Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, will be featured in the Writers’ Trust 50th Anniversary event in Calgary, “Conversations in Trust Calgary: Canadian Authors Make Sense of Our World,” joining Canadian writers and leaders in the arts, business, and society for a national conversation on connection.
Marcello will be in conversation with fellow authors Guy Vanderhaeghe, Jenny Heijun Wills, and Shelley Youngblut.
The event takes place at Decidedly Jazz Danceworks on Wednesday, May 13 at 6PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers here!
Finalist for the 2026 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize • Finalist for the 2026 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2025 • One of The Hill Times’ Top 100 Best Books in 2025 • 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.
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.
