The Bunk House Rules: A Materialist Approach to Legal Consciousness in the Context of Migrant Workers’ Housing in Ontario

In this article, I tackle the controversy surrounding an application to convert an abandoned school into housing for migrant agricultural workers in Ontario. I examine how the written reactions of community residents to a proposed municipal zoning by-law amendment convey and invoke understandings of the legal regulation of temporary labour migration. Viewed through a legal consciousness analytical lens that has been reconstituted to attend to the material practices and contexts underpinning residents’ responses (a materialist approach to legal consciousness), the submissions intervene in the organization and regulation of agricultural labour. While rehearsing well-worn, racist colonial tropes, these responses (re)produce material outcomes affecting the working and social lives of migrant farm workers. I argue that residents’ overwhelming opposition to the bunk house proposal re-inscribes and even extends the unfree labour conditions in which these workers toil and dwell. In this way, residents perpetuate growers’ control not merely of labour power but also of racialized labouring bodies, deepening workers’ regulatory immobilization and hyper-exploitation