Over the last four years, I’ve been working with the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce (CanWCC), an organization committed to feminist values of co-operation and mutual support. When CEO Nancy Wilson was invited to government consultations on financial aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized that none of the discussion related to the needs of her members, 80 per cent of whom were self-employed—entrepreneurs and solo workers providing a service or creating a product.
More than one million women in Canada are self-employed, yet no one considers them part of the economy—not the government, nor other workers, nor economists. Nancy approached me to work with her in building a coalition on self-employment. I was a little skeptical about working with a chamber of commerce, even if it called itself feminist, but I was broke and needed the work. We conducted focus groups of self-employed people across the country, including a diversity of gender, race, age, disability, and location. The biggest problem they identified was isolation. As well, self-employed individuals didn’t have a union or member-based organization to provide them with support or to form a collective base for organizing. CanWCC is now involved in a large fundraising campaign to make the self-employed a visible force in the economy and politically.
The coalition was both a success and failure. It was success in uncovering a significant absence in the economic and political vision of almost everyone and in identifying an urgent need for a significant sector of the working class to get organized and fight for support and recognition by government. It was a failure in creating a coalition with the unions. While Unifor seems to have recognized the problem by supporting the Canadian Freelance Union, the Canadian Labour Congress, while initially participating in the coalition, decided that they were not interested or able to organize self-employed workers.
After the two years of the Equity Coalition work, CanWCC realized that the majority of their members who were self-employed needed a focussed campaign to win recognition and changes to government policy to assist the broad and diverse sector of self-employed women and gender diverse individuals. You can learn more about their advocacy here.
I realized that CanWCC was actually the most feminist organization I had ever worked with. Nancy Wilson is a leader like no other I have worked with. I learned to lead from men, dominate, be sure of your opinion, and fight for it. This has gotten me far in this patriarchal world. But Nancy has a different strength. Besides being a brilliant thinker and analyst, she is a radical listener. At first, I noticed it during the coalition when she would quietly listen to an argument I was having with someone else on the team and then say, “how about this?” Instead of supporting one side or the other, or even proposing a compromise, she found the common ground in the argument and suggested it. We would both say. Ya, that would work. It was amazing to me but over time I realized what an important skill it was and how debating, which is how I learned to argue politics, has its limits. Debates assume one side is right and one side is wrong. And often that’s true but in an organization with common goals and perspectives, usually differences reflect different perspectives and including as many perspectives as possible is how we achieve the strength of diversity.
I think our inability to listen to each other when we have differences has been a major weakness of the Left for generations and it is getting worse. In my generation is was, “I am right and you are wrong.” Today it is “I am right and you are a bad person.” In my generation we would unite across differences even if we fought constantly. In this generation, people don’t seem to think that they have to work only with people they agree with. I look forward to Naomi Klein’s new book on fighting fascism. I’m sure she and her co-author Astrid Taylor will talk about the United Front against Fascism in the 1930’s and 1940’s, where a principled unity was created across deep political differences, with people who had been sword enemies, communists, socialists, liberal capitalists against fascism. A united front means agreement one issue, eg. protecting democratic rights but continuing to battle about differences on others like, raising minimum wage, taxing the rich, anti-racism, gender equality etc. We can unite to build an anti-war movement against the US and Israel bombing Iran, without agreeing about our criticism of the Iranian government or unite to stop Canada from supporting the Israeli arms industry without agreeing on anti-Zionism.
Sometimes this can lead to people changing their minds or as we used to say in the old days radicalizing. But sometimes it doesn’t.
Nevertheless, if a better world is possible, and I still believe it is, we have to unite across differences at the same time as put forward what we think and believe in the strongest way possible and listening to those who disagree. That is part of what feminism has come to mean to me. Listening. I’ve always been good at the fighting for my ideas part but now late in my life I am learning to listen more.
