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Connexions Resource Centre
Focus on Labour and Unions

Recent & Selected Articles

  1. This is a small sampling of articles related to education and children in the Connexions Online Library. For more articles, books, films, and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as education, children, youth, post-secondary education, film, and schools.
  1. The New Worker Organizing (March 11, 2013)
    Many, perhaps most, worker center–based organizing projects focused on workers in low-wage jobs, are conducted with the active support and, often enough, leadership provided by a variety of community-based organizations—with support from one or more unions.
  2. Community Organising - A New Part of the Union (September 28, 2012)
    A look at Unite’s community union organizing.
  3. They Are Still Killing Trade Union Leaders (April 18, 2012)
    Question: So what happens these days in developing countries when a prominent, charismatic union activist - with the courage to stand up to sinister, government-supported business groups who have, on more than one occasion, already threatened his life - attempts to get the country’s underpaid, under-benefited workers to join a labor union? Answer: They kill him.
  4. Remembering Another Occupy (January 2, 2012)
  5. Connexions Archive Case Statement (September 24, 2011)
    Working together to secure a future for the past
  6. Organizing with Love: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign (December 1, 2010)
    Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible.
  7. From Iron Mines to Iron Bars (June 16, 2010)
    Exploring some of the consequences of the long-term decline in union membership and the significant shift in membership towards public sector workers.
  8. Worst Companies for Union Organizing Highlighted for International Human Rights Day (December 10, 2009)
    The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has released #Working for Scrooge: Worst Companies of 2009 for the Right to Associate# # a list of the four worst multinational corporations for union organizing.
  9. Connexions Archive seeks a new home (November 18, 2009)
    The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
  10. Goodbye "Norma Rae" (September 24, 2009)
    Crystal Lee Sutton was a genuine hero. She will forever be remembered as one of the champions of organized labor, right up there with the Joe Hills, Bill Haywoods and Emma Goldmans.
  11. From Self-managed Solidarity Unionism to a Self-managed Society (June 15, 2009)
    Capitalism is built on various forms of oppression and structural inequality. But the subordination and exploitation of the working class remains at the heart of the system. A liberatory program and strategy for a remake of society needs to explain how workers can escape the class cage.
  12. Educate, agitate, occupy! (June 3, 2009)
    An account of the occupation Visteon factory in Enfield, London.
  13. Facebook Facts (June 1, 2008)
    Unions and workers are making much use of the latest web fad: social networking sites. But are sites like Facebook really adding anything to our ability to organize? If yes, how, exactly? And where are the pitfalls in using online commercial sites for organizing?
  14. The Korean Working Class: From Mass Strike to Casualization and Retreat, 1987-2008 (2008)
  15. How the Unions Killed the Working Class Movement (June 13, 2006)
    Unions are vertically organized to minimize relationships and solidarity between union members in different locals, maximize the power of national union staff and officials over local unions, and fractionalize the working class. Away from the workplace the role of the unions is no less destructive. Unions train workers not to rely on themselves as agents of change with direct action, whether on the job or in society. Instead they steer their members into the arms of the capitalist political parties and encourage workers to rely on politicians and courts. The central myth on which contemporary unions depend is that workers# power comes not from their friendships and solidarity but from union structures. The most destructive effects of the unions have been on the self-concept of the working class. Workers have been led to think of themselves as helpless, to believe that their strength comes from institutions outside themselves, and to lose sight of their revolutionary mission.
  16. Marx and Makhno Meet McDonald's (2005)
    Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them.
  17. Revolutionary Optimist (January 15, 2000)
  18. The Export of Philippine Women (1997)
    Principles of social justice are clearly not served by applauding a system that prides itself in an increased GNP at the same time that it farms out its women to be servants of the world.
  19. Workers have to deal with their own reality and that transforms them (1997)
    I think self-activity is the response of working people to the nature of their lives and work. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's quiet. Part of the reality is that we're going through a considerable technological revolution, which means that experiences, even jobs, that people depended on and know about, begin to disappear. To expect workers to say, "Yesterday, they automated my factory; today, I know exactly what to do about it," is Utopian. It takes a while. It takes a generation. Workers will learn.
  20. Why the Industrial Working Class Still Matters (1995)
    It is evident today that the vast majority of the population (perhaps 80% of the workforce) live and reproduce themselves only through wage-labor that produces surplus value, regardless of the nature of the commodity (good or service) they produce. Whatever the changing weight of the industrial sector of this enormous, working majority, it is clear that the working class as a whole is proportionately far larger today than at the time of classical Marxist writers.
  21. A Critique of Kim Moody's An Injury to All (1989)
    Moody's book is no academic study, but looks at the labor movement "from the bottom up"; the author has witnessed and to some extent participated in the many defeats and handful of victories of the past 15 years.
  22. The Origins of the Union Shop (1989)
    Though the typical union contract nowadays contains some sort of union shop provision, union membership was voluntary under almost all CIO contracts prior to 1942. The dues "check off" was virtually unknown in the late '30s and dues were collected on the shop floor by shop stewards and committeemen.
  23. The Working Class and Social Change (1975)
    A study of "The Working Class," and the complexities of its definition as economic categories diffused from profound bases of social demarcation during the 1960's.
  24. Marxist Views of the Working Class (September 17, 1974)
    We are not discussing the working class because we want to find out what the noble worker is all about. We are concerned with social change. The fundamental problem of how you define and how you view the working class is the problem of whether the working class is a viable instrument for social change.
  25. False Promises: A Review (1974)
    False Promises is a strange book. Despite a certain carelessness of presentation, I recommend it to all concerned with the working class for its extensive documentation of the working-class experience, at work, in the larger society, and in the unions. It is imbued with the conception that freedom is the fundamental quality of revolutionary change and it rejects the strangling doctrines and structures of the union movement and of the vanguard parties. Yet it cannot overcome a conception of working-class consciousness which reduces workers to victims and consciousness to verbalizations.
  26. The American Working Class in Historical Persepctive (1973)
    A review of Jeremy Brecher's Strike! (See CX6590)
  27. Marxism and the Trade Unions (1970)
    Draper argues that essentially, no Marxist group has ever carried on any systematic revolutionary work in trade unions.
  28. Theory & Practice (1910)
    Rosa Luxemburg confronts Karl Kautsky on the crucial questions of the General Mass Strike and on the relationship of spontaneity to organization, as well as on the unity of theory and practice. This crucial 1910 debate in German Social Democracy led to Luxemburg's revolutionary break with Karl Kautsky and foreshadowed the collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of World War I.

