labour

John Cartwright, President of the Toronto and York District Labour Council, offers up his thoughts on Transforming Power. Click on the .pdf below to download and read the review that originally appeared in Our Times

Last night I spoke at a fundraising event for the legendary Highlander Center that was part of a three day gathering of labour and community activists organized by the Labour Education Centre.  It was an amazing event.  Incredible diversity, majority people of colour, lots of poor people, many young people.  It was politically diverse from people who have just gotten active to veteran activists, from service workers to anti-capitalist activists, from union, community, and even academia.  And on top of that it was a US/Canada collaboration beginning an 8 month project to build connections between labour and community in Toronto.

The last few weeks in Toronto have shown us that living in a global city means that a conflict half way around the world in a place like Sri Lanka can appear in our streets in technicolour, forcing us to face issues that seemed remote only days before.  The global city will make another appearance on Monday at 1:30 pm in Queen's Park with a march to free recentyly arrested Aung San Suu Kyi.  Yet another sign of the global city was the extraordinary stewards' meeting held at the Metro Convention Centre on May 7 where more than 1,000 shop stewards and union officials discussed a common response to the economic crisis.  The diversity you can see in the photo is a sign of how our movements are changing with the participation of people from all around the world.