Tag: Labour

Industrial Montreal was a hotbed of cheap, easily exploited women’s labour. “You’ll never organize girls,” labour leaders were warned. But Rose Pesotta was determined to try “a woman’s approach” to unionizing.

When Stephen Harper’s government shuttered prison farms across the country without a coherent explanation, some saw an opportunity to transform them into animal sanctuaries.

How are workers in the oil and gas industry affected by Saskaboom’s bust?

When Mexican teachers went on strike to protest President Enrique Peña Nieto’s neoliberal education reforms, the state, backed by major financial institutions, cracked down in a bloody attempt at democratic suppression. What does the teachers’ fight signal for the future of public education?

The decks are stacked against young people and the last thing they need is your hate.

Marx predicted that capitalists will always try to push down wages and undercut working conditions. He was right, and the working class can push back if it builds power broadly and intersectionally.

Racialized women are at the forefront of labour’s most promising campaign.

In Atlantic Canada, where a succession of corporate-compliant provincial governments have created an environment conducive to scabbing and receptive to the business lobby, workers are bargaining not with employers, but with fear, fragmentation, and poor prospects for a stable future of work.

Corporations are after the resource-rich land – not sustainable, fair employment.

Revisiting a book published in 1989 shows us that racialized women’s domestic labour continues to be legislated exploitation.

Few Indigenous labour history studies, especially in the post-fur trade era, focus on Indigenous women’s work, but labour functioned as a colonial tool to strip Indigenous people of title and status. Indigenous women faced the worst moral and social regulation, racism, and sexism at work, and so Indigenous women’s labour became a site of resistance to patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. The history of Indigenous nurses’ organizing was especially revolutionary.

The forestry model conventionally pursued by the Canadian forestry industry has long been battering community economies, trampling Indigenous rights, and damaging forestry ecosystems, all the while empowered by colonial and capitalist legislative frameworks. Sustainable forest management is gaining traction as allied forestry workers, grassroots environmentalists, and First Nations create new models of forestry.

What does it say when the easiest part of the life of a mother in a neoliberal city is starting a new job in the trades?

The automotive capital of Canada was once a site of militant labour organizing. Today, it’s humming with a renewed sense of activism, this time led by students.

Environmentalists have challenged the perceived opposition between labour and the environment, but do we need to democratize our mode of economic production to truly address the climate crisis?

As the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage heats up in Canada, what lessons can low-wage workers learn from the successes of the movement in the U.S.?

Universal Basic Income is having a moment in the spotlight, but it’s not a straightforward win for workers.

For the labour movement to become a truly liberatory force, it must be grounded in our shared social struggles.

With the support of a new government program, trappers are reviving the traditional economy in the Northwest Territories.

An interview with RankandFile.ca’s Doug Nesbitt and David Bush.