Migrant labour and the making of unfreedom: How the law facilitates exclusion and exploitation under Canadaâs temporary foreign worker programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the role of law in facilitating the exclusion and exploitation of migrant workers under Canadaâs Temporary Foreign Worker Programs [TFWPs]. The TFWPs have been widely criticized as contributing to systemic abuse and exploitation of migrant workers, and discursive connections between temporary migrant labour and the concept of human trafficking have increased in recent years. Despite this, little concrete action has been taken to ameliorate what are seen as fundamentally problematic aspects of the TFWPsâ regulatory structure and operation. This thesis establishes that law plays a facilitative role in the exploitation of migrant workers by both excluding such experiences from dominant understandings of 'exploitationâ, located largely within the criminal law realm, and by creating a regulatory structure for the operation of the TFPWs which effectively excludes migrant workers from seeking lawâs protection.This thesis develops a conceptual framework of unfreedom through which to explore the regulatory structure and operation of the TFWPs, having first established the limitations of existing legal definitions addressing severe forms of exploitation, and especially the concept of human trafficking in this regard. Using the conceptual framework of unfreedom, which emphasizes the existence of active, external constraints on the ability to exercise choice, this thesis examines the primary regulatory features under the TFWPs that create conditions of unfreedom, and explores how these regulatory features also impact upon individual experience and enable the occurrence of exploitation by private actors. This thesis concludes by offering insights into the ways in which the ideas of freedom, choice and rights, and their conceptualization within the state-subject relationship, might be reconceived in order to advance the existence of and meaningful access to rights for migrant workers, and enhance their substantive freedom under Canadaâs TFWPs.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".