*Le français suit.
In collaboration with Fernwood Publishing, Solidarity across borders and the Immigrant Worker Centre (IWC), the Social Justice Centre presents a book panel on “Essential Work, Disposable Workers” by Mostafa Henaway at the SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation on Feb 7 from 6-8 pm.
Mostafa Henaway is a former graduate fellow of the Social Justice Centre, a researcher, and a long-time community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, where he has been organizing for justice for immigrant and migrant workers for over two decades.
???? Snacks will be provided.
You can also join us by zoom : Register on zoom.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1098103861540806/
Guest speakers
Sonya Ben Yahmed is a researcher and doctoral student at the University of Montreal, whose multidisciplinary work touches on questions of gender, violence, body, language and mobility. She is also a long-time activist, within the feminist movement in Tunisia, her country of origin, and more broadly in social movements in Tunisia and Quebec, particularly those linked to racism, colonialism and migration issues, such as Solidarity Across Borders. She also works on these questions, for example as the coordinator of the Gender (I)mobilities and Precarious Situation Project.
Manuel Salamanca Cardona is a community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre. He has been an activist and member of the board of directors of the Center for Immigrant Workers of Montreal (CTI) since 2013. He is also a sociologist and researcher previously with the SHERPA Institute of the CIUSSS West-Central Montreal and for McGill University. He is a member of GIREPS and works on issues of immigration, labor law, popular education and knowledge production in social movements.He is currently conducting research on the relations between unions and immigrant organizations in Quebec thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the FRQSC.
About the book
Across the world we are witnessing daily the lethal effects of a rapid and scary hardening of borders, ignited and justified by manufactured fear and scarcity. In such conditions, highly exploitative ideas of “managed migration” are presented as reasonable and just.
And temporary worker programs, championed by countries like Canada and the US, are presented as an acceptable response to both acute labour shortages and ugly nationalist feelings. For this, all workers pay the price in the form of dwindling rights and diminished solidarity. This book is the result of decades of thinking, organizing and deep research on the global struggle for equality and freedom in and against an increasingly walled world. Through this immediate and up-close account, Henaway takes the reader on a journey across a familiar consumer landscape of corporate power — from Amazon and Dollarama to chicken farms and late night rideshares —offering a vivid analysis of the consequences of a system built to marginalize, exploit and divide people through the creation of exclusionary categories of belonging.
In Essential Work, Disposable Workers, Henaway offers a counter proposal to the global border, arguing that we reject control over freedom of movement as a means to halt a race to the bottom for all working people and instead build solidarity across struggles for decent work and justice. In this moving account of a global system of hyper-exploitation, Henaway weaves stories of struggle with his own on-the-ground experience and expansive research, to explain the workings of a global system of managed precarity that affects everyone who works, albeit unequally. Written with the unique verve and insight of a committed scholar and decades-long grassroots organizer, Essential Work, Disposable Workers offers a vivid analysis to help us grasp the cruel consequences of borders and points to an alternative future.
JOIN US
In person: Concordia’s SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W. Montreal, QC H3G 1M8 (J.W. McConnell Building). Confirm your participation on Eventbrite (not required).
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