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	<title>Kate Klein &#8211; Midnight Sun</title>
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	<title>Kate Klein &#8211; Midnight Sun</title>
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		<title>Listen to Disabled People or Get Out of Our Way</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/listen-to-disabled-people-or-get-out-of-our-way/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=listen-to-disabled-people-or-get-out-of-our-way</link>
		
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		<pubDate>Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:27:53 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[COVID-19]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Disability justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[griffin epstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Klein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing tactics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pandemic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>kate klein and griffin epstein on challenging the labour movement to take the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and disability justice seriously, and on alternative modes of labour organizing when traditional forms fall short.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/listen-to-disabled-people-or-get-out-of-our-way/">Listen to Disabled People or Get Out of Our Way</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
]]></description>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">8. 19. 2023</h3><h1>Listen to Disabled People or Get Out of Our Way</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><a style="color: #000000;" href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/kate-klein/">kate klein</a> <br />&amp; griffin epstein</span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />In the US state of Tennessee, two laws are stacked against labour organizers fighting for workplace safety: employers can’t mandate vaccines or masks, and workplaces are not allowed to be fully unionized. So, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty in the Medicine, Health, and Science program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville took matters into their own hands. Faculty created a free “mask bank” for students and staff by pooling their resources to buy and distribute high-quality masks. As professor Aimi Hamraie remembers: “Eventually we tried to get the university to let us pay for those masks out of our research funds, because&#8230;we were providing what should be an institutionally provided resource and service for people. And they wouldn’t let us use our research funds to buy masks because there’s no category in their system of reimbursement for PPE.” The workers involved recognized they shouldn’t have to pay for workplace personal protective equipment (PPE), but the university wouldn’t budge, and they weren’t going to put themselves or their students in danger.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Vanderbilt University excused its unwillingness to participate in community safety by citing the lack of a precedent or a pre-existing framework for doing so. Many workers across the US and Canada have faced similar hurdles when trying to organize in response to a massive global health crisis. In May 2023, we – kate and griffin – </span><a href="https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/they-dont-know-how-to-fight-for-this"><span style="font-weight: 400;">published an article in </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Briarpatch Magazine</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> exploring how unionized workers are pushing union leadership to understand COVID protections as part of a broader disability and accessibility framework. After facing our own struggles as disabled educators trying to bring a disability justice consciousness to our union local, we were inspired to reach out to other workers. We hoped to hear powerful stories of union leaders mobilizing for COVID safety, and to learn from their victories. Instead, we found people struggling in the same ways we were: small groups of committed workers making modest gains and building support networks, but failing to move the needle within the broader union infrastructure. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Workers deserve the kind of protection and power that comes with being unionized. But formal unionization is not the only way to organize a workplace. As we did our research for the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Briarpatch </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">article, we connected with many other educators and post-secondary workers organizing outside or against their existing unions – or in the case of the faculty at Vanderbilt University, without the protection of a union at all. In most of these cases, the work was being led by disabled, chronically ill, Mad, neurodivergent, and/or psychiatrized workers, with support and solidarity from colleagues with pre-existing commitments to collective struggle. As disabled activist and writer Alice Wong </span><a href="https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/14/message-from-the-future-disabled-oracle-society/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reminds us</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, disabled people have always been “oracles,” anticipating the contours of future oppressions and strategizing ways to keep people safe. Hamraie’s department at Vanderbilt was full of people who teach about the social determinants of health, researchers examining the history of AIDS activism, disability scholars, and workers with experience doing mutual aid organizing – lineages that allowed them to clearly see the wisdom in approaches to organizing that prioritize grassroots adaptation and collective response. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What happens when the institutions that are meant to protect us fail to understand what protection looks like or cannot imagine new ways of organizing beyond conventional union tactics? What can the broader labour movement learn from the creative interventions made by workers whose identities, experiences, and commitments ensured that they didn’t have to rush to catch up when the pandemic hit? What might all workers, unionized or not, gain from understanding disability justice as a lens and a set of material practices that not only belong in, but might help to expand, the labour movement – including but not limited to trade unions?</span></p><p> </p><h2>Disability, ableism, and labour </h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While COVID-19 disproportionately threatens people who already face structural oppression and/or who have pre-existing health conditions or concerns, the pandemic is also itself a </span><a href="https://www.thestar.com/life/health-wellness/report-says-long-covid-could-impact-economy-and-be-mass-disabling-event-in-canada/article_c31acd7e-1925-548d-b91e-dc75c4bf7c9f.html?"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mass disabling event</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><a href="https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/post-covid-19-condition"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10 – 20% of all COVID infections result in potentially life-altering Long COVID</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. As a result, there is a growing population of disabled people, at least some of whom are members of unions, fighting for support from their employers. And yet, according to disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, the labour movement continues to fail to incorporate disability justice into its organizing work. Adelman <a href="https://tcf.org/content/commentary/the-labor-movement-is-incomplete-without-disability-justice/">examines</a> the historic strikes of workers at the University of California (SRU/UAW), US-based Starbucks stores (SBWU), and US rail workers (multiple unions), explaining that they have “fallen short of their own ideological goals.” For example, while Starbucks workers included pandemic protections in their demands and rail unions fought for sick leave, neither group enforced COVID safety standards for their strike actions. Disabled workers in SRU/UAW have made multiple public statements about the lack of attention paid to COVID-19 safety throughout the bargaining process. As Adelman </span><a href="https://tcf.org/content/commentary/the-labor-movement-is-incomplete-without-disability-justice/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">writes</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, “The lack of explicit support from workers’ unions for broader pandemic safety measures…harms workers and society at large.” This lack of support deepens what Adelman identifies as the already-existing “ableism in the labour movement.” </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ableism is often misunderstood as a form of oppression wielded exclusively against people with specific conditions that have been legitimated </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">as disabilities</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by the medical industrial complex – misunderstood as separate from but, as the Ontario Human Rights Commission (citing the Law Commission of Ontario) writes, </span><a href="https://www.ohrc.on.ca/sites/default/files/Policy%20on%20ableism%20and%20discrimination%20based%20on%20disability_accessible_2016.