Greenhouse Effects: Captive Labour, or How like a (Salad) Leaf
BY KRISTA LYNES
“With tomatoes they ripen seven days a week. They don’t just ripen from eight o’clock Monday morning till four o’clock on Friday. They ripen all the time. If it was a piece of wood, piece of steel, yes, I could leave it outside until tomorrow. But with vegetables, if you don’t take care of them today, tomorrow it’s too late”
Anna Tsing begins her explorations of mushroom picking by arguing that “the time is ripe to sense precarity” (20). She maps precarity in species extinction, job losses, capitalist devastation, and climate change. The pandemic has (if anything) been an accelerant of sorts for the precarity that characterizes our moment, distributing it unevenly across our communities. Racialized peoples, people with compromised immune systems, those facing economic devastation, and undocumented peoples have felt the sharp edge of our rising collective indeterminacy.
I would like to dwell a moment in the expression “the time is ripe.” When we speak of the “ripeness” of time we summon a sense of eventfulness: the moment is right, the occasion suitable, the time propicious. Strike while the iron is hot, say, or don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today. Time ripens to something sweet and juicy, but failure to act may leave time to rot on the vine. I wonder, what forms of emancipated labour might be imagined if time is left alone, left unpicked? What happens to spoilt time?
This entwinement of time and ripening can also be reversed: what happens if it isn’t time that ripens, but ripening that is bound up in time: planting time, harvest time, growing seasons or crop cycles. How is ripening about time, and how might it challenge our dreams of better, more ecological, and more equitable futures? Not the ripeness of time, then, but the time-boundness of ripening. As the farmer in the epigraph suggests, tomatoes don’t just ripen from eight o’clock to four o’clock; they are fantastic union busters.
Of course tomatoes don’t have to act in this strong-arming way. They might ripen in what Tsing calls “polyphonous assemblages” with other companion plants—basil, parsley, garlic, borage, nasturtiums, asparagus, and chives. But in Leamington, Ontario’s greehnouses, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce ripen in a potent brew of hydroponic technologies, photosynthetic lighting, climate control, plant physiology and pathology research teams, computer programmed crop managers, and “temporary” foreign workers. A high-yield, year-round ripening time governs the pace and character of the labouring processes enclosed in these houses. Leamington has been called the “greenhouse capital of North America,” a sea of polyethylene houses that cover over 1,500 acres near the US border.
To understand greenhoused labour and its temporality of ripening, I am inspired by Sarah Sharma’s analysis of taxis as media, and her argument that media organize racialized and gendered labour according to cultural politics of space and time. In extending her argument to greenhouses, new “greenhouse effects” might be discerned, tied to the warming of the planet and agri-business certainly, but extended to the racialized and gendered labour that greenhouses need for growth. The greenhouse is a kind of ripening time machine, mediating the technologies of intensive growth, high energy inputs, harvests, and the exhaustive labour required so that crops do not spoil. The relentlessness and synchronicity of greenhouse ripening, the conditions of work it requires, and the condensation of crop space produces a need for a kind of labour that is ultimately untenable, and thus orchestrated by drawing from historical founts of racialized exploitation. What appears to be a necessary federal program to insource temporary foreign agricultural labour is actually, then, a “greenhouse effect”.
Those employed to work in greenhouses are bound to the time and space of the vegetables—working in hothouses that can reach 40-50 degrees Celsius in summer, at times swimming in fertilizers and pesticides, picking and planting manually (because the crops require it), on schedules that lead to exhaustion, overwork or injury. The labour required entices few, and agricultural labour at harvest time has always been partially coerced (in Canada’s history, German POWs and Japanese-Canadian internees, conscientious objectors, Doukhobors, the urban unemployed and Indigenous peoples have all been recruited to work fields) (Basok, 26-7). Since the mid-1960s, the majority of labour in greenhouses is performed by men from the Caribbean and Mexico under temporary work permits tied to specific employers.
The “greenhouse effect” makes it appear necessary to insource labour under these conditions, to meet the demands of the crops themselves. But the greenhouse itself is an assemblage that exerts pressure on space and time, that tweaks plant growth and human work to increase yield on both fronts, and to match labour time to the high-yield pace of plant time. The greenhouse is thus a biocapitalist technology that mobilizes and transmits what Kalindi Vora calls “vital energy”, a substance of activity that “produces life from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment” through the racialization and gendering of labour (3).
