Fallout shelter signs in New York City. Images courtesy of David Hayes

While walking along East 29th Street near Madison Avenue last Christmas, I discovered a faded fallout shelter sign mounted on the brick wall above a freight entrance. Few images better illustrate the Cold War era than these three yellow triangles against a black (or sometimes blue) background. At a time when Russia was thought to have aimed nuclear warheads at North America, an American public, especially those living in the natural targets of New York and Washington, D.C., knew these signs identified a building with a public shelter where people could escape from a nuclear attack.

The program was started in 1961, around the time the Berlin Wall was being built. A Fairfax, Virginia-based graphic design firm came up with the three triangles (rejected at first, over copyright concerns, for being too close to the warning symbol for radiation). The signs were manufactured on aluminum using all-weather paint and glass beads (a technique commonly used for traffic signs). They were meant to be clearly seen at 200 feet and were thought to be durable enough to withstand the fires raging once World War III began. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, two years later, the signs had become ubiquitous in America.

Canada wasn’t immune from the fear of nuclear attack in the early ’60s. The federal Emergency Measures Organization published a booklet called “11 Steps to Survival.” People built basement shelters in their homes—although much like contemporary reaction after 9/11, most doubted anyone would attack our modest nation when a much bigger, juicier target lay just to the south. Proof that the federal government of the day took it seriously, though, can be seen in the Diefenbunker outside Ottawa (today a museum). It is the largest of more than 50 other emergency shelters built across the country at that time.

As a lover of cultural iconography I decided that while in New York I’d photograph as many signs as I could. I found one on a lovely 14-storey, Art Deco-styled apartment building on East 40th Street and one on a brick house on East 21st beside a window in which an American flag hung. There was a handsome artefact on the Cabrini Medical Centre on East 20th and one that was curling off the brick wall of a building at West 57th and 10th Ave. They were also affixed to the Madison Square Post Office and the Cooper Post Office. But it turns out I was an amateur compared to Andrew Gonsalves who, a couple of years ago, compiled a list of nearly 140, posted on his blog, Don’t Feed the Animals.

By the time the program was winding down in the late ‘60s, more than a million signs identified public shelters in cities throughout the U.S. The agency responsible for them was dissolved in 1979 and federal officials never set up a formal program to remove them, which explains why so many remain.

The idea that anyone believed even heavily reinforced underground bunkers—let alone the flimsy facilities of public buildings—would protect citizens from a nuclear attack seems truly quixotic. Still, in today’s post-9/11 world, there’s arguably more reason to be paranoid. While the world has lost the Soviet Union it’s gained even more unstable nations possessing nuclear weapons. That’s not to mention the threat of accidents at nuclear power plants or the weather disasters capable of crippling them—or even the lingering contamination from the Chernobyl explosion, which released 400 times more radioactive material than the bombing of Hiroshima. With the threat of Iran becoming a nuclear power and in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi crisis, there’s something oddly comforting about an age when a simple symbol on reflective signs could reassure a nervous population.

JJ Levine, Queer Portraits (2011-2012) Images courtesy of JJ Levine

The fate of JJ Levine’s unconventional hair salon, Lesbian Haircuts for Anyone was in jeopardy this past winter. Levine’s salon has operated out of Bikurious cycle shop in Montreal for the past six years. In 2008, Bikurious owner Danielle Flowers sold the shop, which was then called Révolution Montréal, to two of her employees, on the condition that Levine could continue cutting hair out of the space indefinitely without paying rent. Unfortunately, indefinitely turned out to be a matter of years.

After being approached about being charged for the space, Levine moved out. “The agreement was made as a means of acknowledging the immeasurable contribution I made to the store over the previous years,” Levine says, “and that I would continue to make by giving the store a caché, and by helping to maintain the feel of a queer community space.”

Levine has now teamed up with bow tie design label GrannyB. The latest incarnation of Lesbian Haircuts For Anyone operates out of GrannyB’s sewing workshop in a storefront on Ontario and St. Christophe, three blocks closer to downtown Montreal than the previous location. “I’m so happy to be able to continue my project in the same neighbourhood and in a space where I feel comfortable and my clients feel welcome,” Levine says.

Levine (who prefers the pronoun “they”) assures that their lesbian haircuts are for anyone and everyone—queer, transgender, gay, lesbian or straight. But despite the queer connotations of the hair salon, Levine is more interested in focusing on a queer lens in art.

When not snipping and clipping, Levine is a portrait photographer whose work focuses on marginalized expressions of gender and sexuality. Levine—who has a BFA in Photography and Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality from Concordia University—has exhibited nationally and internationally at artist-run centres, commercial galleries, art festivals and academic conferences. In June during Toronto’s Pride Festival, Levine’s work will appear in the annual 10×10 photography exhibition of LGBT community portraits.

The diverse relationships surrounding urban Montreal queers is of particular interest to the artist. “I think the way that queerness and community interact in our lives is so important,” says Levine, who cites friendship and Montreal’s queer community as a deep source of inspiration for their ongoing series, “Queer Portraits,” an intimate look at friends, lovers and siblings. Levine’s subjects look intensely at the camera, their gaze intentional and pose purposeful.

“As a queer artist whose work deals with self-representation, the categories queer and art are inextricably linked for me,” Levine says. “My work is so connected to my queer identity that my own gender and sexuality influence every aspect of my art practice.”

Photo illustration by Dave Donald

A growing number of teachers and parents say Ontario’s current school  curriculum will graduate scores of children who are 21st century illiterate. Inside the fight for more technology and social media in the classroom.

Every school day from September to June at 3:30 p.m., Aerin Guy meets her nine-year old daughter at school. On this particular Thursday in February, Guy bundles up in a green duffel coat to shepherd her daughter and the family pet spaniel through their busy east-end Toronto neighbourhood. With only seven short minutes before they reach their semi, Guy launches her standard volley of questions toward the fourth-grader. That’s just enough time to probe for satisfactory answers to that question asked by parents everywhere: What did you do in school today? Guy wants to know if something memorable engaged Scarlet’s attention—besides the fact her tooth fell out. Most of all, she wants to know that she didn’t spend the day tethered to a desk, filling out yet another paper handout.

Scarlet’s grade four classroom has only one or two  computers— that she’s rarely invited to use—and a smart board that mostly serves as a projection tool. There are no mobile phones, no iPods, no laptops (though the grade six class has recently received a few of the latter). For Scarlet, and many of her classmates, it’s a bit like living in the Middle Ages. Here is a girl who can spend hours parked at the dining room table, MacBook Pro resting at her fingertips, a Yamaha keyboard on her right. With easy flicks of her slender fingers, she deftly scrolls through a website that she lovingly planned and designed herself, with a little help from Mom. She’s only too happy to showcase a digital resume of blogs, slide shows, Bitstrips comics, videos (made with a Flip camera and iMovie software), a podcast, and websites. One site promotes a dog hotel; a second focuses on launching a dream restaurant to be managed with friends. Scarlet reports she’s currently at the hiring stage.

