After decades of inflation and wage stagnation have eroded wages for workers, the upcoming wage hikes represent progress. But workers certainly deserve more than that.
Workers in industries like railways and air travel have significant structural power and can use their leverage to win favourable contracts because of the amount of economic disruption they can cause.
Unions speaking out on issues as contentious as Israel-Palestine is nothing new. They have a long history of staking international positions on everything from apartheid to the Vietnam War.
The goal of the labour movement is to advance the interests of workers everywhere. Nativist narratives about defending Canada could explain Pierre Poilievre’s popularity among some union members.
In this time of unrest, insecurity and fear, unions and their new, more diverse leadership offer a path to improving workers’ rights and repairing deep social and economic inequalities.
The political muscle of unions that helped to launch the NDP in was never that strong in the first place. Even worse for the party, it’s atrophied considerably over the course of the last 60 years.
Unions must continue to try to recruit and sustain a critical mass of women, particularly visible minority and LBGTQ women, into leadership roles in the years to come.
Labor’s defeat revives a familiar problem in Australian political history: the left’s inability to show how its policies can improve people’s material conditions.
Drivers for online ride-hailing services face several social conditions that may challenge their efforts to transform collective action into a solid union.