Saturday, May 5, 2012

Teamster Nation: Giant student uprising in Canada

Teamster Nation: Giant student uprising in Canada:


Giant student uprising in Canada

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More than 125,000 students have been on strike for weeks in Quebec over a proposed tuition increase.

As Martin Lukacs writes in the Guardian, the strike is about more than just tuition. It's about austerity and inequality:
The social unrest roiling Quebec is colour-coded red. One cannot miss the hundreds of thousands of people with cloth of the colour pinned to their coats and satchels; the stickers pasted on street poles and storefront mannequins; and the sheets fluttering from balconies and windows. The red squares – punning visually on a French expression to be squarely in the red, or in debt – are a gesture of solidarity with university and college students on a massive general strike against government tuition fee hikes... 
The government's response has been to wage a war on the students' right to collectively negotiate