysis has meant that as increasing numbers of women made their way into the paid work force, liberal feminism failed to provide a solution to the care deficit that did not rely upon further exploitation and oppression.
As a result, the imperialist bourgeois family has become dependent upon migrant labour regimes. White bourgeois women are able to work outside of the home in professional and management positions while migrant women raise their children and clean up around the house and migrant men take care of the landscaping and gardening. This is not a contradiction in the mind of the liberal feminist for whom individual empowerment and success are the end goals of the feminist movement. A woman in the white house, or as the minister of finance, a female CEO or “boss babe”, are the symbolic victories that liberal feminists valorize over and above the collective struggle for women’s emancipation. For liberal feminists, collective struggles against women’s oppression and exploitation are less important than empowering individual women to live their best lives. As Sakai reminds us in Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, “It is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic, dependent upon the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples for its styles of life.” (Sakai, 8) What is true for settler society as a whole is also true of white, settler, liberal feminism whose “victories” in breaking the glass ceiling have been achieved by standing on the backs of migrant and racialized women.
The working conditions of the women who work in the homes of the bourgeoisie are notoriously terrible and have only gotten worse as the pandemic exposes exactly which workers are considered disposable. In the early days of COVID-19, nannies and maids working for bourgeois American families, largely racialized and migrant women, were laid off from their employment suddenly and without warning. For undocumented migrant women working under the table means that employers were already able to pay below minimum wage and exploit them for long hours; now pandemic layoffs mean that, in many cases, they cannot access official unemployment insurance or government relief. Furthermore, because of the relatively sudden imposition of COVID measures, many nannies were let go without the chance to say goodbye to the children they had invested so much emotional energy and labour into while others were asked to continue a relationship with the children without pay, via online outlets like Skype, because they are “like family” and the children understandably miss them. As of June 29th, the New York Times reported that over 20 nannies in New York City, mostly older migrant women from Caribbean countries, had died of the corona virus.
In Canada, the vast majority of nannies are in the country on temporary foreign worker visas that tie them to one particular employer and contract. That there is a separate immigration category (formerly known as the Live-In Caregiver Program) for this group of labourers is indicative of how foundational this exploitation is to the participation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women in the Canadian economy. In early 2020 some of these Canadian families employing temporary foreign workers irresponsibly continued to travel internationally with their nannies in tow to look after their children despite the looming pandemic and border closures leading to several non-citizen nannies being trapped in countries like Mexico and the United Arab Emirates. Other nannies have been forced to live with their employers in times of social distancing, leading to a resurgence of the abusive and exploitative live-in conditions that migrant women’s organizations in Canada fought for years to eliminate from the Live-In Caregiver Program. Trapped in their employers’ homes these women are often roped into working around the clock without overtime pay because once again being “like family” means being exploitable for unpaid labour at any time of day or night. Being “like family” can also mean being subjected to the sexualized and patriarchial violence, harassment, and abuse that are commonplace in many families. While the entire immigration system in imperialist settler countries like Canada is based on the exploitation of labour, migrant women working as nannies and care takers are able to be intensely exploited as temporary workers rather than economic immigrants who are granted Permanent Residency because the government has labeled this work as “unskilled”. This labour is seen as unskilled precisely because it has been feminized and essentialized as a natural function women’s bodies by bourgeois patriarchal ideology as earlier chapters demonstrate. Indeed, many of the Filipina women working as nannies in Canada and other imperialist countries have high levels of education and training as nurses––a situation the government authorities in Spain were happy to exploit by granting temporary permission for these women to work as nurses rather than nannies when the pandemic hit and health care workers were urgently needed.
However, in-home care work while making up a large portion of the work performed by temporary migrants in countries like Canada, is not the only type of employment the migrant and undocumented workers are concentrated into. As noted in an earlier chapter, migrant workers are over concentrated in nursing and personal support work in Canada and the United States where Filipina nurses make up approximately 1/3 of foreign trained nurses in both countries. In Canada where the majority of COVID deaths have been associated with Long Term Care Homes it is also important to point out the concentration of temporary foreign workers who work in these homes. But these are not the only migrants working in Long Term Care. Disturbingly asylum seekers who are in the country awaiting their hearings at the Immigration and Refugee Board are also overly concentrated as workers in these homes. One can only imagine the horrors faced by these workers who have fled war, persecution, and right-wing paramilitary violence only to end up laboring in the institutions of death described in our seventh chapter. After months of activist push-back the Canadian government has “generously” offered a “path way to citizenship” for an extremely narrow portion of asylum seekers (approximately 1000) working as personal support workers in long term care homes to the exclusion of those working other essential jobs such as food processing, factory work, or even other jobs at long term care homes such as security guards.
