Haseena Manek
I’m a freelance journalist currently based in Ottawa, Canada. I like to cover labour, migration and human rights (among other things).
I can write, edit and produce audio (for radio + podcasts).
Follow me on Twitter, and/or contact me at haseenamanek (at) gmail (dot) com.
‘Regularization’ could grant rights denied to millions of undocumented people
‘Regularization’ could grant rights denied to millions of undocumented people It’s a heady time to be a migrant justice organizer in Canada. The federal government has gestured towards modifying its immigration system, and migrant rights groups across the country have stepped up calls for mobilization to push Ottawa to transform a system they say is deeply…
Keep readingMigrant workers awarded damages from OPP in racial profiling case
Migrant workers awarded damages from OPP in racial profiling case In a landmark decision, a human rights tribunal in Ontario has ordered police to pay out thousands of dollars in damages in Canada’s first legal case examining allegations of discrimination and racial profiling of migrant farmworkers. During hearings, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) learned…
Keep readingTrans rights are human rights are workers’ rights
Trans rights are human rights are workers’ rights In 2019, Jessie Nelson was fired from their job as a server in a restaurant on BC’s sunshine coast. Two years later, in September 2021, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) ordered their employer to pay Nelson $30,000 in damages for injury to dignity. Nelson is trans…
Keep readingDon’t Bleed At Work
Don’t Bleed At Work Menstruators are the canary in the corporate coalmine. What can we learn from them? If you close your eyes and imagine a “perfect worker,” what do you see? Is it someone focused, dedicated, productive? Is it someone that never calls in sick, or never puts their personal life above their work life?…
Keep readingWhy Prison Labour Doesn’t Work
An explainer on how inmates are made to work and why they shouldn’t be. As protests on racial inequality and calls for defunding police overlap with news of COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons, conversations around dismantling prisons and prison labour have made their way into the mainstream. While activists, scholars and other experts have been advocating in…
Keep readingOrganizing food workers across borders
The Food Chain Workers Alliance supports labour organizing along the supply chain “Worker-led organizing is the way forward to a food system that is not exploitative, and nourishes all people,” says Elizabeth Walle, development coordinator at the Food Chain Workers Alliance. The Food Chain Workers Alliance is a coalition of unions and labour organizations across Canada…
Keep readingHow food workers are building solidarity across borders and industries
From Ontario orchards to Mexican Starbucks, workers are demanding better conditions, and working together to make it happen What does a Starbucks in Mexico have to do with an apple farm in Ontario? A lot, it turns out. Last fall, a group of migrant agricultural workers in Vienna, Ontario, staged a wildcat strike at Martin’s Family…
Keep readingProgressive economist banking on Bernie Sanders-style grassroots campaign in Ottawa
NDP Ottawa-Centre hopeful Angella MacEwen and her team are organizing and engaging constituents for electoral success, but also for the long haul. Angella MacEwen’s campaign office sits in a former yoga studio on a quiet street in Hintonburg, an historically working-class neighbourhood west of downtown Ottawa. A door splashed with orange signage with the NDP candidate’s…
Keep readingIWD 2021 and COVID-19
It’s March 8, 2021. We are mere days away from the dreaded one-year “pandemicversary” that has been looming from my calendar ever since the second wave of COVID-19 spread across Canada last fall. As I count down to March 11 — 365 days from when the WHO declared COVID a pandemic, and despite a simultaneously overtired…
Keep readingHere for All Seasons
On August 19, 2006, the Probo Koala, a ship registered in Panama and chartered by UK-based oil-trading company Trafigura, unloaded almost 140,000 gallons of toxic waste at the Port of Abidjan in Côte D’Ivoire. The waste was loaded onto trucks and illegally dumped in numerous city spots, some near the home of Naolo Charles’ parents. Within…
Keep readingThis is What We Do
Union Solidarity with Migrant Farm Workers On December 18, International Migrants Day, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW Canada) launched a petition calling for Canadian governments to protect the labour rights of migrant agricultural workers. “Without agricultural workers,” it reads, “much of Canada’s food supply would collapse.” UFCW Canada is one among several unions…
Keep readingMistreated, marginalized, migrant
Charting the wins and losses of migrant agricultural workers in Ontario during seven months of COVID-19. “Any time a migrant worker says they’re sick, it’s like they’re not supposed to be sick.” These are the words of Maria,* a migrant agricultural worker from the Caribbean who is currently working at a farm in Windsor-Essex County. Maria…
Keep readingInvested in crisis
Mohamed Yusuf left his home in Ottawa’s Heron Gate community in October 2018, following about four months of organizing with the tenant coalition resisting an eviction order issued by their landlord, Timbercreek Asset Management Inc. In the end, Yusuf and his neighbours – largely racialized, immigrant, and low-income families – were forced to leave their homes,…
Keep readingShared Risk? OMERS indexing dispute fits pattern of attacks
The Ontario Municipal Employee Retirement System (OMERS) Sponsors Corporation Board of Directors will be voting on whether or not to scrap guaranteed indexing for members in favour of a proposal they call “Shared Risk,” on June 24. OMERS is a defined benefit plan for about half a million municipal workers in Ontario, including school board and…
Keep readingAbandoned and Disposable: An Agricultural Worker Speaks Out
“We feel discriminated [against], abandoned and disposable. For the company, [it’s] very easy to get rid of us, but at the end we don’t get any information, nothing,” says Tony, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. Tony is a migrant agricultural worker at Highline Mushrooms, in Leamington, Ontario. Like other workers across Canada…
Keep readingUnion drive at WeedMD takes another twist
