Chapter 6.6 COVID-19 Occupational Safety and Health Challenges for Mobile Workers

COVID-19 and International Migrant Workers

As outlined in chapter 5, IMWs engage in complex and extended mobilities to work in Canada, where those on closed work permits might be (im)mobilized in the homes of employers, as with live-in caregivers, or in crowded living quarters near enterprises, as with farm workers. At the onset of the pandemic, all travel into Canada was forbidden except for returning Canadian citizens and some mobile workers deemed essential (principally truckers and seafarers). IMWs were not initially included among the exempt categories of individuals allowed to enter Canada. Theresa James (2021) tells us how this caused an outcry from Ontario’s agricultural sector, “as farm employers had time-sensitive demands for the SAWP [Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program] labour that they were used to relying on annually.” The federal government rapidly granted travel exemptions for migrant farm workers and workers in some other sectors, such as seafood processing.

Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC) reports how the initial border closures resulted in delays in workers’ travel arrangements, often leaving the workers stranded in cities to which they had travelled from their rural communities in order to catch their flight (MWAC 2020; James 2021). These delays affected the length of their work stay and, inevitably, their income. The MWAC tells the story of some workers who suffered from these delays:

Many of the workers we heard from live in communities where there are few or no cases of COVID-19, and were concerned about travelling to Canada because of the risk of exposure. Without income support from the Canadian government and no other employment options, workers were forced to do what they could to come to Canada to work. The majority of migrant farmworkers come from rural communities. Travel to Canada involves first taking public transportation to a major city, where they are housed for a few days in cramped quarters awaiting flights. Workers from disparate regions then boarded chartered flights that were full. Upon arrival, many migrants were transported to farms in buses that were full. Throughout their entire journeys, most workers were not provided with Personal Protective Equipment. (2020, 16)

Upon their arrival, according to federal quarantine guidelines, IMWs had to self-isolate for fourteen days, during which the employer was supposed to pay for the equivalent of thirty hours per week (18). In addition, some provinces/territories or even regions adopted guidelines and protocols, resulting in “a patchwork of regulations, protocols and access to supports” (MWAC 2020, 18; for a clear picture of the jurisdictional framework in regard to the regulation of IMWs, see Vosko et al. 2022a). However, reports indicate that quarantining wasn’t always adequately provided and monitored, workers were not always paid for this time, and there were crucial gaps in oversight and standardization (Caxaj, Tran, Mayell, et al. 2022). Caxaj, Tran, Mayell, et al. (2022) encountered, for example, one worker who tested negative for COVID-19 on arrival but then tested positive ten days later after sharing a room with three other workers during quarantine. As reported by the MWAC (2020), the quarantine guidelines adopted by the federal regulator at the outset of the pandemic were designed to protect the nonmigrant population, meaning the goal was to prevent migrant workers, when they arrived in Canada with an infection, from infecting the host community. The measures were not always designed to ensure that migrant workers themselves were protected from risk of infection during and after quarantine (18).

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the dangers related to poor housing of IMWs (Weiler and Caxaj 2022; see also Vosko et al. 2022a), which placed them at a greater risk of contracting COVID-19 (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021, 12). As noted in chapter 5, the precarious living conditions of IMWs, particularly in the agricultural sector, have long been identified in the literature as posing a risk to their health and safety (Caxaj, Tran, Mayell, et al. 2022; Preibisch and Hennebry 2011; Perry 2018) but had been ignored by regulators for many years. The pandemic drew attention to these long-standing problems, as they ultimately contributed to the risk of outbreaks (Weiler and Caxaj 2022).

In a 2021 report from the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, for instance, it is noted that advocates for IMWs have long expressed concerns about the living conditions of the workers. That report notes that Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) had acknowledged these concerns and committed to establishing minimum accommodation requirements. However, the Office of the Auditor General (2021) notes that with the onset of the pandemic, “inspections provided little assurance of protection for the health and safety of agricultural temporary foreign workers” (7) and that ESDC “did not address long-standing concerns about worker accommodations” (34) and “did little to meet the commitments to improve living conditions for agricultural temporary foreign workers that it had made in previous years” (7). Among the inspections conducted by ESDC to verify employers’ compliance with the COVID-19 regulatory requirements, the Auditor General found problems in about 73 percent of the quarantine inspections they examined in 2020 and up to 88 percent when they examined the department’s 2021 quarantine inspections. A few cases made the news where it was revealed workers were living in unsanitary conditions—for example, by having to isolate upon their arrival in rooms where the only furniture was a mattress on the floor (Lavigne 2021).