In Canada temporary foreign workers also perform the bulk of seasonal farm labour. In both Canada and the United States the mythology of the settler farmer who works tirelessly on his own small plot of land is deeply foundational to the national imaginary (Sakai, 8) and so the labour of all the people necessary to the functioning of even a small “family” farm has been overshadowed and disavowed by this mythological figure. In Canada there are also major marketing campaigns by agribusiness lobbying groups that have shaped our perceptions of everything from dairy farming to egg farming to the production of Alberta beef as being the product of the local (white) family farm rather than big business. But it is not modest family farms that make up the bulk of the $111.9 billion Canadian agribusiness sector. Major farming corporations such as the Scotlynn Group and Greenhill are only able to generate their massive revenues (over 73.88 million in the case of Scotlynn) and expand their operations at an impressive rate because they rely so heavily upon seasonal migrant labour. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian farmers have continued to import seasonal farm labour despite the border closures that affect other temporary workers such as the nannies trapped abroad by their employer’s family vacation. Already horrific living and working conditions for migrant workers on Canadian farms has led to over 1300 migrant farm workers testing positive for COVID-19. It has also led to the preventable death of three workers: 31 year-old Bonifacio Eugenio Romero, 24 year-old Rogelio Munoz Santos, and 55 year-old Juan Lopez Chaparro. But worker deaths are nothing new to Canada’s farming industry. In recent years, a van transporting 13 migrant workers from Nicaragua and Peru collided with a truck in Hampstead Ontario killing ten of the men inside in 2012, and in 2014 worker Ivan Guerrero drowned while trying to fix a leak near his bunk house in Ormstown Québec. Sheldon McKenzie, a Jamaican worker in Leamington Ontario died after suffering a severe head injury on the job in 2015 and Zenaida a worker from Mexico whose last name remains unknown was killed in a hit and run in Niagara last year.
The dangerous working conditions and extreme exploitation facing farm labourers is built into the very immigration system in Canada. Due to their temporary status these workers are unable to access benefits such as healthcare or employment insurance (EI) despite paying into them and during COVID-19 are ineligible for the CERB offered to other Canadian workers if they are forced to quarantine. These workers also lack many basic protections such as minimum wage laws, overtime pay, time off, and the right to collective bargaining. Because their temporary status in the country is tied to their employer they are subject to deportation if they quit or are fired. As a result, many workers are coerced into silence in the face of even the gravest violations of labour law. Already multiple workers have faced deportation for asserting their rights during COVID. Erika Zavala and Jesus Molina were deported to Mexico in July for inviting two migrant rights activists to speak with them at their employer-provided housing in Kelowna British Colombia. Their employer claimed that this action was in violation of their strict no visitor policy due to the pandemic but Zavala and Molina stated that the activists, their friends, were delivering work clothing and culturally appropriate food that their employer had neglected to provide. Another anonymous Mexican worker in Leamington Ontario was threatened with deportation after injuring his head in the bunk house and calling the Mexican consulate for help filling out a workplace accident report. Yet another worker, Luis Gabriel Flores was fired from his employment and threatened with deportation after he spoke to the media about his working and living conditions. Flores tested positive with COVID-19 after several of his bunk mates also caught the virus and one, Chaparro, died. Flores spoke out anonymously to the media and told them that the living conditions on the farm made it impossible to social distance. He also told them that even after Chaparro and other workers started demonstrating symptoms of the disease, the employer continued to make them work and was slow to take action and get testing for the workers. By the time testing was granted 199 workers on the farm run by Scottlyn Group had contracted COVID-19.
The treatment of migrant farm workers during a global pandemic has been so atrocious that even the Canadian health minister Patty Hajdu has called it “a national disgrace”. Rather than granting permanent status to migrant workers, however, a move that would allow them the protections to assert their rights, the Liberal government has instead responded by giving $59 million directly to employers who we are meant to trust to spend this money on proper social distancing and other safety measures for workers. The government has also promised more farm inspections but since the beginning of the pandemic farm inspections have been “virtual” and always by appointment giving the employers the discretion to show only what they want to show. What have employers done to inspire such trust? According to a report compiled by the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), wage theft is common place in the industry and they were able to confirm reports of over $57,369.46 stolen from workers in the form of deductions and unpaid wages. In particular, many workers have reported that employers have refused to pay them during the mandatory two week quarantine period when they enter the country. For low wage workers missing even two weeks of pay means facing starvation and mounting debt. During this same quarantine period over 539 workers reported inadequate access to food and 160 reported an inability to social distance due to employer-provided living arrangements. Once the quarantine was completed, MWAC reports that the living conditions worsened significantly for a number of workers. Indeed, a number of YouTube videos showing inadequate living conditions on farms have been shared by migrant rights organizations such as Justicia for Migrant Workers. Those who have contracted the virus are often not paid for the time they are sick.
