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…
Tag: trade unions
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.
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…
Where Do Unions Fit Into Socialist Strategy?
The core problem for Marxists is that unions occupy a paradoxical place in socialist strategy. On the one hand, they are essential for creating the collective working-class actor that is necessary to bring about socialism. On the other hand, by their very form they presuppose the continued existence of capitalism, given their primary focus on negotiating wages, benefits, and working conditions with capitalists.
Barry Eidlin 