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André Frappier’s journey as a class struggle militant
I first met André Frappier in the late 1970s, when we were members of the Revolutionary Workers League, a pan-Canadian Marxist cadre organization. When the league decided to hoist its banner in the 1980 federal election campaign, André was chosen as our candidate in a downtown Montréal riding. For André, this was by no means the end of his political activism, quite the contrary, as this recent interview by Pierre Beaudet shows.
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Canada Goose workers fight for fairness in Winnipeg
Canada Goose Union is the latest iteration of a movement pushing for unionization among Winnipeg garment workers, calling out the luxury garment maker’s union busting practices, and shining a light on the hypocrisy of majority owner Bain Capital. For all the national pride associated with the “made-in-Canada” product, the company has been majority owned by the Mitt Romney-founded private investment firm since 2013.
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What if Canada Post was part of the post-COVID recovery?
Canadians own the biggest retail network in Canada: Canada Post. Imagine if those locations could drive a post-carbon, post-COVID transition. Imagine if each of those locations were retrofitted for energy efficiency including solar panels. Every delivery vehicle was electric and there was a network of charging stations from coast to coast to coast, supporting them and the needs of our communities by providing public charging stations.
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Stage left: Fighting precarity in the cultural industries
For the past several years, worker organizing and strike action in the cultural sector have been on the rise. While cultural workers with greater strategic leverage have carried out successful strike actions, those working in precarious situations have faced greater obstacles. This is particularly true for freelance and other arts workers with less stable forms of employment.
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Grocery’s long war: Part II
Following the corporate attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, and their attending defeats, grocery workers across the country ended the century in a workplace radically different from the one that existed several decades earlier. Workers who spent years making careers at supermarkets watched as their former world unraveled in a few short years and was replaced by a new low-wage, low-benefit, part-time reality.
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CLC breaks solidarity with labour movement by endorsing Bill Morneau for OECD’s top job
On October 30, the Canadian Labour Congress issued a joint statement with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in support of Bill Morneau’s candidacy for the position of OECD Secretary-General. This is an unprecedented gesture, one that risks discrediting the CLC in a period of a mounting neoliberal offensive in which the trade union movement is struggling to make gains.
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Prop 22 portends dismal future for gig workers in America
Last week, all the richest liberals in California were celebrating—and not just Joe Biden’s victory. On November 3, Golden State residents voted on a ballot measure called Prop 22, a proposal which will have an enormous effect on the livelihoods of thousands of gig economy workers in the state. This means that, in California, many workers at Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Postmates are no longer considered “employees.”
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Why we need to resurrect the ‘syndicalism’ of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike
Capitalism has changed very little over hundreds of years, and general strikes, now as in 1919, remain the most powerful form of anti-capitalist action. Amid ever-worsening inequality, progressives of all stripes must shift away from electoral politics and focus on organizing general strikes, as workers did more than a century ago in the streets of Winnipeg.
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The electric car comes to Oakville
To suggest that Unifor’s GM campaign served as a warning to Ford Motors is far-fetched. Unifor’s GM campaign was a sign of union weakness not strength, and if the outcome of closing 95 percent of the GM Oshawa plant was a lesson of any kind for Ford, it would have been that they could look good even with a minor investment in electric vehicle production in Ontario.
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Attacking the substance: A review of Young, Banerjee, and Schwartz’s ‘Levers of Power’
In their new book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It, Kevin Young, Tarun Banerjee and Michael Schwartz offer some counterintuitive advice to activists looking to make political change. While the book offers a rich and thought-provoking illustration of corporate political power, its strategic advice to activists needs to be scrutinized.