Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Canada's Agricultural Workforce

In Harvesting Labour, Edward Dunsworth shows how labor power, organization, demographics, and political influence changed from the 1920s to 2020 in southwestern Ontario's Tobacco Belt. By seamlessly linking these subjects in an engaging and smoothly written piece, this work is suitable for both beginners and seasoned researchers and is a must-read for agricultural and labor scholars.Dunsworth's argument relies heavily on interviews with many former tobacco workers. He spoke on record with at least thirty-three participants from Ontario, Quebec, Barbados, and Jamaica. Using these oral histories, Dunsworth's evidence extends beyond southwestern Ontario into other parts of Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. Additionally, he uses government reports to gather limited evidence from guest workers from parts of Europe. Thus, Dunsworth extends his study globally, making his history about how Canadian and global change affected Canadian agricultural labor.By studying a global workforce, Dunsworth examines race and ethnicity's role in the Canadian tobacco industry. He not only shows racism existing in the southwestern Ontario tobacco industry but also shows how race played a nuanced role in tobacco labor. Dunsworth argues that international labor markets were tiered according to race, geography, and political status. He also shows that tobacco farm owners sought access to labor markets based on transportation costs, weakness of labor negotiating power, and a lack of government interference within Canada and internationally. Dunsworth shows the limits of worker agency as a result of these labor conditions, as many arrived in a new place with little mobility and little labor organization. These circumstances led to substandard living conditions and little labor protection against employer malfeasance.Though Dunsworth's work extends beyond Canada, the book is still firmly rooted in Ontario. Focusing on the transient tobacco worker highlights some inter-Canadian social dynamics visible during the late twentieth century. He illustrates how class, gender, and the size of Ontario influenced the acceptance of specific Canadian laborers and the resistance of specific labor groups. In 1966, transient workers protested their living conditions in Delhi, Ontario (137–39). The protest had little success because of the laborers’ limited organizational power, which Dunsworth argues was due to a lack of union organizational support and infrastructure (141–42). Dunsworth argues that technological change helped create spaces for women in tobacco labor but that this had both positive and negative impacts for female workers and tobacco labor in general (118–21). He effectively toes the line between global and Canadian history, embedding Canadiana effectively in what could also be described as a global labor history.One of the greatest strengths of Dunsworth's book is that he connects his argument with current events and the COVID-19 pandemic. This connection shows how the patterns he identifies throughout the book hold true even today. His accounts of topics such as the reliance on migrant labor from the Global South, the Canadian government bowing to the wishes of private industry when dealing with labor availability, and the lack of labor power and safety remain applicable today. Their relevance makes the book appropriate and understandable for those unfamiliar with the historiographical patterns of Canadian history.Though a strong book, this work lacks a robust description of tobacco agriculture. Despite its setting in southwestern Ontario's tobacco fields, his work focuses little on tobacco farming's agricultural practices. He provides some examples of change in agricultural technology, such as the development of a tying machine (118). However, there could be more discussion of how Canadian agricultural trends affected Ontario tobacco. If you are looking for a book examining such movements as the Green Revolution or the increased use and availability of fertilizer, this is not the book for you.Dunsworth successfully shows labor changing in the tobacco farms of southwestern Ontario, making the work a brilliant case study for examining agricultural labor practices in Canada from 1920 through 2020. It is such a strong example of the evolution of labor in Canada that one might exchange “tobacco” with a variety of other Canadian labor activities, such as assembly-line production or domestic care, and find that many of Dunsworth's arguments still apply, making it a must-have in the Canadian historian's library.

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