Permanent Precarity

  • Mostafa Henaway

Joel, a friend and activist working at Dollarama’s distribution centre on the outskirts of Montreal, called me in March 2020 asking to meet in person. All businesses had been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic except those deemed essential. I was scared to leave the house, but Joel said it was urgent. I met him along with a group of his co-workers. The first thing he asked me was, “Why are we essential? Why don’t we have the right to be home like everyone else? Because the owners can make more, they’re playing with our lives?” This is a workplace dominated by people at the margins of the labour market. Asylum seekers, new immigrants, and those awaiting deportation who had come from the US during the summer of 2017, crossing the border at Roxham Road between Quebec and New York state. When these workers were deemed essential, it was not an honour but a slap in the face. Their lives had been identified as collateral damage in the name of profit. Such low-waged essential workers remained at their jobs, placing their lives at risk for little pay. And when companies offered “pandemic pay,” it was often short-lived and fought for by the workers. 

In Montreal, at the time the epicentre of the pandemic in Canada, low-waged essential workers bore the brunt of the pandemic, as they did in other cities globally. Employers with little concern for their employees’ health, safety, and well-being only exacerbated the situation many faced before the pandemic. As Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center at Yale School of Medicine, put it: “We know that these racial ethnic disparities in COVID-19 are the result of pre-pandemic realities.”1Statistics Canada released numbers showing immigrants are at higher risk of death because they predominantly work in essential industries such as care work, agriculture, food processing, the supply chain, and logistics. According to Statistics Canada, immigrants comprise 20% of the total population but accounted for 30% of all COVID-19-related deaths. Further, as of June 2021, immigrants made up 44 to 51% of COVID-19 deaths in Vancouver and Toronto.2In Montreal, the neighbourhoods of Montréal-Nord and Parc-Extension, whose populations comprise immigrants and the working poor, were hit especially hard. One of the asylum seekers living in Montréal-Nord who lost his life to COVID-19 was Marcelin François.3He worked in a textile factory through temping agencies during the week and in long-term care homes on the weekends. His wife also caught COVID, but managed to survive; she worked through an agency at a Cargill meat-processing plant, which saw one of the most significant outbreaks in Quebec during the first wave. 

The pandemic led to a wave of worker organizing in the face of seemingly belligerent employers who had little regard for their workers as profits skyrocketed. The last few years have seen historic organizing campaigns within the hardest-to-unionize sectors in the Canadian context. One of the most vital has been the case of Chapters-Indigo. Alongside this, the Teamsters’ historic union drives at Amazon in Alberta, worker organizing at Dollarama warehouses by the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and Gig Workers United in Toronto all point to a similar trend. The pandemic has led to an urgent rebuilding of the labour movement in sectors deemed at the margins of the trade union movement. Beyond Canada, the US is witnessing one of the largest and longest waves of labour militancy since the Second World War, nicknamed Striketober. Significant strikes at everywhere from Kellogg’s to John Deere and the forming of the Amazon Labor Union in New York are likewise part of this renewed labour movement. This is a historic moment. While not yet constituting a rupture with the current paradigm of neoliberal capitalism, workers, and more broadly society, are now moving forward in a progressive direction. There is push back against the neoliberal revolution, which undid the victories of previous generations of workers and has enforced market discipline on all workers and marginalized populations. From Black Lives Matter to the “Great Resignation,” movements and workers are learning from each other, watching each other, and creating a sense of a collective, coordinated movement forward, which is beginning to challenge the very paradigm of neoliberal capitalism. When workers begin to learn possibilities for transformation not from the past but from each other, this is when it begins to present a real danger to the structures of power. As with other historical conjunctures such as the Great Depression and the post–First World War era, major waves of strikes and upheavals result from a combination of factors. They are never truly spontaneous: while on the surface movements respond to particular crises, in the background a long process of incremental learning between workers has taken place, opening up possibilities for these moments of upheaval and rupture. Where this current moment is leading us, though, remains uncharted; the destination will be determined by how far we are willing to move forward and at what pace we can go as we uncover possibilities to address the sense of precarity we have long been forced to live with. But, as a result of the pandemic, we have been given the opportunity to view our contemporary situation with previously unattainable clarity, as the market discipline and permanent precarity that have dominated workers’ lives and livelihoods for the past three decades become glaringly exposed.

Global Capitalism’s Need for Permanent Precarity

Those on the frontlines delivering our food, stocking our shelves, cleaning our hospitals, caring for our elders, and growing our food were deemed essential overnight. Yet, before the pandemic, these workforces were largely invisible and deemed disposable. Across Europe and North America, these workers share similar traits: many are immigrants, asylum seekers, those without status, coming from the Global South, and racialized. Such essential workers hold precarious jobs, often low paid, non-unionized, dangerous, and contract, temporary, or part-time. These jobs are deemed low-skilled and must be done on site, unlike the remote work possible in “high-skilled” sectors, or what anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs,”4like marketing and project management. Under the pandemic, we collectively realized that our society is unable to survive without low-paid essential workers. Marxist-feminist scholar Tithi Bhattacharya more accurately describes these jobs as “life-making jobs”;5without them, we would not be able to reproduce our societies. They are essential, though, not just to our communities, but also to global capitalism. The largest corporations’ cores consist of mass pools of precarious and disposable workers, from Amazon and Walmart to the agriculture and food industry. 