Guy and her husband moved into their home in the spring of 2011. They were drawn to the eclectic mix of neighbours, and the proximity to restaurants and shops. Guy was confident the local school’s French Immersion, enrichment programs, music string instruments, and an annual musical would be a good fit for her daughter. Excited, the family packed their belongings, left Fernie, B.C. and crossed the country to resume life in Toronto, where they had once lived. What the digital strategy consultant didn’t bargain for was the divide between her technology-rich home and a school that doesn’t show the same appetite.

Guy is among a growing faction of Ontario parents, teachers, and education specialists who believe kids need more technology in the classroom, from blogs to Facebook, mobile devices and beyond. Without it, they argue, children’s education will become woefully irrelevant in today’s fast-changing world—think of it as 21st century illiteracy. These educators know it’s increasingly difficult to engage today’s student, whose life outside of school is inextricably linked to technology. A grassroots movement of teachers —who are starting to sound more like techies—has mushroomed on Twitter, and now a global network of educators openly share new learning strategies, and spread the word that technology promotes critical thinking, investigation and collaboration. “Without technology,” says Halifax-based Paul W. Bennett, a long-time educator and a senior research fellow with Society for Quality Education, “there’s a real risk that students’ curiosity will be suffocated and their education will be stunted.”

Last September, Guy joined the school’s Parent Council in search of allies in the push to integrate technology into the classroom. Instead of encouragement, Guy says she received blank stares from teachers, a litany of excuses about priorities, such as curriculum and test scores, and apologies. In a school with one computer lab, she was told, everyone had to take a turn. The Parent Council was (and continues to be) more interested in fundraising ideas and lengthy discourses on how to spend fundraising dollars—not rabble rousing for revolutionary education. Short of becoming antagonistic, Guy isn’t sure how to push technology into the classroom as a tool for long-term learning. “There’s just no will,” she says. For too many parents, technology is still considered a toy—and a potentially dangerous one.

Guy isn’t alone. There are many towns and cities in Ontario where parents are not joining the debate about the role technology should serve in the classroom. Some parents don’t even know a gap exists. While some classrooms are transforming into digital classrooms, many school boards continue to agonize over the decision to install WiFi, uncertain how to manage classrooms and control student access to the Internet, and fearful that student devices will compromise network security.

Parents feel powerless to incite change when principals say they are just following board policy. Across Canada, each provincial ministry of education is responsible for creating curriculum, while school boards are given the discretion of deciding whether to install Wi-Fi and to permit the use of Personal Electronic Devices (PED) in schools. Depending on where someone lives, a school may have: Wi-Fi and allow mobile devices, allow Wi-Fi and ban mobile devices, or allow neither. Ontario alone has 72 district school boards, made up of 31 English-language public boards, 29 English-language Catholic boards, 4 French-language public boards, and 8 French-language Catholic boards, and is home to 4,020 elementary schools and 911 secondary schools. With the exception of Quebec, the provinces delegate the tracking of Wi-Fi implementation to the school boards, therefore rendering it next to impossible for parents to gage progress—or challenge the status quo.

To date, change has mostly come at the hands of visionaries. Take Ron Canuel, now CEO of the Canadian Education Association (CEA), a Toronto-based group of Canadian leaders in education, research, policy, non-profit and business committed to education that leads to greater student engagement. In 2003, as director general of Quebec’s Eastern Townships School Board, Canuel launched Canada’s first-ever 1:1 laptop initiative. The $15-million project—mostly bank loans with almost no government money—put 6,000 laptops into students’ hands. Canuel was driven by twin goals: Engage kids in learning and enhance the teaching environment. Five years later, drop-out rates in the Quebec Eastern Townships lowered from 42 percent to 21 percent, and its overall ranking rose from 66 to 23 (out of 70 school boards). Despite his success, trustees from other boards were not persuaded to introduce a similar initiative. “That’s what made me think,” says Canuel, “about what is it that really impedes change? It’s that issue of courage, moving forward, challenging the norm.”

Only an hour east of Guy’s neighbourhood, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) is doing just that. On the second floor of Dundas Central Public School, room 208 boasts one board-sanctioned computer, five refurbished computers, one Dell Notebook, one flip camera, one iPod touch, 10 iPad 2s, one digital sound system, one green screen, and a plucky teacher who decided three years ago that something in the classroom had to change.

Heidi Siwak, 47, is the first to admit she was not an ideal candidate to become an early adopter of technology—“I was the Luddite in the family.” But something big had been nagging this teacher with 21 years of practice: the students were no longer engaged. They were just “going through the motion of school.” Siwak recalls days when students showed waning interest in the curriculum, and days when she lacked the luxury of time to indulge student-driven learning. She finally conceded the world was changing. “I would have to learn what technology meant to kids,” she says, “I needed to understand the genres. I needed to be using them myself as writing tools, as thinking tools, as reading tools.” So in the fall of 2010, Siwak changed everything.

This year’s eager grade six students who inhabit the large classroom with majestic ceilings don’t know how many hundreds of hours Siwak sat in front of her home computer preparing for the shift in education. They are, however, thrilled they no longer need to rely solely on textbooks to find answers. Now when they need to research, Siwak is more apt to lecture on good web search practices or, better yet, suggest they Skype an expert and ask their questions directly. Siwak has watched the world become the new classroom: students are immersed in digital citizenship and good practices for working in an online environment—all components of the 21st Century Fluencies program promoted by the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.

In her new role, Siwak has morphed from teacher to coach. Rather than stand at the front of the class spouting content, she teaches thinking and encourages students to find opportunities where they can produce meaningful, original work that adheres to curriculum standards. They haven’t done away with paper and pen, but students are encouraged to record their stories, and to produce video posts on personal blogs that are shared with peers and parents on a board-supported social media platform. Last year’s class even made headlines after collaborating with a New York digital media artist, an Australian app designer, and a developer in Finland to plan and produce content for an augmented reality tourism app that promotes their town of Dundas.

The door to principal Barry Morlog’s office at Dundas Central Public School is wide open. He and vice principal Jennifer George (who has since been promoted to principal of another school) banter back and forth, finishing off each other’s sentences like a married couple. “I’m a computer dinosaur,” he says. “You were,” George says, placing emphasis on the past tense. “But I’m getting better,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter. My skills are not that important. It’s the people we have in this building who rolled this out for Jennifer and me.” He’s right: Morley has been blessed with a techie staff. He also works in a school board that was quick to recognize how students would benefit from the integration of technology.