During the pandemic, provincial governments and regional health units provided employers with different quarantine guidelines on how to better protect agricultural migrant workers’ health and safety (Vosko et al. 2022a, 20–21). But still, existing guidelines were not adequately enforced, and it was not always clear who had jurisdiction to intervene. In Québec, an investigation by journalist Natasha Lavigne covered the living conditions of about eighty Guatemalan workers who lived in three houses and a former motel in the Saint-Nicéphore area in Québec. Lavigne discovered crowded spaces, inadequate access to showers, and facilities covered in mould. The Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CNESST) confirmed that it had received two complaints about health and safety concerns in the company’s homes. However, since the housing was located outside the workplace, the CNESST stated that it did not have jurisdiction to intervene and had apparently reported the matter to Service Canada (the federal regulator) and to the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de la Mauricie-et-du-Centre-du-Québec (a provincial health care organization), leaving it to these agencies to intervene. This situation reveals the highly problematic dynamics at play, where different regulators seem to have been playing a game of hot potato with the living conditions of IMWs.

In light of the migrant worker OSH issues highlighted by the pandemic, Weiler and Caxaj (2022) call first for clear and consistent national housing standards, where the federal government coordinates with other levels of government in order for these workers to “no longer fall through the jurisdictional cracks” (for the different recommendations on housing, see Caxaj et al. 2020). Those housing standards could align “with recognized international standards such as the Guidelines for the Implementation for the Right to Adequate Housing (2019) provided by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing” (Caxaj, Tran, Mayell, et al. 2022).1 They also ask for “proactive, unannounced and thorough housing inspections,” echoing the report from the Office of the Auditor General of Canada to make sure that compliance exists not only on paper (Weiler and Caxaj 2022).2

Caxaj, Tran, Mayell, et al. (2022, sec. 4b) note that even though migrant agricultural workers in Ontario are eligible for workers’ compensation benefits if they become ill or injured at the workplace or in employer-provided living quarters, there were no protocols in place during the pandemic to “investigate these deaths as work-related incidents, nor to ensure that families of deceased workers had a clear path to accessing eligible compensation through the provincial workers’ compensation board.” Based on an analysis of the coroners’ files in Ontario from January 2020 to June 2021, Caxaj and colleagues noticed the blurred lines between what constitutes a work site and a place of residence. They indicated that reports from the Ministry of Labour would, for example, indicate that workers “had not reported to the worksite,” even though workers were actually residing in an employer-organized quarantine site (sec. 4b). The researchers asked the Ontario government to clearly define what an “employer-provided accommodation” is in order to include such accommodation in the work site: “This will address the fact that living conditions are outside of workers’ control, especially (but not strictly) during the quarantine period” (Caxaj, Tran, Tew, et al. 2022, 11). They also asked that worker deaths be investigated for potential work-related associated factors: “This is essential for a comprehensive root cause analysis of these workers’ deaths, whose only reason to be in Canada and in their unique situation is because of work demands” (11).

Vosko et al. (2022a, 36) report that the COVID-19 pandemic “amplified migrant farmworkers’ deportability.” In order to avoid deportation and the loss of income it entails, IMWs may have adopted behaviour such as avoidance of testing and monitoring if they did not experience strong symptoms (Côté et al. 2021).

Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic sometimes prompted highly dubious practices. For example, investigative journalist Sara Mojtehedzadeh (2020) revealed how some workers had been asked to sign COVID-19 waivers releasing the Jamaican government of any liability due to exposure to COVID-19 as a condition to participate in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP).