The transition toward permanent precarity—a central pillar of the neoliberal revolution—began in the 1970s. In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of that decade, a key strategy for corporations was to globalize capital. This meant offshoring manufacturing to the Global South in search of cheap labour, privatizing state enterprises, and deregulating labour markets. In Canada, it led to the reduction of manufacturing employment to 12%.6The threat of offshoring was crucial for extracting concessions from workers to accept increasingly flexible work arrangements and wage cuts. Manufacturing activities, which are labour intensive and cannot be offshored, were also hard to automate. Globalization transformed the Fordist employment model, dismantling full-time, unionized, and single-employer jobs. This has made workers insecure in their employment in the face of deteriorating wage structures. The decline of the social wage (which might include cuts to social assistance, employment insurance, and other state benefits) has compounded a sense of insecurity. In Canada, by 2019, part-time employment reached 20% of total employment.7The transition to increasingly precarious work also relies on the production of precarious workers. The pandemic has illuminated how precarious work is bound to the racialization and feminization of low-wage essential labour, such as agriculture and care work. Those living with precarious immigration status become ideal workers for sectors that rely on a revolving door of disposable workers. As sociologists Ellen Reese and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson put it in their analysis of Amazon capitalism through the prism of racial capitalism: “White supremacy is such a normalized part of capitalism that it often obscures the racial violence inherent in capital accumulation.”8

In Canada, for example, the number of workers in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program outpaces those on a path of permanent migration. As a result, migrant workers are absorbed into flexible and lean labour regimes characterized by insecurity, low wages, and increased risks to health and safety. The intersections of migration, gender, and new forms of precarious work have created what can even be called a sense of hyper-precarity under neoliberalism. This transformation of labour has directly resulted in the structural inequality crisis we currently find ourselves in. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the top 1% of Canadians hold 25.6% of the wealth; this equals the wealth held by a separate 80% of Canadian society.9

The extent of corporate power in the current Canadian context becomes evident when examining the disparities of wealth and power in relation to large employers that also dominate their industries in terms of sales. For example, three food retail corporations account for 72% of food consumption in Canada: Metro, Loblaws, Empire (Sobeys and Safeway). Total sales reached $83.8 billion in 2016.10Extreme corporate concentration of our food distribution systems equips these corporations with immense power to dictate conditions and wages across their supply chains, from industrial bakeries to food processing, agriculture, and retail. In Toronto, Enrico Miranda, a Filipino migrant worker, was killed in 2019 while working at an industrial bakery in North York. He was the fifth temp agency worker to die at Fiera Foods since 1999.11Fiera relies heavily on temp agencies, since their positions are gruelling and low paid. Because temp agencies help client companies evade responsibility for workers, it results in little regard for health and safety or proper training, which in turn has led directly to worker deaths. Fiera’s most prominent clients are Sobeys, Metro, Loblaws, and Tim Hortons. 

The retail sector notoriously relies on a minimum-wage, part-time workforce that is highly gendered. During the first wave of the pandemic, workers at the giant retailer Indigo Books and Music were deeply concerned regarding health and safety issues and basic respect in the workplace. Meanwhile, as her workers were forced to take on extra duties including sanitizing without proper equipment, had many benefits cut, and experienced mass layoffs, CEO Heather Reisman’s family maintained their $1.4 billion of wealth, which places them in Canada’s 1%. According to an Indigo worker named Jennifer, “[Indigo] is always telling us that we’re the backbone of the store, that we’re the ones driving the profits ... and yet your most vulnerable employees are getting the least protections in your store.”12Organization campaigns at the company are significant and hold hope that young people, mainly marginalized women, can push their voices front and centre. Since September 2020, several Indigo stores have voted to unionize.

Amazon Capitalism Made in Canada

The just-in-time production at the heart of the global economy likewise requires a globalized, just-in-time distribution and logistics. From the 1980s onward, heavy engagement in international commerce, logistics, and goods movement became key to corporations’ competitive advantage, because this shift in and scaling of logistics allows firms to maximize profits through fusing the production and circulation of goods. This “logistics revolution” has become central to global capitalism and accounts for the rise of today’s most powerful corporations, such as Walmart and Amazon. The ability to match low-cost, just-in-time production with equally low-cost, just-in-time distribution is central to their retail strategies. 

The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the rise of the e-commerce model that Amazon and others rely on, with sales reaching a record $3.9 billion in May 2020 in Canada.13High turnover due to working conditions and low pay has made this sector reliant on perma-temps. For example, a 2019 report found that, in a sample of fifty warehouse workers, all were immigrants, 90% were temps, and many faced unsafe working conditions.14In Montreal alone, the logistics and warehouse sector employs nearly 100,000 workers. 

