COVID-19 violence and the structural determinants of death: Canada’s seasonal agricultural worker programme

ABSTRACT

The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is a managed migration programme that aims to fill labour shortages in Canada’s agricultural industry with Black and Brown workers from the global South. For decades, migrant workers, scholars, and advocate groups have called for fundamental changes to address power imbalances produced by the design of the SAWP. The continued operation of the SAWP during the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the underlying structural violence that migrant labourers experience. Analysing the SAWP as a case study in how globalised labour processes dehumanise and make workers disposable, we argue that it is one component in a web of social and structural factors rooted in colonialism and racial capitalism, constituting the structural determinants of death. Whereas the structural determinants of health point to health ‘inequities’ and ‘disparities’, we advance the concept of structural determinants of death to politicise the numerous and multidimensional forms of violence embedded within state policy and to shed light on their beneficiaries. In doing so, we detail how policies can diminish the agency necessary to avoid death in deadly conditions and, specifically, draw attention to the preventable suffering and death perpetuated by the SAWP.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural determinant of death
• global health justice
• migrant health
• COVID-19 equity
• necropolitics

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our colleagues. We are inspired by and grateful for advocates, scholars, and above of all, migrant workers for leading the way in this work. RL and APB led conceptualisation, RL APB and KC jointly drafted manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Insight Development Award. The sponsors did not have a role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; and preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.