November/December 2020

Amazon has made a name for itself in pioneering new strategies for worker exploitation. The best way to fight back is to build worker power from below.

An interview with the judges of Briarpatch’s 10th annual Writing In The Margins contest: Larissa Lai, Pat Kane, and Sonnet L’Abbé.

As precarious work becomes the norm, labour activists need to combine the best of our traditions with new approaches that respond to the changing realities of work. To do that, we look to the history of community unionism, worker centres, and whole worker organizing.

Amazon has become lodged in our society. The only way to exorcise it is to organize it. The Amazon Workers Collective needs your help: sign up to join the fight to organize the workers of Amazon.

Three months after Foodora couriers won the right to unionize – a historic win for app-based workers – Foodora announced it was leaving Canada. Five worker leaders talk about the highs and lows of the campaign, and what’s next for Foodsters United.

Following the deaths of three workers to COVID-19, the experience of migrant farmworkers in Canada has received unprecedented media attention. As a result, workers are winning long-overdue changes to their conditions. This timeline charts the wins and losses of migrant agricultural workers in Ontario during seven months of COVID-19.

Amid calls to defund and ultimately abolish the police, we spoke to the people who are already working on replacing the police with crisis workers in Canada.

Amid COVID-19 and a global uprising against police brutality, the already intense demands and pressures that Black women face at work have become crushing. Hawa Mire convened a roundtable on Black women’s labour during these times

With more people working and shopping remotely, the rural post office is not just a quaint village fixture; it is vital infrastructure. But will decision-makers, focused on vote-dense urban Canada, pay attention?

In her new book, Nora Loreto tracks the rise and fall of Canada’s organized feminist movement, and observes how formal organizations were replaced with a mix of online personalities, bloggers, and service organizations. How do we once again build a feminist movement that can pose a serious challenge to neoliberal austerity and misogyny?

When the pandemic took hold in March, the nature of my work as a doctor in remote communities in northern Quebec and Ontario changed drastically. The practice of medicine is defined by coping with uncertainty, but few had experienced the scope of the ambiguity through which we lurched.