Bill Fletcher Jr. gave the keynote address at the 4th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies.
Bill Fletcher Jr. has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labour movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labour unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice; and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” — And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio, and the web.
Hosted by Stephanie Ross, President of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies – cawls.ca
Recorded in Toronto, 2 June 2017.
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1 Comment
The labor movement has no future, largely because its leadership has fantasies of joining the 1%. It does have a past though, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) who got rid of the piecards and made every sister and brother a leader. They changed everything, which was why they were destroyed.