Mostafa Henaway is a long-time community organiser based in Montréal. While in London in 2015, he was involved in the Unite Community Centre Tower Hamlets. After returning to Montréal, he has been involved in the Immigrant Worker Center. In this interview, Mostafa discusses these two experiments in worker organising.

Starting with Unite Community

I was involved in Unite Community in 2015. The idea with Unite Community was, essentially, to build a second front against the Conservative government, especially during the moment of the extreme austerity measures. There were changes to Universal Credit, with benefits being tied to job seeking and finding employment, as well as other issues beyond that. At the same time, there was organising with DPAC - Disabled People Against Cuts - and it was coming off the back of a massive wave of student protests and anti-austerity campaigns. Unite saw strategically, from their perspective, the need to fight these cuts and austerity programmes. They saw what David Cameron proposed as a way to undermine trade unions by propelling a massive injection of the reserve army into the labour market. They were pushing them into the labour market, into zero-hour contracts, and so on.

Unite saw that they had no base outside of their direct membership. So this project was a way of building an unemployed workers or poor people’s flank to the union. It was a second flank in the the fight against the government. I think the two most important parts of this were, first that people who were unemployed could become members of Unite. They would have their own structure and a very reduced rate of membership fees, something like 50 pence a week. Through that, they would have access to Unite services. The idea was that if these people became Unite members, then if they went on to have jobs they would be part of the union already. So, in that way, Unite Community functioned more like a community union and was quite flexible on demands.

They would operate as a chapter in their own right with their own governing structures and elections. Through this, chapters would work with other groups and bigger campaigns. One of the campaigns I was involved with was around benefits and trying to build a united front with different unemployed workers and poor people’s groups. This involved the London Coalition Against Poverty, housing groups, and several local groups. We worked with the E15 campaign in East London, campaigning against evictions. The aim was to work with different groups, both within Unite Community and more widely. There was some tension with doing that, but the flexibility of Unite Community meant that local groups could take on quite different focuses. For example, in Belfast, they focused on youth-related issues, including suicide. They ran a boxing club as a way to get youth off the streets.

Unite Community Centre in Tower Hamlets

One of the experiments that I became involved in was setting up the Unite Community Centre in Tower Hamlets. This was a kind of worker centre. The aim was to serve the community by providing services around taxes, benefits, and work-related rights. It provided classes on basic computer skills and language skills. There was an organiser involved who was well-known in the local Bangladeshi community. He brought in a lot of workers and members. In addition to services, it also hosted political events. We had a discussion on housing struggles, fighting austerity, and Palestine. It wasn’t just direct services, but tried to find ways to build the membership of Unite and a united front against austerity in the borough.

There were, of course, lots of positive and challenging aspects to doing this. There were tensions between the leadership and the grassroots, as well as Unite Community members feeling like they were second-rate members. This was structural as Unite set up Unite Community with a membership structure that did not have the same rights as working members, such as voting within Unite. There was also an issue that, unfortunately, I think a lot of activists only grasped later on: that projects like this take a lot of time. Things take time, there are failures, or they don’t work out how you want them to straight away. We needed to be consistent, but there were all these discussions about “Where are we going?”, “Where is Unite Community going?” But it needed time to build out. Even if Tower Hamlets was a base, there were still problems with building a campaign that could go beyond service. So, there were challenges.

I also think it’s important to credit Unite for investing a significant amount of resources to experiment with something like this. This really shouldn’t be downplayed. There were many criticisms of Unite Community, including from the left, but the fact they were prepared to put resources into full-time organisers and community spaces across the country, was incredible. This was not only about immigrant communities but also in the de-industrialised parts of the UK. There were resources in the Midlands, the North, the North of Ireland, and so on. Given the rise of the far-right protests in Britain recently, you could imagine how Unite Community could have become a counterbalance in communities across the country.

In Tower Hamlets, the space was near the site of the famous Cable Street anti-fascist victory, which reminds me of these connections. The Unite Community project was focused on the centre itself. There were also other Unite members beyond Community who used the space. There were a lot of bus drivers who would come and take a break. So, there was an interesting interaction between Unite members, Community members, and others in the space. The other challenge was that we were so focused on the unemployed. It made sense to focus on precarious workers and those on zero-hours and be able to do both.

