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, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program is "a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery." Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don't see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.

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 six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary.