Tag: Labour

Work is a blessing and a curse. At its best, work gives our lives meaning and purpose. Many of us derive our self-identity from our work. More than just a means to an income, work can provide an opportunity to contribute, interact and connect with others.

For over a century, we’ve thought of work as the use of human labour and technology to transform natural resources into tradeable goods. This economic model has brought us unparalleled prosperity – and exhausted the planet’s capacity to support us.

Being a bike courier was the first job Mark Hayward had that he not only liked, but loved. But times are tough: if he were offered a better job tomorrow, he’d be gone. “For the first time ever, work was so slow, couriers were complaining they didn’t have enough money for food,” says Hayward.

With the Financial Times lamenting the “end of the era of liberalization” and the “death of global free-market capitalism” and Newsweek declaring “we are all Socialists now,” one could be forgiven for believing that the worst excesses of neoliberalism have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Kara Gillies is a sex worker and activist who has been advocating for sex workers’ rights and well-being for the past two decades. She co-founded both the Canadian Guild for Erotic Labour and the former Toronto Migrant Sex Workers Advocacy Group. Gillies hosted a sex worker rights radio show on CIUT 89.5 FM called The Shady Lady and was a health worker at the Hassle Free Clinic. She has been involved with Maggie’s (www.maggiestoronto.ca), a Toronto-based sex worker-run organization, for 18 years and currently coordinates its education program.

Organized labour, with a membership of around 100,000, or one in four workers, is relatively strong in Saskatchewan, thanks to modestly friendly labour laws put in place by NDP governments over the years. Saskatchewan has the fourth highest rate of unionization among Canada’s provinces, far ahead of Alberta and even slightly ahead of B.C. To right-wing ideologues and their business lobby bosses, this is not acceptable.

Canada is very close to jumping into bed with one of the worst human rights violators in the hemisphere, and almost no one seems to have noticed.

The shift in people’s media habits away from top-down broadcast media like television towards more interactive network media opens up interesting possibilities for grassroots democracy and political organizing. Labour unions are increasingly taking notice, and beginning to adapt the technologies to their own uses.

There are no prepared documents. There’s no agenda. Your job, along with the other hundred front-line members of the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC), is to set priorities for the sector for the next three years, to tackle obstacles to that work, and to look for concrete ways to build the group’s capacity.

Liliany Obando was arrested — in front of her two children and elderly mother at their Bogota apartment — on August 8, 2008 by the Anti-Terrorism Unit of the Colombian National Police.

At last fall’s University of Toronto conference on academic freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Teach, James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, offered some useful reminders about the intersection of schools with free expression.

In a landmark ruling on June 8 of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms constitutionally protects collective bargaining as part of its guarantee of freedom of association.
One group that has long been struggling against the denial of its freedom of association rights is Ontario’s part-time college workers—and our struggle could serve as a model for other workers in similar circumstances.

“These photos were taken on farms in southern Ontario, as well as in Mexico, in the home villages of the workers. The portraits provide an intimate glimpse into the lives of people who are the backbone of Canada’s agricultural industry, and yet whose faces go largely unseen.”
—Adam Perry

Since coming to power, the Harper Conservatives have moved aggressively to expand Canada’s Foreign Worker Program, making it increasingly easy for employers to import workers from abroad. In this first segment of our special report on Canada’s invisible workforce, Karl Flecker investigates the impact on workplace rights in Canada, and how the labour movement is responding.

What connects singer/songwriter Fred Eaglesmith, a rape crisis centre in Brantford, Ontario, and an anti-poverty group in nearby Port Dover? They’ve all come together to help ensure the safety of migrant farm workers on Canadian roads. Perhaps an odd combination for social justice work, but it seems to be working.

Sometimes a term comes along that enables us to name—-to make visible—-our situation, to better understand the social and economic forces that shape our choices, and to connect various struggles within a broader tapestry of social change. Precarity is perhaps such a term.

As part of an ongoing project, Making the Links Radio is conducting interviews and producing radio shows focused on immigrant communities in Canada. From these conversations, we bring you glimpses of three important sites of struggle against the exploitation and marginalization of (im)migrant groups in Canada: the Philippine Women Centres, the Workers’ Action Centre, and Justicia for Migrant Workers.

Former farmers driven north in search of work have found that the rules governing the free flow of capital don’t apply to them—indeed, that crossing borders has never been more difficult.