(Originally published at The Media Co-op.)
Chris Ramsaroop is based in Toronto and has organized with Justicia for Migrant Workers for two and a half decades. Jusitica primarily organizes with people who come to Canada as part of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), though according to Ramsaroop they also work with migrant workers brought in under other programs, undocumented people, and “many other communities with precarious immigration and labour status who are employed on farms across southwestern Ontario.”
Under the terms of SAWP and other temporary foreign worker programs, participants are brought to Canada for a set period of time (though many return as part of the program in subsequent years), and while here they are denied rights that Canadian citizens take for granted. This denial of rights by the Canadian state enables exploitative (and sometimes abusive) treatment by employers. There is a long history of struggle by migrant workers demanding everything from basic dignity, better living and working conditions, and better pay, to an end to work permits tied to specific employers, access to the social programs that they pay into but cannot use, and full legal status on arrival.
In more recent years, Ramsaroop has also taught at the University of Toronto.
The Media Co-op: What are a couple of important things that you’ve learned from struggles that you’ve never been personally involved in, and why are those things important?
Chris Ramsaroop: Justicia is part of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and I think that’s really important. The alliance is an organization that organizes, advocates, and supports food chain workers, worker centres, community groups, and labour unions of people employed across the food chain. And I think I’m constantly learning from many of the comrades who are involved in other struggles across the food chain. So these are peeps like in Washington State, Familias Unidas – the way that they’ve formed a union, their ability to try to engage and develop co-ops for workers, and so on.
I’m part of the injured workers community too, the migrant workers who are organizing. And just watching them engaging in democratic base-building. I think that’s also critically important for organizations. It’s the way people come to understand analysis, nuances. It’s not like a top-down approach. Watching how people debate, dissent, and coalesce around particular ideas. And that’s never an easy answer for a lot of organizations – labour or community groups – so watching other members of the alliance engage in those types of struggles is also really important.
From organizations such as the now-defunct Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, I learned about the role of direct action both in actions and case work. Every aspect of their work (which is sorely missed) pushed boundaries and played such a significant role in anti-poverty work. I learned about the role of creativity in the activism of Toronto Action for Social Change, who were also in-your-face challenging the food industrial and weapon industrial complexes way before anyone else was.The Black Action Defence Committee and organizations that spoke out against police brutality are extremely critical. These voices were foundational.
TMC: What are some of the key lessons that you’ve taken from these other groups about, like you mentioned, dealing with a difficult challenge and coming to a consensus on how to move forward?
CR: That’s always a tough question. One thing is that working-class struggles should never be about browbeating. It’s not about people being condescending to one another, but trying to engage in learning collectively. And this is a messy task. That’s first and foremost, I think.
Number two is the critical role of multiracial organizing, and trying to address the way that employers try to profit and commodify racial divisions and gender divisions in workplaces. So continuing to see and to work across that is also critically important.
I think an important lesson right now, for people on both sides of the border is, what does working-class solidarity mean? And I think both the American and Canadian organizations – we’re all trying to contest nationalism and the implications of nationalism on our workers’ struggles. It’s not even the big things. Right now, I think, American comrades are very concerned about deportations. There’s so many people being picked up. For us in Canada, it’s about addressing the working conditions here. And with this rise in nationalism – and whether it’s from the Conservatives, Liberals, or the NDP – this idea that workers have to be sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
That learning – there’s a different, nuanced analysis that comes through workers and worker engagement, or worker struggles, that doesn’t take place in a classroom. It doesn’t take place in an academic journal or newspaper article. And it’s really hard for people to understand or to capture what that means. Whether we’re talking on the shop floor, or when people are getting together, that’s where these types of learning engagements take place.
TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you’ve never been involved in yourself that you’ve found to be particularly useful or important?
CR: I think the role of an organizer is to keep learning. And I was just thinking about this. I was watching a documentary yesterday, and I showed it to my students, about the Amazon labour struggles at Staten Island. And I spent a good portion of the late night just trying to see what they did, what was good, what was successful, what was negative. So learning is trying to understand about, you know, how are people supporting themselves during struggle? What are the tactics that they’re using? How are they building a base? So definitely, I was watching and observing some of the struggles with the Amazon labour workers. Now, I want to be clear, this is not a romanticization of what happened there, but just trying to understand that.
