Sam Gindin is a Canadian intellectual and activist known for his expertise on the labour movement and the economics of the automobile industry. Gindin's writings have focused on the Canadian Auto Workers, the auto industry, the crisis in organized labour in Canada and the US, and the political economy of capitalism. In 2012, he published The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, co-written with his lifelong friend Leo Panitch, which traces the development of American-led globalization over more than a century. In 2013, it was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in the UK for best and most creative work in or about the Marxist tradition, and in 2014, it won the Rik Davidson/SPE Book Prize for the best book in political economy by a Canadian. He is also co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today. The CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Toronto Metropolitan University is the first union-endowed chair at a Canadian university. Its mandate is to "create a hub of interaction between social justice activists and academics at Ryerson University". Life Sam Gindin was born in Kaminsky Ural, Siberia in the former Soviet Union, and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Gindin is a graduate of the University of Manitoba, and obtained his MA in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Although he worked as a researcher for the New Democratic Party of Manitoba and taught at the University of Prince Edward Island, Gindin spent most of his working life as the director of research for the Canadian Auto Workers union from 1974 until his retirement in 2000. From 1985 until 2000, he served as assistant to the president of the union, both Bob White and Buzz Hargrove. He participated in collective bargaining, the formation of union and social policy and strategic discussions on the structure and direction of the union. He also wrote a book on the history of the CAW entitled The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union. Gindin led the position of Visiting Packer Chair in Social Justice from 2000 to 2010 in the political science department at York University. In 2000, the university announced that Gindin would teach a course "that will bring students and union, anti-poverty, and non-governmental organization activists from around Ontario into the classroom" as a way of building bridges between social activism and university education.