Nearly three decades ago, I stumbled into my first experience of labour arts not in a union hall or socialist meeting, but on stage. I was twenty-one, a first-generation university student from small-town Ontario, studying English and theatre at the University of Guelph. One semester, I was cast as Sid, a cab driver, in Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935). Produced at the height of the Great Depression, the play dramatized a taxi drivers’ strike, exposing the exploitation of workers, poverty, racism, sexism, and state corruption. At its legendary premiere, the Group Theatre ended the show by rallying the audience to its feet, chanting “Strike! Strike!”—collapsing the boundary between labour art and labour activism.

Sid’s scene is simple: a tender conversation with the love of his life, Florence, where their simple dream of one day getting married is crushed by precarity and poverty. Playing Sid in 1998, during Ontario’s Days of Action against Mike Harris’s neoliberal “Common Sense Revolution,” I began to see how class difference and division structured not only the play, but also my own life. The play was directed by Alan Filewod, my professor and one of Canada’s leading scholars of radical labour theatre. Filewod reminded us that theatre was never just entertainment. It could take a stand in solidarity with workers, and even help activate class consciousness and class struggle against the powers-that-be, and the conditions they benefit from.

Under Filewod’s guidance, we didn’t just restage Odets’ play. We created our own agitprop vignettes about the social consequences of Harris’s austerity program, his attacks on the welfare state and labour movement, and how to fight back. I have theatre to thank for introducing me to the politics of art and helping me begin to understand class. It marked the start of a political coming-of-age: recognizing myself in Ontario’s class hierarchy, connecting that experience to broader economic and political conditions and the lives of others, and seeking new ways of understanding the world to try to change it for the better.

My formative experience with the labour arts in Waiting for Lefty came back to me as I read The Art of Solidarity: Labour Arts and Heritage in Canada, co-edited by Rob Kristofferson and Stephanie Ross. The Art of Solidarity is a landmark volume that documents the dynamic history and present of labour arts and heritage organizations in Canada. Kristofferson and Ross bring together an impressive range of organizations, artists, and researchers to show that labour is not only the source of all creativity, but that creativity, in turn, nourishes the labour movement’s collective memory, tactics of resistance, and visions for a different future.

This inspiring book dignifies labour’s cultural history while imagining bold futures for movements rooted in economic and social justice, and in the labour, love, and joy of making art. It captures how working people in Canada, across different times and places, have produced and used culture not only to tell their stories but to resist, to build solidarity, and at times, to win. It is an essential resource for researchers and activists alike and should be included in every labour studies curriculum in Canada.

In cultural policy and cultural industries terms, this book is also what we can conceptualize as a “cultural product,” shaped by the industrial organizations, production logics and social relations that brought it into being. Every book is a cultural product, one dependent on an astonishingly complex international division of labour. Behind The Art of Solidarity stands not only the intellect, time, talent, and energy of the editors and contributing authors, but of peer reviewers, acquisitions editors, copyeditors, cover art designers, typesetters, binders, printers, publicists, distributors, and even the digital savvy folks running Between the Lines’ websites and social media pages and feeds to get the word out.

The earth and the environment are also part of this cultural product. The printed copy in my hands right now, began as pulp from trees, pressed into paper, bound with glue, and stamped in ink by machines. The digital PDF copy, opened on my computer earlier, rests on rare earth minerals mined from the ground, transformed into chips, circuits, and sleek shells, then assembled by workers across the world. And all of it depends on the vast infrastructure of the internet, another layer of firms and workers who make access to information possible. Many minds, hearts, and hands combine to produce collective knowledge in print and digital media forms. This book, like those that came before it, reminds us that cultural production is never an individual act. It depends on the labour of many, brought together, in complex ways.

The Art of Solidarity stands on the shoulders of unions, labour organizations, and social movements that carved out space for workers to express their lives, their labour, and their struggles. It is both a tribute to that history and a living expression of labour arts and heritage today. And while this book speaks of history’s importance, it is also part of our present, a call for more projects where workers can creatively express their conditions and experiences, and contest these, now and in the future.

In their introduction, Kristofferson and Ross make a powerful argument: labour arts and heritage matter. They convey this argument, systematically, leading to a foundational intervention. They tell us labour arts and heritage matter because they give working people the means to understand and express their own experiences in a society that often sidelines them. Think of the union song sung through a megaphone on a freezing picket line, not just a chant to keep spirits up, but a collective reminder of endurance and resilience in the face incredible odds. Or consider a mural painted on the side of a decommissioned or half destroyed old industrial factory wall, where bright or fading images of workers and their tools remind us of the labour process that happened there before, and dignify the people whose labour made that machine and made things with it.

