Category: Labour
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Fragmentation in Toronto’s Hotel Sector
The intensity of the current conflict between UNITE HERE and its trusteeship of Local 75 and Unifor’s formation of a new local of hospitality workers (condemned by most of the labour movement as a raid) makes critical self-reflection and discussion especially difficult. In this essay, Steven Tufts attempts to put this clash into perspective and offers ways forward that point to a unity beyond the current polarizing divisions in the sector. Keep reading »
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Don’t Let a Union Split Tear the Labour Movement Apart
Dear Canadian union sisters and brothers: There’s a lot to admire about your labour movement. With community organizing, creative street heat, and militant strikes, you’ve just scored the biggest win … Keep reading »
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Crisis in the Canadian Labour Movement
A crisis has suddenly erupted within the Canadian labour movement, falling along old divisions of the movement’s archaic organizational structure, and assisted by the lack of any strategic focus or … Keep reading »
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Workers are the Heart of the Algorithm
Antonio Casilli, a professor at Télécom ParisTech, is considered one of the leading experts in the capitalism of digital platforms. He was interviewed by Roberto Ciccarelli.
“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labour that is necessary to make the algorithms work.“ Keep reading »
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Doug Henwood and Hilary Wainwright – Insurgent Left, Resurgent Labour?
The relative success of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns have put left politics back on the political map. This panel seeks to explore the role that the labour … Watch video »
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A Just Transition From Climate Change and Unemployment
The global economy is facing numerous structural challenges. With the looming fourth economic revolution characterized by even more technological development and mechanization, the future of productive labour is bleak. Most … Keep reading »
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Unions and the Gig-Economy: The Case of AirBnB
The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions … Keep reading »
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Public Sector Unionization Grows
The composition of the labour movement has fundamentally changed over the last twenty years. This article reviews the dramatic changes in public and private sector unionization and some surprising differences … Keep reading »
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CAMI Strike 2017
After Another Setback Can Unifor Move On? A four-week strike at the CAMI assembly plant, that began on September 17th, ended on October 16th. Members of Unifor Local 88 voted 86% … Keep reading »
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Ontario Colleges On Strike
More than 12,000 Ontario public college faculty were on the picket line rather than in their classrooms on Monday morning after talks between the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) … Keep reading »
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Strike Vote at Laurentian University
In the latest turmoil in the Canadian university sector, faculty at Laurentian University are now on strike. At the core is the longstanding vices of the neoliberal university – underfunding, … Keep reading »
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Workers’ Comp is a Right!
For years now, injured workers and frontline advocates have been sounding the alarm that Ontario’s Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB) has been “getting its financial house in order” through austerity and cost-cutting measures. Keep reading »