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Magazine
Smash the machines
As Big Tech unleashes new technologies increasing worker surveillance and eroding working conditions, workers can learn from the Luddites’ example.
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Magazine
Media by and for workers: a reading list
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.
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Magazine
B.C.’s forgotten front-line workers
Food service workers struggle under weak protections from extreme weather. B.C. labour advocates are fighting to change that.
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Magazine
How to start a worker-owned restaurant
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.
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Magazine
The case for large-scale workers’ media in Canada
Unions, union members, and people with access to wealth need to think big about shifting the media landscape in Canada.
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Magazine
“With our own hands”
Workers and international students in Brampton are fighting back against wage theft, naming and shaming employers to recover over $250,000 in stolen wages. 12 workers share the lessons they’ve learned in the fight.
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Magazine
Reflections on winning the Fight for $15 in Saskatchewan
In some ways, winning a $15/hour minimum wage by 2024 is a truly hopeful sign for Saskatchewan politics – and shows that even the most right-wing governments will bow to movement demands. In other ways, it’s deeply inadequate.
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Magazine
The right to return to work
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Pacific Gateway and Hilton Metrotown hotels laid off their workers – then refused to hire them back. Hotel workers are fighting for their jobs, and for the future of the hotel industry after the pandemic.
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Magazine
Resting toward liberated futures
We must use as many tools as possible to fight against oppression, including – or maybe especially – rest.
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Magazine
Rumour has it
Anti-gossip policies, like other ostensibly good policies, are wielded by management to keep workers from building solidarity and transforming their workplaces.
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Magazine
A penny a poppy
Millions of Canada’s plastic Remembrance Day poppies have been made by prisoners and people labelled with intellectual/developmental disabilities, who are paid pennies on the hour. It’s part of a long history of prisons and institutions using poverty to control disabled and criminalized workers.
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Magazine
« C’est un régime de terreur. »
Pour mobiliser les travailleuses et travailleurs migrant∙e∙s en région rurale, il faut d’abord les trouver. La seconde étape est de réussir à desserrer l’emprise de surveillance et de peur qu’exerce leurs patrons.
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Magazine
“It’s a regime of terror”
The first step in organizing rural migrant workers is finding them. The second step is breaking through their bosses’ iron grip of surveillance and fear.
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Online-only
The story of the union drives sweeping Indigo stores
Four Indigo stores have unionized in less than five months. It’s a lesson in how workers can play the pandemic to their advantage – leveraging social media and relying on community support to fight for lasting changes in their workplace.
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Online-only
Migrant workers are the present and future of low-carbon care work
Migrant workers are keeping us alive through catastrophes like COVID-19, but they face an impossibly complex, punitive, and high-stakes immigration system. It’s time to completely overhaul the way we value those who do the most vital, life-giving work.
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Online-only
Amazon, McDonald’s, A&W, Sleep Country, TJX Linked To Anti-Union Conference
Top Canadian companies were among the sponsors and attendees of Canada’s largest union-busting event, according to photos and documents obtained by Briarpatch.
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Magazine
Workers of the world: Salt at Amazon!
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.
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Magazine
New traditions
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.
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Magazine
The postmasters and the pandemic
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?