The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour, UNIFOR, LIUNA Ontario Provincial District Council, Goldblatt Partners LLP, and Cavaluzzo LLP.
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* Written by Anne Thomson
In 1929, during the Great Depression, my husband John was 7 years old when the Eleen family emigrated to Canada and settled to farm. Arriving by train in the early morning hours, the family spent their first night sleeping in some haystacks. Later, they occupied an abandoned farmhouse before ultimately building a two roomed log cabin that became their first Canadian home. Pioneer life was very hard and required both physical and mental stamina.
He attended a one room school where he learned English quickly. He had an inquiring mind. John grew up with a desire to improve his knowledge and skills and helped to support his parents and three siblings.
In 1934, at age 12 John had to go to the local council to ask for” relief”. He was given $3 ($75 purchasing power today) to buy food for the family but his father had to work on the county roads upon his return from harvesting grain in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and working on the Trans-Canada highway, the only opportunities for paid work.
John joined the RCAF in 1941 and became a leading flight mechanic. One of the requirements was to take a flight in an aircraft that you had serviced….. a great incentive to do the job correctly the first time! Although he signed up to go to the far east, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war. After the war he attended Winnipeg University under a Dept. of Veterans Affairs grant.
His next stop was Toronto and a job with the unemployment insurance office. When an opening at Canadian General Electric was posted, he applied and was hired. Soon he was active in the United Electrical Workers Union at CGE and joined their staff as an organizer. Through his political work, he became chair of the National Federation of Labour Youth and a member of the Labour Progressive Party till 1956.
John was an excellent organizer and assisted many workers to organize themselves and join the UE. His proudest accomplishment was organizing the CGE plant in London but the most memorable one was his attempt to organize the peanut vendors at the Canadian National Exhibition. Everything was going smoothly until their employer provided free ice cream and false promises of more money at a later date.
John had a varied career as a union organizer, research assistant at Sick Kids and fund raiser for the Canadian Cancer Society Later he was approached by the federal government of the time to work in Ottawa but decided against it.
In 1964, the Ontario Federation of Labour recruited him to the position of Research Director, a position he held for the next 23 years till retirement. In 1984 in the OFLs 25th anniversary publication, he explained the role of research director.
“We don`t profess to be experts in the areas that the Federation has to be concerned about, but we do have a working knowledge of the economy, taxation, energy , housing. labour relations and employment standards. We have to respond when budgets are brought down, write briefs to task forces, Royal Ccommissions and regulatory board hearings.”
One of John`s first tasks was a major study named Poverty in the Midst of Plenty which examined poverty in rural and urban Ontario. Later he wrote another major study entitled Plant Shutdown which examined the impact on the workers and their communities. For John, the written word was his primary tool to bring about positive change. As research director he wrote extensively on many subjects. His belief was that 75% of what he wrote was aimed at labour activists across the province in the belief that it would lead to an enhanced level of political activity province wide.
Labour activists of John`s generation were “big picture” activists who saw the interdependence of issues. They drew on personal experiences, history, literature, philosophy and politics to develop inclusive and effective strategies to address the issues facing the labour movement in Ontario. The question they would ask one another is “What re you reading?”
Through his work ,John became an early advocate for the labour movement to be involved in environmental issues in the workplace and the community. He represented labour in a wide variety of forums including the Conservation Council of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum where he succeeded in organizing the security guards, thus thwarting the plan to outsource their work. Following retirement in 1987 he was appointed research officer for a commission examining pension indexing by the Peterson government and he met with Jack Layton to provide input to his PhD thesis on pension reform.
John wrote many position papers to the government on topics such as pension reform, mandatory retirement, injunctions having no place in collective bargaining. He wrote op-ed opinions in the Toronto Star and the Globe and an abundance of diverse articles in the labour, socialist and Ukrainian heritage print media. He continued to publish articles well into his 80s.
For the last seven years of his life John required supplemental oxygen, but it did not slow him down. He attended Glendon Fitness 3X week pulling an O2 cylinder behind him. The students told him he was an inspiration to them.
John was totally committed to labour activism, a fierce advocate for and defender of workers rights, a passion that lasted a lifetime. He worked tirelessly for the NDP in every election till his health deteriorated. John walked in the Labour Day parade every year.
John died peacefully at home in 2015 one week after his 90th birthday. His labour books were accepted by the York GLRC and his papers went to the Ontario archives.