And trying to see the historical struggles. So in places like Toronto, the role of the Black Action Defense Committee, the struggles around the East Indian Defense Committee – trying to understand what some of those struggles were. I’m always impressed with the Naujawan Support Network people, and the way that they come to an understanding of what’s happening. There’s so many different places. Different Indigenous struggles, of course. I think in particular, with the American comrades now, with this ongoing form of fascism, trying to see how they’re trying to resist on the ground.
There are some books that I’ve learned from that are helpful for this learning – A Troublemakers Handbook, Poor Workers Unions, Secrets of a Successful Organizer, amongst others. I think Frantz Fanon‘s work is important too.
TMC: What other kinds of ways could they approach doing this kind of learning?
CR: First and foremost, I think this goes back to C.L.R. James and The Black Jacobins‘ account of the Haitian revolution, and up to what we saw with the Amazon labour struggle, and many other struggles – we prop up people who become the so-called spokespeople. We take a collective struggle and it becomes the domain of particular individuals. And we need to realize that for successful struggles, it’s not about having these leaders who are the main focal points. Building not from the eyes of the credibility of the government, or the state, or the capitalists, but actually building the other way, building within the community, building within the workplace. It shouldn’t be about creating these celebrities, or creating these focal points of a movement, when movements are really about people coming together. And the way that the left fails in trying to support and care for people, so it doesn’t turn into this type of celebrity status – that type of work.
I think this is kind of this fundamental thing that’s happened for generations with people. We put people on a pedestal, and then we throw them down, or we push them down after a mistake. Mistakes are going to happen. People are going to fail. And so about trying to find ways to come together and to build after massive defeats.
How we view struggle is another important lesson I have (and continue to) learn. Neoliberal forms of organizing look at the end goal, the final end product. That should never be what we take from struggle. It’s the entire process from the beginning to the end. What happens in between is the most significant part.
In addition, I get frustrated when organizers and activists speak about success. Too many of us talk about it by rolling out numbers, stats, figures of success. It becomes a contest to see who and which organizations are better. That is extremely problematic for me. I don’t think activism and organizing should be based on neoliberal logics such as performance indicators, nor competition.
Apologies for the long rants, but there’s also the role of defeats and losses. These are critical for struggle. We aren’t always going to win, and especially for newer comrades, it’s important to be honest and prepared so we learn from defeats. Defeats are not necessarily errors in organizing – in many instances when you go up against the state, its imperative to understand the role of power and how power is wielded specifically targeting grassroots groups.
Finally, I see this on repeat – how organizations and very good activists get caught up in the non-profit industrial complex. It’s critical that we begin the level of consciousness regarding this behemoth sooner than later because when the state, foundations, and corporations start throwing around money, it always has a harmful effect on radical organizing. One, by co-opting organizations, and secondly (more critically) by erasing grassroots organizations, visions, and demands.
TMC: What are a couple of key things about struggles that you are involved in, or about your approach to activism and organizing, that you would like other people to know more about?
CR: For Justicia, I think our work is unknown to most activists. People know many other organizations but don’t necessarily know what we do, why, and how.
For our organization and our base, we organize with smaller numbers of workers, because of the precarious way that migrant workers are positioned in our society. Workers are transient and constantly on the move. It’s extremely difficult to explain to the outside community. Guest workers are cyclical. Even when they are in their home country, there is a constant concern that they will not be called back the following year. There are multiple strategies that need to be considered – one specific for those who are still working, one for those no longer in the program, one for those who are injured – and then developing ways to bring each of these groups together. It’s unique and incredible the injured migrant workers and their ability to come together and organize. These spaces they discuss, debate, and they occur with workers who are in the Caribbean and Canada. Zoom has been important to bring these comrades together.
I cannot stress this enough: Migrant worker programs are designed so that people are not seen as humans, it denies agency, the ability to come together collectively. When the state and the boss no longer needs your service, they expect you to simply vanish. These types of organizing continue to persist in spite of the structures of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program.
Number two, there are many struggles that may get lost in history. Many struggles are getting erased because of the way that a lot of activism is basically mimicking neoliberal structures. And I think it’s important for us to see the dangers when we’re trying to basically engage in this idea of quantity organizing rather than quality organizing. And what I mean by that is this engaging in number crunching, or this idea that we have to perform for funders, or have this quantifiable impact. These organizations that are out there talking about their impact statements – that should never be the work of activist organizations. This is not about what type of impact you’re having, but knowing that the work that we’re doing is an ongoing struggle; that you win, you lose, you have these moments of joy, you have tremendous moments of sorrow. And that’s what I guess the work is.
TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you’re involved in, or to your approach to activism and organizing, that you would want other people to read, or watch, or listen to, or learn from?
CR: Oh my gosh, that’s a long list. I think, you know, in Ontario, of course, Migrant Dreams and El Contrato. A Time to Rise from the struggle of BC farm workers. I strongly encourage people to watch the film Union. The Hand That Feeds about the Hot & Crusty bakery workers in New York City. The Forever 21 documentary, Made in LA. Those are important places to start off with. I’m trying to think of a few other documentaries which are really, really good. There are the books I’ve already mentioned.
I think it’s about trying to understand the different ways that people are organizing. Observing, talking with people, not talking at people. Trying to go through archives of different struggles. I think that’s really critically important, too.
TMC: So you mentioned earlier in the interview the way in which, seemingly all of a sudden, nationalism has become a huge factor in political life, in a way that it hasn’t been in quite some time. Talk a little bit about things that you’ve learned about nationalism, about how to think about nationalism, from your work organizing with migrant workers, and resources that you would point people towards as they’re trying to think through what it means to be navigating this moment.
CR: There’s always heightened nationalism of one sort or the other. What we see is, I think, three or four fold. Over the expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, as Canada has come to rely more and more on migrant workers, it’s been really easy to attack disenfranchised people. And people with power have basically been moving that needle. Whether it’s people with disabilities, people who are homeless, people who are on Ontario Works here in Ontario, refugees, undocumented people – we keep seeing the way that the needle’s positioned attacking particular groups. We weaponize the state and ideas of media to target particular communities. And we keep doing it to different groups. And it becomes even more difficult to try to bring people together.
So I think the challenge for us is, how do we develop counter narratives? And what I’ve been trying to do with my comrades – whether it’s successful or not, that will be told in 50 or 100 years from now – is to try to show the different ways that the working-class communities are coming together. So the Presteve Foods workers, which were a group of Thai, Mexican, and Canadian (particularly Mennonite) women, who fought, in their workplace, an attempt to break the union and to de-certify their facility. The construction workers in Ottawa, who are trying to form a union with the carpenters, both Canadian and Jamaican workers. So, trying to show how working-class people are coming together, in spite of the differences that people place on immigration status. The organizing, too, around injured workers and EI access. Trying to start with the most marginalized and trying to push up, so that all workers could benefit from the struggles of communities who were most impacted.
Those are the ways that I try to think about, how do we tell our stories differently? So that’s the thing that’s first and foremost.
I think responding to heightened nationalism means trying to think about grassroots organizing. I don’t think it’s about trying to necessarily engage the national frameworks, but working with the communities that we’re in, working with other allied organizations, and trying to basically take this moment where we are on the defensive, we are being attacked, and trying to figure ways to push back.
So firstly, sharing ways that migrant communities have come together to organize against racist attacks. Two, looking at critical events in labour history such as when Asian and Canadian workers came together to organize strikes to fight back against bosses. Thirdly, continue to undertake deep dives into the history of farm worker organizing/plantation organizing to see how communities came together to fight back against fascists are starting points for myself.
I am still in the process of compiling resources; however, I think its also critical to understand the role of fascism from where migrant farm workers are situated. From the ground up would mean to examine the role of colonialism, the plantation system historically, and the role of resistance in the Caribbean, to illustrate the connections between colonialism and fascism. Secondly, examining the role of migration and how migrants are scapegoated during periods of heightened xenophobia
I would start with the farm worker contract which the workers sign every year. Break it down to illustrate in conversation with workers how the contract is a tool of control and containment by the state and bosses. Then examine the role of our food system to illustrate how food is being weaponized against working class communities here and abroad. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Foods (IPES) have developed some really critical tools for this. Finally, Gord Hill’s The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism and Antifa Movements would also be invaluable for our efforts.
Scott Neigh is a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton, Ontario. You can pre-order his new book, Listen! Knowing the World and Fighting to Change It, out from Fernwood Publishing in November 2025.
