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Mostafa Henaway is a community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) 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 at Concordia University. 

For issue #77 of The Internationalist, we draw from Henaway’s book Essential Work, Disposable Workers: Migration, Capitalism and Class (Fernwood Publishing, 2023). In this excerpt, Henaway looks at the restaurant industry’s staff shortages in the Global North, leading to the exploitation of migrant and undocumented workers. This trend underscores the pivotal role migrant workers play in sustaining the food sector globally, revealing systemic issues of labour abuse and structural dependence.

An important aspect of the food industry, restaurant work, is poorly paid and demanding. In 2018, the New York Times published a report titled “A Fast Food Problem: Where Have All the Teenagers Gone,” which examines the decline of teenage employment in the fast-food industry. It reveals that the issue is not solely the lack of employment participation but also the expansion of the industry. In the US, with a 40 percent increase in the number of fast-food restaurants, fast food jobs have grown twice as fast as employment overall since 2010. The rise of the percentage of people’s food expenditures in that country had reached 49 percent of their food budget by 2010.

There is a staff shortage in restaurants in Canada and the US. The difficulty of finding workers has been a major issue for employers, and migrant workers have become the key or desired choice for cheap exploitable labour in the restaurant industry. Because of their status, these workers are regulated and funneled into sectors that demand a particular kind of worker. Researcher Bridget Anderson calls this hiring phenomenon “migrant jobs for migrant workers”. In Quebec, the restaurant employers council has called for an easing of restrictive immigration measures in order to fill vacant jobs in the growing industry. The president of the council claims, “But if we don’t get a larger share of immigrants, permanent or temporary, we are actually risking the employment of Quebecers”. In the UK, employers have created racialized preferences for what is considered an ideal worker within the sector. Many employers do not see hiring “local” workers as a viable option.

In France the issue of undocumented labour in the restaurant industry came to the fore after the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy passed regressive immigration laws in 2007. Undocumented workers staged a strike, demanding status. The goal of the strike was to show that entire chains of restaurants relied on the exploitation of undocumented workers, many of African origin. The expansion of the restaurant industry could have led to wages going up due to a tightening of supply, but readily available low-wage labour is necessary in a sector with low rates of profit.

Reliance on migrant labour in restaurants has been a major factor in the demand for relaxed immigration policy not just in the US and Canada, but in Europe as well. In the UK, migrants are disproportionately employed in low-skilled work — half of all those working in canning or bottling factories, for example, are foreign born. People come to the UK looking for work, and most gravitate to where there are vacancies. This concentration in agriculture and across the food chain, downward pressures and the use of what could be termed “internal value chains” always ensure that the value added goes to those firms that control marketing and distribution. This is true even for grocers in the food industry. This has resulted in employers in the US relying on an undocumented reserve army of labour, despite the consequences. The same is true in the sea of plastic in Spain and in the chicken processing and strawberry-picking industries in Quebec. Despite the efforts of governments to characterize this phenomenon as “human trafficking,” or the behaviour of a few bad employers, the working conditions are due to structural factors. The trends of intensive work, low pay, inhumane housing conditions and “unfree” racialized labour are central across the food sector. This speaks to how these workers generate both our sustenance and the massive profits of major grocers and food titans. Relative price stability is also important, and it is achieved on the backs of migrant workers. This in turn has impacted subsistence farming in the Global South, with the flood of cheap imports from the Global North.

Regardless of which part of the supply chain you look at, our dependence on the ever-increasing role of monetarized food and eating out at restaurants relies on migrant labour, whether undocumented, guest workers or those with status. While these jobs are considered “not real jobs,” these segments of the economy are becoming increasingly crucial. Corporate concentration has led to trade wars and agribusiness conglomerates and monopolies that rely solely on a flexible, vulnerable and racialized workforce. This workforce is understood to be “loyal and hardworking,” which is code for stratified and locked into the lowest ranks of the labour market without any chance of escape, either due to their status, the needs of their families back home or the ways in which the work is segmented and racialized. Migrant workers are tasked with the hard job of providing our societies’ very sustenance at an inhumane cost. We depend on them for the orange juice we cherish, the bread we eat, the meat and vegetables on our plates and the restaurants we frequent. They are not working in a marginal economic sector or activity; they are essential.

Excerpted from Essential Work, Disposable Workers by Mostafa Henaway, published by Fernwood Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Mostafa Henaway. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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