April 2004

Fed up with poor working and living conditions, migrant workers are organizing. The Yukon’s labour movement needs to step up and support them.

Workers are fed up with measly wages that don’t pay the rent while their bosses’ profit margins soar.

Behind the newest AI technologies are hundreds of Canadians labouring for a fraction of minimum wage.

Without a public home-care system, disabled people are forced to choose between living in a long-term care home, medical assistance in dying, and hiring an underpaid migrant home-care worker.

As Big Tech unleashes new technologies increasing worker surveillance and eroding working conditions, workers can learn from the Luddites’ example.

Not only do labour-focused publications RankandFile.ca and Labor Notes report on workers’ struggles – they help workers build a stronger labour movement. Here are a few articles for workers looking to organize more strategically.

Food service workers struggle under weak protections from extreme weather. B.C. labour advocates are fighting to change that.

Of the hundreds of unionized Starbucks locations in Canada and the U.S., only two have negotiated a collective agreement. Baristas fight against the coffee giant is just beginning.

The Allium was a community hub with a vision for a more equitable service industry. Now closed, its success offers lessons for future worker-owned co-ops.

As bosses and Big Tech push us to make every second productive, this issue’s articles show that we can take control of working conditions, from status for all, to a just transition, to Big Tech’s reach, if we’re willing to make those demands – and to act for them.

An interview with the judges of Briarpatch’s 13th annual Writing in the Margins contest: Helen Knott, Juliane Okot Bitek, and Kevin Settee.

As thousands of workers push to unionize, their bosses are hiring union-busting companies to cling to power. Here’s how you can out-organize your boss.

On medical assistance in dying

Our new print design, Meta’s tax tantrum, and more.

On the tail end of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, these articles, books, and podcasts demonstrate Palestinians’ strong spirit of refusal.  

Anti-sex work feminists endanger the lives of sex workers and prop up the far right. To fight fascism, the left must adopt a sex worker feminist politic.

Tithi Bhattacharya, Nora Loreto, and Naomi Klein on the impact of COVID-19 neoliberalism and working through pandemic-era isolation to build a better world.

It’s not a coincidence that so many prisoners are disabled – the system was designed that way.

Governments are selling off the health-care system to the private sector, compromising patient care and nurses’ working conditions. If nurses organize, we can stop the sell-off.

To stifle Indigenous organizing, the Canadian government is investing in Indigenous police officers.

Canada’s Indigenous relations aren’t domestic – Canada is an imperialist settler colony. If our movements stand a chance against the fascist far right, we need to reject the liberal reconciliation narrative and understand that Canada is an invasive force.

Thank you Briarpatch readers for making this issue of the magazine possible. We’ll do what we can to keep earning that support, for as long as it takes us to bring into being the better world we’re all fighting for.

For over 200 years, Black people have built community and taken care of one another in so-called Waterloo, Ontario.

Settlers have a lot of questions about the call for Cash Back. Briarpatch sat down with Yellowhead Institute researcher Rob Houle to learn about the movement.

As governments decriminalize psychedelics, companies are clamouring to gain a foothold in the market. But is the medical industry best suited to bring psychedelics into the mainstream?

Leftist reads are often dense and difficult to understand. Thankfully, there are many graphics novels that cover the same issues in a more accessible format.

From psychiatric facilities to youth detention centres, the prison keeps growing. To abolish prisons, organizers first need to map the system.

Four years after the historic Hong Kong protests, organizers reflect on how to grow the labour movement under China’s increasing political repression.

As climate change displaces millions worldwide, the Canadian government is expanding temporary foreign worker programs and funnelling migrants back onto the front lines of the crisis.

Five trans feminists on the rise of fascist feminism and how to fight back.

How industry and governments hatched plans to pass the most contentious pieces of resource industry infrastructure onto First Nations

Rule changes, hostile colleagues, and a lack of democracy – Anjali Appadurai, Kaitlyn Harvey, and Navjot Kaur share their experiences organizing and running with the NDP.

Losing an election or settling for a subpar collective agreement can feel like devastating losses in leftists’ larger struggle for power. As we continue to organize for better working and living conditions, the articles in this issue remind us that the struggle isn’t won at the polls or at the bargaining table, but on the picket line, on doorsteps, and in conversations with our communities.

Youth canoeing camps resist colonial policies and occupation by restoring Indigenous youth’s relationships with canoeing.

In year four of the COVID-19 pandemic, will unions fight for workers’ right not to get sick on the job?

In her new book “Black Disability Politics,” Sami Schalk highlights the Black disability justice activism overlooked by mainstream disability rights movements and writing.

If we’re serious about addressing sexual harm and providing consent-based sex education, we need to teach students about alternatives to the police and equip them with tools to deal with harm when it happens in their communities.

In this reading list, Black women, queer and trans people, people who use drugs, sex workers, and migrants share their stories of marginalization and their fight to be recognized as valuable community members.

A photo essay on displacement, grief, and Land Back in the Philippines

While the state abandons people it deems disposable, many of the articles in this issue highlight and strategize how to better organize and include people in the margins in our movements.

A reading list to help leftists face the conditions within which we organize without consolation or despair. 

The Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board’s “digital-first” hearing model is silencing tenants and helping landlords evict them.

Hormonal birth control has long been a feminist symbol of choice, but without other options, is it truly a choice?

We song our stories – put them to a beat, draw the melancholy out of them, voices like droplets squeezed out of a braided dish rag on an open balcony.

An interview with Beatrice Adler-Bolton on her new book “Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto”

Sophie didn’t mean to die. She had simply arrived at the point where she was prepared to try anything to feel better.

Organizing prisoner workers is the first step toward abolishing prisons.

When journalists insist the world’s problems, no matter how big or small, are caused by U.S. government interference, grassroots struggles against austerity and authoritarianism fall out of view.

Alternative media’s promise is that all people have a right to participate in making media, free of commercial and government control. These are a few of the guiding voices on how to build media for people, not profit.

Google and Meta are spending millions on programs and awards to help news outlets in crisis. What’s at stake when tech giants are allowed to brand themselves as the saviours of an industry they helped destroy?