The paper analyses impacts of certification schemes on workforce recruitment and working relations in intensive farming. It discusses how migrants’ competence may be an argument to the recruitment of a foreign group, whereas foreign migrants are rather usually seen as odd-job men in intensive farming. In the context of a quality policy applied to French Corsican clementine farming, Moroccan labour migrations’ patterns were partly reshaped: farmers managed to obtain a dispensation for Moroccans recruitment, putting forward as a pretext their skills, acquired within long-lasting labour relations. Moroccan migrations participated to Corsican Eastern Plain’s agrarian development, by linking the quality of a labelled commodity into the context of its production, i.e. in relying on Moroccans’ skills, be these so-called or not, hard or soft. This case has thus compelling implications for further research on labour relations studies in intensive farming contexts. It suggests that forms of labour domination could be found and / or explained by a ‘quality turn’ within labelling policies applied to the intensive farming production of a commodity, rather than by productivist logics, as often stated in dominant literature. This research is based on different evidences from a fieldwork carried out in Corsica, France, from 2008 to 2010.