We have mainly discussed agricultural workers, but it is worth mentioning that meat-packing and other food-processing plants often employ IMWs. Some of these plants were the scene of several major COVID-19 outbreaks, as reported by Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. (2021, 69).

Mobility to Work

Ongoing efforts to explore links between work and transmission mainly focus on COVID-19 outbreaks. Such efforts have been hampered by the fact that information about work collected from those who tested positive was incomplete and minimal (Curran, Davis, and Smith 2021). Furthermore, while it is not uncommon for research on work and COVID-19 to mention commute mode to work and commute dynamics as risk factors, such studies rarely systematically examine mobility and risk. For instance, a study of outbreak-associated COVID-19 cases in Ontario found 12 percent of cases among working-aged adults from April 2020 to March 2021 were attributable to workplace outbreaks, with the highest incidence rates in agriculture, health care and social assistance, food manufacturing, educational services, and transportation and warehousing. Unfortunately, the study did not deal with ERGM (Buchan et al. 2022).

In the UK, a national-scale study of COVID-19 workplace outbreaks explored their association with employee, workplace, and population characteristics, including where workers lived and worked, their ability to maintain physical distance at work, their vaccination status, and, unusually, their modes of commute. This study found that a higher risk of workplace outbreaks was associated with physical proximity in the workplace in most sectors, the proportion of workers on permanent contracts, vaccination rates, and a higher proportion of individuals from Black ethnicities living in deprived areas. In terms of modes of commute, they found that “workplaces where a higher proportion of employees were expected to use taxis (or travel as a passenger in a private car) and other forms of transport were found to have increased outbreak risk for many industries, with trains or single occupancy typically associated with the lowest risk” (Overton et al. 2024, 97). In this case, other forms of transport exclude bus/metro/tram, taxi, train, and private vehicle use. While important, the focus in that UK study was on forms of transport rather than on the more complex mobility dynamics and characteristics that are our focus here. There is more to be said and more to be done related to those engaged in various forms of daily ERGM and COVID-19 risk.

Even though telework was much more widespread during the pandemic than it had been in the past, some workers still needed to travel to work on a daily basis. In the Greater Toronto Area, even though the Toronto Transit Commission saw a major drop in ridership overall, there were a few specific routes where the number of commuters remained extremely high. These routes, which remained crowded, served many precariously employed workers who depended on public transit to get to their jobs in warehouses and food-processing plants and who were deemed essential during the pandemic (Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021, 71). These segments of public transit were crowded with workers from high-risk workplaces that often lacked social distancing opportunities. Many of these workers also lacked access to sick leave benefits (which would permit them to remain home when ill) and likely had less access to vaccinations that could reduce transmission risk than other groups (Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021, 71; see also McNamara, McKee, and Stuckler 2021; McLafferty and Preston 2023). In this situation, a bus driver may well be eligible for workers’ compensation if they were deemed to have contracted COVID-19 while driving busloads of workers (even though, as we will see, this may not be a straightforward case), but the workers themselves who contracted COVID-19 while riding the bus would not be eligible for compensation in Canada because, in that context, commuting is not considered to be part of work.

Many FIFO/DIDO workers were deemed essential during the pandemic, particularly in the mining and oil industry (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021; Hall et al. 2023). COVID-19-related issues arose from the particular nature of their employment, which, as documented elsewhere in this book, involves both long-distance travel, often using multiple transportation modes, and “stuckedness,” since they often live in remote work camps (Dorow 2020) or other potentially crowded, congregate settings.

Long, often multimodal journeys to and from the work site rendered these workers more exposed than others to the virus during travel time. In Alberta, although workers travel to the oil sands both from within the province and from elsewhere, they were not always required to quarantine upon arrival (Public Safety Canada 2021; Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health 2020). Interjurisdictional workers were accused of being the cause of outbreaks in some oil sands sites. For example, in a press conference in May 2021, former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney put the onus for outbreaks on these workers: “It’s regrettable that we have seen the recent surge. I do believe it probably is connected to travel with workers coming in from out-of-province and out-of-country. As you know, the government of Canada controls international travel quarantine requirements” (quoted in Yourex-West 2021, para. 16). However, this ignores the potential contributions to outbreak risk of working and living conditions on site and from intraprovincial mobility within Alberta.

FIFO/DIDO workers were also at risk of blame and shame in their home communities. In her reporting, journalist Malone Mullin recounted how these workers and their families in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) could be publicly shamed, particularly following COVID-19 outbreaks in work camps, and could end up bearing “the brunt of blame” (Mullin 2020) in social media postings for outbreaks in their home regions.

As for life in work camps, some camps were reported to be “packed” with workers during the pandemic (Dorow 2020, para. 8; Mullin 2020). This was the case for oil sands workers but also for other kinds of FIFO/DIDO workers in the mining industry and some parts of the construction industry (Purkayastha et al. 2021). In some workplaces, investigative journalism reported that work and living conditions were exposing the workers to dangerously high levels of risk of contracting the virus because of inadequate physical distancing, sanitizing, and testing (Snowdon 2021). Besides their long-distance travels, some workers might have to travel to the work site by shuttle bus on a daily basis: “Dwellers get on shuttle buses together each day, and collectively shuffle in and out of common spaces like dining halls and gyms and sometimes bathrooms” (Dorow 2020, para. 8).

In May 2020, more than one hundred confirmed cases of COVID-19 were traced to one oil sands site, a quarter of them among people who resided outside of Alberta (Dorow 2020). According to Alberta Health, as of the fall of 2021, a total of 5,432 workers in Alberta oil sands were infected by the COVID-19 virus across 20 workplace outbreaks during the third and fourth waves of the pandemic. Among those workers, 431 were commuters from outside Alberta. Eleven deaths were reported (Wilson 2021). There were also some outbreaks at mining sites across the country (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021). During the following months, throughout different waves of the pandemic, outbreaks were legion in the Alberta oil patch, forcing some employers to work with fewer staff and to focus on routine operation (Stephenson 2022). While these FIFO/DIDO workers were vulnerable to infection in multiple places, those from Indigenous communities working in the camp sometimes travelled out of the camp, potentially exposing their own community to the risk of infection (Morgan, Hoogeveen, and Leeuw 2021, 416). Those from Atlantic Canada often had to quarantine when they returned home. And as infection rates were generally low in those areas, for them, transmission risk was probably greater on the road, at the work site, and in their accommodations and host communities (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021). The laws in place seem to have been unable to effectively protect these workers.

These FIFO/DIDO workers faced other types of hazards in this pandemic in addition to exposures to the COVID-19 virus. As noted in chapter 1, FIFO workers normally live with the strain of schedules that mean they are away from family and friends for prolonged periods with potential consequences for their relationships and mental health (Dorow 2020). During the pandemic, certain types of rotations, such as two weeks on / two weeks off, were not feasible because of quarantine requirements in their home provinces and, often, on the work site. Some companies extended rotations to accommodate this challenge, and some workers opted not to travel home to visit their families (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021). Longer rotations imply longer periods where workers are living in the camp and are away from home, which can also mean longer periods working without breaks. In a preliminary study on FIFO workers in the Alberta oil sands industry, Dorow et al. (2021, 33) reported that participants interviewed in the early months of COVID-19 pointed to growing anxieties “stemming from unpredictable travel, new rounds of layoffs, increased workloads, and work and camp conditions conducive to transmission.” Some workers reported “not seeing their families for months” (Dorow 2020, para. 10).

In Alberta, the workers’ compensation board (WCB) has classified different situations where claims for COVID-19 are acceptable or not. Whereas an acute care hospital worker is deemed to have an acceptable claim, a captive worker in a camp setting is considered to have a “possibly acceptable claim” only if the employer “requires [the worker] to reside within a camp setting, and an outbreak of . . . SARS/COVID-19 is confirmed within the camp” (WCB-Alberta 2022, 1). To come to this conclusion, the Alberta WCB has to consider that captive employment can put the worker at greater risk than the general public and that this was the source of the condition. In every situation, the WCB will adjudicate work relatedness based on the circumstances of each claim (WCB-Alberta 2022).