The floodgates opened to this new way of doing school seven years ago when Morley’s district unveiled a plan to introduce Wi-Fi into their 94 elementary and 18 secondary schools. To date, only a third of the schools have Wi-Fi, evidence that implementation is a costly process that requires time to fully roll out across a school board. John Laverty, the superintendent of student achievement at the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board believes they have been successful, because the people coming into the board share a vision to make teaching relevant on three levels: at the student level, teaching level and board level. Their philosophy is to create an environment where students and teachers working in groups can access mobile devices, rather than interrupt the work flow to access technology stored in a separate lab or library. “We’ve been able to personalize instruction,” says Laverty, “without losing that contact with the teacher.”

Despite such successes, however, training Ontario teachers to leverage technology in the classroom remains a formidable task. Jim Hewitt, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, describes the Siwaks of education as “maverick teachers” who are creative and resourceful enough to experiment with technologies in the classroom—and who are also among the minority. “We are currently not doing a great job of training our teachers to use technology in educationally effective ways,” Hewitt says. He adds the Ontario government is exploring the idea of mandating longer teacher preparation programs, which would allow for more in-depth study of critical topics such as educational technology, among other things.

Zoe Branigan-Pipe, a seconded teacher in the Hamilton-Wentworth district, pre-service instructor and co-hort advisor who trains student teachers at Brock University, champions technology’s potential to help elementary and secondary students learn, especially those who typically rank in the bottom half of the class. Thanks to audio and video, for instance, students can learn without relying completely on text. It should be mandatory, she says, for teachers to learn how to teach literacy using technology. Yet even her enthusiasm is tempered when she considers that some teachers, though comfortable with technology, may not be confident with using it effectively in education—even if they do have access to it. Others may not be able to use it at all. “It worries me,” Branigan-Pipe says, “that we are encouraging students to use tools that we ourselves [the profession] are not proficient at.”

Take Robert Bell, who teaches a split grade 4/5 class just down the hall from Siwak’s. “The problem is that I’m learning five minutes ahead of my class,” he says. “I’ve taught older grades and I’m about five minutes behind them.” And while the introduction of technology has been an adrenaline boost for Bell, he has his reservations. He believes technology is a good tool for teaching literacy and math skills, but also that it’s not that simple. Technology will not make a bad teacher shine. Ultimately, he says, it is a teacher’s energy and enthusiasm that will engage students.

Yet, if teachers do not use technology in the class, can they realistically prepare students to meet tomorrow’s workplace challenges? Geoff Roulet, a Queen’s University education professor with a specialty in information and communications technology, says no. Roulet tells parents: “You’re training students for irrelevant and unpaid work if you restrict their learning to memorizing things and doing very basic skills that can be programmed.” The question is: Are parents listening?

Annie Kidder is the executive director and co-founder of Toronto-based People for Education. Her organization talks to parents every single day—sometimes up to twenty a week—and fields even more questions online. The organization was established in 1996 to engage parents, school councils, and communities in matters about public education policy and funding changes in schools. It also does research, provides support to parents, and works with policy-makers. Kidder says there are parents calling and fundraising for technology in the classroom, and feels that many parents care about the role technology should play in school.

If you talk to enough parents, most concede that technology is so pervasive in society that it cannot be ignored by schools. Many, such as Whitby-based father of three, Derek Marsellus, however, attach a caveat. “We shouldn’t be using it just because we have it,” says Marsellus. “We should look at it and say, ‘What kind of educational benefit is there to using it?’” Like many administrators and educators, he is cautious and wants to know what long-term impact technology will have on learning. Sometimes, he says, it seems like educators grab hold of these things and do not thoroughly ask a vital question when it comes to technology: Is this really going to help?

“I see that it makes it very exciting for the kids,” says Nadia Heyd, a Scarborough-based mother of three, who volunteers at her children’s school. She describes her first impression of watching a grade two class draw with their fingers on a Smart Board: “The way the teacher used it was very interactive. The kids are right in there. They’re very physical and they want to be part of it.” But Heyd, whose children are not plugged in excessively at home, is unconvinced that technology is essential: “If you have learned how to learn, you’ll learn whatever technology you need to know.” Neither Heyd nor Marsellus believe limited technology in the classroom puts their children at a disadvantage.

Branigan-Pipe is not surprised by this reaction. The new generation of teachers she trains for the classroom also cling to a back-to-basic mantra, because that is how they remember school, and—more importantly—they thrived in that environment. “They see tech as scary and bad. They’ve always been told, ‘No computer in the school. Don’t go on the internet. Don’t put your picture on the internet.’ Now I’m coming in and saying, ‘Do it.’”

There are pockets across Canada where this urgency and excitement is resonating. But outside these pockets, administrators and educators’ vision for school hasn’t changed dramatically. The call for action is still very new and many are unaware of the sophisticated tools that are transforming classrooms elsewhere. In communities where school boards and administrators are resisting change and guarding policies, teachers sense there’s no support. Sometimes lone teachers advocate for change, hoping principals will appeal to school boards, but as one teacher says: “It’s really a stressful thing to do. The easiest thing for a teacher to do is to pick up the chalk and ask the kids to open their textbook”—especially if parents are not demanding change.

Unfortunately, many parents, and even kids, still think of technology as a toy—and toys are major distractions, not assets, in the classroom. Few realize the power behind technology’s potential to teach. Once, Branigan-Pipe had a parent complain her child wanted to blog every night as part of their homework. When Branigan-Pipe tried to explain the blogging was an authentic way for students to express their voice and share their ideas with peers, the parent told her, in unequivocal terms, “No, it’s a game.” Parents, she adds, need to become familiar with the tools and discover what technology can do for their child’s learning. “If parents are not shouting for it,” Branigan-Pipe says, “and we’re not saying that our students must have these things, it won’t be on the top priority of funding. And change will come slowly.”

An Occupy protester in Toronto. Photo by Ian Willms

Lia Grainger spent more than two months among the dissidents of Occupy. Nine camps, and dozens of interviews later, the Toronto reporter reflects on the movement’s message, its future, and why she’s convinced Canada needs more Occupy—and we need it now

There is no camping on the White House lawn. On the Wednesday before American Thanksgiving, when President Barack Obama drives down a darkened windy H Street and turns into the gated driveway that leads to his abode, no tents sully the immaculately manicured grass. One block away, several hundred people bed down in tents, tarps and cardboard on the modest rectangle of wet grass and snaking pavement known as McPherson Square—as close as they can get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. I climb into my two-person MEC tent and join the dissidents.

