Right-wing movements are capitalizing on people’s fears of a loss of dignity and livelihoods that has resulted from three decades of neoliberalism protecting the interests of capital in the advanced capitalist economies that rely on migration. In Canada, governments are pursuing a strategy of scapegoating migrant workers for our housing crisis and the cost of living crisis.
Migrant justice activist and scholar Mostafa Henaway will explore the massive expansion of precarious work under neoliberalism, and how migrant workers are challenging the conditions of their hyper-exploitation through struggles for worker rights and justice. The talk will also explore how the struggles of migrant workers are a central part of any genuine renewal of a labour movement that organizes and fights for the entire working class.
Mostafa Henaway is a community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, Quebec since 2007. The Immigrant Workers Centre organizes for both workers' rights and migrant justice. Henaway is the author of Essential Work Disposable Workers: Migration, Capitalism and Class (Fernwood Publishing). The book received the 2024 Errol Sharpe book prize by the Society for Socialist Studies and honorable mention for the Leo Panitch book prize by the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies(CAWLS). He is also a PhD Candidate at Concordia University researching labour conditions inside Amazon’s warehouses in Quebec and Italy