Mobility Within Work

Employment in multiple workplaces also likely played a role in COVID-19 virus exposure risk. In the health care system, many provinces relied on temporary placement agencies to address labour shortages. Some health care workers were assigned to an establishment for either very short periods (a few days a week, if not every day [Armstrong, Armstrong, and Bourgeault 2020, 422]) or longer periods. At this time, as more generally, health and home care workers continued to provide care to clients in their own homes and might have to travel between different workplaces during the day. The fact that these workers could be assigned to different establishments or required to visit multiple clients in their own homes was identified as conducive to the spread of the virus among beneficiaries (Estabrooks et al. 2020, 36). While they were at risk of exposing others, their own health was also at risk because of their mobility: They may have lacked familiarity with work sites, and they often lacked personal protective equipment (PPE; Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021, 72). These and other multisite workers “can’t work from home and don’t have an office to go to at work where they can manage their exposures. Instead, they deal with the public or with clients who move in and out of their spaces (taxis) or are required to move in and out of spaces that are open to changes in potentially infected personnel (as with cleaners, warehouse workers), clients (long-term care), and the public (retail) in order to do their jobs” (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021, 47).

Armstrong, Armstrong, and Bourgeault (2020) discuss the different types of elder care that take place in Canada and underline how privatization had expanded in the past decade. However, this privatization and the for-profit model of nursing home care have had a major impact on the quality of care and on the quality of jobs offered in nursing homes, where employers rely on fewer staff, who often have fewer formal qualifications and are paid less (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Bourgeault 2020, 452). The repercussions during COVID-19 were significant: “Part-time staff not only move from home to home, as has become obvious during this pandemic, but they are often without the benefits that would enable them to stay home when sick” (460). Hence these workers were at risk at work, in situations where other workers, family members of clients, and possibly the clients themselves were coming and going. They would also have been at risk when travelling to work and between workplaces if they had to use public or shared transportation.

As mentioned in chapter 2, compensation coverage is not homogeneous across jurisdictions in Canada, and while public long-term care homes are covered under the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) in Ontario, coverage of private care homes is not mandatory. This left “many Ontario workers at the heart of the pandemic without workers’ compensation and those employers vulnerable to lawsuits” (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Bourgeault 2020, 478). Also, several workers were left without support from WCBs across Canada (a problem not limited to mobile workers). In fact, data comparing the number of outbreaks and workers’ compensation claims in Ontario revealed that workers were either unaware of their rights to claim or afraid to report an infection (Marotta 2021). In these cases, workers and their families would be the ones required to manage the burden of costs associated with the illness.

Paramedics are another example of frontline workers who work on the road but whose work often requires them to move in and out of client homes and health care institutions as well. The pandemic drastically changed their way of working (Arthur 2020), and certain issues were raised regarding their health and safety and the type of personal protective equipment they should use (Lacoursière 2020). There was also some confusion related to which recourse these workers had if they needed to protect their health and safety. The appeals tribunal in Québec concluded in a few cases that a paramedic could ask for protective reassignment3 if their personal health was impaired and the exposure to a contaminant in the workplace (the virus) would be dangerous because of this impairment.4 In other cases, however, the tribunal decided that the COVID-19 virus was not a “contaminant”5 and rejected such demands, leaving workers without this means of recourse.

