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What’s often framed as an “international student crisis” is less about migration numbers than labour. As Canadian universities become revenue engines and work rules shift with market needs, international students are channelled into Canada’s most precarious jobs, propping up low-wage sectors and exposing how exploitation is built into immigration policy itself.

Union wage gains were relatively healthy, but unemployment crept up and workers felt the cost-of-living crunch.

History shows that race and labour are deeply connected in Canada. For the labour movement to advance racial equality, it must contend with this reality. Through a critical race analysis, this paper examines how race-evasive approaches in labour laws and practices have contributed to systemic racial inequality. It argues that race-conscious strategies are essential for addressing the specific experiences and needs of racialized workers. By leveraging existing legal tools and intentionally incorporating race-conscious approaches into areas such as collective bargaining, the collective agreement, and the duty of fair representation, labour law can be a powerful mechanism for achieving racial justice in the workplace.

How migrant workers, with the support of Canadian unions, won justice in a landmark court decision. In April 2006, 42 Latin Americans landed in Vancouver to excavate tunnels for the Canada Line Skytrain. They thought they'd won the lottery with promised wages far above what they would earn at home. But the reality was miserable wages, unpaid overtime and inadequate living conditions. It was the beginning of the Canadian construction industry's reliance on migrant workers and the treatment of temporary foreign workers has made headlines ever since. Author Joe Barrett, fluent in Spanish and a researcher for BC Building Trades unions, first spoke to three of the Costa Rican workers through a chain link around the worksite. They confirmed the low wages. He shares his unique insider perspective as he joined the team of union organizers and became a liaison between workers, union officials and lawyers throughout the court battles. The workers' resentment grew in the face of employer lies, intimidation, coercion and prejudice. Most of them came from a group of villages in central Costa Rica. They grew up together, sharing a background of poverty and hardship. These common bonds gave them the courage they needed to face fears of employer retaliation as they organized, which resulted in a successful vote for union certification, a first for temporary foreign workers in the Canadian construction industry. But their victory was short-lived and their unity was broken by a series of employer "sticks and sweeteners." The fight for fairness continued at the BC Labour Relations Board (BCLRB) and, ultimately, at the BC Human Rights Tribunal in a race against time before the workers left Canada with the completion of the tunnels. In 2008, the tribunal delivered a triumphant decision, a landmark case in the evolving issue of global migration. Workers were awarded $2.4 million to compensate for discrimination based on country of origin; for wages, inferior accommodations, meals and expenses and injury to dignity and feelings. A Fight for Justice is an inspiring story of collective action and relationships across progressive communities in Canada and Latin America and offers a remarkable story of migrant workers successfully fighting for fairness and equality. --Publisher's description

This article reviews the book, "Unjust Transition: The Future of Fossil Fuel Workers," by Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker, eds.

This article reviews the book, "Salud y Shalom: Conversations with Jewish Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade " by Joseph Butwin.

Workplace representation – the process through which workers voice concerns, negotiate conditions, and participate in decision-making – can be a crucial mechanism for reducing employment strain. Access to such structures is particularly vital for precarious workers, like temporary migrant farm workers in Canada, who face intensified demands owing to employer-tied contracts, congregate living arrangements, and persistent fears of job loss and deportation. Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus groups with migrant farm workers in three agriculturally dense regions in southern Ontario, this study explores the workers’ perceptions of one form of workplace representation: peer representation. While peer representation may foster lateral communication and social support for an otherwise isolated workforce, it is complicated by the structural precarity that intensifies competition and conflict among migrant farm workers. This article demonstrates how the conditions of entry and residency for migrant farm workers in Canada generate lateral surveillance and intra-worker control, amplifying workplace pressures and demands and reinforcing the strain that peer representation might otherwise help to alleviate.

Inspired by the recent national policy framework establishing the Canadian Employee Ownership Trust, we survey the landscape of broad-based employee ownership (BBEO) in Canada, focusing on the two prominent forms: worker co-operatives and broad-based employee share ownership. We conceptualize BBEO based on two inclusion criteria: the percentage of shares held by employees and the breadth of access to ownership opportunities. We also draw attention to two other relevant factors: the extent of employee control rights and degree of equality of share allocation. We then discuss the evolution and prevalence of the two forms of BBEO in Canada, utilizing limited available data and supplementing with illustrative examples. Finally, we call for an integrated and comparative research and policy agenda that bridges worker co-operatives and broad-based employee share ownership models.

This article reviews the book, "Ships of State: Literature and the Seaman’s Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain," by Laurie Ellinghausen.

Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in Vancouver, Canada experience ongoing systematic conditioning processes that are rooted in Philippine colonial history. Utilizing a multi-ethnographic approach and a framework drawn from Berger and Luckmann's concept of institutionalization and Foucault's biopower, I rethink the Filipino labour diaspora and interrogate how empire, labour, and migration, shape Filipino trajectories. Existing scholarship has documented the structural and working conditions of Filipino labour migration; this research contributes by foregrounding how these arrangements between the Philippines and Canada are lived, internalized, and reproduced through the institutionalized subjectivities of the Filipino citizen, the ideal migrant, and the Bagong Bayani (new hero). These subjectivities sustain systemic inequalities, coerce joining the labour diaspora, and render OFWs more vulnerable to exploitation while glorifying their sacrifices as noble contributions to family and nation. I further discuss the agency and resistance of OFWs, who actively reimagine their subjectivities and challenge these neocolonial paradigms.