Most egregiously, the Ontario government has released a plan for migrant farm workers that allows them to continue working even if they are COVID positive, as long as they are asymptomatic. Other employers across the country have infringed on the basic rights of their workers by pressuring them into signing agreements where they agree not to leave the farm and to allow their employer to use their wages to provide food and other provisions for them. The option for migrant workers is to sign the document so as to face firing and thus deportation. The same restrictions, including the restrictions on visitors that led to Zavala and Molina’s deportation, are not being placed on Canadian workers. Other egregious cases of differential treatment have been reported to MWAC such as the case of migrant workers at Ontario Plants Propagation who were asked to unpack a major shipment of plants from an American farm with a confirmed COVID outbreak while their Canadian co-workers were given the day off. For this risky work the labourers were paid an extra $2 per hour, bringing their wages for the day to a generous total of $8 per hour. Within a few days cases of COVID-19 were present at Ontario Plants Propagation. Workers have also reported increased surveillance, intimidation, and threats from the employers and some have even had private security guards placed at their bunk houses to control and monitor their movements. These facts make it obvious that the COVID measures put in place on Canadian farms are meant to protect Canadians from contracting the virus from migrant workers but not to protect the workers themselves.
Temporary migrant workers are also concentrated in meat and fish plants across the country. Cargill and JBS meat packing plants in Alberta have been responsible for major outbreaks comprising up to 30% (1400 cases) of total cases in the province. It is also estimated that between half to 75% of their employees are migrant workers. In April Bui Thi Hiep, a Cargill worker originally from Vietnam, died of COVID-19 and two more deaths have been linked to the JBS plant. In New Brunswick, fisheries afraid they would not have access to their usual seasonal migrant workers, hired children as young as 13 to work in their plants processing fish and lobsters. By resorting to child labour the employers here have exposed the true function of the temporary foreign worker program. Although there are many adult workers out of work due to COVID-19, the plants are unable to attract them because the wages are below the measly rate offered by Employment Insurance and the CERB benefit. In Capital vol. 1, Marx spends a considerable amount of time elucidating the ways that child labour is used by the bourgeoisie to drive down wages and to maintain a relatively[ii] docile workforce. Similarly, the temporary foreign worker program with the lack of rights and protections, as well as the constant threat of deportation hanging over workers’ heads, is designed to keep wages low and the rate of exploitation high.
In Settlers Sakai details the multiple ways that the white American working class has been treated as privileged over and above migrant, racialized, and Indigenous workers who have been regulated to the most dangerous, lowest paying jobs. By standing on the backs of this “third world” workforce the white working class has been able to form a labour aristocracy and has at times achieved wages and working conditions impossible for most workers in other parts of the world. (Sakai, 27) The “privileges of belonging to the oppressor nation” (Ibid., 13) have often been enough to encourage a, “petit-bourgeois consciousness that was unable to rise above reformism” in the white working class. (Ibid., 27) As Sakai writes, “It was only possible for settler society to afford the best-paid, most bourgeoisified white work force because they had also obtained the least-paid, most proletarian Afrikan colony to support it.” (Ibid., 13) And while many things have changed since the times of the slave economy––slavery has been reformed into the for-profit prison industrial complex, globalization and imperialism have exported many of the most dangerous and lowest paid jobs to the Global South, and the multiple recessions of recent decades have meant the shrinking of the middle class and the impoverishment of some segments of the white working class in the United States and Canada––it remains true that worst paying, most dangerous, most precarious work in these countries is reserved for racialized workers who are often migrants, undocumented people, or asylum seekers. Furthermore, the immigration system in imperialist countries such as Canada has been deliberately designed to “respond to the labour market” by creating entire groups of workers who lack access to the legal rights and protections granted to citizens.
It is imperative then that communist efforts to organize the working class in settler countries like Canada and the United States focus extensive attention on this group of ultra-exploited and oppressed workers. As J. Moufawad-Paul is apt to point out in his new book A Critique of Maoist Reason, these efforts necessitate the leadership of a revolutionary proletarian party. (Moufawad-Paul, Critique of Maoist Reason, 95) The ultra-precarious and by design temporary position of temporary migrant workers means that organizing must often take place clandestinely (Ibid., 96) and not through a traditional union drive since temporary foreign workers lack access to collective bargaining rights in Canada anyway. As Moufawad-Paul goes on to explain, because this and other sectors of the working class are made precarious, and because their work is often temporary even if they are citizens, the politically advanced elements of the working class will necessarily be drawn from disparate industries and job sites (Ibid., 97). It is only through the revolutionary proletarian party then that the working class can find political unity in this context. As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies this pre-existing exploitation and leads inevitably to the death and illness of countless workers who lack even basic protection under the law, the necessity for this type of mass organizing led by a revolutionary party is more urgent than ever.
[i] While this is certainly the case in the majority of heterosexual and nuclear families, we should not imagine that the phenomena is neatly confined to the state-sanctioned unions of “the straights” as the queer youth of the internet like to call them. Indeed the same patterns are often replicated and reproduced in a myriad of ways in families that extend beyond the nuclear model––in poly families of all sorts, and even within queer chosen families where home and care labour remain feminized to a large extent.
[ii] I write “relatively docile” because although children have always had less (or no) access to legal rights and protections in the workplace and in general, we should not imagine that children are without a proletarian consciousness and unable to organize themselves as workers. Indeed, the large newsie strikes in the late 1800s in New York City were organized and led entirely by working class children. The fact remains that child workers have historically and continue to experience intense exploitation and oppression at the hands of employers because of their lack of legal protections and because of the uneven power relations between adults and children in general.
On Necrocapitalism 