Justicia for Migrant Workers

Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) is a volunteer-run political collective comprising people from diverse walks of life, including migrant workers, labour organizers, educators, researchers, students and racialized youth based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We are engaged in this work alongside our personal commitments and numerous social justice struggles.

J4MW strives to promote the rights of migrant farm workers (participating in agricultural streams of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, including the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program) and farm workers without a formal immigration status. Promoting workers’ rights entails creating for spaces where workers themselves can organize and voice their concerns without losing their work or being repatriated. The collective starts with workers’ knowledge and concerns and fight for change collectively, basing our work on fighting racism, sexism and capitalism. We see ourselves as a movement of workers and allies and strive to support organizing that is led and directed by workers in the fields, farms and greenhouses.

Our work is and has to be transnational in scope. It considers the context of stolen Indigenous land here and in migrants’ countries of origin, and Canada’s complicity in benefiting and creating poverty in the Majority World. Most importantly, we consider families left behind, primarily children, women and extended family members who are very much a part of migration but who are always forgotten in the equation of migrant farm labour. We work in solidarity and respect for the Indigenous peoples of this continent.

J4MW is motivated by experiences shared and lessons learned from migrant farm workers over the course of nearly 20 years of community outreach in rural Ontario. As allies, migrants, farm workers, organizers, and friends we believe migrant workers deserve work with dignity and respect!