Lives on Hold: An Exploratory Analysis of the Effects of Temporariness on the Health and Well-Being of Temporary Foreign Workers in Saskatchewan.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last forty years, Canada has relied on millions of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) to alleviate labour shortages and to boost the Canadian economy. Past research regarding TFWs highlights the negative impacts of precarious legal status on their health and well-being. Nevertheless, limited attention has been given to the intersection between the temporariness of TFWs legal status and their overall health outcomes. This study aims to investigate how temporariness is perceived and experienced by TFWs in Saskatchewan and explores the ways in which lack of permanent status affects their health and well-being. By analyzing thirty semi-structured interviews conducted in Saskatchewan in 2017, this research applies a qualitative approach to secondary data, using thematic analysis within a Social Determinants of Health Framework. This study investigates key factors such as access to healthcare, the psychological impact of living in uncertainty and the ways in which a precarious legal status shapes health and well-being. The analysis shows that the temporary nature of TFWs’ legal status is not accidental but shaped by immigration policies that set the terms under which migrant workers live and work. Through things like visa lengths and renewal deadlines, the system maintains control over the ability to stay and transition to permanent residence. This creates a form of precarious status, which translates into socio-economic vulnerability where rights are limited, and uncertainty is a constant. This situation has a direct impact on health. The fear of deportation and the instability push many migrant workers into cycles of exploitation, fundamentally maintaining their status as permanently temporary labour.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".