Mobility as Work

Workers in the ground transportation industry, such as truckers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, and delivery drivers, faced particular challenges during the pandemic. On the one hand, lockdowns and business closures reduced the traffic on the roads, thereby reducing the risk of traffic crashes and injuries. On the other hand, new OSH risks emerged. Trucking was deemed an essential service in Canada from the outset of the pandemic (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021). As this work entails stopping at different places, truckers were at risk of infection at pickup and delivery sites and also at restaurants, stores, and garages along the route (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021; see also Qureshi et al. 2024). As a journalist reported, “Truck drivers practice social distancing all the time. They drive alone. They often sleep in their cabs. You might think the pandemic-required isolation would be business as usual. But they still must eat, shower, and use the bathrooms” (Norton 2020, para. 1). Indeed, truck drivers who travel long distances need rest stops and are required by regulation to stop driving after particular periods of time. In the first few months of the pandemic, many service places were closed, and prolonged periods without access to washrooms were an issue: “These constraints can affect the mental and physical health of truckers and contribute to the risk of humiliation and social isolation, particularly for women; they also force drivers to drive longer than they would like” (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021, 138). Researchers Vassyukova et al. (2024, 4) reported food insecurity (due to the closure of establishments), parking shortages (drivers having to park in unsafe locations), inadequate access to facilities (compromising their personal hygiene), and inadequate health care accessibility. As noted in chapter 1, trucking is “a high-risk occupation associated with stress, fatigue, . . . and other hazards,” and COVID-19 threats and infection control measures could exacerbate those hazards (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021, 139). A recent study of perceptions of long-haul truck drivers underlined fears some drivers had regarding their own health conditions when they had to drive to high-risk areas (Crizzle 2022, 175; see also Lemke, Apostolopoulos, and Sönmez 2020). Conversely, some truckers were stigmatized as “virus spreaders” (Vassyukova et al. 2024, 8).

Ground transportation workers were particularly prone to receiving different guidelines from different organizations related to COVID-19. Côté et al. (2024) highlight the confusion and lack of clear information arising from guidelines issued by various organizations. They report the experience of a taxi company manager and a school bus driver who received different information and recommendations from different stakeholders (e.g., employers, public health authorities, and OSH authorities such as the CNESST in Québec, not to mention social media): “This overload of information can therefore cause confusion among workers as well as the general population, and possibly frustration at finally having to synthesize the information themselves according to what ‘logic’ tells them” (7).

Trucking associations and researchers in the US and Canada pushed for priority access to vaccinations for truck drivers (Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021; Lemke 2021), but not all provinces in Canada were willing to give these and other essential transportation workers high priority in their vaccination programs (Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021; Villella 2021).

Other ground transportation workers, such as public transit workers, taxi drivers, and delivery workers, were part of the urban mobile labour force who went “to work during the pandemic, putting themselves at risk to support the mobility of others, including essential workers, and helping others when they self-isolated at home” (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021, 50). Several decisions have been rendered by the Québec appeals tribunal in order to determine whether the drivers had in fact contracted COVID-19 in the course of employment. In many decisions, the CNESST refused the claim of a worker, stating that the worker had not demonstrated that they had been in direct or indirect contact with the secretions of persons infected with the COVID-19 virus. After thorough examination of the presence or absence of outbreaks at work, contacts with infected coworkers and/or possibly infected users, and the worker’s personal environment, the tribunal often overturned the WCB decision and considered it to be probable that the onset of the disease stemmed from the particular hazards of the bus driver’s job during the period in question.6

As for platform workers, such as those working for Uber or Lyft and food delivery platforms, many are considered to be self-employed, meaning they are not covered by OSH and workers’ compensation schemes. Ineligible for paid sick leave, these workers might have had incentives to continue to work despite symptoms in order to avoid loss of income. Some platform companies introduced safety measures, such as contactless delivery, and offered financial support for COVID-19 illnesses, but for these drivers, their “perceived COVID-19 risks remained high because of platform-related work pressures, including rating systems” (MacEachen, Meyer, et al. 2022, 731). For delivery workers, risks remained, since they had to pick up food at sometimes crowded restaurants or had to deliver within buildings where social distancing was not always possible. As for drivers, some platforms put in place questionnaires for passengers in order to reduce the risk of drivers having to carry a symptomatic passenger. However, MacEachen, Meyer, et al. (2022, 738) report that this proved rather ineffective, and drivers reported being exposed to the virus.

Seafaring is one of the most dangerous occupations globally, and international seafarers, in particular, experience weak OSH standards on board (Shan 2022b; Shan and Lippel 2019). These workers face many OSH hazards, including extreme physical injury risks, mental health challenges, and workplace fatigue (Shan 2022b, 270). In addition to being employed in mobile workplaces, these workers also rely on multiple modes of mobility as they may commute long distances between their residence and ports of departure or disembarkation (Shan and Neis 2020; Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021, 66). Within Canada, some may work regionally, but many are interjurisdictionally mobile, and some, particularly international seafarers, will live within their work site for months at a time, as seen elsewhere in this book.

