From Fields of Power to Fields of Sweat: the dual process of constructing temporary migrant labour in Mexico and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the social construction of migrant labour forces through an analysis of the exterior and interior conditioning in an agricultural contract labour programme between Mexico and Canada. I argue that forms of exterior conditioning, especially employers' point-of-production control, establishes the context within which migrant workers' experience unfolds, for which reason it contributes to their ‘interior conditioning’. But I argue as well that the result is shaped by workers' employment of a ‘dual frame of reference’ through which they gauge Canadian wages and working conditions the only way they can, which is in relationship to Mexican ones. Given that neoliberal policies have reduced the options available in Mexico, and diminished the attractiveness of those that remain, contract labour in Canada presents one of the few opportunities many poor, rural Mexicans have to acquire the income necessary for a minimally dignified life. Consequently most workers in this programme do everything possible to please their employers and continue in the programme.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".