About this Event
Register now for our 2025 Sefton-Williams Memorial Lecture, , delivered by Full Professor, Faculté des arts et des sciences - École de relations industrielles, Université de Montréal, and co-founder of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT). We will also present the Sefton-Williams Award for Contributions to Labour Relations to David Fairey, Labour Economist, as well as the co-founder and co-chair of the BC Employment Standards Coalition. A reception will immediately follow the lecture.
This is a free event and all are welcome. Seating is limited, so please ensure you RSVP to attend in-person. Alternatively, you can live-stream the event via Zoom.
Abstract | Citizenship at work once offered a historical meta-narrative for understanding the progress of workers’ rights and democracy through collective bargaining in large private sector firms. Is this ideal now an illusion? Trade unions across the globe face a range of disruptions that are destabilizing traditional structures, practices and strategies. The most optimistic versions of this vision have faltered over recent decades, and the counter thesis is now that of inevitable decline and the weakening of such citizenship.
Drawing on his work with colleagues at the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT), Gregor Murray considers this argument through the lens of a local union in a multinational firm in Canada’s metal working industry. This was the heartland of highly unionized, largely male, manufacturing. What are the ramifications of multiple disruptions to its traditional modes of action and strategy? To assess the state of citizenship at work in this firm, and the role of its union over recent decades, Murray looks at the efforts of this union to experiment. He also examines what this experimentation reveals about this union’s possible future and the lessons for union renewal more generally.
Despite considerable pressures on this citizenship, there are multiple signs of renewal through enlarged union repertoires and the need for managers, workers, and unions to meet digital and ecological challenges. Meeting these challenges will require enhanced skills and social dialogue mechanisms, and this lecture will unpack the ways in which experimentation can continue to stimulate renewal, while also highlighting that proactive policies to promote workplace democracy in Canada are largely missing in action.
- Date & Time | Thursday, October 23, from 4-5:30pm | Reception to follow
- Location | Debates Room, Hart House
The presents topics of interest to scholars and practitioners of labour-management relations, and is jointly delivered by Woodsworth College and the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Hart House, 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