During the pandemic, seafarers were deemed to be essential workers and hence were expected to go to work in Canada (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021) and globally. COVID-19 created multiple new challenges for these workers and underlined pre-existing ones. During the first wave of the pandemic, outbreaks were common on cruise ships and had devastating impacts on both customers and crew (Stannard 2020), but there were outbreaks and cases on board other types of ships as well. Controlling the spread of COVID-19 on board vessels once an infection occurs is challenging, and during the pandemic, vessels with cases on board sometimes experienced difficulty finding a port of refuge and accessing appropriate medical care (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021). Desai Shan (2020b) reminds us that self-isolation of an infected seafarer in their cabin is hazardous for customers and for other crew because the ventilation systems may bring the virus to all cabins, as was the case on the infamous Diamond Princess cruise ship. If seafarers were to contract the virus while on board, they were particularly vulnerable to serious illness or even death because of limited medical facilities on the ships (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021 provide an overview of the different outbreaks that occurred on Canadian ships in the first year or so of the pandemic). On cruise ships, passengers were at some point allowed to leave the ship, but in some cases, cruise crew remained stuck on board, waiting to be repatriated and to return home (Neis, Butler, Shan, et al. 2021, 67).

A crucial problem faced by seafarers during the pandemic was shore leave refusal. As reported in April 2020, Canadian crews working internationally could be restricted to their vessels for up to three months at a time (MacDonald 2020; see also Doumbia-Henry 2020). Such measures may have reduced the risk of outbreaks on board ships, allowing the industry to continue to operate, but also resulted in excessively prolonged periods at work and confinement (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021). Given that communication tools like Wi-Fi and satellite phones are not always available aboard cargo ships, these workers struggled with social isolation (MacDonald 2020). Negative mental health consequences for these workers as well as workplace-related fatigue were reported (Lippel, Neis, and James 2021; Pauksztat, Grech, and Kitada 2022). Also, without proper shore leave opportunities because of denials from port authorities, the access of seafarers to primary health care was certainly a challenge (Shan 2022b, 280). In Canada, it appears there was some jurisdictional confusion related to seafarers and COVID-19. Transport Canada (2020b) promised to ensure the essential movement of domestic and international seafarers, including crew changes. But it appears that some ports denied shore leave despite the federal guideline (Shan 2020b). Indeed, provincial/municipal health authorities could possibly deny entry into their territories, outside the port property, since they are in control of the movement of persons and operation of businesses inside the province. However, the situation for Canadian seafarers was generally less severe than that for other seafarers, including particularly international migrant crew (Shan 2020c, 2022b; Pauksztat et al. 2020).

Crew changes were also problematic. Shan reports that crew changes are crucial to protect seafarers’ health and safety (2022b, 276; see also Shan et al. 2024) “in that they relieve seafarers from their heavy workloads at sea and enable them to have a period of rest and to spend time with families and friends between voyages” (2020b, para. 9). During the pandemic, it appears that some foreign companies would extend contracts up to a year, a clear violation of the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (Shan 2020b; MacDonald 2020).

Fish harvesting is also a hazardous occupation associated with mobility as work. Some of the safety risks related directly to the COVID-19 pandemic were exacerbated by features of the industry. Neis et al. (2022, sec. 1.1) identified these features as the following:

a) mobility of crews to and within work and interactions with shore crew during offloading, which presents opportunities for infection; b) frequently crowded working and living conditions onboard vessels, complicating adherence to physical distancing guidelines; c) limited ventilation in fishing vessel holds and sleeping quarters; d) potentially constrained resources in fishing communities for pandemic education, communication and for monitoring safety practices by health and safety and public health authorities; and, e) limited access to health care during prolonged periods at sea, and in remote communities.

