ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the unique regulation of piece wages (PWs) in British Columbia, Canada, and argues that the regulation of PWs helped entrench rather than remedy the work-related harms of farm PWs. PWs afford indirect control alongside other managerial, economic, and social mechanisms of labour control to ensure low-cost, productive, and compliant labour while distancing employers from their responsibilities for ensuring workers’ broader well-being and social reproduction. More recently, gig and platform workers have pursued PW regulation, and those providing in-person services have achieved some success. The chapter provides a brief conceptual section on PW as a political technology that organizes precarious workers by combining self-disciplining management with hyper-precarious labour conditions. It discusses piece rates in agriculture specifically, documenting some of the industry’s features that help explain how PWs have persisted as a dominant management and production strategy. Within the mushroom industry, piece rates vary according to mushroom quality and size.