Selected Websites and Organizations

  1. This is a small sampling of organizations and websites concerned with education and children in the Connexions Directory. For more organizations and websites, check the Connexions Directory Subject Index, especially under topics such as education, children, youth, post-secondary education, film, and schools.

    Other Links & Resources



    Books, Films and Periodicals

    1. This is a small sampling of books related to education and children in the Connexions Online Library. For more books and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as education, children, youth, post-secondary education, film, and schools.

    1. All For One
      Arguments from the labour trial of the century on the real meaning of unionism
      A trial which challenged the right of unions to exist in Canada.
    2. Building Bridges
      The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community
      Author: Brecher, Jeremy and Costello, Tim (ed.)
    3. The Canadian Labour Movement
      A Short History
      Author: Heron, Craig
    4. Down To Earth People
      Beyond Class Reductionism and Postmodernism
      Author: Secombe, Wallace; Livingstone, David W.
      Working class women and men offer their analysis of the world today and its multi-dimensional inequalities.
    5. False Promises
      The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness
      Author: Aronowitz, Stanley
    6. First Contract
      Women and the Fight to Unionize
      Author: Conde, Carol, Beveridge, Karl
      Looks at the "personal side" of the struggle of working women to organize themselves into unions and win first contracts.
    7. HERstory: Jeritan
      Author: Ho Wing Yin, Cecilia (Director)
      A story of Indonesian female migrant workers who left their homes to work as domestic helpers in Macao, China, a community consisting of mainly Chinese as well as a city of casinos and entertainment parlours.
    8. The Hidden Injuries of Class
      Author: Sennett, Richard; Cobb, Jonathon
      Sennett and Cobb look at human relations between people of different classes and analyze everyday life and ordinary situations to identify class signals that make people feel inadequate.
    9. The Making of the English Working Class
      Author: Thompson, E.P.
      Discusses the development of a working class consciousness from the 1790s to the Great Reform Bill
    10. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions
      Author: Luxemburg, Rosa
      Luxemburg writes that "the mass strike in Russia [in 1905] has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working-class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International."
    11. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration
      Author: Stalker, Peter
    12. Pay Cheques & Picket Lines
      All About Unions in Canada
      Author: MacKay, Claire; Illustrated by Peters, Eric
      A children's book which explains what unions are, how they came to be, and why they exist.
    13. Plunderbund and Proletariat
      A History of the IWW in B.C.
      Author: Scott, Jack
      A history of working class struggle from the workers' perspective.
    14. Rank and File
      Personal Histories of Working Class Organizers
      Author: Lynd, Alice; Lynd, Staughton (eds.)
      A collection of stories and recollections from labour movement organizers.
    15. The Retreat from Class
      A New 'True' Socialism
      Author: Wood, Ellen Meiksins
    16. Strike!
      The True History of Mass Insurgence from 1877 to the Present
      Author: Brecher, Jeremy
      A history-from-below that brings to light strikes as authentic revolutionary movements against the establishments of state, capital, and trade unionism.
    17. Workers' Councils
      Author: Pannekoek, Anton
      Now the goal becomes distinct; opposite to the stronger domination by state-directed planned economy of the new capitalism stands what Marx called the association of free and equal producers. So the call for unity must be supplemented by indication of the goal: take the factories and machines; assert your mastery over the productive apparatus; organize production by means of workers' councils.
    18. Working Class Experience
      Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800-1991
      Author: Palmer, Bryan D.
      From nineteenth-century tavern life to late twentieth-century cinema, from rough canallers and the first stirrings of craft unionism to contemporary public-sector strikes, this books provides a sweeping interpretive study of the history of the Canadian working class since 1800.


    Learning from our History

    Coming soon





    Resources for Activists

    The Connexions Calendar - An event calendar for activists.

    Media Names & Numbers - A comprehensive directory of Canada's print and broadcast media. (CX5857).

    Sources - A directory that enables journalists to find spokespersons of organizations. Organizations that list themselves in Sources signficantly increase their odds of getting called by reporters when they are doing a story of their issues..