Double Precarity: Experiences of Former Seasonal Agricultural Workers Who Settle in Rural Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) has grown substantially since its inception in 1966. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of temporary foreign workers entering Nova Scotia under this program almost tripled, a rate of growth that far outstripped the national average. This is also significantly higher than the rates of growth in Ontario and British Columbia, where most research on the SAWP has been conducted. By focusing on Nova Scotia, we address key gaps in existing research. We offer a glimpse into the experiences of former participants in the SAWP in Nova Scotia who have transitioned to permanent residency through a small series of in-depth interviews. We focus in particular on the opportunities—or lack thereof—for the development of off-farm informal social ties with rural Nova Scotians, and on pathways to permanent residency. We find that the patterns of social and spatial isolation of migrant workers identified by research in other provinces are replicated in Nova Scotia, but are compounded by the small size and the relative isolation of their work sites. We also note the key role played by former SAWP participants who have transitioned to permanent residency in buffering against total isolation. Echoing previous research, we conclude with a range of recommendations around housing, working conditions, and employment and visa restrictions. We also make recommendations that enhance opportunities for developing stronger social ties between migrant workers and the rural Nova Scotian communities where they work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 teacher head, 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".