The state of the Canadian labour movement: Call for submissions

“Canada’s negative productivity growth under the Harper government has its roots in a deeper, longer-term trend: our emerging role as resource supplier to other, more advanced economies, and the abandonment by policy-makers of the pro-active tools that (until 1984) helped us boost productivity and diversify our economy.”
-Jim Stanford

“Over the past decade, union organizing in Canada has fallen off the map. The organizing of new union members has hit record fifty-year lows of 40,000 or so in over the past few years, less than a third of what is required if unions even want to tread water and keep up with employment growth. As a result, today only fifteen percent of those in private sector across Canada have union representation and protection. And with fewer members, there are of course, fewer resources for organizing.”
-John Peters

Briarpatch Magazine invites contributions to our November 2008 issue on the state of the Canadian labour movement. We are looking for feature articles, provocative essays, investigative reportage, news briefs, reviews, interviews, profiles, poetry, humour, and artwork that explores the issues surrounding the efforts of working people to gain and maintain some modicum of control over their lives, and their struggles for secure work and work with dignity.

Possible topics could include (but are by no means limited to):

• migrant workers in the tar sands;
• organizing the service sector;
• prospects for Canada’s manufacturing industry;
• “hewers of wood, drawers of water once more?”: labour rights and the resource boom;
• the Saskatchewan government’s attack on workers’ rights;
• the labour movement and the environment;
• international solidarity campaigns;
• the Canada/Colombia free trade agreement;
• John Cartwright’s “Action Agenda”;
• the labour movement and party politics;
• change and renewal within labour movement structures.

Queries are due by July 15, 2008. If your query is accepted; first drafts are due by August 15, 2008. Your query should outline what ground your contribution will cover, give an estimated word count, and indicate your relevant experience or background in writing about the issue. Please provide a brief writing sample.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting. Send your queries/submissions to editor AT briarpatchmagazine DOT com.

We reserve the right to edit your work (with your active involvement), and cannot guarantee publication. We pay for the articles we publish, but not well.