Prominent racial justice, labour and international activist Bill Fletcher Jr. will speak Wednesday on the kind of labour movement needed.
His talk, “What Kind of Labour Movement Do We Need?”, will take place Sept. 24, from 11:30am to 2:30pm, in the Harry Crowe Room, 109 Atkinson College, Keele campus. Fletcher, based in Washington DC, is the Global Labour Research Centre’s first speaker for the 2014-15 Global Labour Speaker Series. The talk is free and open to the public. Following the talk, there will be a reception.
Fletcher has been involved in the United States labour and racial justice movements for nearly 40 years, beginning as a welder in a shipyard. His book, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press, 2009), co-authored with Fernando Gapasin, provides an incisive examination of the limits of contemporary unions and charts a path to a revitalized labour movement through social justice unionism.
His political writing has been published widely in such venues as The Nation, Monthly Review, Black Commentator, Jacobin, The Huffington Post, LA Progressive and Common Dreams. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum, a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, and is currently the executive assistant to the national vice-president of the American federation of government employees.
To read an excerpt of Solidarity Divided, visit the University of California Press website. To see Fletcher in conversation with Bill Moyers, visit the Moyers & Company website.
For more information about the Global Labour Research Centre, visit its website, contact glrc@yorku.ca or ext. 44704.
The event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Social Science, Sociology and Geography in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.