Graham Cox

Graham Cox is a labour union researcher at Unifor focusing on economic, bargaining, and policy in the energy, road, rail, and marine sectors.

Previous to Unifor, Graham was a researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). At CUPE his work focused on economic and policy analysis for the anti-privatization, trade, post-secondary education, utilities, employment insurance, special projects, and organizing files.

Before working at CUPE, Graham served the student movement as National Researcher of the Canadian Federation of Students and chairperson of the National Graduate Caucus.

Graham has worked as a union organizer for the PSAC, CUPE, and the CFS with a focus on graduate student teaching assistant, research assistant and contingent academic staff union drives. This included leading drives to organize academic workers at the University of New Brunswick, UPEI, and Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Please also see articles under the author Editors (What’s left).

CV available here.


Energy firm competition and profit dynamics

Energy firm competition and profit dynamics

While there is an increase in profits from the energy infrastructure in Canada, it is from running the system harder, increased efficiency of output, a little from financial hedging wins, and some from hedging with the physical assets of the fully integrated companies. The profits are high without the effect of price and the price increase has had little impact on that profit growth. This is because the strategy of companies in Canada is cost/asset/capital discipline. Instead of investing in new infrastructure or even maintenance, it is about squeezing the assets and the workers they have for every penny of profits to return to shareholders.

Research tools, Emacs, SQLite, and self-hosting briefing notes

Research tools, Emacs, SQLite, and self-hosting briefing notes

Research notes and data are part of any organisation doing serious work. It is important to have that data easily findable and readily available when people need it. This is not usually when it is produced. Having self-hosted solutions that allow for app installation, forums, notifications, search, and data exploration and collection brings the research to life. Allowing me to do this while using my own workflow, tools, software, and set up is priceless.