Precarious - by Marcello Di Cintio (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book Award

A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.

In 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata spent two weeks in Canada, meeting with representatives from federal and provincial governments and human rights commissions, trade unions, civil society organizations, and academics--as well as migrants working in agriculture, caregiving, food processing, and sex work. His conclusion: the country's Temporary Foreign Worker program is "a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery." "I am deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared with me by migrant workers," Obotaka said in a statement. Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being denied access to health care, language courses, and other social services; of being physically abused, intimidated, sexually harassed; of the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity. In response, some farm owners and their advocates, angry at Obokata's comparison to slavery, defended the program, citing long standing relationships with workers who returned to their operations year after year. "If the program is so damned bad," one farmer advocate asked, "why do these guys keep coming back?"

In Precarious: the Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio seeks the answers to both the question and illuminates the charges that compelled it, researching the history of Canada's migrant labour program and speaking with migrant workers across industries and across the country to understand who, in this global elaborate enterprise, stands to gain, who to lose, and how a system that depends on the vulnerability of its most disenfranchised actors can--or can't--become more just.

Review Quotes

Praise for Marcello Di Cintio's Driven: the Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

"An astonishing book about folks from all over, many of whom have been through total hell but have somehow made their way out . . . You never know who's driving you. Each person contains multitudes."
--Margaret Atwood on Twitter

"In these deeply researched and richly--often shockingly--detailed portraits of Canadian taxi drivers from all over the world, Di Cintio reveals, among other things, the heavy price exacted by getting here, and staying here. The funny, savage, and poignant stories in these pages give a fresh urgency to an old saying that all of us should remember the next time we get into a taxi: 'Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.'"
--John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather

"A blend of reportage, social history, and personal profile, Driven is a triumph of curiosity and compassion."
--The Walrus

"Di Cintio takes the time and trouble to engage with a cross-Canada range of people representing a profession too often taken for granted. Most of them are immigrants; all of them are subject to scarcely conceivable challenges and obstacles, often exacerbated by the onset of Uber."
--Montreal Gazette

"A masterpiece of original sociological research, Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers is an extraordinary and deftly presented series of perspectives. Unique, engaging, entertaining, inherently fascinating, thoughtful and thought-provoking."
--Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of four books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, both winners of the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. His magazine writing has appeared in appeared in publications such as the International New York Times, The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, and Afar. Di Cintio has served as a writer-in-residence at the Calgary Public Library, the University of Calgary, and the Palestine Writing Workshop, and he teaches nonfiction writing at the annual WordsWorth youth writing residency.