Fair Farm Work

An initiative to improve employment conditions in agriculture

The security of the food production chain in Canada relies heavily on immigrant labor. Immigrants, usually with temporary status, work at all stages of production from cultivation to harvesting, processing and distribution. This is also true throughout North America and Europe. The recent pandemic has highlighted how essential and undervalued is the work of immigrants. New awareness of this inequity has provided a backdrop of opportunity to effect change in the working conditions of migrants and all workers employed in agriculture and food processing.

Focusing specifically on farm work, this project will develop a pilot for a Fair Farm Work labelling system for vegetables and meat produced in Ontario which would then be scalable at the national level. Our main objective is to improve farm workers’ working and living conditions while rewarding those farmers who are willing to comply with established standards. By having their farms certified by a third party, farmers whose produce will be labelled as fairly produced will have a competitive edge with consumers and distribution chains in the competitive market. The project will work with associations of employers and farmers, migrant organizations, consumer associations, as well as provincial authorities, experts and the media to establish the blueprint for the Fair Farm Work labelling scheme.