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By Warren Bertram
Trade unionist Helene Davis Whyte says the preliminary report on the treatment of farm workers in Canada shows that the majority of the workers are being treated well.
Last year, some seasonal agricultural workers complained about having to work under substandard conditions on Canadian farms.
This prompted Labour Minister Karl Samuda to deploy a fact-finding mission in October to investigate the reports.
Mrs. Davis Whyte, who chaired the mission, said from the interviews conducted, most of the workers appeared satisfied with their working conditions.
"A survey questionnaire was actually developed and that addressed things like the living conditions, the relationship between the worker and the supervisor/owner/manager, and based on what we saw and what the workers indicated, we had a majority, I think about 70%, indicating that the conditions were either good or excellent," she revealed.
Mrs Davis Whyte said the workers who believed the conditions could have been better were engaged on shorter stints, which could be as little as six weeks, while those who stayed for longer periods of about six to eight months were the ones generally satisfied.
In response to specific reports about workers being mistreated, Mrs Davis Whyte said those incidents appear to be isolated and not an indication of the conditions on the majority of the farms.
She said workers were interviewed from two of the farms featured in the complaints.
"The view that has come back from both sets of workers is that while there are problems – sometimes you may have the employer speaking to the workers in a disdainful kind of fashion, etc – overall, they felt that the conditions at both farms were acceptable," she indicated.
Mrs Davis Whyte said she is not discrediting the adverse reports of the workers and admitted that perfect working conditions did not exist on all the farms.
But while she acknowledged that there are "bad farms", she said these are "not in the majority".
Mrs Davis Whyte was speaking Thursday on Radio Jamaica's Beyond the Headlines.
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