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: 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.
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…
Of Hoffa and Hollywood
I recently published a piece in Jacobin offering a sober assessment of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa’s legacy. He was a household name in his prime when he was heading up the Teamsters Union, and even today remains one of the best-known labor leaders in the U.S. He’s been on people’s minds more recently thanks to Martin Scorsese’s film The Irishman.
Barry Eidlin 