Translating Solidarity: What Happens When the Jobs Disappear but the Workers Remain? Migrant Workers, Labour Mobility, and Community Unionism after the Del Monte Oshawa Closure

We are no longer facing a single crisis but a condition of upheaval, instability, and uneven change across multiple scales. How might cultural translation and mobility help us understand—and imagine new possibilities for—solidarity under these conditions?

This paper examines the struggle of migrant and racialized workers at Fresh Del Monte Produce’s Oshawa facility in Ontario, Canada. In February 2024, the company ended its contract with the staffing agency through which the previously unionized workers were employed. None were rehired, although production continued under direct employment arrangements. The resulting upheaval disrupted the relationship between workers, employment, and collective representation without closing the workplace itself.

The paper approaches solidarity not as a fixed bond but as a process continually shaped through struggle. As workers’ experiences, demands, and organizing knowledge move between workplaces, unions, migrant justice organizations, and communities, solidarity is translated into new relationships and meanings. These translations can connect local struggles to wider concerns about labour precarity, migration, and belonging. Yet they also raise questions about whose experiences are represented, what is lost or transformed, and whether relationships built through solidarity can sustain collective power when workers are displaced.

Situated within labour geography, the paper uses the Oshawa case to explore the intersections of cultural translation and labour mobility through a planetary perspective attentive to connections across places and scales. It examines the possibilities and limits of community unionism in carrying workers’ knowledge and collective struggles beyond the workplace. Rather than treating Oshawa as a model, the paper asks how solidarity might be renewed under changing conditions—and how the translation of workers’ struggles can contribute to more connected, reciprocal, and transformative forms of collective action.