Taming Amazon, renewing labour
Taking on the Amazon Goliath may not succeed without the equivalent of a party or proto-party with bases in unions, across unions, and in class-based social movements, writes Sam Gindin.…
Sam GIndin
Education workers lead but come up short: What lessons for labour?
CUPE education workers and supporters amass at Queen’s Park to protest after the Ontario government enacted the notwithstanding clause to legislate a contract on the union. Photo courtesy OPSEU. In…
Inflation: Reframing the narrative
Photo by Frank Busch/Unsplash Fighting inflation is on the public agenda today in a way not seen since the 1970s. The orthodox response—having central banks raise interest rates to slow…
Living socialism today: Remembering Leo Panitch
Leo Panitch (1945-2020) at The World Transformed 2018 in Liverpool. Photo by Kevin Walsh/Wikimedia Commons. Standing outside a conference with a group of devotees, a famous political scientist brags that…
The electric car comes to Oakville
In late September, Ford reached a deal with Unifor to build electric vehicles at the Oakville assembly plant. The three-year deal includes investing $1.95 billion in two Ontario facilities. Photo…
Political openings: Class struggle during and after the pandemic
One in seven small businesses in Canada are at risk of closing permanently as a result of COVID-19 in addition to the ones that have already shuttered. Photo from Pixabay.…
Health Workers: From Praise to Protection
Green Jobs Oshawa has pushed to highlight the desperate need for more PPE for front line workers, especially N95 masks. Photo courtesy Courage Coalition. Crises sometimes bring out the best…
The GM Strike and the Historical Convergence of Possibilities
Workers leave Flint Assembly plant early Monday, September 16, 2019 while taking part in a national strike against General Motors after stalled contract negotiations with General Motors. Photo by Ryan…
NAFTA renewed. Now what?
Photo by The White House When Donald Trump declared NAFTA to be “the worst deal” in American history (and the worst deal ever signed “by any country”), those who had…
Will the Ontario Labour Movement Return to Class Struggle as Austerity Deepens?
Photo by Randy Risling (Toronto Star) The Ontario labour movement is in deep crisis. Some impressive struggles aside, it has been staggering since the end of the great mobilizations of…
Bob White, Union Organizer, Union Leader: April 28, 1935 – February 19, 2017
Photo from CanadianLabour.ca When I last visited Bob at his nursing home in Kincardine, a nurse politely pulled me aside to tell me that he no longer talked much but…
The Power of Deep Organizing
Photo by Kheel Center The profound defeat of the U.S. labour movement over the past three to four decades is usually measured by the loss of things that workers once…
Big Three Bargaining: Different Ways of Making History
Photo by Ford Motor Company Canadian autoworkers have long been pace setters in the Canadian labour movement and as soon as its most recent agreement with General Motors was ratified,…
When History Knocks
Photo by Jonathan McIntosh Naomi Klein is a longtime movement and media icon, a gifted synthesizer and popularizer who, over the past two decades, has been a leading chronicler of…
Unmaking global capitalism
Subscribe to our free e-newsletter HERE. This piece was originally published in Jacobin. When Karl Marx famously declared that while the “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;…
Unmaking Global Capitalism
When Marx famously declared that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it, he was asserting that it was not enough to dream of another…
Beyond the impasse of Canadian labour: union renewal, political renewal
This is the opening piece of our “State of the Unions” special issue of Canadian Dimension Magazine published in May, 2014, which you can view and purchase HERE. Subscribe to…
Raising our expectations
Looking back to the defeat of the labor movement since the early 1980s, three lessons seem especially important. First, any gains made under capitalism are temporary; they can be reversed.…
Stagnation, austerity and left politics
That the many attempts to theorize the crisis of 2008, the deepest crisis since the Depression, have at best been inconclusive should not be all that surprising. After all, as…
Beyond the Economic Crisis: The Crisis In Trade Unionism
Discussions on the left about the economy might be summarized as warning that things are going to get a lot worse before they get…worse. This is not just a matter…