Migrant Workers, Rights, and the Rule of Law: Responding to the Justice Gap

Migrant agricultural workers provide an essential and longstanding contribution to food security in Canada. Exploitation and rights shortfalls for these workers are welldocumented. On paper, they have rights on par with Canadian workers, but these rights do little to address the structure and dynamics underpinning their subordination in Canadian society. In this article, I argue that law creates a “justice gap” in the case of these workers. Law gives rights to these workers on an individual basis but also creates structural vulnerability which renders them unlikely to make use of individual remedies or compliance-based systems. Rights and protection discourse does not challenge the underlying institutional arrangements in which workers’ labour unfreedom is maintained. I argue that the justice gap can be understood as a rule of law problem, but that the utility of this approach is u