Back to Work? Labour, State, and Industrial Relations in Canada

The central argument of this book is that getting people to work and getting them to stay there is a significant political achievement in its own right. ...[W]e may assume that in any social situation in which labour is experienced as a coercive aspect of daily life, work, or more accurately obtaining work effort, becomes problematical. Often it entails state intervention in a well-developed system of industrial relations that includes an important element of public policy. This book is a study of that element in Canadian industrial relations. Proceeding from this starting point, two central questions are posed throughout the remainder of this text: 1) What does the state do when it practices industrial relations; and 2) What are the implications of such practices on work and those groups that are brought together in labouring processes? --From introduction