This Monday marks the beginning of the second annual installment of McGill’s Labour Week, a week-long event aimed at exploring the labour movement at McGill and in Quebec. McGill’s Inter Union Council (IUC), a group of labour unions at McGill, has worked to create a variety of workshops, panels, and talks, in hopes of promoting awareness about the function and purpose of the many different McGill unions.
Labour Week was started last spring after some members of the IUC began to see that general knowledge of unions at McGill, even among students who are union members, was low.
“We’ve noticed a lot of our members don’t really talk about or don’t really understand what the purpose is of having a union,” said AGSEM: McGill’s Teaching Union Vice-President for Invigilators and TAs Sunci Avlijas, one of the organizers of Labour Week. “[We] wanted to have some kind of event where the members of the McGill community [could] have a discussion about labour.”