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.

The case for publicly funded universities | Graham Cox

Defending Student Rights

This article first appeared in the Spring 2018 Issue of the journal Academic Matters. All told, Canadian public universities are massive employers of students, teachers, researchers, librarians, academic and research support technicians, academic support workers (custodians, building services, food services, grounds and building maintenance), apprentices, councillors, utility workers, administrators, clerical workers, bartenders, security guards, and parking staff. Together, all of these workers maintain a space that fosters the advancement and dissemination of knowledge.

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Just Transition: a task force and critique

Just Transition: a task force and critique

Just Transition

Several things have happened in the previous few weeks that make it important to review what we mean about Just Transition for workers affected by major changes to employment. 1) The Liberal government has announced the Task Force: Just Transition for Canadian Coal Power Workers and Communities. 2) Trade Unions for Energy Democracy have released 'Trade Unions and Just Transition: The search for a transformative politics'. The new paper examines the inadequacies of the current policy development processes on Just Transition.

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Ontario Liberals do not understand what universities are for | Citizens' Press

Defending Student Rights

The Ontario Liberal's 2018 budget had a few large progressive sounding programs to announce. However, none of these were focused on the university system. Almost all of the budget outside the announcement of large subsidies to private childcare providers and pharma continued to be a standard Liberal fare - progressive sounding, regressive in implementation. The true impact of government spending on the university system will be the implementation of funding reforms not written explicitly into government spending. This is the case for much of the government's policies that seem to be ignored during budget time – even though these policies give the budget its true political framework.

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Apologists, failure, and always being wrong about privatization | What's Left 2018-01-21 Volume 104

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Economics, Privatization, Neoliberalism

The fight against privatization is framed by liberals and the right-wing as a clear and unsubstantiated ideological position of the left. And, no matter how much research is presented exposing how privatization of state services and programs costs more and has no positive (but, in many cases negative) impacts on quality of services, the dominant narrative is privatization works. But, at this point, believing that privatization leads to increased efficiency and lower costs is akin to the denial of climate change and thinking vaccines cause Autism. Decades of real life examples, economic analysis, and trial and error policy show that there are so many ways that do not work when it comes to privatization. So, why do people still believe this nonsense?

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What's Left 2017-05-28 Volume 94

WhatsLeft

Ontario's Changing Workplaces Review; Poll says most people want Greens to Side with NDP in British Columbia; Citizens' Press Brazil Correspondent Report; Corbyn Gaining Ground; OECD takes a look at UBI and finds it wanting as a solution; Book review: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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