The day-to-day activity in the centre was mainly focused on outreach. This meant going around to talk to people in the community. Then, people would come in requesting services or to use the computers. People had all kinds of issues that they wanted to discuss, whether housing, housing benefits, or immigration. There were a lot of individuals coming in and dealing with that. On the weekends, there would be programming for members and membership meetings. Other than that, we hit the streets and did outreach around Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets in general. It was also keeping the place open, that was a big part of it. You couldn’t predict if it was going to be a busy or slow day. But if the centre was empty, we would spend our time out on Whitechapel high street, talking to people in the shops and the market. We wanted to make it into a hub, a place where people could meet, socialise, have their own meetings, and so on. It was really important to have that kind of space as there were few in Tower Hamlets.

Over time, the space included other groups and organisations. There was a Somali women’s organisation and lots of other informal networks. Some of this was through the Trades Council, as well as the actual council. Unite had members at the council and so a lot of housing issues came in that way. Unite Community wanted this space to be a hub for the community.

Perhaps one of the weaknesses was about the issues we focused on. Tower Hamlets was a poor urban community. It wasn’t the case that unemployment was the cause of poverty; it was often bad employment. So, if there had been more flexibility to deal with people who were working and the issues they were having, then there could have been a stronger base. We could have supported workers who weren’t getting enough pay or enough hours. So, looking back, I think that could have been a strategic mistake. They saw it as: “Unite is for people with a traditional job, Unite Community if you’re unemployed.” Instead, the centre in Tower Hamlets could have been a way to recruit workers more widely.

The Immigrant Worker Center in Montréal

The Worker Center began in 2000. It was started by Filipino organisers who were becoming disgruntled with the bigger business unions, particularly in the textile and garment industry. They left the unions and needed another model. They wanted another way to reach workers and build a sense of solidarity among them. However, they also wanted a way of developing their leadership and building campaigns that would be relevant to them, both in the community and in the workplace. It was focused on workers who were difficult to organise in the labour movement. So, for the Filipino organisers, it was really centered around domestic workers.

The way they were structured back then was really small. They got some startup money from the auto workers union. They had one staff member, a student, and they focused only on domestic workers. It was more about the neighborhood that the worker centre was in. This was an immigrant working class neighborhood that was predominantly Filipino. They focused on particular skills programming that could be useful. So, there was a leadership for change programme, but also teaching people how to use computers - fewer people were using them back then. They would have courses on labour rights, immigrant rights, the history of the labour movement, and more educational content.

In the early stages, it was much more about coalition building. They would focus on issues in the local community, whether that was around police violence or deportation campaigns. It was a hybrid, activist space where people wanted to focus on actually being in communities and trying to recruit workers and develop their leadership. Back then, it was tied more to that one community.

When a layer of us got involved in 2006/7, that was still very much the focus. However, it then started to become slightly more broad. We were dealing with mass layoffs in the garment industry and people were starting to approach us. This was the first time we started to develop a multi-racial base in the worker centre. We were doing these campaigns around severance for garment workers. There would be meetings of seventy-five workers, speaking in five different languages. This was a really great moment in the worker centre. We were able to be flexible. We were also dealing with political issues. For example, we had a strong base in the Tamil community and were involved in a lot of anti-war demonstrations in 2008/9. We supported the demonstrations and tried to get the wider left involved. The worker centre took a lead on this.

The worker centre also took a lead in organising the International Workers Day March each May. We developed an alliance of different immigration communities and the far left pushing demands together. The centre has always maintained a radical edge to it, being an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist project, while also trying to do the day-to-day work that is relevant to immigrant communities. There is no contradiction here. One day, we would be organising an event on Indian communism, then the next day a computer skills workshop. Our foundation was that we did not see any contradiction between these kinds of organising tactics.