The surrounding buildings light my nylon interior bright as noon. Eight days ago, I left the comfort of my Toronto home to spend the winter visiting Occupy Wall Street camps and actions across the United States. This is stop number two—last week was New York, and I’ve already spent two nights here in the capitol. Last night was a wet one: heavy rainfall had saturated the earth, turning the grass into icy mud that coated everything—my boots, my clothes, the walls of my tent. The smell of tobacco from hand-rolled cigarettes still hangs in the cold air.

It hasn’t taken long to get to know my neighbours. Nearby, in his own little tent is 57-year-old Frosty, a grandfatherly homeless man who started helping in the camp kitchen after he was kicked out of D.C.’s Old Post Office Pavilion by Homeland Security. A few yards away beneath a patchwork of tarp and plastic is 18-year-old Elliot from Northampton, Massachusetts, a pensive adolescent who has been waiting his whole short life for a movement like this to sweep across the nation. In a large communal tent just off 15th St., a half-dozen new arrivals from New York City doze, including a young Queens native named Kelley. The pint-sized instigator has led the crew on a 230-mile, two-week march from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, spreading the Occupy gospel along the way.

Like them, I’d ditched everything—job and home—to experience a pivotal moment in the history of our monumental neighbours to the south, and perhaps in our own nation’s history as well. As a 30-year-old, raised by baby boomer parents who took me on peace marches before I could walk, I had inherited a casual commitment to social justice issues and environmentalism that was more theoretical than practical. I had never felt any real ability to influence the political world. Coming of age in a global world sometimes makes corruption and inequality seem insurmountable. You’re not just fighting local or national power; you’re pushing up against the world. Suddenly, here was 2011: Tunisia, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol. Individuals were upsetting the order of things by simply standing together. Something big and important and kind of wonderful was happening—something outside of the realm of normal, everyday, North American experience, and I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to join them.

On October 15, I began to visit the camps. My first was Toronto in October 2011. I then jumped the border to New York (six days), followed by D.C. (four days), Boston (four days), Savannah (two days), Miami (four days), Los Angeles (three days) and Seattle (two days). My last stop was Des Moines, Iowa, where I saw 18 of the hundred-odd Occupy the Caucus protesters get arrested at the campaign headquarters of GOP candidates. I arrived home on New Year’s Day, 2012 with a changed vision of the movement and a transformed understanding of the value of civil dissent. Some of the naivety is gone, and some of the cynicism is back, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we still need Occupy—and in Canada, perhaps, more so than ever.

When news of the Occupy movement protest camp in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park first flooded the Canadian public consciousness in late September 2011, I was skeptical. By now, the precursors to the American explosion of populist rage are well known: the deregulation of banking and lending systems, the housing bubble, the 2008 crash, the subsequent foreclosures and bailouts, the obscene Wall Street bonuses, and the inability of the administration to improve regulation. It all highlighted one overarching theme—an unprecedented and ever-expanding gap between rich and poor. By 2007, the top ten percent of Americans held 73 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the rest held a mere 27 percent. By 2010, 46 million Americans, or 15 percent of the entire population, already lived in poverty.

The unlikely spark was the Estonian-born editor-in-chief of the Vancouver-based, culture-jamming magazine Adbusters. Inspired by the parallel uproar in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt, Kalle Lasn and his team spent much of 2011 thinking about a soft regime change in North America. On July 13, Lasn sent a visual call-to-action to the magazine’s 70,000-person mailing list, an image he repeated in the next issue’s centrefold: a serene ballerina poised atop the iconic Wall Street bull, scored with a simple question, “What is our one demand?” The frustrating irony of that query would emerge only in the weeks to come.

“The political left for the past 20 or 30 years has been ineffective and whiny. It’s been a real dud,” says Lasn from his home office in Aldergrove, B.C.  “We need to jump over the dead body of the old Left and come up with new models.” If the Left wanted to follow the Egyptian model, he thought, it only made sense to occupy the iconic economic heart of America. On September 17, the first Occupiers set up camp in Zuccotti Park and renamed it Liberty Square.

It’s easy to see why the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—achieved in a matter of weeks largely through the power of smartphones, laptops and human bodies as weapons—might make a lifelong activist like Lasn think: “Why not here?” But America is not Egypt. And Canada is not America.

On October 7, 2011, roughly 200 people gather in a semicircle on the grass in Berczy Park on Front Street. The occupation is set to start in a week; this is the designated planning session. Sarah Rotz, a recent graduate of the environmental studies master’s program at York University, addresses the youthful crowd: “Can we have consensus that we’re going to decide things by consensus?”

Numerous participants raise their arms to form an “X,” the agreed-upon signal for a “block” (strong opposition to a statement). A long and painfully nuanced conversation on the definition of consensus ensues. Many of those seated begin rolling their eyes. One person shouts: “What’s our goal here?” The answering shout: “Our goal is to figure out what our goal is.”

The Toronto Occupiers are trying to follow New York’s lead. By early October, Occupy Wall Street had established itself as a leaderless movement with a commitment to horizontal democracy. By design, the Zuccotti Park camp’s consensus-based decision-making process allows everyone to be heard. After three hours of attempting the same style in Toronto, however, little has been accomplished.

Part of the power of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States is that it speaks a truth nearly all Americans can recognize—even if some protesters can’t name the banks they’re targeting. The failings of their financial system and the influence of corporate interests in Washington are obvious. The same can’t be said for Canada. Corporate donations to political campaigns were made illegal here in 2007. Our government didn’t inject billions in cash into failing banks. Superior federal regulation prevented the banking catastrophe experienced by the U.S. in 2008.

In Toronto later that evening, I voice my skepticism for the first time: How relevant is the Occupy movement in Canada? The answer I received then was the same one I would receive any time I questioned or criticized the movement in the months to come: It’s new. We don’t know what this is yet. Like many, though, I was impatient to discover what the Occupy would become.

When I arrive in Lower Manhattan on October 16, 2011, the mood in Zuccotti Park is jubilant. Yesterday, thousands of citizens in cities around the world had pitched tents in parks and squares in solidarity with the amorphous demands of the 99 percent. It’s day 30 of Occupy Wall Street. Fresh off a 12-hour Greyhound bus ride from Toronto, I round the corner of Broadway onto Liberty Street and am confronted with a teeming mass of people. One month earlier, this space had been little more than a refuge for Wall Street workers on smoke breaks.

In Occupy camps, talking to strangers is de rigueur. The first person I meet is a 26-year-old Newfoundlander named Kanaska Carter. She has multiple facial piercings, neck and chest tattoos, but exudes a calm, feminine warmth. “The first day there was no organization. People didn’t have any roles at all … it was absolute torture trying to get some kind of consensus on what to do at the general assembly,” says Carter, who has been living here since day one. But by day three, “people realized they had to stop dilly-dallying with all the details and get to the point.”

