While York’s vice-chancellor, administration, and philanthropic alumni enjoy a disproportionate share of financial wealth, the workers, teachers, and students at York University remain left out in the cold, with their concerns and demands for living wages and a safe and protected educational environment going unmet.

History does not allow for a great deal in the way of direct instructions, but it is capable of identifying the times and places where people disturbed the complacencies of their time. In doing so, they brought about changes that were necessary but never inevitable. These struggles did not fully succeed, but their influence continues to be felt, and this too is one of McLachlan’s legacies.

In May 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike. Just two months later, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) joined them on the picket lines. Yet, while Hollywood suddenly ground to a halt due to these strikes, production continued and continues in “Hollywood North” without resolution.

Argentines weary of annual inflation soaring above 140 percent and a poverty rate that reached 40 percent have elected right-wing libertarian economist Javier Milei. He had campaigned on the promise to privatize state-owned enterprises, slash government spending, dollarize the economy, eliminate the central bank, and close key ministries, among them health and education.

Since Israel began its brutal siege of the Gaza Strip, Canada’s labour unions have come out in vocal support of the Palestinians. Ranging from calls for an immediate ceasefire, to opposition to Canadian arms sales to Israel, and statements opposing violence “on both sides,” unions have increasingly lined up to call out Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.

Fed up with the deterioration of public services under the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, thousands took to the streets of Montréal on September 23 to demand fair pay, improved benefits, and better working conditions while unions negotiated new collective agreements with the province. Journalist Lital Khaikin provides our latest labour update.

Unions have given us the weekend. They have fought for the eight-hour day. They have agitated for improved health and safety laws. They have eradicated child labour. They have managed to get us paid holidays and six paid public holidays each year. Here in Nova Scotia, unions have given 25 percent of workers a voice in what is going on in their workplaces.

The essays comprising For a Better World contain a contradictory interpretive dynamic, in which a present-minded insistence that the Winnipeg General Strike unfolded within a white working class erasure of Indigenous peoples co-exists with a more traditional analytic accent on the politics of class struggle.

After years of passivity in the face of upper class greed workers have begun to fight back. As Henry Heller explains, recent walkouts in Canada and around the world reflect a pattern of rising participation of workers in strike activity evident since 2020 as a belated response to years of wage suppression and recent spectacular increases in consumer prices.

On February 16, over 40 CUPW members at a Canada Post processing plant in Edmonton exercised their right to complain at a pre-scheduled meeting with management, who initially refused to give them five minutes to read their prepared statement and threatened them with discipline. Then those members were served with five-day consecutive suspensions and final warnings. Brett McKay reports.