It seems logical to bring in temporary workers from the Asia Pacific region to plug the seasonal gaps in Australian horticulture. Australia has jobs with no workers; neighbouring countries have workers with no jobs. Temporary entry for employment is already an established and growing component of Australia’s migration program - although currently only open to skilled migrants. Extending temporary entry to low or semi-skilled workers in agriculture is not a huge leap. Such schemes already exist in many developed countries and flows of seasonal workers are rising around the world.

In a nation fixated on border control, the immediate objection is that ‘guest workers’ will outstay their welcome and fail to go home when the job is done. This need not be the case. A carefully designed scheme would create incentives for workers to return home at the end of the season and offers benefits for the workers’ families and their home countries.

Canada’s seasonal agricultural workers program has operated since 1966 and now brings around 20,000 Mexican and Caribbean workers to Canada each year for an average of four months’ employment. (The maximum allowable stay is eight months). Local employment centres approve requests for workers - to certify that no Canadian workers are available to fill the jobs - and farmers must offer a minimum of 240 hours work over six weeks, at or above prevailing minimum wage rates, with free housing and meals and/or cooking facilities. Canada’s North South Institute has undertaken a major study of the Canadian program as a ‘model of best practice and migrant worker participation in the benefits of economic globalisation’. The findings suggest that it has a number of benefits:

• It provides income opportunities for jobless or underemployed Mexican and Caribbean farmers at pay rates well above those on offer in their home countries. Workers use savings and remittances to improve housing, nutrition, clothing and health care for their families at home.

• It has long term development outcomes in source countries; in particular the children of migrant labourers are likely to stay longer in school.

• It increases labour reliability for Canadian primary producers at times of peak demand, enabling them to plan production increases with confidence. Rather than ‘stealing’ local jobs, seasonal workers expand employment opportunities, particularly in tertiary industries such as transport, construction and food processing.

• It offers a legal route to farm jobs that would probably otherwise be filled by undocumented (illegal) workers. Growers need not fear immigration raids and workers are spared the smugglers’ fees and risky journeys required to enter North America without the appropriate papers.

• It creates mechanisms (at least on paper) to protect the rights of foreign workers in terms of wages, health and safety and regulated work hours - protections that are completely denied to undocumented workers.

• It produces positive outcomes for rural towns through the spending of seasonal workers on goods and services. This helps small communities to maintain shops, banks and post offices that might otherwise close.

The fear that workers will overstay can be tackled by withholding a proportion of wages in a compulsory savings scheme and remitting the funds after workers return home, as is done for Caribbean workers in Canada. But even this level of control may be unnecessary. The Canadian program also offers workers the chance to return to Canada in subsequent years and, according to the UN World Economic and Social Survey 2004, this ‘partly explains the lower number of overstayers compared with those in other similar programs’ elsewhere. Recirculating workers allows growers to retain their skills, reducing the need to constantly train new workers that arises under Australia’s working holiday maker program.

The Canadian scheme is not without problems. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada describes the exploitation of migrant workers as ‘Canada’s shameful little secret’. There have been protests and strikes by migrant workers, cases of abuse, examples of sub-standard or overcrowded accommodation, and industrial accidents (like chemical exposure or workers getting caught limbs in agricultural machinery) due to insufficient training, inadequate safety equipments or overlong hours.

If seasonal workers are mistreated in the workplace, there is very little that they can do about it because Canadian farmers can send the workers home, at the workers’ expense, before their contracts expire, on the basis of ‘non-compliance, refusal to work, or any other sufficient reason’. The union says workers have been sent home ‘for expressing concern over inadequate housing, for not receiving the hours of work contracted for, and because they have become ill or injured’. There is no appeal process and workers cannot seek alternative employment on a different farm; each worker is contracted to a particular employer for the season. If they leave their job, they must leave Canada.

There are plenty of practical issues to be sorted out if Australia is to proceed down the path of a seasonal migration scheme for agriculture (not least the provision of adequate accommodation) and there are good arguments for starting small, with a pilot scheme that recruits workers from Pacific Island nations, as recommended by the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee in its 2003 report A Pacific Engaged. The overall challenge is to construct a program that provides a secure labour supply to horticulture yet protects the rights of migrants at the same time. If we go about it correctly, Australia can ‘leap-frog’ the Canadian experience and design a program which is truly a ‘win-win’ situation for both growers and workers.