Toronto Community Book Launch: Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work
Peace Lounge, 7th Floor OISE Building
252 Bloor St West
Toronto ON
Canada
Event photos
Across the world, workers and communities have responded to neoliberal restructuring, austerity, and economic crisis by taking over workplaces and converting them into worker-managed cooperatives and community-anchored enterprises. From Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises to experiments in worker cooperatives and democratic workplaces across Latin America, Europe, and North America, these initiatives have prefigured new ways of organizing work – grounded in solidarity, and collective ownership. They are turning workplaces into spaces of democracy and commons – a labour commons.
Join book authors, Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta, and Special Guests: Andrés Ruggeri, professor at the University of Buenos Aires and director of the Documentation Center for Worker-Recuperated Enterprises and invited labour organisations, cooperatives, and scholars from Toronto and southern Ontario, including:
Jorge Garcia-Orgales, The United Steelworkers
Rafael Grohmann, Creative Labor and Critical Futures Group
Greig de Peuter, Cultural Workers Organize Research Collective
Irum Chorghay, New Media Cooperative
Susanna Redekop, Food sovereignty and CSAs in Ontario Expert
Juliet ‘Kego Ume-Onyido, Founder of the Black Women Professional Worker Co-operative
Andi Argast, Hypha Co-op
Kevin Wilkinson, The Big Carrot
and, Joshua Zachariah, Danu Social Club
Join us March 10th for this community–university gathering that uses the book Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over as a starting point for a collective conversation about the possibilities and limits of building labour commons in Toronto today. The authors hope to begin a dialogue and movement-oriented discussion among labour, cooperative, and community actors in Toronto, that asks:
- How can we democratize and cooperativize more and more workplaces in Toronto?
- What can be learned and adapted from democratic workplaces and worker-recuperated enterprises elsewhere?
- What institutions, alliances, and infrastructures are needed to sustain democracy at work in a highly financialized, precarious urban economy?