In 2009, things really began to change in the worker centre. We were doing a lot more defensive work, taking on whatever was coming our way. We were spending all our time putting out fires - particularly as we do casework. This meant a lot of individual accompaniment with workers. There was a legal information clinic. Back then, it was two days a week - it is expanded now - but workers could come in if they had unpaid wages, been laid off, had health and safety issues, and so on. We filed the complaints and we would sometimes organise direct actions against employers. In 2009, we decided to build two organisations that were broad enough to deal with the precarious situations that our members are in, as well as build some sense of collective action. Because it was a worker center, there were structures that were both worker-driven and staff-driven. If we had a textile worker campaign, there would be weekly assemblies. All the political and campaign decisions came from the workers. But the day-to-day stuff, the budget, came from the staff. So there can be this fight between the two different approaches. The budget did not come from dues, so funding was always an issue. We would get money from radical professors, research grants, different trade unions, and so on to pay the rent and organisers. We rotated on unemployment and benefits constantly.

In 2009, we decided to become more membership-focused. We created what was called the Temporary Foreign Workers Association and the Temporary Agency Placement Workers Association. The Temporary Foreign Workers Association was for workers under the temporary foreign workers programme, who came on closed work permits to one employer, meaning they couldn’t switch employers. There was much more stability with these workers. There would be larger groups of workers and they all came under one contract. The Temporary Agency workers were much more fluid. Workers would be in all kinds of different agencies. There were people who were paid cash, with an employer who was just a guy with a cell phone. Then, there were bigger agencies, like Adecco and Manpower, that would supply a lot of warehouses. The idea was that these associations were independent of each other and organisers would be supporting the efforts in each. The aim of the centre was to focus on building these associations. We developed a newspaper and did weekly outreach at metro stations and different workplaces. We brought workers through the legal clinic and held labour rights workshops. We would have political campaigns around an issue each month at that stage. For example, campaigning around temporary placement agencies and demanding that they were regulated, because there is no co-responsibility between the agency and the employer. There would also be issues with agencies going bust and not having money to pay the wages.

This was the model for about four or five years. Slowly, actual immigration issues became much more pronounced. This was the big issue that our members were facing. There were lots of people coming from the US and claiming asylum. There was a huge wave of international students and an even bigger wave of people from South Asia. A lot of people had a precarious immigration status. Our entire base shifted to being people without permanent immigration status.

To jump forward to now, the worker centre has gone through a lot of changes. We have changed the structure over time. We have had some victories on the policy level. In 2019, regulations were brought in for agencies, including the same pay for the same work and co-responsibility. We have expanded significantly, but we have a focus on four main pillars. First, on leadership development. This term gets thrown around a lot in NGOs, but we mean more like training organisers and cadre building.

For example, a lot of our organizers are workers who are members. We don’t have activist organisers; they are worker organisers. For example, Gura, worked at Dollarma, a big warehouse like Sports Direct. He was an injured refugee claimant from India and an incredible organiser. A lot of people from the South Asian community were working in meat processing, warehousing, and truck driving. When we brought him in as an organiser, which was an incredible decision, the centre has been able to mobilise hundreds of people in that community. We had been trying for years and it wouldn’t have been possible without him. Then we have Viviana and Nina, both Spanish-speaking women workers who work through agencies. We have had a lot of immigration issues with what we call “fly-by-night” agencies. They were able to work out in the regions, working with these temporary workers and supporting them. We have been trying to build and support them as organisers, as well as train other organisers from the community.

The second pillar is that building leadership is fine, but only if it is part of trying to build collective organisation. Otherwise, what is the point of it? So we have become more flexible in our organisation structure. When you’re trying to organise across lots of sectors, particularly with temporary foreign worker programmes, then there are challenges to building workplace organisations. So we have tried to map these kinds of employment and find more flexible ways to organise. In one case, that’s a women’s committee made up of migrant women. They set their own agenda, campaigns, recruitment and so on.