From theatre groups staging plays protesting automation and layoffs and privatization in community venues and union halls to handmade posters pasted on buildings and billboards, labour arts capture what capitalism prefers to hide: the working class’s existence, its experiences and struggles. But Kristofferson and Ross remind us that labour arts aren’t only about commemorating hardship, they’re about fostering new resources for hope, and expanding horizons. Workers’ theatre troupes, strike comics, and grassroots film collectives do more than document struggle; they enact and prefigure new ways of being, inviting audiences to imagine how social relations could be organized differently, in ways irreducible to forms of capitalist exploitation and oppression. These labour arts can re-energize a flagging labour movement, making campaigns feel alive, educational programs less bureaucratic, and solidarity more visceral. Labour arts can articulate fragments, linking labour movements with feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous, and anti-fascist struggles, forging connections across movements that might otherwise remain separate, and find a basis for common ground, for working with difference, for true solidarity.

Kristofferson and Ross insist that labour arts is not a sideshow or supplement to real politics. It is integral to all labour politics and class struggles, historically and presently. Importantly, labour arts are not confined to official union projects or heritage plaques. They often exist in tension with the reigning cultures by and for capital pushed by elite donor-driven galleries, neoliberal cultural bureaucracies and of course, the likes of Walt Disney and Bell Media. Instead, the labour arts thrive in grassroots spaces: a Mayworks festival that brings workers and artists together, a strike poster that travels from a kitchen to a picket line, or a song passed from one generation of activists to the next. These forms of expression dignify working class history and help sustain the new and emerging movements still struggling to shape a more just and democratic future.

I also love this book because it reminds us of where creativity really comes from. Today, Silicon Valley billionaires, the self-styled overlords of Big Tech and various social platforms, tell us they’ve turned us all into “creators.” We’re supposed to thank them for the privilege of logging in while they harvest our data, monetize it and algorithmically target us with ads for things we don’t want or need. TikTok insists anyone can be a creator if they use its tools. Meta and YouTube push the same line. Now, AI technophiles go further, telling us human labour itself is becoming obsolete because the machines themselves have become “creative,” have developed a mind of their own. From ChatGPT to image generators, from scriptwriting bots to platforms promising to spit out entire TV series with a few easy prompts, AI’s pitch is the same: creativity without people, art without labour costs. Yet even this story hides the workers behind the AI curtain: the precariat data labelers and content moderators, along with the artists and writers whose work is scraped from the Internet, to train the models.

Fortunately, The Art of Solidarity points us toward a deeper truth: creativity has never come from billionaires, new technologies, and gadgets. It lives in human labour itself. Even under the harshest conditions of exploitation—the Amazon warehouse shift that reduces bodies to machinic logics, the call-centre script repeated in some made-up voice for hours, the delivery app that drives precarious riders down endless routes to nowhere—working people still find ways to sing, paint, tell stories, and imagine futures otherwise. Much labour under capitalism is a toil we’d rather avoid, but labour can also be something else: transformative, expressive, and world-making. That is the lesson of the labour arts and heritage traditions this book recovers. Capitalism may deskill, control, and automate, but it cannot erase the fact that human labour is the source of all creativity, including the art made by workers, for workers.

I also appreciate this book because it reminded me of the value of historicizing. It urges us to remember the long history of workers’ creativity and to resist the technological determinism of the present, which imagines that only now, in the digital age, have working people begun to express themselves. In truth, workers have always used the tools available to symbolize their lives, their pains and pleasures, their hopes and fears, their nightmares and dreams. The Art of Solidarity shows this vividly. Before there were hashtags like #WGAStrong rallying Hollywood workers against the studios, there were murals like Evangelina Sapp’s Murallista, painted in Toronto to honour the struggles of immigrant and refugee women workers. Before YouTube livestreams carried Labour Day marches from St. Kitts to Toronto—or May Day rallies in Los Angeles—there was the Mayworks Festival. Before Twitch streamers like Hasan Piker raged against the machine, and raised money for unions, there were workers co-creating art with Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. And before unions used TikTok to explain what unions are, there was the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, opened with What We Fought For, telling the story of local strikes through photos, oral histories, even a board game called Bread and Roses.

In a nutshell: labour has always needed culture. And culture has always needed labour. They are symbiotic. Whatever the time or place, the technologies of cultural production available or not, human labour has always been the source of creativity. The Art of Solidarity shows us just how true this is. Culture is not a luxury. It is not an add-on. It need not be a commodity made to make money. At its best, culture is part of a whole way of life, and importantly, part of the living labour movement. It wasn’t autocratic media-tech bosses like Donald Trump or Elon Musk who built the creative industries. It was workers. The history, study and production of labour arts and heritage, help us remember that.

But this isn’t just about remembering history. It’s about making history through the new labour arts projects and struggles of today, that will one day become part of working class art and heritage too. That is why The Art of Solidarity is essential reading not only for the labour movement but for society at large. More than the first history of its kind in Canada, it is a reminder that cultural production, whether print, live, or digital, must be central to rebuilding the left now, and for the future.

Tanner Mirrlees is a Full Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University.