In finishing, a brief portion of an article he wrote for a conference of the Canadian Society for Ukrainian Labour Research:
"Working people will always have to fight to protect their human rights and struggle for social justice and an equitable society. They will draw inspiration, courage and a sense of community from those who have passed before them. The struggle is as valid and urgent today as it ever was."
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2025 John Eleen Lecture
Title: What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism
Speaker: Arun Kundnani, author of What is Antiracism? (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007). Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010 and now lives in Philadelphia. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he is currently working on a biography of Jamil Al-Amin.
Commentary: Abigail Bakan, Professor, Social Justice Education department at OISE, University of Toronto.
Click here to watch the event recording
Date: February 20, 2025
Location: Kaneff Tower – Room 519, York University (Keele campus)
This lecture will be part of our 2025 Graduate Student Symposium: Critical Conversations in Work and Labour.
The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour, UNIFOR, LIUNA Ontario Provincial District Council, Goldblatt Partners LLP, and Cavaluzzo LLP.
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2023
Title: Labour and the Climate Crisis: Developing a Worker- and Equity-Centered Clean Energy Economy
Speaker: Lara Skinner, Executive Director, Climate Jobs Institute, Cornell University
Commentary: Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Feminist Economist & Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University
Moderattor: Nathi Zamisa, Graduate Student, Social and Political Thought, York University
Click here to watch the event recording
Find more information on the Climate Jobs Institute website.
Reports by Dr. Lara Skinner:
- Combatting Climate Change, Reversing Inequality: A Climate Jobs Program for Texas
- Building a Just Transition for a Resilient Future: A Climate Jobs Program for Rhode Island
- Climate for Change: A Complete Climate Jobs Roadmap for New York City
- Maine Climate Jobs Report
Blog Post by Nathi Zamisa for YorkU’s Climate Change Research Month: From Ambition to Action: Labour, Equity, and Climate Justice
Bios
Keynote Speaker Dr. Lara Skinner is the Executive Director of Cornell ILR’s Climate Jobs Institute. Dr. Skinner is a nationally recognized expert in the labour and employment impacts of climate change, clean energy policy, and the transition to a low-carbon economy. Under Lara’s direction, Cornell has designed jobs-led climate programs for eight U.S. states and helped form coalitions composed of labour unions, elected leaders, environmental organizations and industry experts in states like Texas, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island.
Respondent Dr. Marjorie Griffin Cohen is an economist who is a professor emeritus of Political Science and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She has written extensively in the areas of political economy and public policy with special emphasis on issues concerning, labour, the Canadian economy, women, electricity deregulation, energy, climate change and labour, and international trade agreements.
Moderator Nathi Zamisa is completing an M.A. in Black Studies: Theories of Race and Racism in the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University. Nathi is currently the President of the York University Graduate Students Association, the Chair of the York Community Housing Association, a Board Member of the Global Labour Research Centre, and a Member of the York Senate’s Academic Planning, Policy, and Research Committee.
The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour, UNIFOR, LIUNA Ontario Provincial District Council, Goldblatt Partners LLP, and Cavaluzzo LLP.
2021
Title: Border Imperialism: Migration, Racial Capitalism, and Labour Struggles
Speaker: Harsha Walia, Activist and Writer.
Moderator: Angele Alook, Assistant Professor, York University.
Click here to watch the event recording.
This lecture was part of our 2021 Graduate Student Symposium: Critical Conversations in Work and Labour.
Bios
Harsha Walia is an activist and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is known for her organizing work with No One Is Illegal, the February 14th Women’s Memorial March Committee, the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, and several Downtown Eastside housing justice coalitions. Walia has been active in migrant justice, Indigenous solidarity, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist movements for over a decade. Walia is the author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (2013); and the co-author of Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (2019) and Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration (2015).
Angele Alook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. As a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research has mainly focused on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She specializes in Indigenous feminisms, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of family and work. She is a co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded (Partnership Grant) Corporate Mapping Project, where she completed research with the Parkland Institute on Indigenous experiences in Alberta’s oil industry and its gendered impact on working families. Angele is also a member of the Just Powers research team, a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant.
The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour, UNIFOR, LIUNA Ontario Provincial District Council, Goldblatt Partners LLP, and Cavaluzzo LLP.
2020
Title: Workers' voices in the Age of COVID-19
Speaker: Sara Mojtehedzadeh, The Star's Work and Wealth Reporter.