Behind us, every inch of stone and grass is blanketed with human activity. Cops chat with tourists, families make protest signs, and young moms push baby strollers down narrow walkways. It’s a burgeoning autonomous city: there are named streets, a sanitation station, a hospital, a library and a kitchen where everyone eats for free. At the buzzing media centre, dozens of laptops and devices charge simultaneously while bandanna-ed volunteers furiously blog and live-stream. Photographers and reporters are everywhere. Even Geraldo Rivera, the famously mustached Fox News pundit, drops by—and is welcomed.

Within a couple of hours of arriving, I meet 62-year-old Vietnam veteran Bill Johnsen. With his poor-boy cap and handsomely wrinkled features, he looks like an aged Gene Kelly. He’s been waiting 30 years for this moment: something to jar America’s youth into action. “We’re beginning to break down the robotic, mechanical ways that people have related to one another over the past few decades,” says Johnsen. The lifelong activist beams at the scene around him. “This is rich, this is rich,” he says, nodding. “But how do you sustain this?”

Johnsen’s question animated the conversations of protesters around the world. The media, however, chose a different question to dwell on: What does the 99 percent want? Type “Occupy Wall Street” into Google, and it immediately adds the word “demands.” A small sampling of American and Canadian Occupy signs doesn’t help either:

“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”
“End war! No drones.”
“I couldn’t afford a politician, so I made this sign.”
“Igualdad para todos.”
“Natives have been occupied since contact.”
“We want a university for the 99%.”
“You want a list of demands?? Here: 1) revolution. We are not here to compromise.”

It’s a real mixed bag—one that has confounded the mainstream media and given punditry an easy out. Kevin O’Leary characterized the movement on CBC’s The Lang & O’Leary Exchange in October as: “Just a few guys [with] guitars. Nobody knows what they want. They can’t even name the firms they’re protesting against.” This vagueness of purpose sets Occupy apart from other major movements—civil rights, gay rights, women’s suffrage—where the goals were clear, and victory, when achieved, was obvious.

When Lasn called for an occupation, he pushed for a single demand; his suggestions included a one percent “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions and currency trade. Once the epicenter of the movement had shifted from Vancouver to New York, however, the grievances of those pitching tents in Zuccotti Park stretched far beyond any one concrete, answerable request. Lasn now applauds the wide net cast by Occupy: “We wanted a debate, to have an argument about it. That’s exactly what’s happened.”

Many leading leftist thinkers have embraced this amorphous state of opposition to the status quo. In a speech last October 6, Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein told occupiers in New York: “I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.”

I arrive in Washington, D.C. on November 21, six days after Mayor Bloomberg ordered police to dismantle New York’s Zuccotti Park encampment. Many of those evicted from Wall Street are headed this way. They’ll find Washington isn’t the same ideologue’s utopia. By now, across the continent, occupations are beginning to hold a dystopic mirror to the problems that plague each urban centre. In Vancouver, there have been two drug overdoses, one fatal. In Oakland, police violence flared, and in L.A. and D.C., the camps have become refuges for massive urban homeless populations. Only two months in, and the purpose of the occupation is shifting—from spotlighting inequality of wealth to the more practical task of maintaining the camps.

In the D.C. camp there is a small, dark library, a dismal kitchen, minimal food, and the GAs, if they are held at all, often end in shouting matches. In four days, I struggle to find someone willing to explain his or her reasons for being there. “I’m not interested in politics,” is a common response. Educated idealism has largely been replaced with radicalized anarchy.  One day, as we sit sipping chicken noodle soup from paper cups, a middle-aged female camper explains the camp. “You have four kinds of people here,” she says holding up the fingers of a weather-reddened hand. “The activists, the homeless people who have become activists, the homeless people with no interest in the movement, and the crack heads.”

By November 26 I’m in Boston. I discover the plain concrete rectangle there known as Dewey Square isn’t much better. When I arrive, much of the community is gathered in front of a towering spot-lit brick wall to hold the evening’s general assembly. The facilitators, a young German-American named Anna and a middle-aged man named Greg, first spend ten minutes explaining the general assembly process.

A young man named John stands up. His army issue cap covers his eyes: “The safety group proposes that we remove a certain individual, Henry [from the camp].” Henry is an alcoholic who is at times violent. Despite interventions and counseling from members of the camp, Henry is extremely disruptive. As the group debates the proposal, the hypocrisy becomes apparent: How can an avowedly inclusive community defend forcible removal of a member, especially in a public space?

In the next hour-and-a-half, the conversation vacillates between booting Henry out and allowing him to stay—illuminating both the success and failure of the camps.

In hundreds of parks in towns and cities across North America and the world, Occupy camps vitalize debate by “occupying” what might otherwise be abstract conversations with real people and real problems, often leading to real solutions. At the same time, the energy needed to care for the homeless, addicts, and mentally ill—members of the community most affected by the nation’s wealth disparity—undermines the progress of the movement. At one point, a middle-aged man speaks out: “My friends, this is public land. It’s a disaster if this group decides to evict somebody. As much as I think in my heart that he doesn’t belong here … We would [become] a parody of ourselves.”

The Boston occupiers do not evict Henry that night. Two weeks later, in the early hours of Saturday, December 10, the residents of Occupy Boston and their belongings are forcibly removed from Dewey Square. In many ways, it is a blessing.

By late November, the narrative of the movement in the media is one of police violence. The skull of 24-year-old Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a “police projectile” at Occupy Oakland on October 25. This was followed by Lieutenant Policeman John Pike’s casual deployment of pepper spray into the faces of a seated row of passive protesters at the University of California, Davis. In fact, the movement received its first serious treatment in the media when the NYPD pepper sprayed two penned-in female protesters on September 24. In her October speech in Zuccotti Park, Klein applauded the movement’s non-violence: “You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality.”

Perhaps the most iconic representation of Occupy violence is the November 15 photograph of the dripping, pepper-sprayed face of Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old lifelong activist in Seattle. A few days before Christmas, Rainey and I meet over coffee. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment at a Seattle seniors’ housing development. Among the butterfly magnets and baby animal cards that decorate her fridge is a bumper sticker: “Regime change begins at home.”

When I ask Rainey about getting pepper-sprayed, she tells me it was a good thing: “Absolutely! I’m going to be on the cover of The Guardian weekend edition!” More than fifty-five years in the United States have not erased her lively Austrian accent. She says unprovoked police violence—often captured and broadcast by the protesters themselves via social media—gives the movement currency. It implies the Occupy message has enough weight for those in power to deem it worthy of oppressing. “[Occupy is] a microcosm of the entire population, trying to build a movement,” she says. “It’s bigger than any movement we’ve had before in our lives.”

