Intervention de :
2nd ISWA Symposium on Work in Agriculture :
Date : 29 mars 2021
Lieu : webinaire, France
Organisation : INRAE (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environnement - ex INRA), IAWA (International Association on Work in Agriculture)
Présentation de l'intervention
During the Covid-19 crisis, the establishment of spatial and sanitary barriers in Europe and Canada highlighted the invisible and yet indispensable contribution of foreign labour in Western European and North American agriculture. The systematic recourse to foreign seasonal workers, widely documented in the francophone press between March and May 2020, shows the variations and invariants in the employment of foreigners in northern agriculture. The pandemic reminds us that the regulation of the residence of foreigners is a social and political construction, imposing a continuum of precarious statuses « changing according to circumstances, according to the populations concerned » and which « aims to impose on everyone the definition constituted according to the needs of the moment » (Sayad 1991: 64). On the basis of an exhaustive corpus constituted between March and June 2020, we will decrypt the media-political semantics that developed on the issue of agricultural employment during the Covid crisis. Papers collected describe in detail different sequences of mobilization of a « galvanized » agricultural sector trying to avoid any disruption in production and distribution in the food chain. The analysis of the francophone press shows the convergence and divergence concerning the employment of foreign workers in agricultural sector of major interest. Both quantitative and qualitative content analysis make it possible to understand who are the main actors at work, the structure of their relationships and their evolution in space and time. Among the newspaper articles collected, certain themes were common: labour shortage, specific skills of a foreign workforce assigned to different precarious statuses (seasonal or posted workers), contagion by the formation of clusters in the host areas. Although this attention is exceptional, it does however shed light on the way the press takes hold of certain structural dynamics of the employment of foreigners in the agricultural sector. Exacerbated by the pandemic, the degraded living and working conditions that characterise the seasonal employment of foreigners have been denounced massively by trade unions and workers’ associations. It implies an awareness of the fact that the migration regime invalidates the « protection of the rights » of workers, even if this protection is a sine qua non condition of the « freedom to provide services » promoted in the unified European market.
Plus d'informations : https://symposium.inrae.fr/workinagriculture-iswa/