The Montreal Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) began organizing with precarious workers at Dollarama warehouses nearly a decade ago. We distributed flyers and organized workshops and campaigns to improve basic conditions. These actions were spurred by Dollarama workers approaching the IWC and sharing their indignation that, because of their status or race, they were being treated unjustly and that no other workplace had placed them in such precarity. Dollarama is one of Canada’s largest retailers, operating over 1,200 outlets and achieving annual sales of $3.78 billion. Its owners are currently the fiftieth most affluent family in Canada. Yet most of Dollarama’s racialized immigrant workforce in Quebec receives an average wage of $13.50 to $14.75 per hour. The Rossy family has built its vast fortune on the extreme exploitation of workers at their stores, distribution centres, and warehouses.

Joel, the Dollarama worker mentioned at the beginning of this text, is just one of a thousand such employees hired by the five different temp agencies that the company uses. All workers across Dollarama’s six warehouses and central distribution centre are racialized, and many are refugee claimants with little access to health and safety measures or protective equipment. 

In March 20, 2020, I and other IWC organizers began doing outreach in front of the metro station where workers congregate. Joel and others alerted us to their dire work situation and fear during the beginning of the pandemic. We understood the seriousness of the situation, because Dollarama has often placed profit over the health and safety of its workers. We distributed masks. We encouraged workers to call the Labour Standards Commission. Finally, on April 7, workers held a press conference to denounce the situation they were facing. In response, Dollarama claimed it treated its workers well. 

In the spring and summer of 2020, we met with workers fired for questioning Dollarama’s protocols. We continued to collect contacts, organize workshops to support workers with immigration files, and hold rallies to halt cuts to COVID-19 pay premiums. We built coalitions with trade unions and community organizations, and succeeded in securing permanent wage increases. It took several actions and a year-long public campaign for Dollarama to finally directly deal with the IWC. But, ultimately, the concentrated actions of workers and allies in the public sphere created its own momentum, and our incremental, long-term actions proved that persistent action can force corporations to change their course.

From the Margins to the Centre

Much of the organizing we are witnessing at this moment is bringing hope amid the ongoing crises caused by our economic system. Despite the odds, workers at Amazon and Dollarama warehouses, grocery store clerks, retail workers, and gig workers are reclaiming their dignity. These current struggles are highlighting the collective crisis we all face: capitalism as a system is at the heart of the precarity and anxiety of our current moment. Much of this union revival, on the surface, may seem spontaneous. However, all along, organizations like the IWC and countless other workers’ centres and organized labour initiatives have been quietly pushing to bring the margins to the centre.

The IWC, for its part, has sought to organize among the most “unorganizable” sections of the working class, including immigrant women in the care sector, textile and garment workers, temporary placement agency workers in warehouses, temporary foreign workers in agriculture, and those in even more vulnerable positions, such as workers without status. The IWC’s strategy is to embed itself in communities and workers’ lives to build the solidarity and trust needed to defend these groups’ rights, both collectively and individually, regardless of any person’s status type of work. We believe such embedding is necessary for any renewal of the labour movement, which has become even more evident during the pandemic. In Canada, trade unions and policy makers boast about our union density rate, which stands at 32%, as compared to 11% in the US. However, once you scratch below the surface, another reality appears. Union density for private-sector workers is only 15%, and this represents the bulk of workers in Canada. One of the most significant obstacles to increasing this number is that unions have taken a defensive stance and shown themselves unwilling to adapt to the transformations of work and the composition of the working class. 

The IWC, founded in 2000, aims to overcome the current crisis within trade unions by viewing labour organizing as a movement in itself, beyond the confines of recognized unions. Precarious immigrant workers in Montreal required a space where they could discuss their issues, build solidarity, and organize campaigns to begin to undo the structural laws that exploit them. With unions unable or unwilling to organize temporary agency workers, it became necessary to build grassroots leadership directly among these workers. The IWC’s approach has been to build a coalition against precarious work, bringing together different groups of workers who experience precarity in various ways. It aims to build leadership and give a collective voice to workers, but also to organize beyond the confines of contract negotiations by building a movement that meets the needs of workers inside and outside the workplace. Regardless of how laws may or may not change, organizing among these precarious workers—who are at the heart of global capitalism—is essential. That these workers have the power to bring down the largest corporations, and even the entire economy, shows the immense power they have, despite their vulnerability. Under the pandemic, unions have finally begun to realize this and change toward a new way of organizing—one that reflects the realities and needs of today’s workers—is now happening. Because what is at stake is not just a renewed role for the labour movement, but, fundamentally, the possibility for radical social transformation to tackle the enduring crisis of capitalism we all confront.


Mostafa Henaway is a writer, organizer, and researcher. Mostafa has is a longtime organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, working with precarious immigrants and migrants for labour and migrant justice. Before that he organized with Taxi drivers in Toronto with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. He is also a PhD candidate at Concordia University in Geography, Planning and Environmental Studies focusing on the economic and social impact of Amazon warehouses. He is also a writer on issues of precarious work, migration and warehouse worker organizing. He is also the co-editor of Montreal! A Citizen's Guide to City Politics.

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