What next for Take Back the CLC?
By David Bush
The Peoples’ Social Forum that took place last week had a large labour presence among the thousands who attended. There were numerous – too many to count- workshops, panels and larger assemblies that dealt directly with issues confronting the labour movement.
The labour movement assembly was organized by the Take Back the CLC campaign that built Hassan Husseini’s presidential bid at the Canadian Labour Congress convention in May. The assembly started by getting participants to write down their names, location, contact information and affiliations and placing it on a giant map in the front of the room. This mapping exercise was useful to visualize the geography of those in the room, and to allow people to connect who live in the same city. Most were from Ontario and Quebec, but there were large contingents from BC, Nova Scotia and a contingent from Winnipeg.
This exercise was followed by five speakers: Hassan Husseini fro Take Back the CLC, Jean-Claude Parrot former president of CUPW, Penny Bertrand an activist who worked on Carol Wall’s 2005 bid for CLC president, Kyle Buott president of the Halifax-Dartmouth District Labour Council, and Janice Folk-Dawson of the Guelph Labour Council.