Even so, numerous experienced and successful activists and intellectuals question the practical value of such attention in the absence of demands. Duff Conacher is one of them. As one of the founders of Democracy Watch, a non-profit Canadian citizens action group, he has spent the past 19 years advocating for democratic reform in Canada. Conacher was frequently called upon by media in the early days of Occupy Canada to explain his hopes for the burgeoning movement. His repeated advice: make demands.

The Toronto-based Conacher now speaks about the movement with fatigue. “Essentially, if you don’t have goals, you’re not cornering anyone,” he says. Democracy Watch, he adds, has won changes by detailing the problems, proving they exist and are bad, then setting out solutions, and pushing for those solutions. Conacher points to one of the primary concerns of the American Occupy movement: campaign finance reform. In Canada, he says, the battle was won seven and four years ago, with Democracy Watch’s Money in Politics coalition. That campaign brought advocacy groups together and forced Harper to revoke the right of corporations, unions, and other organizations to donate to political campaigns. He wonders if Occupy Canada is pushing for anything that activist groups or coalitions aren’t already tackling.

“[Occupy] was a great tactic for bringing attention to a lot of issues,” says Conacher. “But a tactic is not a strategy. Nor is it an organization.” When told many occupiers instead think of the camps as an example of a properly functioning democratic community, Conacher’s response is curt. At some point, he says, activists have to decide whether to create communes where everyone lives in the model way, or to change society so that it is the model way. Protesters, he adds, need to engage with the system in meaningful ways to create change. “Yes, [Occupy] got people involved who were not involved before,” says Conacher. “But what are they doing now?”

Conacher raises a fair question—and it’s one Dave Vasey can answer. Vasey slept in Toronto’s St. James Park for Occupy Toronto’s entire 40 day existence. At 33, Vasey has been organizing—primarily around tar sands issues—for the past four years. When he saw the initial call for Occupy Toronto, he didn’t think it would take off. “But then people started to plan—a lot of young people without much organizing experience. A lot of the white, middle-class, suburban demographic.” He speaks with a casual softness that belies the intensity of his politics. “There were a lot of people coming to political consciousness for the first time.”

So what was accomplished?  “It changed the conversation,” says Vasey, echoing most protesters’ response to this loaded question. “It reintroduced capitalism as an issue to be discussed.”

In the United States, protesters point to a number of tangible wins: last November 5th’s Bank Transfer Day, by which an estimated 650,000 Americans transferred some $4.5 billion from big banks to credit unions; Bank of America’s revocation of their proposed $5 monthly debit card user fee; and several courtroom wins regarding rights to protest and civil dissent. Even the change in conversation is tangible. A Nexis search for the term “income inequality” turned up 91 results in the week before the protests began; in the week of October 30, it’s there close to 500 times. Obama now references “the 99 percent”, framing his administration as sympathetic with the movement’s complaints, a stance he’ll likely maintain throughout this election year.

Will time equal success for Occupy? Conacher references the civil rights movement: “It took years for those protests to slowly build and grow. If you look at Occupy, it’s the opposite. They started big and are getting smaller and smaller.”

Vasey believes the lull is a blessing: “Action, reflection, action. The camp was a tactic, and yes, it needed to end. We know the idea of challenging capitalism will take a lot of work, but we have demonstrated that there is support.”

Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn is adamant the world will witness a resurgence of Occupy. He says it is becoming a “rainbow movement” that it is moving beyond occupation, and that the splintering we’re witnessing will somehow be useful. “Some of us,” he says, “are going to get involved in normal politics, some will move into more extreme ‘Black Bloc’ tactics, some will work on the internet.” These divisions regarding fundamental questions of ideology and strategy are already occurring. In Philadelphia, Occupier Nathan Kleinman is running for congress, yet in Oakland, increasingly violent Black Bloc tactics have derailed peaceful protests.

My last visit to an Occupy protest in the United States is on New Year’s Eve, 2011.

“Let’s see, there was David, Jess, Erin, Frankie, Kevin, Kalen…Geez! That’s 10.” Jessica Mizour, 24, of Des Moines, Iowa, is jotting down the names of the protesters who were moments earlier arrested at Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign headquarters. Mazour’s list is written in nearly illegible handwriting, but it isn’t her fault—her desk is her lap, and her office is the back of a graffitied school bus packed with Occupy the Caucus protesters. As she writes, the bus rips down the highway from Michele Bachmann’s headquarters to Newt Gingrich’s. The mood here is different than any other camps I’ve visited—it’s tactical and focused. There are press releases, demands, and a unified message: get money out of politics.

If Occupy is actually evolving into a new method of dissent—a way of exerting pressure on the political system without becoming a part of it—then its continued efforts in themselves could be judged a success. Occupy’s ongoing existence still confounds politicians, law enforcement and the public. Yet, while Occupy reminded candidates in Iowa of dissatisfaction with the status quo, it didn’t force anyone’s hand. To do so, Occupy will likely have to become a part of the system it claims to loathe.

Here in Canada, we’ve weathered the economic and social storm that has pummeled the U.S. and Europe. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to do so indefinitely. Already, our rate of income inequality is growing faster than in the U.S., according to a recent study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Plus, Statistics Canada already announced in late 2010 that Canadians are taking on more debt than Americans for the first time in 12 years. And steering the ship is Stephen Harper, a leader intent on stripping this country of the qualities—public health care, environmental protection initiatives, superior social services—that once made us enviable. We need the tools of direct action and horizontal, participatory democracy that Occupy has provided to steel ourselves for the battles we’ll face in the future.

Whatever Occupy becomes, chances are it won’t know where it’s going until it gets there. It has been more than half a year, but these things take time. Hell, we don’t even know what this is yet.

This Magazine's May/June 2012 cover story

The meat counter at the Cambie Street Whole Foods in Vancouver is thirty feet long, filled with choice cuts of beef, lamb, chicken, pork, and at least 20 different kinds of sausages. Two clerks, dressed in white smocks, black aprons, and Whole Foods caps, hustle around behind the counter, making sure everything looks just right. One of them wraps up an antibiotic-free chicken breast; the other offers instructions on how to grill a $33/pound cut of tenderloin to a young, attentive shopper.

Philip Dunlop used to be one of these workers. From October 2009 to April 2010, he spent forty hours a week slicing meat, making sausages, and serving customers, all in workplace conditions he found increasingly depressing. The sturdy, dark-haired 30-year old recites the list: lack of respect, uneven  wages, uncertain pay bumps, short staffing, inability to rectify grievances, low job security—it goes on and on. He lodged complaints about these issues to store managers in letter after letter. Each time he did, the managers spoke to him, placated him, assured him things would change. Only they didn’t. Dunlop felt more and more like he was being handled—that he had no real voice in his workplace. After less than two months of working at what Dunlop calls “The Meat Pit,” he started thinking about unionizing the store.

