November/December 2016

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.

Are we paying enough attention to the postal workers’ fight for a robust and public postal service?

Briarpatch editor Tanya Andrusieczko caught up with our sixth annual writing contest judges to talk history, habits, politics, and writing.