Homes and Hands United: Bridging Housing and Labour Struggles at McMaster University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[⚠️ Suspicious Content] "This paper examines the strategic alliance between the Tenant Solidarity Working Group (TSWG)—a graduate-student tenant union—and CUPE Local 3906, representing Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Situated within Hamilton’s ongoing economic shift from manufacturing, specifically steel production, toward increased real estate speculation, financialization, and intellectual labour, this study investigates whether tenant-labour collaborations provide an effective model for addressing systemic socio-economic inequalities in student housing. Utilizing Nancy Fraser’s analytical triad of recognition, redistribution, and representation, the research evaluates the potential and limitations of this collaboration in achieving tangible socio-economic justice outcomes for graduate tenants. Through the lens of Fraser’s framework, the study identifies how tenant and labour activists mobilize recognition by contesting normative stigmatization of graduate renters; pursue redistribution through collective action that has yielded financial concessions such as rent reductions; and seek representation by demanding political inclusion within university administrative structures and broader public discourse. The analysis underscores that, despite Hamilton’s persistent identity as a major steel producer, the city's gradual pivot toward real estate investment and intellectual labour exemplifies David Harvey's concept of a ""spatial fix,"" redirecting surplus capital and labour into the university sector, thus complicating the intersection of housing affordability and labour precarity."
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".