Labour in the retail sector is notoriously difficult to organize. The position of retail clerk is now the most common job in the country, at over 1.8 million workers. Yet, the field remains one of the least unionized. In Canada, nearly 30 percent of all workers are union members; less than 11 percent of workers in the retail sector are unionized. Membership is particularly low among young workers. Just under 15 percent of those aged 15-24 are union members, half the rate of workers in any other age bracket. Even worse, labour organizers are grappling with a concerted effort among companies to change corporate culture—an insidious new way to convince workers that labour and management are playing for the same team. With such stacked odds, the future of unions in retail looks increasingly grim.

Dunlop lives in an old white house in the affluent Point Grey neighbourhood in Vancouver. It’s one of the few run-down homes. He shares the space with six roommates, all of whom are students or recent graduates like Dunlop, who has a Master’s degree in history. It’s a February afternoon and Dunlop is making everyone sandwiches with clearance deli meat. He’s dressed in old cargo pants and a much-too-large black sweater with rips along the seams, supporting his claim that he gets all of his clothes second-hand. The toonie-sized red sale sticker is conspicuous as he pulls slices of salami from the package. This is what he could afford to buy on his $11/hour wage at Whole Foods and it’s the kind of meat he still buys now that he’s unemployed and living off a combination of EI and meagre savings.

Dunlop was finishing up his Master’s degree when he landed the job at Whole Foods in late 2009. His thesis was an exploration of the Sino-American influence on the Cambodian genocide. There wasn’t much of a market for that slice of knowledge; he wound up working as a meat clerk instead. Dunlop had also studied labour history in school and had developed a sense of class consciousness. When he arrived at Whole Foods, he both was surprised and dismayed with working conditions.

Dunlop was impelled to act. He tried to build relationships with his coworkers and strengthen bonds with informal gatherings outside of the store. In conversations with his fellow employees, Dunlop suggested the possibility of alternative dynamics between labour and management. He outlined a place where workers weren’t obliged to accept everything they were told without question. He was in small ways trying to break the illusion that labour and management are always playing for the same team. Months later in his kitchen, Dunlop recounts the obstacles and feelings of impossibility in between bites of the salami sandwich he’s filled out with mustard, mayonnaise, tomato and a slice of Kraft singles cheese.

In January, Dunlop began to look for allies in an organizing drive. He started with his coworkers in the Meat Pit, but soon branched out into other departments, striking up conversations with grocery clerks, workers at the specialty foods counter, and a few cashiers. All of the workers he approached were under 30. The longest any of them had been at Whole Foods was a year and a half. As Dunlop flitted about the store, he sought to get a sense of workers’ attitudes toward their jobs and workplace conditions, as well as their feelings about organized labour. He was discouraged by the response. “Far from having an opinion,” he says, “some didn’t know what a union was.”

Canada’s early trade unions were established in the second half of the19th century in response to the spread of industrial capitalism. As production accelerated in the early 20th century, so did labour activity. Escalating tensions between wealthy employers and workers facing high unemployment and inflation led to the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, the largest general strike in Canadian labour history. In the 1930s, the Depression helped boost union appeal and by the end of World War II, workers were organized enough and militant enough to demand better wages, hours, and conditions. Strike activity surged. Unions continued to fight for rights and to gain strength, with union density (the proportion of unionized workers in the workforce) peaking in the 1980s. Since then, however, union activity has been on the decline.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to see how some workers, and particularly young workers, have become less aware of unions and the role they played in shaping the 20th century. Unions aren’t in the media as much as they once were—and labour news isn’t exactly a hot topic on social media. There is the sense that unions are a thing of the past, unnecessary now that Canada has labour laws and minimum wages. Corporations have capitalized on this sentiment, suggesting that unionized workplaces are inefficient and outdated, and that unions just get in the way of healthy, fluid relationships between workers and management.

Just as discouraging, the Conservative government is now encroaching on workers’ hard-won right to strike. In June 2011, the Harper government enacted back-to-work legislation after postal workers went on a rotating strike and were subsequently locked out of work by Canada Post. The Canadian Postal Workers Union is challenging the legality of this legislation. In March 2012, similar legislation was used to prevent Air Canada workers from striking. Without the right to strike—or even to present a legitimate threat of strike action—unions lose one of their key bargaining chips.

“The influence of unions has slowly been diminishing,” says Andy Neufeld, director of communications and education at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1518, which, along with UFCW local 247, represents most of the unionized supermarket workers in B.C. (As the largest retail union in Canada, UFCW would have been the most likely union for Dunlop and his coworkers to join.) Flagging awareness is exacerbated in the retail sector by the huge number of young workers with no previous union experience, he says. About 65 percent of workers in his local are under the age of 30. Many have little or no previous experience with unions.

Neufeld makes an extra effort to capture the enthusiasm of these workers, many of whom are disinclined to pay union dues and don’t see the benefit of membership—proven wage premiums, increased job security, better benefits, and a chance to have a stronger voice in the workplace. Neufeld says the union is trying to get this message out there, but is sending information into a glutted market. “We’re competing for people’s attention,” he adds, “just like everybody else.”

Young workers also have a high turnover rate (the turnover rate in Canada’s retail sector is 25 percent), making it difficult to keep a strong, stable core of workers in place long enough to push an organizing drive through to success. Dunlop has firsthand experience with this phenomenon: During the course of his rabble rousing, half a dozen potential allies quit or were fired. Neufeld says high turnover is the number one cause for stagnating unionization rates in retail. It’s no happy accident, either. “Employers can rely on this churn in the base of the workforce,” Neufeld says.

In fact, at Whole Foods many of those interested in the idea of collective bargaining were afraid of reprisal to the point of inaction. Even Dunlop worried his union talk would find its way to management before he was ready—lest he prematurely land in hot water. As Dunlop puts it: “Nobody likes to stick their neck out.”

Kyle Attwaters and Jillian Brooks were fellow meat clerks at the Whole Foods in Vancouver. (Brooks was employed from April 2009 to October 2009; Attwaters from January 2010 to May 2010.) Both are in their mid-twenties and both say they would have signed union cards despite their fear of being fired at a time when unemployment was high. When asked how they perceived the store’s attitude toward unions, their responses are unqualified.  “It was very frowned upon,” Attwaters says. “They told us that right off the bat.” Brooks is more frank: “The mention of unionizing would piss so many people off.”

