• Essential Work, Disposable Workers
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Essential Work, Disposable Workers

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This book is about the massive expansion of precarious work under neoliberalism and how migrant workers are challenging the conditions of their hyper-exploitation through struggles for worker right...
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  • 25 July 2023
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In recent years waves of migration from the Middle East, Latin America and Africa to Europe and North America have been met with a corresponding rise in anti-immigrant, far-right populism in host countries, placing the question of migration at the forefront of politics and social movements. In this sweeping account, Henaway seeks to understand these patterns through contextualizing global migration within a history of global capitalism, class formation and the financialization of migration. As globalization intensifies, workers everywhere are forced to compete for wages — not through foreign investment and outsourcing, but through an increasingly mobile working class. Henaway rejects the dominant responses of restricting or “managing” migration through temporary worker programs, proposing that stopping a race to the bottom for all working people involves building solidarity with migrant worker struggles for decent work and justice. Through examining the organizing strategies of migrant workers at giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart as well as discount retailers like Dollarama and Sports Direct, the immense power and agency of precarious workers in global companies like Uber or Airbnb, the successful resistance of taxi drivers and fast food workers around the world, and the contemporary mass labour movement organized by new unions and workers’ centres, Henaway shows how migrant demands and strategies can help shape radical working class politics.
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Price: $27.00
Pages: 320
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Imprint: Fernwood Publishing
Publication Date: 25 July 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781773632254
Format: Paperback
BISACs: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Immigration, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, LAW / Emigration & Immigration
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Mostafa Henaway, a Canadian-born Egyptian, is a long-time community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, where he has been organizing for justice for immigrant/migrant workers for over two decades. He is also a researcher and PhD candidate at Concordia University
Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee. She is formally trained in law, works with women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013).

: Foreword by Harsha Walia
Chapter 1: : Neoliberal Migration Takes a Grip
Chapter 2: : Financialization of Migration: Keeping Global Capitalism Afloat
Chapter 3: : The Making of Migration Crisis and the Unwanted Migrants
Chapter 4: : Managing Migration and Class: Trump and Trudeau, Both Want to Globalize the Kafala System!
Chapter 5: : Precarious Work for Precarious Workers
Chapter 6: : The Amazon Economy: Just in Time Distribution for Just in Time Production
Chapter 7: : We Built This City! The City as a Sweatshop
Chapter 8: : Continuity and Change: New Forms of Organizing and Immigrant Workers
Chapter 9: : Workers Centres in a Time of Crisis
Chapter 10: : The Fight for 15 Immigrant Workers: Fight for the Entire Working Class
Chapter 11: : A Day Without an Immigrant: Striking for Status
Chapter 12: : Solidarity Summer and Great Migrations
Conclusion: : From Movements to Power: We Are People, We Are Not Illegal