In Canada today, as well as in the rest of the world, workers and their families are finding it harder and harder to live a decent life. While corporations continue to post record breaking profits, the working people who made all this possible are receiving less and less. To maintain their rate of profit, the bosses are moving away from high-wage unionized shops in Canada, to low wage, highly exploitative shops in China where genuine trade unionists are jailed. We need a movement to save good quality union jobs. The future of working-class communities in Canada depends on it.

In Ontario and Quebec hundreds of thousands of jobs have already been lost. The living standards of workers, already at all-time lows, are once again on the way down. The burden of the failures of capitalism to maintain a stable and growing economy is once again falling on ordinary people.

However, for the first time in two generations, working people are fighting back. Last summer we saw a wave of factory occupations against plant closures and the destruction of working-class communities. There is a growing feeling of militancy amongst rank-and-file workers today.

The Occupied Factories Solidarity Network has been set up in order to link the struggles of various individual factories with the broader working-class struggle for better conditions and higher standards of living. This network seeks to bring workers from all sectors, youth and students into the struggle for a better and fairer economy.

The goal of the network is not just to provide passive support, but to actively engage in the movement itself. This means setting up a rapid action network that can inform our supporters of factory occupations as soon as they happen and organizing flying picket squads to go and support, report and build on these actions. For this purpose we have established, as a first step, an email list that we would ask you to join and to forward as widely as possible. We are in need not only of activists but resources as well. We need to be able to coordinate travel, events, reports and any other logistical demands the campaign will need. We especially need people with cars to transport people to help out workers in struggle.

The email list can be joined here: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/occupied_factories

We encourage you all to join the Occupied Factories Solidarity Network so that we can work towards ending the attacks by the bosses and start building a better and fairer place to live for all of us.