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“analogous to”</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> other forms of social oppression. The disability justice movement understands ableism more broadly. As Talila “TL” Lewis puts it,” ableism is “a system of assigning value to peoples’ bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence and fitness,” all of which are “deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism.” These interlocking forms of oppression – and the expectations they set for individuals’ behaviour – affect everyone, albeit in different manners. In this way, Lewis argues, “you do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” Disability identity is also complicated because it is both gatekept and stigmatized: many people do not readily or easily claim the label of “disability,” even if they have chronic health conditions, mind and body differences, and/or access needs that are unmet by our current social structure.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Despite this breadth of disabled experience, most unions see ableism as a niche issue, disconnected from other forms of workplace oppression, and treat disability as anomalous rather than common within the workforce. As such, although unions have often advocated for accommodations and/or compensation for workplace injury, they have rarely understood disability as scholar </span><a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-2500-9_601.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sami Schalk</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> defines it: “a political concern” requiring not only individual support but also collective action.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The COVID-19 pandemic could have been a turning point for the labour movement. And it has had an impact on some unions’ organizing demands: for example, Adelman’s article highlights the Chicago Teachers Union’s </span><a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2022-01-05/chicago-teachers-union-votes-to-go-remote-during-omicron-surge"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pivot to remote instruction</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in response to unsafe classrooms, and strikes by </span><a href="https://paydayreport.com/atu-shop-steward-who-warned-of-covid-19-dangers-dies-from-it/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">transit workers</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and others to protest unsafe working conditions at the beginning of the pandemic. “Unfortunately,” Adelman writes, “most unions have not continued this kind of action; few recognize that the pandemic has no end in sight.” </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We wonder: what would it look like to follow Alice Wong’s lead and see disabled people as </span><a href="https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/14/message-from-the-future-disabled-oracle-society/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">organizing oracles</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, central to labour justice? As disability and transformative justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha </span><a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/future-is-disabled-book"><span style="font-weight: 400;">writes</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, “We have the power to transform the world from the hellscape it is in right now to one oriented around care, safety and everyone having enough.” But this can’t happen if we limit our imaginations and allow the mainstream labour movement, with its narrow scope, to be our only option for workplace organizing.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Tethering ourselves to a community of disabled workers</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to foundational disability justice performance project </span><a href="https://www.sinsinvalid.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sins Invalid</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, disability justice organizing is driven by sustainability rather than urgency, asking that organizers and communities “pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term” and reminding us that “our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.” This kind of organizing invests in “flexibility and creative nuance,” asking us to experiment and rethink constantly. It insists on interdependence and building alternative social and political structures, “knowing that state solutions inevitably extend further control over our lives.” It does not rely on vanguards or a figurehead who fits a narrow, ableist image of a “charismatic leader.” Instead, it makes space for people to bring their unique skills and capacities to collective work. These material practices can be seen in the labour organizing of the Disabled Academics Collective (DAC)</span><b>, </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">founded in the summer of 2020 by disabled historian Nicole Lee Schroeder.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">COVID-19 hit as Schroeder was in the final stages of her PhD. “Because I’m a historian of medicine and disability, I knew this was going to go bad,” Schroeder told us. “We have to prep for the long haul – three to five years, at least – and we have to prep for the rise of eugenics.” In the summer of 2020, Schroeder posted on Twitter to ask whether other disabled scholars would be interested in creating an online space “where people at all levels of the academy can connect with each other.” The response was overwhelming. She gathered a group of interested people, and in July 2021, on the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, launched the Disabled Academics Collective. Though the DAC has advocacy-focused public-facing resources, at its core is its Discord server, an online discussion hub for approximately 800 disabled students, faculty members, and independent scholars to build solidarity, community, and collective care. The choice to use Discord as an organizing platform was intentional: the DAC is designed to be “a repository of disabled peoples’ knowledge,” and Discord is easily searchable and saves all posts. “Many newly disabled people, especially with Long COVID, are realizing the academy is no longer structured for them,” Schroeder told us. “I wanted a space to allow people to do that early learning – you can read through these posts, see other peoples’ experiences, get feedback, ask questions.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The DAC Discord also supports labour self-advocacy. As disabled workers, Schroeder notes, “we’re often told that we’re the first person to ask for an accommodation at our institutions. I wanted people to be able to say, no, there’s precedents – I know people at other campuses are getting this.” But it was important for DAC to remain autonomous and decentralized – and, particularly, that it provide resources that unions can’t. “We have a lot of unions in the US,” Schroeder says, but few of them are “actually engaging in radical action. They’re just like, ‘Let’s pay people an okay wage.’” She continues, “I have seen some institutions and faculty groups push to establish mask mandates on their campuses again, that is true.” But, she adds, unions such as the one at the University of California will often “abandon” disabled people in contract negotiations. For Schroeder, this is because of a lack of disabled people and disability justice analysis “in the room.” She says: “You need people who are aware of disability. I’m a part of my union, but I’m not active in it. I don’t trust them to fight for me when I’m not there in the room, raising every single point about accessibility. If other people are in the union, and I see them unmasked, then I already know, you’re not fighting for me.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ultimately, the DAC functions as a way to connect people to one another and to relevant social movements, outside a single workplace. Schroeder’s hope for her own work, and for the DAC, is to help disabled people across academia “tether themselves to a community they didn’t realize is as expansive as it is, reclaim histories they have not been told or long denied, and see themselves as something bigger.” This is where power – and change – comes from.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p><h2>A place where we take care of people</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In interviewing union representatives for our </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Briarpatch</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> article, one thing that became obvious is that many conventional mechanisms for pursuing labour justice have become almost impossible to use when it comes to COVID-19. It’s very difficult to prove without a shadow of a doubt that you got COVID in one particular location, </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/waterloo-region-paramedics-covid-19-wsib-1.5882060"><span style="font-weight: 400;">so workplace health and safety claims have been getting rejected</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> even when transmission has happened at work. People often can’t get workplace accommodations unless they have a medical diagnosis for themselves, which means they won’t be entitled to access to remote work – let alone universal masking – if they, for example, live or are in close community with somebody who is immunocompromised. It’s hard for union members to file a grievance related to COVID when everything in the collective agreement was designed for pre-pandemic times. A </span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/workers-cant-sue-over-take-home-covid-calif-top-court-rules-2023-07-07/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">recent ruling by a California court that workers cannot sue over COVID-19 spread to their households</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> may have a chilling effect on union organizing around COVID, even beyond the United States. It feels clear that unless labour organizers find new language and frameworks attuned to the present moment, workers will continue to be left inadequately protected. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In truth, traditional labour rhetoric has long ignored disabled workers and pushed issues related to ableism to the sidelines. But disability justice-informed language has a lot to offer the labour movement right now – so long as labour organizers are willing to challenge the internalized ableism (and misogyny) that may lead some to see this language as “weak” or “soft.” </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In June 2020, scholars across the social and health sciences formed the Accessible Campus Action Alliance and published a statement called </span><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/accesscampusalliance"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Beyond “High-Risk.”</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Its initial focus was to pressure universities not to return to in-person learning. As one collective member explained: “So many universities were relying on the accommodations process to cover COVID safety, and we didn’t think that that existing structure was adequate for getting people the access that they needed. We were basically making the argument that everyone is affected by this, so it shouldn’t be an individual accommodation process.” Treating disability accommodations as a case-by-case bureaucratic process limits workers’ imaginations, and makes it hard to see these issues as a collective matter.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instead of relying on traditional labour frameworks such as “workplace health and safety,” “equity,” or even “disability rights,” the Beyond “High-Risk” statement centred on a different concept: “care.” The member we spoke to acknowledged that “care is a contested term,” but argued that “it provides a useful contrast against more economic frames and calculations.” In some ways, the choice of words was pragmatic: in the US, federal legislation defines faculty at private universities as managers, so they’re not allowed to unionize. Using rights-based language linked to the labour movement could therefore have jeopardized their political work if they were accused of stepping outside the bounds of what they’re allowed to fight for.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But “care” turned out to be a concept that travelled. The statement caught on, sparking a national conversation about what kind of institution a university could even be; as of this writing, it has over 60 pages of signatories. The collective member we interviewed emphasized that this success has helped many workers expand their imaginations of what’s possible: “A university doesn’t have to be a real estate developer. A university can be a place where we take care of people.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What does it mean to “take care” in a workplace? If unions attempt to understand “care” legalistically, as a right that can be fought for or a line item to be negotiated at the bargaining table, so much is missed. “Care” as understood in the Beyond “High-Risk” statement is about human relationships, about experiences of belonging, and about imagining a world that is organized according to different priorities. If unions see themselves as bureaucratic rights-administrators meant solely to enforce and update collective agreements, “care” is not a concept that’s likely to be useful to them. But if unions were to see themselves as vehicles for broad social movements, and as vibrant hubs where workers could get organized around issues that matter to them, wouldn’t it make sense to lead with ideas that move people? Wouldn’t it </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">especially </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">make sense to lead with ideas that resonate with workers who may not have historically seen the union as a place for them? Can a union articulate a radical vision of what our worlds of work could look like? Or do we need other kinds of organizations for that?</span></p><p> </p><h2>Building power amongst disabled workers</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Organizing for disability justice outside the union structure is personal for us (kate and griffin). As disabled faculty at an Ontario college, we know the limits of what unions can offer. Last spring, in the middle of an Omicron surge, Ontario college workers very nearly went on strike. Though we were fighting for better working conditions, our union’s plans for executing a strike did not include any safety measures to prevent COVID-19 transmission or meaningful accommodations for workers unable to make it to campus to picket four days a week. In response, we offered to organize a Sick and Disabled Access Team, to come up with creative solutions to ensure everyone could be included in our workplace strike action. We were not taken up on our offer. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the strike was averted, the need to organize at our workplace did not disappear. We continued to negotiate with the union to create a working group focused on bringing a disability analysis to our local. We were told it would be hard for us to start this initiative through the union unless we were to become formally involved with the union as stewards; at the same time, we were told that as stewards, our activities would be focused mostly on upholding the collective agreement, and we would need to be very careful not to encourage any grassroots actions that might be seen as “insubordination” by our managers. In particular, given Canadian labour law, we would need to ensure we were never “encouraging employees to participate in an illegal strike” – taking some potential labour actions off the table.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We recognize the need for a union to uphold the limited rights guaranteed to workers by a collective agreement. However, as people interested in grassroots struggle more than service provision, these limitations concerned us. Instead of becoming stewards, we decided to found an autonomous worker-led group called College Workers for Access, a “disability justice-focused space in a pandemic world for people left behind in the ‘return to normal.’” While we wanted this to be a space where people could find emotional support during a moment when our employer had made it clear we were expected to navigate the risk of COVID entirely alone, we also hoped that our monthly gatherings could be a space to cultivate a radical disability politic amongst our coworkers and move towards action outside the union. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It quickly became clear to us as organizers that there exists a whole segment of the workforce that was and still is completely ignored by both our employer and our union. People with permanent disabilities – and therefore permanent access-related needs – were feeling lost in an accommodation process designed around time-limited injury and illness in a pre-pandemic world. Immune-compromised and otherwise higher-risk people, and those with personal, interpersonal, or ethical concerns about contracting or transmitting COVID, were struggling to have their legitimate worries and principles affirmed by either their colleagues or their bosses. Some had been sitting with the question of whether they would be able to continue in their line of work in the face of so much risk, or whether they would be quietly pushed out by their employer, especially if they were on contract.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As of this writing, College Workers for Access has existed for one full year. Our gatherings have spanned a range of feelings: sombre, rageful, tender, disillusioned, and hopeful. Together, we have listened to each others’ stories; researched and built a political analysis around our rights in the accommodations process; laughed together and made morbid jokes as a way of collectively coping with impossible circumstances; and planned public forums to discuss how to translate accessibility frameworks that we use with students into the contexts of our own working lives. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What makes College Workers for Access different from many conventional union-led disability frameworks, which tend to focus on facilitating accommodations under the collective agreement, is that we see disabled workers as a potentially powerful labour bloc. If governments and employers continue to refuse their responsibilities around workplace health and safety, more and more workers will become disabled by COVID-19. </span><a href="https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2023/03/09/report-says-long-covid-could-impact-economy-and-be-mass-disabling-event-in-canada.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are seeing this today</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. When we spoke with our union local executives about our experiences, we told them that the widespread abandonment of COVID safety measures could realistically result in disabled workers being eliminated from the workplace en masse. Seeing disability solely through the lens of workplace accommodations runs the risk of understanding disabled and chronically ill people as an administrative burden rather than as potential organizers. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As we begin our second year of College Workers for Access, we are still deciding how much energy we want to put towards convincing our union local to change its practices and address its ableism. We see some promise in divesting from the union entirely and building something that holds more excitement for us as radical educators with investments in intersectional grassroots organizing. We do hope, though, that our colleagues at the union may learn from what we are able to accomplish when we imagine what connection between workers can look like beyond negotiating collective agreements and filing grievances.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Through our work in College Workers for Access, we want to help all workers at our college to understand how a disability justice framework can benefit them even if they have not historically read themselves into the category of disability. In doing so, workers may be better able to  see how, as people with bodies labouring under racial capitalism, the liberation of each of us is bound up with the liberation of all of us. As Sins Invalid co-founder Patty Berne </span><a href="https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reminds us</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them. We understand that all bodies are caught in these bindings of ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state and imperialism, and that we cannot separate them. These are the positions from where we struggle. We are in a global system that is incompatible with life. There is no way to stop a single gear in motion — we must dismantle this machine.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Labour unions’ current approach to disability could not be further away from this vision. Instead, it focuses on tweaking the capitalist labour system, chasing slight amendments to collective agreements and accommodating individual workers. The traditional labour movement has not yet begun challenging the broader ableism that underpins the institution of work itself. In this way, it not only fails to stop the machine, but is part of what keeps the machine running. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recognizing this reality, we have several options as organizers. We can try to change the mainstream labour movement so that it better understands and incorporates disability justice. We can honour that there are in fact </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">multiple</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> labour movements and invest </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">in those that are already organizing against ableism as a form of social oppression constituted by and inextricable from all other forms of social oppression, especially white supremacy.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Or we can move away from trade unions as the primary framework for workplace organizing and try something different. In any case, one thing is clear: to meaningfully protect workers in a world that is decidedly not </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">post</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">-pandemic, unions will need to listen to grassroots movements led by disabled people and other oppressed workers – or else get out of our way.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p>kate klein (they/them) is a facilitator, teacher, and organizer. They organize with a local abolitionist collective to create safety without/despite police in their neighbourhood, and against workplace ableism alongside griffin and other sick &amp; disabled college workers. You can find them at <a href="http://rebelpedagogy.ca">rebelpedagogy.ca</a>.<br /><br />griffin epstein (they/them) is a Mad/psychiatrized white settler educator, community-engaged researcher, radical mental health and harm reduction practitioner, and poet in Toronto (Dish with One Spoon/Two Row/Treaty 13 territory). They are proud to do disability justice-oriented workplace organizing alongside kate and others. Find them at <a href="https://griffinepstein.com/">https://griffinepstein.com/</a>.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/life-making-or-death-making/"     class="crp_link post-3623"><span class="crp_title">Life-making or Death-making?</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Susan Ferguson on how the pandemic has laid bare the social reproduction labour that keeps capitalism churning, the fundamental violence of the capitalist system itself, and emerging possibilities for fighting back.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/listen-to-disabled-people-or-get-out-of-our-way/">Listen to Disabled People or Get Out of Our Way</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Indispensable</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/indispensable/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=indispensable</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 May 2022 05:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Interventions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Klein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing tactics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social movements]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist organizing]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=5454</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Kate Klein on a subtle source of activist burnout and what can be done about it.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/indispensable/">Indispensable</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/H3htK85wwnU" target="_blank">Photo: Mitchell Luo/Unsplash</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">5. 26. 2022</h3>
<h1>Indispensable</h1>
<h3 style="text-align: right;"><span style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: #000000;" href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/kate-klein/"><strong>Kate Klein</strong></a></span></h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br>I’ve been thinking about the hidden costs of what others perceive as our natural gifts. Just because we&#8217;re good at something doesn&#8217;t mean it comes easy.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I notice two general tendencies in how we talk about bringing new people into social movements, or supporting their leadership. One tendency is to say: &#8220;The movement needs ALL gifts! Activism doesn&#8217;t have to look like just one thing! If you&#8217;re good at writing, then be a movement writer! If you&#8217;re good at research, then research for the movement! If you&#8217;re good at accounting, then be a movement accountant!&#8221; I think this tendency has really gained steam lately as people try to make getting involved seem and feel more accessible. It&#8217;s a way of challenging the production of activist celebrities, which can make organizing seem unapproachable, like something that only a special kind of superstar can do.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A second tendency is to see social movements as </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">vehicles</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for revolutionary capacity-building. This tendency tells us that we don&#8217;t have to wait to be good at activism before becoming activists; practice is how we get good at things. There are many skills that are needed in the work of making change happen. Not only can organizing help us build a wide array of these skills, but we all actually have a responsibility to do so. This is important if our movements are to stay strong and resilient in shifting social conditions, and if the labour of sustaining them is to be fairly distributed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I don&#8217;t see these tendencies as mutually exclusive. While I tend towards the second, I see the value of the first. But, while at its best the first is about cultivating diversity and accessibility in our movements, I also see it facilitating and entrenching burnout amongst us when it’s taken to its extreme.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My experience of burnout tells me that when you are seen as good at something, people tend to assume you will do it. When you are seen as good at something, sometimes that ends up being the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">only</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> thing you find yourself doing, because people always expect it of you. This isn&#8217;t done maliciously. It simply becomes a collective habit, and can even be seen as a way of acknowledging your strengths. The thing you are good at is seen as </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">your job</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When you&#8217;re a part of a social change organization and you&#8217;re the only one who&#8217;s comfortable with public speaking, or writing a press release, or facilitating a meeting, or posting on Twitter&#8230;and a speech, a press release, a meeting, or a tweet is needed&#8230;it becomes incredibly difficult to say no to doing that thing. Because the movement </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">needs</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> rousing speeches, savvy media skills, keen facilitation, and social media wizardry. And if you don&#8217;t do it, who will?