The greenhouse effect is an architecture of the “green revolution”—concentrating land and capital in larger producers, increasing the need for (racialized and gendered) hired wage labour, increasing mechanization where possible, and focusing on monocrop vegetables whose ripening process has been made simultaneous and continous. New technology in greenhouses has increased yields (for instance by producing tomato plants that grow vertically), which places more demands on agricultural labour. The pressure exerted in the greenhouse can also be seen in drains of water and energy resources in the region to service the sea of hothouses.
Tanya Basok calls the foreign labour insourced to work in Canadian greenhouses “captive labour” because workers can be hired and fired at will, because their work permits and visas are tied to a single employer, because they are denied permanent residency status, and because of their inability to circulate in the labour market. She notes that what this structure produces is a form a feudalism, where workers are coerced to “comply with their conditions of unfreedom” (Basok, 17). It is illegal for workers to form unions in Ontario and Quebec (although not in British Columbia). Fear of being deported, or of not being selected the following year, mean workers frequently do not take time off work, even if they are sick, exhausted or injured. The practice of loaning workers to other farms, of coercing grocery purchases through the company store, and of deducting costs of travel and accommodation, highlight the conditions of captivity the greenhouse effect produces. Because the contracts are temporary and time-bound, and because workers seek to maximize remittances to families in their home countries, the labour force’s work cycle is synchronized to the (permanent, relentless) time of ripening. The greenhouse mediates labour so that workers become like leaves and plants—entwined in the continuous process of ripening, a labour-time transformed into time tout court.
These greenhouse effects have been exposed by the pandemic’s spotlight, after large outbreaks of COVID-19 contagion occurred among workers, revealing their inadequate housing, unsafe working conditions, lack of access to health services, and fear of making complaints. Labourers brought to Canada in the peak of the pandemic were insufficiently quarantined, working conditions did not permit them to isolate or seek care when symptoms developed, and the costs of COVID measures were frequently borne by workers themselves. The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, which took calls from farmworkers during the pandemic, emphasized that the majority of the complaints focused on workers’ lack of permanent residency status. Workers’ temporary status contributed to their exposure to COVID-19, their decreased access to healthcare information or decent housing, and diminished forums for asserting labour rights. The greenhouse is a conceit in fact, since it extends planting and harvest time from season-bound labour to continuous labour. Workers are thus trapped in a cycle of permanent “temporariness.” They are temporary insofar as they are deported at the end of their contracts, but continuous, in the sense that the time of ripening marches on. Temporariness is an attribute not of their labour-time but of their labour contract. Temporariness thus allows for the permanence of racialized, gendered, and classed greenhouse effects.
But if the time is ripe for sensing precarity, then perhaps the time is ripe for addressing ripening’s time. In a powerful text about migrant justice, Ariella Azoulay argues that it is time to refuse the imperial power to render people “undocumented.” Pointing to the looted objects that fill the collections of imperial museums, she locates a right embedded in those institutions of pilfering for people to come live in proximity to their objects and ancestors. Might we see the greenhouse also as a storehouse of looted energy? A museum of captive time and continuous ripening? What if the greenhouse’s assemblage of ripening and labouring is also a rights-granting machine? Its expenditures, yields, and nourishment a guarantee of permanence that translates into rights of co-citizenship? What time would ripening and agricultural care take without the pressure of continuity on the one hand, and temporariness on the other? What might we do with time that is left unpicked? If the time is ripe for social change—building back better, green new deals, universal basic income or child care—then ripening must also make time for unpicking.
Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.
Tanya Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada. Kingston: McGill Queens UP, 2002.
The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, “Unheeded Warnings: COVID-19 & Migrant Workers in Canada, June 2020. http://migrantworkersalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Unheeded-Warnings-COVID19-and-Migrant-Workers.pdf.
Sarah Sharma, “Taxis as media: a temporal materialist reading of the taxi-cab.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture. 14:4 (July 2008): 457-464.
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.
Kalindi Vora, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Krista Lynes is is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies and Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is also the director of the Feminist Media Studio, which provides a space for media creation and critical engagement with persistent forms of intersectional and gender-based oppression and exploitation. She is the author of Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits: Feminism in a Globalized Present and co-editor of the Open Access anthology Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis. Her current research project, Traffick: Thinking Voluntary/Involuntary Movement, seeks to examine the gendered and racialized politics of movement of bodies, artefacts, goods and critters.
Banner photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
