No One Is Disposable: A Conversation with Mustafa Henaway

The Raah Lab hosted Mostafa Henaway on February 23, 2024 for a discussion of his newly published book Essential Work, Disposable Workers. The discussion focused on the need to situate migration beyond human rights discourses within a crisis of capitalism, Mostafa’s long years of organizing migrant workers in Montreal and finding modes of broad-based collective resistance to increasingly extractive immigration regimes. Dolores Chew (Marianopolis College) and Nildeep Paul were the respondents to the discussion.

In Essential Work, Disposable Workers, Mostafa Henaway offers a counter proposal to the global border, arguing for a rejection of mobility controls and for building solidarity across struggles for decent work and justice. Critically examining a global system of hyper-exploitation, Henaway weaves stories of struggle with his own on-the-ground experience and expansive research, to explain the workings of a global system of managed precarity that affects everyone who works, albeit unequally.

Bio: 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 in geography at Concordia University.