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">(This is burnout logic, of course. I know. And you </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">could</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> try to mentor other people, but have you tried doing that when you’re burnt out? Especially if you’re like me and have a full-time day job that involves a huge amount of care work?)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Maybe all of this is okay if what you&#8217;re good at feels relatively neutral to you. But when using your gift </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">costs</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> you something&#8230;I don&#8217;t know. What could it look like for us to see people&#8217;s gifts not as a resource to be extracted but as a cherished source of energy that needs care and replenishment?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I had to live three decades of life before I learned this lesson: being good at something doesn&#8217;t mean you have to do it. Being good at something doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s good </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">for</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> you. Being good at something doesn&#8217;t mean you need to do it in all contexts of your life. Being good at something doesn&#8217;t mean that it has to be the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">only</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> thing you do. And being good at something doesn&#8217;t mean you have to be alone in doing it.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Anybody with gifts that lie in the use of their body knows this, I think. Skilled singers know that singing constantly, at full volume, would harm their instrument. A weightlifter knows that it&#8217;s important to switch up the particular strength exercises they&#8217;re doing in order to work different muscles and avoid injury. The ability to run a marathon doesn&#8217;t logically translate to &#8220;now I guess I&#8217;m doing this every day.&#8221; That would be absurd. So why do we expect this constancy and consistency from more emotional and relational skills? Why do we think that a skilled conflict-resolver can or should do that work all the time? Why do we think that a skilled facilitator wants to always be facilitating, that a skilled listener wants to always be listening, that a skilled coordinator wants to always be coordinating, or that a skilled strategist wants to always be strategizing? We need a variety of people to be able to do a variety of things in order for those skills (and the people who have them) to stay present in our movements.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I desperately want people to feel like their </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">being</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is indispensable to the struggle, but that the manner in which they contribute can grow and change and shift direction when needed (or wanted). I want this for everybody, including myself.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I don&#8217;t think that everybody has to learn how to do all things. Of course, we each have gifts, and those should be seen and recognized. Of course, we all have things that we absolutely cannot do, or that cost us too much. But I do believe in collectively having a general orientation towards learning how to do lots of different kinds of movement tasks. Because we know that how activist labour is distributed is gendered, it&#8217;s raced, and it&#8217;s classed. If we naturalize the fact that it&#8217;s always disabled activists facilitating the access stuff “because we&#8217;re good at it,” if we naturalize the fact that it&#8217;s always women of colour resolving conflict in our groups “because they&#8217;re good at it,” if we naturalize the fact that men are doing all the public speaking “because they&#8217;re good at it”&#8230;I mean, come on. This isn&#8217;t new; we&#8217;ve been talking about who&#8217;s doing the dishes on the left for ages. But I often wonder whether people realize that this well-meaning but essentially individualistic &#8220;gift-oriented&#8221; approach to activist onboarding kind of perpetuates these same age-old problems.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am such a young activist. I have not been organizing for very long! There is so much that I still want to learn how to do! I want all of us to feel like radical organizations are spaces where we can not only build power collectively, but also </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">feel</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> powerful through the supported, lifelong cultivation of our skills. When lots of people know how to do lots of things, that makes it easier for people to take breaks, to make different choices; they can switch it up and mix it up and put on a new hat and decide to take it off again. It means the same people don&#8217;t always get stuck doing the same hard work just because we’ve all internalized the same “you should do what you&#8217;re good at” message. It means that when we start to feel burnout knocking at our door, maybe we don&#8217;t have to jump ship. Maybe we get to take some time to do something that costs us a little less, knowing there is space for that.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What new activist skill have </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">you</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> been wanting to learn but haven&#8217;t pursued because it was someone else&#8217;s “thing”?</span></p>						</div>
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							<p>Kate Klein is a facilitator, teacher, and activist based in Toronto. A self-described &#8220;process nerd,&#8221; she works with social movement groups to help them work together better. She also organizes with her local abolitionist collective to help keep their neighbourhood safe without police intervention (as well as safe from police intervention).</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/why-we-need-mass-movement-climate-justice-politics/"     class="crp_link post-6460"><span class="crp_title">Why We Need Mass Movement Climate Justice Politics</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> David Camfield on competing strategic visions of the fight for climate justice today, and why mass movements are indispensable. Excerpted from the new book Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/indispensable/">Indispensable</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Unsealing the Echo Chamber</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/unsealing-the-echo-chamber/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=unsealing-the-echo-chamber</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Aug 2021 18:21:44 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Klein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mining justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=2867</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Kate Klein on tactics and strategies for mining justice organizing in the COVID-19 era, when corporations are increasingly using digital technology to stifle dissent.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/unsealing-the-echo-chamber/">Unsealing the Echo Chamber</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/@olga_o" target="_blank">Photo: Olga Thelavart</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">8. 4. 2021</h3><h1 style="text-align: left;">Unsealing the Echo Chamber</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><b><br /></b><strong>Kate Klein</strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />Let me start with a story. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2016, I walk into a plush room in a Toronto conference centre, just before the start of the annual general meeting of a large Canadian mining company – call them Rockpoint Resources. Hoping to give off an air of nonchalance, I wear a blazer covering my tattoos and carry a large bag concealing a collection plate borrowed from some radical minister friends. Although we pretend not to know each other, I’m there with a handful of fellow activists to create a moment of disruption inside an otherwise slickly curated corporate performance. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My co-organizers and I plant ourselves in seats around the room, ignoring each other and trying to seem like business types. Looking around, I notice a number of signs notifying guests that video recording and photography by anybody except authorized personnel are strictly prohibited. The room is loaded with security staff, placed strategically up and down the aisles, monitoring the crowd. I see one guard photograph my friend on the other side of the room and then point at me. Almost instantaneously, another guard appears by my side, pretending not to watch me. They all seem nervous. I put my phone away and try not to seem nervous, too.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">2016 marks six years since the beginning of a very costly criminal trial in Guatemalan courts against the former head of security at one of Rockpoint Resources’s mines, a man accused of murder and other brutality. We’ve been to many Rockpoint events before and know the company won’t be discussing any of these realities without a little help. Our goal is to see how far we can pass a collection plate down the rows of attendees before it gets intercepted by security. The plate has a note on it, asking Rockpoint’s shareholders to donate their dividends to cover legal fees for community members in Guatemala. A minor intervention, really. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When an opportune moment arises, I subtly lift the collection plate from my bag and pass it to a friend, who stands up and carries it to the end of the row. Predictably, nobody donates. Attendees look at the plate like we’re trying to pass them a pile of garbage, and my friend is promptly ejected from the room. I try to look unfazed.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">During the scheduled Q&amp;A, an audience member – not one of my co-organizers, but from a peer organization – requests the microphone to ask a question about Rockpoint Resources’s stance on the court case in Guatemala. Adhering to the meeting’s protocol, but pursuing the same goal as me and my friends: force the company to acknowledge what they’re so desperately trying to gloss over. Despite this audience member being entitled as a shareholder to ask her question, the room fills with deep sighs and rolling eyes. A man behind me puts his head in his hands and massages his temples, as though deeply burdened by this momentary breach of typical shareholder meeting decorum. “I imagine </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">she </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">will be swiftly escorted from the premises,” tuts one older woman to another. As though on cue, I can hear another friend a couple of rows behind me get escorted out by security, who’s caught them trying to video-record the company’s response to the question. Rockpoint’s president and CEO gestures to a security guard, who extracts the microphone from the question-asker’s hand mid-sentence. “Can I have the mic back?” She cannot.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After the meeting adjourns, I help myself to a bottle of cranberry juice. A man in a suit glares at me and mutters something about me being a freeloader. Outside, when I find my friend who was ejected for filming, they tell me they were tailed by security staff for blocks.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’m a member of a grassroots activist group called the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network (MISN). Up until early last year, these kinds of strange, securitized interactions in mining industry spaces were typical for us. As with many contentious industries, Canada’s mining sector pours vast resources into controlling and cleaning up its image. It’s imperative that shareholder meetings, especially, remain positive and full of corporate self-praise, since investor confidence is so central to mining companies’ bottom line. For MISN, a group that works in solidarity with mining-impacted communities around the world, it’s always been important to make sure the most villainous companies headquartered in Toronto can</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> never </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">attempt to misrepresent their work to investors at those meetings without somebody standing up and saying, “No, you’re lying. Here’s the rest of the story.” </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It used to be that you could just pay a buck for a share in a company and gain easy entry into insider spaces typically shielded from outsider critique. This tactic allowed us to gather information withheld from impacted communities in the Global South, including land defenders with whom we are in ongoing relationship. It helped us cause some much-needed ruptures in rooms full of people who are very skilled at insulating themselves from challenges to their worldview. It let us expose shareholders to information about justice issues that are also financial concerns for them. And it created a particular kind of accountability mechanism, where companies could no longer claim that they “just didn’t know” about the suffering they leave in their wake – because we </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">told them</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, in front of so many people, on this day and at this time.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">COVID changed all that.</span></p><p> </p><p><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-2881" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-41-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-41-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-41-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-41-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-41.jpg 1080w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p><p> </p><h2>The digital filter</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first sign that the pandemic would facilitate a new era of heightened control in mining industry spaces came with the release of a code of conduct before the 2021 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention, the world’s largest mining conference, which takes place in Toronto every year. The new rules included bans on “any action that will cause disruption to the event,” “uncooperative behaviour,” disruptions during presentations “including but not limited to off-topic communications and protests,” and taking screenshots or audio/video recordings of conference proceedings. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the past, the public could attend two major parts of the convention: some workshops and panels; and the “convention floor,” where you could interact with mining companies’ representatives and others connected to the industry, at public-facing booths. My co-organizer who attended this year’s virtual convention reports that many sessions consisted of pre-recorded speeches, offering little to no opportunity for audience participation. On a couple of occasions, attendees apparently hadn’t been informed that a session wasn’t live, and left questions in the chat for the absent speaker. These events all ended with zero response from the mining companies: the lights are on, but nobody’s home. Other sessions were live, but presenters reviewed attendees’ questions and chose which ones they wanted to respond to. Many questions went unanswered.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This year’s PDAC conference contained more references than ever before to accountability, transparency, and what the industry calls ESG (environment, social, and governance) factors. Yet this rhetoric of openness is escalating at the same time as the mining industry expands what I have been calling a “digital filter” against dissent. Even faithful believers in the industry are taking notice, with eyebrows raised; a </span><a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-silent-shareholders-at-virtual-agms-should-be-a-red-flag-for/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">recent article</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> accuses mining annual general meetings of “muting” shareholders, arguing that online AGMs “appear to be limiting investor participation and shielding corporate boards and management teams from an appropriate level of shareholder scrutiny.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At in-person AGMs, if you raised your hand to ask a question and your hand got ignored, you had options – even if they were messy. You could loudly demand to speak. You could start a chant. You could be a human being in a space full of other humans, with all the accompanying awkwardness and discomfort. It wasn’t much, but it was something.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Curious to see for myself how things would be different in an online annual general meeting, I logged into Rockpoint Resource’s virtual AGM this past spring. Because one of MISN’s members owns a single share in the company, every year we’re mailed instructions on how to attend the meeting, and this year was no different. Well, it was a little different. The document we received in the mail gave us something called a “control number”; it wasn’t until I scrolled down to page 91 of a vaguely titled information circular posted on Rockpoint’s website that I found the convoluted login instructions. Five minutes before the start of the AGM, I clicked the link I was supposed to click, typed the numbers I was supposed to type, and…“Incorrect login or password.” No suggestion of what could be wrong, or how to fix it. After trying many variations on the password with no success, I was forced to log in as a guest, which meant I could no longer vote in the meeting, ask a question, or see what questions were asked. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jazzy elevator music was playing as I entered the meeting. There was no way of knowing who else was in the room. There was no chat. When the meeting began, it became clear to me that I wouldn’t be seeing a single human face. The presentation was just the disembodied voices of the company’s chairman and president speaking overtop of PowerPoint slides. It could have been pre-recorded, but I don’t know. The business was brief, and there were no questions. No expressions of dissent. I left feeling even more numb than I usually feel walking out of mining industry spaces.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s so much easier to gatekeep digitally. MISN’s Rockpoint Resources share is registered under the name of a well-known opponent of the company. Maybe the fact that I couldn’t get into the AGM was just a glitch; maybe we missed a step in the new maze-like registration protocol; or maybe company staff saw that name appear on the registration list and said no thank you. These are companies that leave photos of known activists with front desk staff to prevent those activists from entering an in-person AGM: is it so hard to believe that a company staffer might see the name of a potential “problem guest” from a “problem organization” and conveniently overlook it?