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…
Category: Professional
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.
“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…
An introduction to comparative-historical sociology
I recently received one of those e-mails that we as professors dream of receiving: an e-mail from a student asking for reading recommendations to get better acquainted with my chosen field of study. In my case, this involved introducing my student to the world of comparative-historical sociology.
Taking Stock of the Labor Movement for Labor Day
To mark the Labor Day holiday, I wrote a piece for the Washington Post taking stock of the current state of the US labor movement, and thinking of what its past can tell us about the road ahead. While unions have taken a beating over the past several decades, this Labor Day is somewhat different in…
A step backwards for worker freedom
Today, the US Supreme Court issued its worst decision on labor rights in decades in Janus v. AFSCME. The 5-4 decision uses a narrow conception of individual rights to declare that workers are free to opt out of paying for the cost of negotiating and enforcing union contracts from which they benefit. It does so by stating…
Awards Season
I was both honored and humbled to learn recently that I am the 2018 recipient of the Canadian Sociological Association’s Early Investigator Award. I’ll have to wait until 2019 to pick up the actual hardware, since this year’s CSA meeting is pre-empted by the International Sociological Association Meeting in Toronto, but I’ll take the official…
Barry Eidlin 