St. Lucian Farm Workers Speak Out Against Abuse In Nova Scotia
As reported by media outlets in St Lucia, Latoya Ben, a female migrant farm worker from Saint Lucia is speaking out against abuse on a Nova Scotian farm. She is one of the first group of Saint Lucian women to come work in Nova Scotia through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). They arrived in April 2022 to harvest strawberries. Now back in St Lucia, she is speaking out for her and her cohort of women about their experiences facing abuse and neglect by their employer.
She says the workers were paid $700 bi-weekly before deductions such as taxes, rent and utilities. She says “We didn’t know we had to be crawling on our knees 24-7 to make money to pay ourselves” and “The money was not worth it.” At that farm, strawberries are harvested from the ground, with pickers usually resting their knees on a gardening pad. As farm workers, they were not paid overtime or for statutory holidays.
Furthermore, she told the media that, one day, an employer sprayed the farm with chemicals and after that workers fainted. This led her group to strike to refuse unsafe work. “When the boss came in, we strike on the farm and considered that we were not working.”
She recalled that both Saint Lucians and Jamaicans were impacted by abuse. “They used to treat the Jamaicans like s***.”
She is calling on the authorities in Saint Lucia to do a proper investigation before sending women to work on Canadian farms. Saint Lucian and Jamaican Liaison Officers visited the farm in an attempt to resolve the issue. However after the officers left the abuse continued.
For further information, see coverage by St. Lucia Times, and Caribbean Hot7 tv.
No one is illegal - Halifax / Kjipuktuk’s Migrant Workers Program regularly receives reports of abuse from migrant farm workers throughout the province and we are supporting workers to organize. Temporary immigration status in Canada makes it difficult for migrant workers to speak out about the abuse they are experiencing because they can be fired, sent back to their home country and not called back again. For this reason, migrants across the country are organizing for full and permanent immigration status for all.
