Articles
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Why I’m On The Picket Line
While our public schools have many wonderful programs and many dedicated teachers, the sad truth is that there are also overcrowded classrooms, children falling behind, and a workforce exhausted from trying to fill in the gaps. Keep reading…
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Glace Bay’s Union Daughter
An Interview with Suzane MacNeil
Suzanne MacNeil is the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour’s vice-president for young workers, and also the first female president of the Cape Breton District Labour Council. Her primary interest is helping the labour movement tune in to the realities faced by younger workers and recent graduates, while revitalizing itself in the process. Keep reading…
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A Call for Solidarity with Bangladeshi Garment Workers
Interviewing Kalpona Akter
The fire at the Tazreen garment factory in 2012 killed more than 110 workers. In 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory killed more than 1,100 workers, and injured 1,600 more.These were not the first, nor, likely, the last tragedies to take place in Bangladesh’s garment industry. Keep reading…
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The Infinite Energy Illusion
There can be no individual path towards climate justice. We have to find our way collectively, which means we need to learn how to talk to one another. Let’s start with the massive new hydroelectric development at Labrador’s Muskrat Falls. Keep reading…
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Mail Chimps & Changing Walmart
I’ve used my WebWork column before to look at the distressingly negative experiences many women have online, including being flamed or otherwise harassed. And how those experiences might negatively affect women’s receptiveness to their unions’ online organizing efforts. In other words, I’ve looked at the gendered division of the internet. Regrettably, it’s still an issue.A recent article in The Pacific Standard, ... Keep reading…
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Project Of Heart
Teaching the Untold History of Residential Schools
Sylvia Smith, an alternative high school teacher in Ottawa, never dreamed a buried episode in Canadian history would come to light as she was teaching Grade 10 history seven years ago. It all began when the class was reading the very few words in their textbook dedicated to Indian residential schools. Keep reading…
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Metro Vancouver Alliance
Faith in the Future
Six hundred and fifty people gathered recently to celebrate the launch of Metro Vancouver Alliance, a different kind of coalition that includes faith, labour and community organizations working together for the common good. Keep reading…
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Beyond Charity, Towards Solidarity
Making Waves in Windsor-Essex County
“There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher once declared, “just individuals and families.” In November 2013, progressives in Windsor-Essex County, the southwestern corner of Ontario, came together with the support of UNIFOR to challenge these and other core ideas of neoliberalism. But they came also to question, and to move beyond, the silo-based activism and defeatist pessimism that often paralyze the exist… Keep reading…
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Boosting Member Participation
Longtime Our Times reader and supporter Allan Gottheil called in last summer to suggest an idea for a column: what I’ll call “tech-enabled broader-based participation.” Continuous democracy? Breakfast-table mobilization? Whatever it gets called, it is about the wider and deeper inclusion of members in their union’s activities, on a daily basis, through a process similar to polling.For instance, imagine a smartphone app that connects members to their union. The union wants to kno… Keep reading…
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Telling Our Own Stories
A People’s History of Nova Scotia
A self-proclaimed group of misfits, radicals and rabble-rousers got together recently in Halifax to recount a different sort of history than what’s usually taught in schools. Keep reading…
