Exploring the Social Relations of Class Struggle in the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign

Abstract

The various workers’ rights activities going on today form a nexus including education, union-renewal-oriented organizing, and anti-racist social-change initiatives. In this chapter, I will explore some moments of the 2007 phase of the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC) as an example of this. The OMWC was a Toronto-based labor-community project to raise the minimum wage to ten dollars per hour; it started in 2001, was revived briefly in 2007, and ebbed and flowed in the years between. Launched as part of a long-term strategy to contribute to efforts to build a low-waged-workers movement,¹ the campaign brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies, and labor organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials, and staff were the agents or targets of the campaign. This initial exploration is part of a larger inquiry² that will contribute to building an understanding of why it is that today’s dominant labor-community organizing approach is able to realize short campaigns but not develop an effective workers’ movement “in the struggle against global capitalism.”³ I suggest that what I name as pragmatic and transformative anti-racist approaches to organizing are historically driven and influenced by a range of dynamic social conditions.