</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s not that AGMs were good before and bad now. They were bad before, and now they’re worse. The virtualization of mining industry gatherings has created a more efficient way for mining companies to exclude opponents from their spaces and shield shareholders from the realities on the ground. More than ever, it’s enabled them to get on with business as usual and face no opposition, no demands that they account for the harms they cause. Where once we had a slight opening that certain people could slip through, now there is a mirrored gate. The echo chamber has been sealed, and we don’t know when or how it will open again. What will it take to find another sliver of access to a human encounter?</span></p><p> </p><p><img decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-2880" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-53-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-53-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-53-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-53-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-53.jpg 1080w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p><p> </p><h2>Breaching the filter, or swerving around it</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mining industry has always been and will likely remain slippery. In response, the mining justice movement has learned to be creative and incredibly nimble. For example, after the first time a company we’d been fighting for years got sold, renamed, and relocated, MISN pivoted away from solely targeting specific corporations or executives. We realized that we needed to prioritize fighting the drivers of the industry at large: corporate networks, extractivist ideology, major industry gatherings like PDAC. Still, the changes we have seen in the last year remind me how important it is to avoid becoming complacent or fetishizing specific resistance tactics. As maddening as it is to see a previous pathway to solidarity become unavailable to us, we can also treat this kind of obstacle as a chance to take a step back, reflect on our strategy, and reorient.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Like many people’s, my personal experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has involved a great deal of slowing down. In my first few years of mining justice organizing, spring was always MISN’s busiest season. What we called “shareholder season” – that is, the period between May and July when all the Toronto-based mining companies tend to hold their annual general meetings – was a high-speed race to intervene in industry spaces as much as possible. It wasn’t unusual for us to hold multiple actions in the span of a week, for a month straight; we would usually need to take August off to rest and recover. There was something exhilarating about this mode of organizing. Some of our most creative ideas emerged through adrenaline-fuelled brainstorming sessions in the lead-up to shareholder season. We never wanted to do the same thing twice. “This time, with helium balloons! This time, with Santa costumes! This time, with a giant 10-foot puppet of a mining exec with blood on his hands! Now with the sound of jackhammers drowning out the panel!” But, in a way, we were staging the exact same kind of intervention again and again. We were operating on the mining industry’s timeline, and it was burning us out. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">During the pandemic, we haven’t organized a single in-person action, but we’ve still been busy. We’ve been developing an app-based self-guided walking tour of Toronto’s financial district, and curating an art project that gathers imaginings about a post-extractivist world. We’ve been working in coalitions, and engaging in the slow, careful process of building new relationships of solidarity with mining-impacted communities. We’ve spent a whole year researching a new campaign that we’ve wanted to work on forever, but never thought we had time for. Working outside the mining industry’s timeline has felt </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">good. </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s made two dreams that I’ve had for years about the future of this work feel more possible.</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></i></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I dream, first, of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">less corporate confrontation and more organized communities. </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Right now, for example, MISN is working on that new campaign I mentioned: a project supporting teachers and students to organize in service of mining justice. The campaign is focused on encouraging schools to divest from mining industry propaganda, and helping kids understand resource extraction in ways that centre environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty. Schools can be sites of mining justice struggle as critical as AGMs, since the mining industry has put a great deal of resources into distributing pro-industry teaching and learning materials to schools across the country, through an organization called Mining Matters.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">MISN can get a hundred people to come out to a hundred protests, and that’s great. But if we can help a hundred networked communities get organized enough to take action in service of mining justice on their own terms, in their own spheres of influence…that’s transformation. This kind of activism doesn’t involve interacting with the mining industry at all. Instead of looking mining executives in the face, the people we’re looking at are each other. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mining companies headquartered in downtown Toronto drive ongoing colonization here in Canada and all over the world. In Toronto today, it’s pretty much impossible to exist without in some way giving your money to mining. The industry is ingrained in almost every facet of life here, through investment in universities, hospitals, museums, pensions, banks, and more. One could see that as overwhelming, but </span><a href="https://crimethinc.com/tce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">as Crimethinc</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> says: “To change anything, start everywhere.” Organizing teachers to push mining propaganda out of schools is one place to start. Organizing auto workers to reject the current greenwashing of the car industry under Canada’s </span><a href="https://toxicnews.org/2021/04/30/critical-minerals-and-the-politics-of-refusal/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“critical minerals strategy”</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is another. What if artists got organized and pressured arts institutions to divest from extractivism? What if University of Toronto students finally said enough is enough and went on strike until Peter Munk’s name were removed from the School of Global Affairs? What could a movement of geology students for mining justice look like? What if the workers at every Ontario mining project followed the lead of workers at the Baffinland mine in Nunavut and </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/baffinland-protestors-open-letter-1.5910951"><span style="font-weight: 400;">declared their solidarity</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> with the rightful stewards of the land? All of this is possible. It’s slow, deep work, and it’s possible. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My other longtime dream that’s felt more possible lately is </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">an increased focus on stopping harm by directly intervening at its source.</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> After years of disrupting the mining industry </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">narratively </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">(by trying to interrupt lies and tell a different story that might influence shareholders), as well as </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">legally </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">(by attempting to change laws that support the impunity of these corporations), I believe the North America-based arm of the mining justice movement must get better at disrupting the industry </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">materially </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">through direct action. The meaning of the phrase “direct action” has become a little fuzzy in recent years; often it’s used as a catch-all to describe any sort of confrontational or law-breaking tactic. But I define direct action as anything we do that makes change happen </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">ourselves, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">rather than appealing to politicians or bosses or corporations to make change for us. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Many of the mining-impacted communities with whom we have relationships of solidarity use direct action as a central tool: they run longstanding blockades, maintain land reclamation sites, and launch mass uprisings. They are often severely punished for this activism, through militarized policing (backed by the Canadian government) and insidious threats. In MISN, we’ve tended to think of the work we do in Toronto as supporting direct action that’s happening elsewhere</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">But lately I’ve been wondering: what is the Toronto-side version of a mine site blockade? What might it look like for a movement to defend the land </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">both </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">on the threatened territories </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">and</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in the backyard of the enemy? What sorts of actions could we take that don’t rely on CEOs or politicians having a change of heart, but instead make it impossible for them to carry out their agenda?</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I take inspiration from the recent re-popularization of supply chain disruption tactics, used notably in early 2020 by the movement in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation’s sovereignty struggle. As Indigenous people and settlers across the Canadian state blocked railroad tracks, more of the public seemed to discover that bodies placed strategically in physical space can have magnificent impacts. While these blockades had a broad range of motives and results, they were all fierce in their directness. These actions showed that we don’t have to wait around for people in power to change their minds. These actions said: if politicians won’t stop plans for this pipeline, the public will stop the pipeline infrastructure in its tracks. People have that power. I remember how </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">terrified</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the Canadian government seemed about this awakening. 2021 has seen a spate of similar tactics: from the </span><a href="https://worldbeyondwar.org/press-release-activists-block-trucks-at-company-transporting-weapons-to-saudi-arabia-demand-canada-stop-fuelling-war-in-yemen/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">truck blockade in Hamilton, Ontario</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, preventing weapons from being supplied to the </span><a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-un-experts-report-on-yemen-war-names-canada-as-one-of-arms-suppliers/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Canadian-backed</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> war on Yemen, to the </span><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-palestine-arms-livorno-port-italy-b1848773.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">work refusals carried out by Italian port workers</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> unwilling to be complicit in airstrikes on Gaza.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">All of these actions are ways of asking: how do those of us who live in the commercial capitals of the Global North ensure that the tools of violence don’t even get where they’re going? And what does effective intervention look like when those tools are as abstract as futures trades on stock exchanges? </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Deepening our capacity for direct action at these sites will require us to intensify solidarities across struggles locally, in order to enhance these actions’ power and create more safety in numbers. It will demand that we knit together many of the communities I mentioned earlier – teachers, auto workers, artists, students, geologists, and more – to create a mass movement for mining justice in the streets below the boardrooms.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Multiplying the sites of our direct intervention will also involve building new skills, or connecting with allies (even unlikely ones) who have those skills already. We need people who know about finance to help us understand the factors that influence share prices. We need people with tech skills to help us navigate the digital filter. We need young people with wealthy parents to help us identify the social spaces that decision-makers move through. We need working-class industry insiders with no emotional attachment to mining (admin assistants, communications interns, co-op students) to feed us information and help us predict what’s coming next. The motlier the crew, the better.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With the help of these new allies, we also have to take our research skills to the next level. Mind-numbing corporate documents can help us predict a company’s plans, offering us a more complex understanding of potential sites of intervention than we could ever gain from an AGM. In Canada, for industries like mining, there are many sequential steps a company must follow before it can render a project operational. Two layers of environmental assessment (federal and provincial/territorial) must be conducted; access roads, mineral processing smelters, and other infrastructure may need to be built. The process can take years, and companies must retain shareholder confidence all the while. With so many steps along the way, the possibilities for intervention are countless – if we can learn to predict how a given company might navigate those steps.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Of course, whatever new tactics we embrace, we must continue to foster deep relationships with activists organizing on the front lines of extraction around the world, and take our lead from them, so we remain in tune with their needs and goals. When the ferocity of movements in global mining finance hubs matches that of movements in regions threatened by mines, winning everywhere will feel much more possible.</span></p><p> </p><p><img decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-2882" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-30-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-30-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-30-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-30-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PDAC2020-30.jpg 1080w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p><p> </p><h2>A human scale, but scaled up</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">2017. I approach the booth of a small mining company at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention. An older white gentleman greets me warmly. “Oh, hi! How are you doing today?” I ask. He tells me he’s great. I flash him an innocent-young-white-lady smile and tell him I’m glad he’s great. I ask him about a legal case that’s just entered Canadian courts: the company he works for is accused of profiting from forced labour, slavery, cruel and inhumane treatment of workers, and other crimes against humanity at one of its mines. He becomes increasingly flustered as he realizes that my questions don’t match my friendly smile. The case hasn’t yet gotten much media attention in Canada, and this man is not prepared. Eventually he just stops talking.  </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The next year, as those legal proceedings make their way to the Supreme Court of Canada, that company has no booth on the PDAC convention floor. When you know you don’t have answers to people’s questions, you try not to let them ask. This is what’s happening in today’s virtual annual general meetings.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There is something deeply satisfying about looking a representative of an abusive corporation in the face and knowing that you are making an impact, even if that impact is just a slight emotional stirring. It’s an opportunity many people resisting Canadian mining projects on the front lines never get. Knowing that you’re being heard, that your emails are not going into a spam folder, that your questions aren’t being digitally filtered, is powerful. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I think there’s meaning in that feeling, and I wouldn’t want to lose it. I’m not suggesting that we stop seeking those human encounters entirely. But I also don’t want to be seduced by them. If disturbing the people who run mining companies were a direct route to justice for communities, we would have won a long time ago. We can allow the digital filter to discourage us, and bemoan the further narrowing of already-narrow cracks in the echo chamber. Or we can ask ourselves what trying to slip through these cracks has cost us, and take this moment as a chance to develop a more multifaceted strategy. How much must we shrink to slip through a crack? How big must we become to win? Is it time to choose one over the other – shrink or grow? Or can we do both?</span></p>						</div>
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							<p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Author’s note: While I wrote this piece on my own behalf and it may not reflect the views of the entire MISN collective, my analysis is always deeply informed by my co-organizers’ brilliance and our many years of thinking alongside each other. I’d specifically like to acknowledge Merle, Erin, and Val’s generous contributions to this piece.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: center;">~~~</p><p>Kate Klein is a community-based facilitator, teacher, and activist. She organizes with the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network, a grassroots group based in Toronto that works in solidarity with impacted communities around the world to resist the harmful practices of the Canadian mining industry.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/unsealing-the-echo-chamber/">Unsealing the Echo Chamber</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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