On April 4, 2024, McGill university professors from the Faculty of Arts rallied on the steps of the McCall MacBain Arts Building in the midst of an April blizzard to launch our new labour union, the Association of McGill Professors of the Faculty of Arts, or AMPFA. We were following the trail blazed by our colleagues in the Faculties of Law and Education, who have already unionized.

We were joined by striking graduate student teaching assistants, members of AGSEM, along with members of other campus unions and supportive undergraduate students.

Below I reprint the remarks I delivered on the Arts steps to open the rally.

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Bonjour à tous et à toutes, merci d’être venus pour nous rassembler dans la neige pour les droits des travailleurs et travailleuses!

Hello everyone, thanks so much for coming out today in the snow to speak out for labour rights!

Je m’appelle Barry Eidlin, et je suis professeur agrégé dans le département de sociologie ici à McGill.

My name is Barry Eidlin, and I am an associate professor of sociology here at McGill.

Normally I’m known around here as a scholar of labour and social movements. So as a scholar of labour and social movements, I think it’s important to start by noting that we are rallying on an historically significant date.

Fifty-six years ago, on April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. That much is widely known and remembered. But what is less known and remembered is why Martin Luther King was in Memphis on that day. 

He had come to Memphis to support and build a strike of 1,300 municipal sanitation workers, who had by then been on strike for several months. He came to Memphis because he understood the deep link between civil rights and labour rights.

Fundamentally, MLK understood that the key to victory for both struggles, for all struggles for social justice, was the power of solidarity. The night before he was assassinated, he gave his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, where he foreshadowed his own death. 

But what’s important from that speech for our purposes today is the message of solidarity he gave to the strikers and supporters that night. He said:

“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., excerpt from “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, April 3, 1968

That message still resonates today, 56 years later. And it’s that message of solidarity that brings us here today, to the steps of the Arts Building. Because I’m not up here today speaking as a scholar of labour and social movements. I’m here today speaking as a practitioner of labour and social movements. I’m here not to study collective action, but to engage in it.

And I’m engaging in collective action today as part of a group that historically is not known for engaging in collective action: professors. Even though it’s not exactly our forte, the times call for it, so we are taking action today collectively, as professors.

We’re doing that in two ways. First, we are collectively here to stand in solidarity with our striking TAs, members of AGSEM. The work they do is essential to this university, and it’s work that needs to be valued and rewarded with a fair contract.

And second, we professors in the Faculty of Arts are collectively here to announce the formation of our own union, the Association of McGill Professors in the Faculty of Arts, or AMPFA! Let’s give it up for AMPFA!

Now some might ask, why do professors need a union? Isn’t that for workers? We’re professionals. We’re colleagues. We share in the governance of our university.

And yes, it’s true that we are professionals. We believe in collegiality. But collegiality can only exist on a level playing field. And today that playing field is tilted decidedly towards the administration. They may listen, they may take our opinions under advisement. But at the end of the day, they do what they were going to do anyway.

Collegiality at McGill today is the equivalent of the employee suggestion box you see at some workplaces. For the administration, we are just another group of workers. And if that wasn’t clear enough before, it certainly became much clearer when they decided that they could order us to scab on our TAs for free.

So to that I say yes, we are workers. We may be professionals, we may be collegial, but we are also workers.

But we are not the kind of workers who will just keep our heads down and meekly do what we’re told. We are the kind of workers who join together in solidarity with other workers on campus, with AGSEM workers, with MUNACA workers, with SEU workers, with AMPL workers, with AMPE workers, with MCLIU workers, with AMUSE workers, to demand a voice and to fight for a better McGill.

So that’s why we are here today, as professors in the Faculty of Arts, to launch our new union, AMPFA. 

Now, as I explain to my students when I teach Contemporary Social Movements, one of the key ways that social movements grow and solve collective action problems is through the creation of collective identities. That’s something that can be a bit foreign to us professors, but I’d like to launch our union by engaging in a little bit of collective identity building.

Those of you who aren’t professors can help us out by joining in. So when I say “who are we?” you will respond “AMPFA!” OK? Let’s try it:

Who are we? 

Who are we? 

Who are we?

[I then introduced the remaining speakers, and after the rally we marched back to the AGSEM picket line set up at the Roddick Gates]