An effort to unionize workers at Ontario cannabis company WeedMD just got more complicated for the labour movement. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has been trying to organize at the medpot company’s Strathroy and Aylmer facilities. Kevin Shimmin, a national representative with UFCW, says workers contacted the union a few weeks ago over working…
Keep readingEssential but precarious: Toronto bike couriers fight for a union
Since Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced restaurants would stay open for takeout and delivery during the COVID19 pandemic, bicycle couriers have ben deemed “essential” workers. Already a dangerous job, bicycle couriers working for food delivery apps like Foodora, Uber Eats, Doordash and Skip the Dishes have no sick leave, no health insurance. Now they’re part of…
Keep readingBreaking bread & movement building
“I want to help people who look like me, I always tell women, get involved in the labour movement. We’ll make space for you.” So says labour activist Gogi Bhandal who, on Sunday March 1, came together in sisterhood and solidarity with over 500 women in Brampton, Ontario’s Starlight Grand Convention Centre for an annual brunch celebrating…
Keep readingThe case for a human rights response to homeless encampments
Haseena Manek and Leilani Farha A pattern is emerging. For two years running, the month of January has triggered the forced eviction of homeless people living in encampments in Toronto. This was the fate of those living in the Rosedale ravine a few weeks ago. They were evacuated ostensibly to preserve the ecology of the area,…
Keep readingOntario teachers begin one-day strike against Ford’s cuts
Today, members of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) walk off the job to protest ongoing attacks to the education system by Doug Ford’s government. Key issues for the teachers’ job action include preserving jobs, lowering class sizes and rejecting mandatory e-learning courses for students. The one-day province-wide walk-out will close secondary schools across the…
Keep readingOntario’s education workers inch closer to strike position
Last week, negotiations between the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) bargaining agent the Ontario School Board Council of Union (OSBCU) and the province move to mediation as bargaining makes no progress for the 55,000 education workers CUPE represents across Ontario. RankandFile.ca spoke with OSBCU President Laura Walton about the role of the government and Council…
Keep readingBargaining stalled for Ontario’s education workers
On July 31, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) filed for conciliation after 10 days of bargaining with the Council of Trustees’ Associations (CTA) and the provincial government. RankandFile.ca spoke with Laura Walton, President of CUPE’s provincial bargaining agent, the Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU), to discuss bargaining so far and the issues…
Keep readingSTAND UP, SPEAK OUT! An Interview with Shelina Merani on Comedy, Islam and Unions
Comedian, union activist and award-winning digital media strategist Shelina Merani uses stand-up to empower and educate by deconstructing stereotypes and building bridges. Merani has performed for unions and organizations in Canada and the U.S., including the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), the Union of Taxation Employees (UTE) and the Canadian Association of Labour Media (CALM). She has…
Keep readingJFAAP to launch report on the rights of temp workers
Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) will be launching their new report, Permanently Temporary, at an event in Toronto this evening. The community-led report details experiences of community members working with temporary employment agencies and the challenges they face as a result of their precarious working status. The report includes the anonymous accounts of current and…
Keep readingLabour council presidents across Canada #UniteAgainstRacism
Thirteen labour council presidents from across Canada have signed onto an open letter calling for the theme of Labour Day 2019 to be #UniteAgainstRacism. The letter was released by the Migrant Rights Network (MRN) as part of their ongoing anti-racism campaign. It calls for the labour movement to endorse the campaign by making #UniteAgainstRacism the theme…
Keep readingHuman rights support centre workers fight back against provincial cuts
“Our thing is that, as front line work is being cut, overall it affects the people of Ontario being served. I mean, what are they to do? If they’re being discriminated [against] in a human rights matter, what do they do? It’s not just impacting our front line people, it’s impacting the people of Ontario. That’s…
Keep readingWorkers at Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto are fighting for decent pay
“The best thing about this whole process has been an awakening among the workers,” said Local 518 President Elizabeth Wickwire in an email to Rank and File. “It is from small moments like this that I think the broader movement for workers’ rights is built. So, when people talk about fighting ‘Doug Ford’ or other larger…
Keep readingJoin a Group Discussion on “the Erotic” as a Source of Empowerment
“When I speak of the erotic, I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women,” writes American feminist writer, poet and activist Audre Lorde in her essay, “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power”. She speaks, she continues, “of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are…
Keep readingSome Local Politicians Commit to Anti-Racism Pledge Ahead of Election Campaigns
The idea is to get politicians to prove that they are against hate speech, says Memet Uludag, the national chairperson for United Against Racism. At the weekend, his group invited politicians to take an election pledge against racism, challenging them to commit to rejecting racist and xenophobic language ahead of votes later in local and European…
Keep readingPurple Yam or Screwpine Cakes, Anyone?
Growing up, Rolando Estores lived with his family in an apartment above his grandparents’ busy bakery in the city of Malolos in the Philippines. By the time Estores turned 18 he wanted nothing to do with baking. But that eventually changed. Sat in the office at the back of the Golden Ribbon Bakeshoppe on Dorset Street…
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Haseena Manek 