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How did labour fare in 2024? In many ways, the Canadian labour market and labour movement are both looking more like they did pre-pandemic. Hopes of using the relatively robust post-pandemic economy as a springboard to build something better seem to largely be fading. Strike activity was down considerably in 2024, after reaching historic heights the previous year, by some measures. Wage growth has cooled, even as unions continue to seek pay increases to account for post-pandemic inflation. While some legislative gains were made this past year, governments also intervened in several important labour actions to end or pre-empt strikes and to come to the aid of employers who locked out their workers. In particular, the federal government has been especially coercive in its use of back-to-work orders.... Introduction
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This summer, the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) brought a strike of running trades workers at Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited (CPKC, or just “CP”) to an abrupt conclusion. In a moment of rare opportunity, Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) contracts covering nearly 10,000 locomotive engineers, conductors, crew dispatchers, and rail traffic controllers at both companies had expired at the same time, in the fall of 2023. ...The stories collected here were shared by current and former engineers and conductors, as well as workers in other trades and unions at both CN and CP. They describe in detail the day-to-day work of a railway employee, and they reflect on the conditions on the job, within the TCRC, and with management and the federal government – the conditions that brought the heady few days in August, when it looked as though a historic strike was set to shut down the railways, to devastating effect.--Introduction
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Working class politics in Canada is at a disturbing junction. There has been a shift in voting patterns, sometimes referred to as “dealignment,” in which working class voters have moved away from traditional class-based loyalties towards right-wing populist parties and movements. In the recent US election, an estimated 56 percent of working class voters cast their ballot for Trump. In Canada, through most of 2023 and 2024, a significant plurality of working class voters indicated their preference for the Conservative Party under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre. There are multiple theses competing for narrative leadership to explain dealignment and surging working class support for right-wing populism: geopolitical and environmental crises that put tens of millions of people in motion as migrants pour across borders; a rise of individualism and rebellion that took root in the trauma of the COVID crisis; an inflation and affordability crisis after the COVID recession; a cultural backlash to identity politics and advances for women, especially among young men; disinformation and social media; a growing political divide between those with and without post-secondary education, and; the failures of social democratic and liberal parties that associated themselves with neoliberal globalization and abandoned the working class. But there is another less discussed yet important factor in the drift of working class voters away from traditional values and politics—the problematic role and capacity of trade unions and the labour movement to influence working class political outlooks and choices....