Attwaters says that when he first started at Whole Foods, he had to watch an introductory video with a segment on unions. Although the video didn’t expressly forbid workers from unionizing or engaging in organizing activity, he says message was clear that workers didn’t need a union—Whole Foods’ employment system worked fine without one. That system, it turns out, is to dictate the terms of employment and working conditions, leaving workers to accept them or find another job. Neufeld explains that employers are able to exploit their daily interaction with workers to influence opinion: “They’re able to convince employees that they’re better off without unions,” he says. “Employees are very quick to pick up on those cues.”

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has been infamously outspoken in his contempt for unions. He once told a reporter in the ’80s: “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient and stops a lot of people from  becoming your lover.” This strong anti-union sentiment is woven into the ethos of his 300-plus stores. (As of press time, Whole Foods had seven stores across British Columbia and Ontario, six in the UK, with the rest in the States.) Like many corporate retail stores, Whole Foods carries its fight against unions—and its own boosterism for the company—right down to the language workers are required to use. Whole Foods doesn’t have employees or workers or clerks; it has “team members.” And, despite clear distinctions in authority, there are no bosses or managers, only “team leaders.”

In December, for instance, Dunlop submitted a long list of grievances to store team leaders. Among his complaints was unpaid overtime. At closing time, he’d observed workers clocking out and then returning to finish tidying up the area, readying it for the next day. Dunlop participated in this process once, on his first day. But when he realized nobody was getting paid for this extra work, he raised the matter with his superiors. Dunlop says that in the resulting conference between himself and an assistant store team leader, the team leader insisted on stressing the distinction in terminology—namely, Dunlop’s use of the word manager—before addressing any of his actual complaints.

Such workplace jargon exists to influence the way employees perceive their relationship to the store—and it works. The idea is to create a feeling of allegiance to the company and not to fellow workers. “It was extremely difficult to convince people that workers and management have mutually antagonistic interests,” says Dunlop.

In a list of things to expect during an organizing drive, the UFCW cites the “We’re a family, we’re a team” line as a likely scare tactic employed by companies. In some cases, as at Whole Foods, this team approach is undertaken pre-emptively to stop workers from even considering an organizing initiative, as it might be seen as playing for the other side. But capitalism by nature pits labour and management against each other. Management is interested in minimizing costs, which means keeping wages low; labour is interested in maximizing wages. These fundamental differences in interest make it impossible to be part of the same team.

Once obtained union certification is a challenge to maintain. Wal-Mart shut down its Jonquière, six months Quebec store in 2005 after workers voted to unionize (and failed to reach a collective agreement). More recently, in 2011, Target expanded into Canada, buying out over a hundred Zellers stores, including a handful of unionized locations. It refuses to honour any union contracts and is planning to fire all current Zellers employees. Instead, Target welcomes employees to reapply for non-union positions, foregoing any accumulated wage increases or benefits they may have earned over years of work. Whole Foods biggest push to unionize a store was in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 2000s. Although workers voted for union certification, contract negotiations were drawn out for years and the union effort eventually ran out of worker support—especially after Mackey showed up at the store to hand out pamphlets titled “Beyond Unions.” When Madison decertified in 2004, Mackey went on a nine-month “Beyond Unions” tour of his stores.

If unions are to stay relevant, they have to adapt. In some ways, they seem to be trying. The UFCW now requires every one of its locals to devote 10 percent of resources to organizing initiatives, leading to some positive results. Earlier this year, a Future Shop in Montreal gained union certification. And in late 2011, an H&M store in Mississauga became the first in Canada to unionize, prompting organizing activities in many other locations. Notably, the campaign used social media to keep young workers interested in the drive. The UFCW has also launched a campaign to fight the anti-union Target takeover of Zellers. The “Target for Fairness” campaign raises awareness of Target’s plans for Zellers workers and awareness billboards have been erected in cities across the country.

More innovation is still key. Unions need to be more creative in their organizing approaches, says University of Manitoba labour studies professor David Camfield. One of the best ways for unions to increase appeal, he adds, is to engage in significant action—something they’ve been doing less and less. This may mean more strike action, more political action, or even stronger responses to concession demands by employers. “It’s not a question of sticking with the tried and true,” Camfield says. “There’s a lot of room for experimentation.”

Part of this experimentation has to include greater democracy within unions, allowing for an increase in both worker participation and worker control. Enduring change must come from the bottom up. Currently, most unions are controlled by a small number of officials, who dictate how the organization will run. “Unions need to become more worker-driven, worker-run,” says Camfield, “and that will only happen when workers themselves make it happen.”

Unfortunately, current economic conditions aren’t exactly encouraging workers to engage in union activity. Camfield says that higher unemployment and low job security have contributed to an environment in which workers are encouraged to compete amongst themselves. Such a situation is disastrous for the idea of solidarity, but it’s terrific for employers, who constantly promote it, even with initiatives as seemingly harmless as Employee of the Month awards. In the difficulties and discouragements, though, Camfield also sees opportunities for workers to find commonalities with each other, to identify and work with each other rather than submit to competition. “There are all sorts of ways,” he says, “in which people could see that collective action would be a much better way to solve our problems than by being pitted against each other.”

Recent activism have proven the power of solidarity and collective action. The Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the student protests in Quebec have all brought huge masses of people together to resonating effect. Camfield says that these examples of effective collective action outside of the workplace can serve as inspiration; they could have the potential to feed into the workplace by influencing the way workers think about what they can achieve and how they can achieve it.

Had Dunlop stayed at Whole Foods longer, he might have been able to do more—of course, that’s largely the point. Dunlop was fired after six months. He says he arrived to work one day in April, was allowed to work for one hour, then told to go home. He adds a store manager alleged he’d uttered a threat of physical harm against his immediate supervisor, a claim Dunlop disputes. Whole Foods has faced previous allegations of firing pro-union employees on trumped-up charges. During the campaign in Madison, two of the workers involved in the organizing activity were reportedly fired for dubious reasons. One of them made a latte the wrong way and gave this defective beverage to her co-worker instead of throwing it out. Both were let go for their parts in this breach of store policy.

Dunlop filed a claim with the labour board in November 2010 for having been fired without cause or notice. He says although Whole Foods maintained that they had sufficient grounds for dismissal, they decided to settle the matter without litigation. Dunlop was paid the week’s worth of wages to which workers are entitled when fired without notice. He is now using his knowledge of labour law to help former coworkers challenge the power of the corporation. He has written a letter to the store managers offering his experience free of charge to anyone who’s been fired from Whole Foods. It’s a small, but cheeky contribution that helps him feel like he and his fellow workers haven’t been pushed to resignation.

As Dunlop sits in his kitchen, finishing his budget salami sandwich, he says he’s not surprised by his lack of success—he feels the deck was stacked against him. He doesn’t regret the effort, though. “We have to try to stand together,” he says. “If we don’t at least try, where are we?”