Colette Murphy is the Chief Executive Officer of the Atkinson Foundation. Colette offered these remarks on a panel that included Gavin Kelly from the Resolution Foundation and  Sophie Long from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. This webinar was hosted by the U.K. Association of Charitable Foundations on Wednesday, May 8th, 2024.

Thank you for the invitation to join your conversation about worker power – why worker power is important and the role funders can play in generating more of it. 

I’m joining this call from Toronto – the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as well as the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee peoples. As one of the 3.25 million people who live here, I hold obligations for the treaties Canada entered into with the First Peoples of this place more than a century ago. We’re also responsible for repairing the harm caused by colonialism in this place and time. You’ll get a glimpse into what this means when I tell you more about our role as an economic justice funder committed to strengthening movements for decent work and a fair economy.

This commitment is now exactly ten-years old although we’ve been fighting for social and economic justice in Ontario for more than 80 years. The Atkinson Foundation was established with the proceeds from the sale of Joseph Atkinson and Elmina Elliott’s biggest asset, the Toronto Star – the daily newspaper founded by a small workers’ cooperative at the end of the nineteenth century and acquired by them over the first half of the twentieth century. Think of it as a Canadian equivalent of The Guardian. 

Joe and Elmina’s families were originally from the U.K. The Atkinsons were a desperately poor family settled on unproductive land. The Elliotts began with much more and grew wealthier on the better land they received from the colonial government. Both Joe and Elmina were devout Methodists. They became journalists and met in a newsroom. 

Joe went on to become the editor, publisher and owner of the Star and a powerful voice for social and economic reform. A commitment to the rights of working people was one of his six editorial principles. He described unemployment insurance as the fight of his life. He also used his platform at the Star to campaign effectively for other social protections like old age pensions, survivors’ benefits, and workers’ compensation. The foundation was established to continue fighting for material and long-term improvements to the lives of people impoverished by the harshest rules of capitalism well into the future.

When I became Chief Executive Officer in 2012, the Board and staff decided to take a hard look at decades of funding poverty reduction work. Gaps in Income, wealth and democratic inequality were getting wider year after year despite our best efforts. Billions of dollars in public infrastructure spending were flowing to the usual suspects while creating a gentrification and displacement problem for many of the low-income communities most affected by these projects. Very little if anything was trickling down unless workers came together to push up and demand more.

We decided to focus on what people living in poverty told us they wanted. No one had ever said they wanted to be ‘less poor”. They said that they wanted more and better economic opportunities. Even though they were holding down more than one job, they were living below the poverty line and not getting further ahead. 

They said they wanted a voice in their workplace and in their communities. They wanted the media to quote them, not only their bosses, and to tell their stories about systemic injustice and what needed repair. 

They wanted their knowledge, perspectives and ideas heard wherever decisions about their lives were being made.

They wanted a say in the terms and conditions of their work if they were not represented by a union and they wanted their right to join one respected, especially if their boss was an app like Uber. 

Simply put, they wanted more power.

So, that’s what we decided to do in 2014 for no less than 10 years. We decided to focus on the solution of decent work instead of the problem of poverty. Specifically, we created four, inter-connected strategies to build movement capacity: narrative change, leadership learning, public and corporate policy advocacy, and knowledge co-creation. We then used all the tools available to us as a funder, investor and advocate to put workers at the centre of the policy discourse about work and the economy.

We’re a mid-sized foundation with an endowment of about $100M and an annual budget of $6M. So, we don’t have a lot to throw at this strategic priority and to see what sticks. We pride ourselves, however, in listening closely to the aspirations of working people and finding the right acupuncture points to release positive energy where they live, work and find community. We work hard everyday to shift whatever power we have toward workers, especially those who are Indigenous, Black and racialized, and earn low incomes. In this way, a little money can go a long way and have an outsized impact.

First, we started the Atkinson Decent Work Fund to put multi-year funding behind worker and resident organizers.

Next, we revived the labour beat at the Toronto Star seven years after the last labour reporter in Canada was laid off. We funded that beat reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh to go undercover to investigate gig work and bust the myths that are eroding workers rights. Her experience was shared in a seven-part podcast called Hustled. We also developed an in-house podcast focused on millennial workers and their issues called Just Work It.

We funded research and coalition building to explore promising models for sharing the prosperity generated by public infrastructure development through community benefits agreements and social procurement. We also underwrote the cost of a research program by the Centre for Future of Work, including a foundational paper on worker voice and workplace democracy.

We named a fellowship for a media savvy and highly effective economist Armine Yalnizyan to help move the future of work conversation toward the future of workers. She has had many high points in six years but really dominated the conversation in 2020 with her economic analysis of the gendered impact of the pandemic and the need for what she called a she-covery after the she-cession.

We used that research to advocate strenuously on our own and with other funders for more worker-centred public and corporate policies, including decent work metrics for investment managers. We use our power as an active and engaged shareholder to take on Indigenous justice issues within the Toronto stock exchange and decent work issues within global companies like Restaurant Brands International.

From time to time, we convened key movement actors to strategize and build power through community-labour coalitions or leadership learning experiences like My Labour Our Future and The Power Lab. We also paid attention to cross-movement organizing but remained focused on how decent work intersects with affordable housing, just transitions to a carbon-free future, and other critical social and economic concerns.

In 2017, we launched a special prize – the Good Fight Prize – for the broadly based campaign that channeled worker power for significant material benefits and other signs of progress for workers.

Ten years in, we’ve had some celebrated wins but also some deeply disappointing losses. As quickly as we won an increased minimum wage, for example, we lost it when there was a change in government. The challenge has been keeping our eye on the long game, stretching back to the Nine Hour Movement that won Canada’s first workers’ rights legislation in the late 1800s and looking forward to the roll out of the new Working for Workers Act that was passed here in Ontario two months ago. 

All political parties are currently competing vigorously for the allegiance of workers in upcoming federal and provincial elections. There are those running for elected office who still believe some workers deserve much better protections and standards of employment than others. And there are other candidates who stand firm on the idea that all workers have unalienable rights wherever they are and whatever they do for a living. It’s a complex tug of war and the strength of each side can change from day to day. That’s why showing up and doing our part has never been more important. At the same time, we know the economic game must become way more cooperative and collaborative in the interest of planetary and human health.

I hope our approach and experience opens up the conversation about the role of funders in generating worker power and why this work has never been more important — not only in Canada or the UK but around the world. 

I’d like to give the last word of my presentation to the spokesperson for one of the worker-led organizations we’ve supported for a long time — The Workers’ Action Centre.

Their successful campaign for a higher minimum wage won the Good Fight Prize in 2017. I’m going to share their acceptance speech which was delivered in front of a room of 300+ social and economic justice movement leaders from all walks of life – community, politics, the academy, journalism, philanthropy, labour, business, and more. 

The voice you’re about to hear belongs to Deena Ladd. She comes from a family of garment workers originally from Leicester. Deena has a lot to say, especially at the end of this speech, about why this work is important and deserves our collective support.

Here’s the link to the speech. 

Thank you for your interest in our work. I look forward to answering any questions and digging into this topic with you.