“Completely Free”: How a Subsumption of Labour and Nature Framework Explains the Surprising Expressions of “Freedom” by Immigrant Worm pickers in Ontario

Abstract

Canadian nightcrawler (Lumbricus terrestris) worms, the most popular live bait for recreational freshwater anglers, are hand-picked from Ontario dairy farmers’ fields by an immigrant labour force working in the middle of the night with limited equipment. Though no picker enjoys the arduous activity of picking worms, they do express feelings of “freedom” and “autonomy” in the job. Such expressions are surprising coming from mostly non-English-speaking immigrants, labouring with bent backs under dreary conditions producing profit for their employers in an unregulated industry. To understand these counterintuitive conceptions of freedom, I connect debates around “un/free labour” and “constrained agency” with the Marxist concepts of formal and real subsumption of labour and nature to reveal how the ecological conditions of commodity production shape capitalist control over labour. I argue worm-picker agency should be understood by seeing how the subsumption of labour is related to the subsumption of nature.