Neis and colleagues emphasize the tension between economic pressures and safety concerns: Fish harvesting is a crucial segment of the economy in some places like NL, but it wasn’t clear for a while, from the point of view of public health and other regulators, how fish harvesters could do their work in a safe manner. In 2020, the startup of some seasonal fisheries was delayed in NL during discussions about whether it was even possible to provide safe conditions for the fish harvesters (Neis et al. 2022). It is also worth noting that in August 2020, the federal government set up a program to help compensate self-employed fish harvesters for their losses during that fishing season (Fisheries and Oceans Canada 2023).

Notably, international fishermen shared similar issues to those of international seafarers in terms of “employment disruptions, extended periods at sea, loss of access to shore leave, limited access to health care and other services, and challenges returning home due to closed borders” (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021, 31).

The airline industry was affected by massive layoffs after the onset of the pandemic. However, airline workers who continued to work put their health at risk when helping international travellers return to their home countries: “Between March 13 and 27, 2020, 158 international flights into Canada had at least one infected passenger. Close proximity of flight attendants put workers at high risk of COVID-19 . . . , and more than 1,000 flight attendants went into 14-day quarantines” (Neis, Butler, Neil, et al. 2021, 34) [original references omitted]. After the peak of the pandemic and the lifting of travel restrictions, a massive travel rebound occurred. Because of different factors, there were many delays in flights and lost baggage, and airline workers faced verbal abuse and physical threats from frustrated passengers (Reynolds 2022).

Conclusion

This case study of COVID-19 and the mobile labour force is instructive at a number of levels. While most research linking mobility and OSH focuses on injury-related risk, COVID-19 is an example of an occupational disease where we have documented exposure risk, spread, and impacts at work and while living at work, in transit, and at home. There is also clear evidence of heightened illness and fatality risk among members of the mobile labour force who kept going to work, many deemed essential, relative to those privileged enough to work from home, live at home, and travel alone during the pandemic. For the former, the pandemic highlighted the variable but inherent relationship and interconnections between work requirements in some sectors and ERGM. Predictably, as shown here and elsewhere, congregate work, travel, and living situations (as with international migrant agricultural workers) were associated with a higher risk of outbreaks. While the precise origins of exposures and illness were somewhat masked among workers living, travelling, and working in congregate settings, with employers often pointing to situations outside of work as the main threat and source of outbreaks, they were less ambiguous when FIFO and DIDO workers experienced outbreaks at work and in camps. Quarantine requirements designed to protect communities and regions with low infection rates reduced the risk of returning workers infecting families; however, social isolation and prolonged periods apart created huge challenges for those workers and their families.

Mobility between work sites, as with temp agency health care workers, influenced both worker and client risk, as did living in crowded situations outside of work, such as apartment buildings, where workers from multiple high-risk work and ERGM situations might share living space. Further exacerbating transmission and other health risks across the spectrum and throughout the home-mobility-work cycle was more limited access to vaccinations, paid sick days, health care, and personal protective equipment and other infection control measures, particularly among precarious status IMWs and precariously employed, low-wage, racialized, and nonunionized workers.

COVID-19 effects and regulatory responses combined to make ERGM more visible to regulators and to the public but too often led to immobilizing mobile workers such as seafarers, truckers, and others within work sites and camps for prolonged periods with significant mental health and other consequences. These effects and regulatory responses highlighted ways siloed public health, occupational health, immigration, and transportation regulatory and inspection frameworks could contribute to both worker and public risk with economic, social, and health impacts.

As with the rest of this book, this exploration of COVID-19 and its impacts on the mobile labour force calls into question the separation in law and policy between “travel time” and “work time” that underlies employment standards, OSH, and compensation regulations, treating the former as a matter of choice, separate from employer and state control and influence. An alternative view, informed by the literature on IMWs and precarious employment but seen through a mobility lens, draws our attention to ways employer practices intersect with current and past state policies, such as patriarchy, racism, and colonialism, to influence not only which workers do what types of jobs and their control over their working conditions but also where they live and their mobility both to and within work. An important factor, then, in employment relationships is the mobility regimes of employers and how these operate to constrain worker control, voice, and engagement with OSH and the compensation system. We turn to this in the concluding chapter.