Graham Cox is a labour union researcher at Unifor focusing on economic, bargaining, and policy in the energy, road, rail, and marine sectors.
Previous to Unifor, Graham was a researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). At CUPE his work focused on economic and policy analysis for the anti-privatization, trade, post-secondary education, utilities, employment insurance, special projects, and organizing files.
Before working at CUPE, Graham served the student movement as National Researcher of the Canadian Federation of Students and chairperson of the National Graduate Caucus.
Graham has worked as a union organizer for the PSAC, CUPE, and the CFS with a focus on graduate student teaching assistant, research assistant and contingent academic staff union drives. This included leading drives to organize academic workers at the University of New Brunswick, UPEI, and Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Please also see articles under the author Editors (What’s left).
The Conservative attacks on workers' collective rights are focused on undermining the financial capacity of workers' organizations. The goal is to destroy the ability of unions to fight for the interests of their members at the bargaining table and in the political arena.
Labour, organized into politically active and democratic unions, is essential to the support for all other social justice movements. It is why the Conservative activists in Canada and around the world are so hostile to them. No matter what nonsensical reason right-wingers put forward, their main reason to attack unions is to undermine the most powerful opposition to their regressive agenda.
Trade Union Briefing from TUAC to the OECD on the World Economic Forum.
Bill C-377 was a Harper Conservative written federal piece of legislation that is supposed to be about union financial disclosure. However, after careful analysis we came to understand that it is a highly partisan and political attack on the right of free association in Canada. The Parliamentary Budget Office and the Canada Revenue Agency have both released costing analysis showing that the government will have to spend millions of dollars a year on the implementation of the reporting system.
It is sometimes hard to follow liberal analysis at it weaves and meanders through a track of ahistorical and inconsistent narratives. Most of the time it is not worth it, but every once in a while the analysis does harm to struggle for historical justice, fairness and equality: namely, the work of the union movement. In these cases, it is probably better to point out some of the problems.
The CFIB have released their annual report that attacks the public sector's higher reported sick days (when compared to the private sector). The analysis they put forward is bogus and their recommendations essentially amount to an attack on women and health care workers. If their recommendations were adopted it would be disastrous for public health and safety.
