Precarious

Precarious is a finalist for the 2026 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the 2026 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. It was recognised as a Globe 100 Best Book of 2025 and listed among The Hill Times' Top 100 Best Books in 2025. The book also won the 2024 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book Award.

A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labour and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.

In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata reached a scathing conclusion: Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program is "a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery." Workers reported excessive hours and unpaid overtime, being forced to perform dangerous tasks or duties not specified in their contracts, physical abuse, intimidation, sexual harassment, and overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that stripped them of privacy and dignity.

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio travels across the country, speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, care for our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles. He uncovers stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. Di Cintio reveals that vast swathes of our economy rely on the work of people we do not see, expands our awareness of modern migrant work, and shows that mistreating the most vulnerable diminishes our own dignity.