Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, will be appearing at Calgary Wordfest for the panel “Othering & Empathy.” Marcello will be joined by fellow writers Linden MacIntyre and Saeed Teebi, and host Christina Frangou for a discussion on empathy. What more life-affirming way to spend your Saturday night than walking a mile in someone else’s shoes? Come grow your mind and heart with these deeply thoughtful authors. Book will be available from Owl’s Nest Books.
The event will take place at the Memorial Park Library 2nd Floor on Saturday, October 18 at 7:30PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Precarious here!
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.