Click here to watch the event recording
Will COVID-19 change workplace power dynamics forever? In the 2020 John Eleen Annual Lecture on Global Labour, Sara Mojtehedzadeh will examine what the pandemic has shown us about the role of workplaces and workers’ voices in creating a safe and healthy society. The talk will highlight stories from different sectors impacted by the pandemic and look at underlying commonalities. It will examine how authorities–and the public–responded, what gaps in protection remain, and where openings for change exist.
Event Recording
Bio
Sara Mojtehedzadeh is the Star’s Work and Wealth reporter. Sara reports on the changing workplace, including precarious work, labour issues, and workers’ compensation. Previously, Sara worked for the BBC World Service. Her work at the Star has been recognized by the Hillman Foundation prize for social-justice oriented investigative journalism, Journalists for Human Rights, and the Michener Awards.
This lecture kicked off our New Voices in Work & Labour Studies Workshop Series. This series ran from OCtober 15 to November 12, 2020, in collaboration with the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies (CAWLS).
The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour, UNIFOR, LIUNA Ontario Provincial District Council, Goldblatt Partners LLP, and Cavaluzzo LLP.
2019
Title: Reclamation: Feminism, Labour and The (Un)Learning of (Radical) History
Speaker: Kiké Roach, Ryerson University, Unifor National Chair in Social Justice and Democracy.
Over the past decade, dynamic and visible social movements have brought many to the streets in protest: Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, #MeToo, the Women’s March, the Fight for $15 and Fairness. Yet while these movements have garnered national and international attention and action, deep, vital, transformational change remains elusive. As income inequality and racial and xenophobic tensions rise, and sexual violence persists, modest reforms and symbolic gestures are cast as progress while an emboldened rightwing systematically chips away at gains of the past. The narratives and core philosophies of Black and feminist struggles too often continue to be distorted, hollowed out, or co-opted. Have we heeded the wisdom of the past and learned the lesson that to transform the world, we would have to start by transforming ourselves? This talk explores past and contemporary manifestations of feminist and antiracist struggles for economic justice, human rights and an end to violence, and asks “What do we need to reclaim to make a better world?”
Bio
Kiké Roach is the Unifor National Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University, where she teaches courses in Social Movements and Human Rights in the Politics department and at the School of Social Work. As a civil rights lawyer, she was an advocate for accountability and reform in policing and detention centres for many years representing organizations such as the Black Action Defense Committee. A former Executive Member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Kiké is co-author of the book Politically Speaking, on Feminism and Canadian politics.
This lecture was part of our 2019 Graduate Student Symposium: Critical Conversations in Work and Labour.
The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour, Unifor, LIUNA Ontario Provincial District Council, Goldblatt Partners LLP, and Cavaluzzo LLP.
2017
Title: Trump’s American and the Plague of Illiberal Democracy
Speaker: Professor Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest.
Higher education in our politically desperate age is threatened by a legacy that it does not dare to name and that legacy with its eerie resonance with an authoritarian past asserts itself, in part, with the claim that education is failing. The Trump administration needs
education to fail in a very particular way. Hostile to its role as a public good and democratic sphere, it is attempting to reshape education according to the market-driven logic of neoliberalism with its emphasis on privatization, commodification, deregulation, fear, and
managerialism. Under such circumstances, higher education is threatened for its potential role as a public sphere capable of educating students as informed, critical thinkers capable of not only holding power accountable but also fulfilling the role of critical agents who can
act against injustice and resist diverse forms of oppression. In this lecture, Professor Henry A. Giroux posits that the modern loss of faith in the marriage of education and democracy needs to be reclaimed, but that will only happen if the long legacy of struggle over education
is once again brought to life as part of a more comprehensive understanding as education being central to politics itself.
Bio
Henry A. Giroux holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. He is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals, and has served as the editor or co-editor of four scholarly book series. Dr. Giroux is a regular contributor to a number of online journals including Truthout, Eurozine, and CounterPunch. He has published in many journals including Social Text, Third Text, Cultural Studies, Harvard Educational Review, Theory, Culture, & Society, and Monthly Review. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (2014); Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Lang 2014, 2nd edition); The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014); Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (co-authored with Brad Evans, City Lights, 2015); Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2016); America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017); and The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of Authoritarianism (Routledge 2018). His primary research areas are: cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and public education.
This lecture was part of our 2017 Graduate Student Symposium: Critical Conversations in Work and Labour.
The John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour was initiated through the generous donation that Anne Thomson-Eleen made to the GLRC and was co-sponsored by the Ontario Federation of Labour & Unifor.