Barry Eidlin

AMPFA In The News!

It has now been just five days since the launch of our new faculty union, the Association of McGill Professors of the Faculty of Arts, and we are starting to make some waves! On Monday, April 8, CBC Montreal came to the McGill campus right after the total eclipse to visit the picket line of…

McGill Arts Professors Launch Our New Union: AMPFA

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.

To My McGill Colleagues: Don’t Scab On Your Students

Legal technicalities aside, the fact is that the McGill administration is trying to enlist professors on the side of management against our own graduate students. The Quebec Labour Tribunal will have to clarify whether or not this violates Quebec’s anti-scab law. But beyond the law, McGill’s efforts to undermine our TAs also raises important questions about the erosion of undergraduate and graduate education and training at McGill, not to mention concerns about the professional autonomy of professors and academic freedom.

Making Sense of One of the Largest Strikes in Canadian History

Early on the morning of May 1, 2023, the leadership of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) announced a tentative agreement with the Treasury Board of Canada, ending one of the largest strikes in Canadian history, which began on April 19. This was only the third time that federal workers have staged a nationwide…

On Union-Busting, Job Quality, and the Perils of U.S. Labour Law

The recent union election at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama has proven to be one of those all-too-rare events that gets the broader public to tune into labour issues. In the aftermath of the defeat, there have been countless analyses and accounts of what happened, along with prognostications about what this portends for the…

Analyzing the Amazon Campaign and US Labour

The aggregate numbers assessing the state of the U.S. labour movement did not look good in 2020. The spike in strikes we saw in 2018 and 2019, propelled by teachers, collapsed amidst the pandemic in 2020, with only eight major strikes (involving more than 1,000 workers, lasting more than one 8-hour shift). This is the…

Mapping the Current U.S. Political Terrain

When Joe Biden takes office tomorrow, the personnel in the U.S. government will change, but the deeper problems remain to be addressed. This creates a unique set of challenges and opportunities for those committed to addressing the pathologies that gave us not only Trump, but Trumpism.

Thinking Through the 2020 U.S. Election

The past few weeks have had more than their fair share of “through the looking glass” moments for scholars of U.S. politics. Donald Trump lost the presidential election, but not in the decisive way that many pollsters had predicted. And despite presiding over an historic economic collapse and a catastrophic response to a deadly global pandemic, he ended up losing while increasing the number of people voting for him, and increasing his margins among some unlikely constituencies, particularly Black and Latino men.

“Labor and the Class Idea” Comes Home

My book came out in the spring of 2018. I was on parental leave at the time, so it was hard to arrange as many talks and events as I would have liked. Then I came back to McGill for the Fall 2019 semester, and had a somewhat delayed book launch set for March 2020….

A Bit of Recognition

Yesterday I learned that my book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, has been awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award competition of the American Political Science Association’s Canadian Politics Section. It is both ironic and fitting that my book should win an award named after…

The Class Idea on The Vast Majority

Like many things in the world, this blog has been lost in the vortex of the coronavirus. I just logged back into my account to see that my last post was from the uncertain days at the start of the lockdown, before we really had a sense of how long this would last. Although I…

COVID-19’s Financial Fallout for Workers

On April 2, I took part in a live-streamed discussion on the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic for workers. The event was sponsored by McGill University’s Alumni Association, and featured myself in dialogue with Christopher Ragan, Director of McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy, and Chair of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission. You can find…