tl;dr:

In Part 1 of our two-part dispatch from the CLC, we talk to: Emily Leedham, the Prairie Reporter for PressProgress and editor of Shift Work, PressProgress’ weekly national labour newsletter; Guy Smith, president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees; Mary Newman, a journalist and producer for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and member of the Canadian Media Guild; James Russwurm, a quality assurance tester for Keywords Studios, where workers formed the first union in the video gaming industry and affiliated with UFCW Local 401; Liz Ha, 1st Vice President of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 154, chair of the OPSEU provincial human rights committee, and vice-chair of the OPSEU Coalition of Racialized Workers. Then we represent the direct government frontline workers as social services, corrections, sheriffs, lot of administrative support workers, a lot of workers that work with handicapped folks. There’s still so many workers who are left out of the movement or who are written out of the movement itself, because, like migrant farm workers, for example, in the United States, farm workers were deliberately written out of the National Labor Relations Act for very racist reasons and are very underrepresented in the movement as a result of it. What you were saying is that when COVID hit, farm workers were deemed essential along with other classes of workers, but no one wanted to do those jobs. Instead of doing what people typically think of construction workers in New York City doing, which is blaming undocumented workers and non-union workers as the enemy who are undercutting our jobs and our wages, they’re reaching out to these workers, largely migrant and undocumented workers in the city or returning citizens coming home from prison, who are ripe for hyper-exploitation and have to work for the most union-busting, exploitative, corner-cutting demolition and construction companies in the city.

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