Another project has been in Park X (Park/Parc Extension, a neighbourhood in Montréal) that is similar to Tower Hamlets. There is a massive new South Asian immigrant working class community. There are a lot of people working through agencies in the meat processing industry. They get picked up on buses and taken to different locations. Some of them work at Amazon and other warehouses. This means we need to build in the community. We have built through a really vibrant process of developing new leaders and community organising. So Gura was a professional theatre director in India on social issues. So we organised workshops on labour rights, immigration, health and safety, workplace-specific, cultural activities, the whole gamut. We went from five workers to something like three hundred at our events in that one neighbourhood over the course of five years. The challenge is that we haven’t been able to turn that into workplace committees and campaigns. But we’re doing that now with two campaigns. First, with truck drivers who are subcontracted and categorised as self-employed. There is a massive amount of wage theft among them and warehouse workers. So we’re building a warehouse workers section and a truck drivers section within this broader South Asian community.

We have had campaigns with a group in Montréal that work at the airport for the food prep company. They had a union at this French company called Newrest. The company was really shady, with everyone being paid under the table, but hundreds of workers having access to the airport. We met one or two workers and did cases, and then they brought more, and it became a hundred-worker campaign.

The third pillar is developing a political structure. We have been trying to build collective structures where we can. We are starting to see that develop. This is our near-term roadmap, to build these worker structures over the last year. Each committee sends two or three representatives to a council. The council meets twice a month and they discuss the bigger political campaign. So it also acts like a solidarity network. We find out about each other’s campaigns and then can mobilise for each other. The idea is that it removes a lot of decision-making from the staff to this council, but trying to make the council a working committee and not so bureaucratic. In a way, it acts like a union council of different local committees, but much more flexible.

An important part of this is that we’re becoming membership-based. The legal clinic is now four days a week, run by radical law students. Its more of a network where they drop in when they are needed for casework. We may see a hundred workers a week. We still use it as the number one way to actually meet workers and try to make connections. For example, when we do casework, we ask ourselves: “Is there a campaign that could come out of this? Is this a collective issue? Individual?”

And then the fourth pillar is our political work. We still focus on International Women’s Day. We have taken on a bigger role in organising the May 1st demonstration. We run a big cultural event that brings together all of our members. All the different committees are represented, and people from their community perform. Then we host a big dinner for everyone. It is the most popular event we do because it is cultural, political, and there is dinner with hundreds of other workers. The only difficult thing is finding a venue big enough to host it. Then, of course, we do the demonstration.

We also have a campaign around regularisation, which is the main political campaign for the centre. We have another one around basic labour standards right, and we are beginning to work on warehouse work. We have brought together workers from Amazon, Dollarama, and a few other warehouses to come up with a list of ten basic demands as a platform. This is the start of an organising campaign, collectively developing some basic and unifying demands. We are aiming to develop local committees and then either take these demands up through workplace organising, the union, or the wider political movement.

The centre has grown a lot over the time I’ve been involved. There was one staff member, now there are thirteen. It is all paid for with grant money at the moment. During the pandemic, there was a wave of cash, and we decided to take it. It won’t last forever. I think we need to transition to being self-financed and membership-led, but that takes time. Even if you have grant money, the problem is that you’ll spend ten to fifteen hours a month on grants. That could be time spent talking with workers. You also just end up kissing the butts of fancy NGOs and foundations. That’s the problem with grant money. It is as much work as raising subs from members, but it is much more annoying work. It might feel better getting that cheque all at once, but it is a dangerous path to rely on grant money.

Why a worker centre?

I think an important benefit of a worker centre is having a physical space in an immigrant, working class neighborhood. This is vital. I always think about how, with a project like this, you cannot see the outcome right now, but it is much further down the road. Whenever we look at working class history, we see these high points. Take the what the CIO did in the US, well that was rooted in the Communist Party in the 1930s. Well, what preceded the 1930s? These moments don’t come out of nowhere. They are built out of the experiences that came before, whether in the US, the Knights of Labor or the IWW. They are all built on previous experiences. In that sense, a worker centre can play an important role in a neighbourhood. It can become a working class institution and play a pivotal role in facilitating the development of a working class identity. For example, there are already lots of good community organisers and housing organisers, but these struggles need to be tied together. A worker centre can bring these things together with struggles over work, which is already tied into these other struggles. This is about developing a more overt class politics. There is no magic pill, but having a physical presence is so crucial. A worker centre is a starting point.