Rethinking Employment Strain Through a Transnational Lens: Centring Migrant Workers’ Lives

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework adopted in this book and applied to the case of migrant farmworkers. It begins by elaborating the conception of transnational employment strain among precarious status workers—a holistic framework accounting for relations of social reproduction and production, citizenship status, and transnational relations—that builds on, yet departs from, foregoing scholarship on employment strain. To situate this new conceptual model, the chapter also describes the institutional framework guiding the employment of migrant farmworkers in Canada by offering an overview of the nature, operation, and growth of temporary migrant work programs in agriculture, with attention to the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and Agricultural Stream (AS) of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), and source country dynamics therein.