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The article provides information on the municipal elections which were held in Ontario in November 2006. The elections represented a strategic shift in the political priorities of organized labour. The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) held a series of strategy sessions, candidate schools, public speaking and media courses, and political organizer training sessions. The campaign was rolled out in four phases including visioning, training and endorsement, and accountability.
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The article reviews the book, "Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement," by Clayton Sinyai.
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This article surveys positions on constitutional reform of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) from a historical perspective. In addition to analyzing how Canada’s largest labour organization has approached issues of national unity, federalism, and constitutional reform, the article underscores how Canadian constitutional struggles were reflected within the labour movement by focusing on how constitutional politics affected the relationship between the CLC and its Québec affiliate, the (Québec Federation of Labour) FTQ. Specifically, the article traces the gradual eclipse of the CLC’s preference for centralization and the emergence of sovereignty-association as a political position which the CLC has both externalized politically and internalized organizationally.
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In the wake of a series of prolabor Supreme Court decisions in Canada, the mantra of “workers' rights as human rights” has gained unprecedented attention in the Canadian labor movement. This article briefly reviews the Canadian labor movement's recent history with the Supreme Court before arguing that elite-driven judicial strategies, advocated by several academics and Canadian unions, threaten, over time, to depoliticize traditional class-based approaches to advancing workers' rights. The argument is premised on the notion that liberal human rights discourse does little to address the inequalities in wealth and power that polarize Canadian society along class lines.
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The article considers the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Québec Federation of Labour (FTQ) during the tenure of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Discusses CLC and FTQ approaches to the Meech Lake Accord, as well as organized labour's response to the Charlottetown Accord. Explores how the longstanding party-union relationship deranged the trade union movement's weak constitutional perspective.
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The Quebec labour movement's decision to withdraw its support for Canada's federal system in the 1970s and instead embrace the sovereignist option was unquestionably linked to the intersection of class and nation in Quebec. In this period, unions saw the sovereignist project as part of a larger socialist or social democratic societal project. Because the economic inequalities related to ethnic class, which fuelled the labour movement's support for sovereignty in the 1970s, were no longer as prevalent by the time of Quebec's 1995 referendum, organized labour's continued support for the sovereignist option in the post-referendum period cannot adequately be explained using the traditional lens of class and nation. This paper employs an institutional comparative analysis of Quebec's three largest trade union centrals with a view to demonstrating that organized labour's primary basis for supporting sovereignty has changed considerably over time. While unions have not completely abandoned a class-based approach to the national question, they have tended to downplay class division in favour of an emphasis on Quebec's uniqueness and the importance of preserving the collective francophone identity of the nation. Party–union relations, the changing cultural, political and economic basis of the sovereignist project and the emergence of neoliberalism in Quebec are offered as key explanatory factors for the labour movement's shift in focus.
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This article examines the relationship of the Canadian Labour Congress with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms from the initial stages of the Charter's development, in the 1980-81 Special Committee on the Canadian Constitution, to its present status as powerful legal instrument and national symbol.
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This article reviews the arguments for and against adopting an anti-scab law and considers what impact such laws have on unions, businesses and individual workers. This article will then look at the constellation of players in today’s debate: governments, political parties, labour organizations, and the business community. The article will focus on the Canadian Labour Congress’ (CLC) unsuccessful campaign for a federal anti-scab law, in the form of bill C-257, to determine what, if anything, it says about labour politics and what lessons it provides for labour law reformers. (Excerpt from introduction)