To be published: October 2026. Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy was meant to foster the domestic production of consumer goods and, in the process, ensure steady jobs at good wages. In reality, in small towns like Renfrew, Ontario women workers laboured for unconscionably low wages, and men worked staggeringly long hours. They suffered largely in silence, their exploitation hidden by a myth of small town community that denied their class standing. In this book, Peter Campbell brings to life the untold story of how small-town workers in the Renfrew Woollen Mills both benefitted from and were exploited by a National Policy that survived on their unseen labour and silent sacrifices. The “small town deal” rested on the expectation that workers would be seen but not heard while employers maintained labour harmony through paternalistic ideals and practices. Focusing on Catholic owners and Catholic workers, this book introduces a different Ontario, one in which the Catholic Church plays a key role in fostering worker acceptance of their class standing. Campbell details both the heyday of this moral economy and the challenge to it in the form of the 1937 strike, then a “company union,” and later the arrival of the Textile Workers Union of America. Renfrew’s small town deal survived the coming of the international union movement, but could not survive Cold War anti-Communism and the Liberal Party’s dismantling of the woollen textile industry as part of the creation of a new post-war economic order. The era of the National Policy and the small town deal is gone, but the contributions and the struggles of the workers who made small towns like Renfrew places where things were made live on. --Publisher's description

This report on Nova Scotia’s labour market finds that precarious employment is widespread and leaves many workers just one setback away from deeper insecurity. The report shows that 30.4 per cent of paid employees — approximately 131,000 workers — are in precarious jobs, with low wages, limited protection and job instability. About 43 per cent of employees show at least two signs of precariousness, leaving many workers on the edge of precarity, and at risk of deeper insecurity if their job conditions worsen. Too many workers in Nova Scotia are working hard without the stability they need to make ends meet,” said Dr. Daniel Cerdas-Sandí, co-author and CCPA-NS research staff. “This is not a marginal issue. Precarity is a defining feature of our labour market,” says Cerdas-Sandí. The study uses two complementary tools: an Employment Precarity Index based on Statistics Canada’s 2024 Labour Force Survey, and for the first time a 2025 survey of workers across Nova Scotia conducted by Angus Reid, which captures the day-to-day experiences such as unpredictable schedules, on-call demands, and fear of losing work.--Publisher's description (press release)

How do digital platforms, such as Uber, Amazon, or DoorDash, reterritorialize social protections for immigrant workers at urban, national, and transnational scales? In this paper I show how they function as tools of economic integration, situating interplays between states, markets to generate new territorial configurations and exclusions in the digital economy. By analyzing the role of immigrant workers in the platform economy, I aim to show how platform economies both enable and constrain transnational mobility, deepening global inequalities through the uneven impact of flexible labour mediated by digital infrastructures. I focus specifically on software engineers and gig workers, who perform what Vallas and Schor (2020) identify as “geographically tethered work”. These two migrant groups allow me to observe how platformization has reterritorialized labour relations. Providing an analysis of different immigrant workers in the North American platform economy, I aim to show the ways in which immigration status makes these labour relations more precarious, increasing the reliance on transnational infrastructures of care.

This essay examines the expansion of digital platforms through the lens of racial capitalism, focusing on their implications for people of colour in the Global South and migrant populations. It begins by outlining racial capitalism as a theoretical framework that extends beyond classical Marxism by centring the historical and ongoing racialization of labour, dispossession, and accumulation. Drawing on foundational insights from W. E. B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson, the essay situates capitalism as inherently structured by racial hierarchies rather than merely class relations. It then engages in a critical review of recent scholarship addressing racial capitalism across domains such as social reproduction, migration, and border regimes, highlighting how digital platforms intensify and reorganize these dynamics. The analysis emphasizes how digital infrastructures reproduce longstanding patterns of exploitation, surveillance, and differential mobility while rendering racialized bodies central to global circuits of labour and value extraction. Finally, the essay applies this framework to the study of digital migration and embodiment, illustrating how platform-mediated environments both constrain and reshape the lived experiences of racialized populations. By foregrounding the interplay between race, technology, and political economy, the essay argues for the continued relevance of racial capitalism in understanding contemporary forms of inequality and in envisioning alternatives.

While we know that transgender people are not a monolith, the spectrum of labour precarity that exists for trans workers as well as the additional factors that lead some trans people into deeper levels of life precariousness remain understudied. In this article, we consider how employment precarity impacts trans peoples' quality of life, and how trans peoples' social and material conditions mediate their overall life precarity alongside their experiences of labour precarity. This article is based on 55 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, including 41 interviews with trans precarious workers and 14 with service providers who have worked with trans people experiencing precarious labour. Our analysis highlights participants embodied experiences of labour precarity and explores how varied positions of marginality and material barriers among trans people mediate the kinds of precarity they face. Examining participants' recollections and personal narrations, we explored relationships among poverty, disability, migration, gender, and labour precarity as well as trans workers' deployments of hope, agency, and resistance.

Workplace racial discrimination remains a pervasive and harmful reality with profound implications for health and well-being. Drawing on evidence from three interrelated independent studies using both primary and secondary Canadian data, this research provides a comprehensive understanding of how workplace racial discrimination functions as both a social determinant of health and a chronic stressor contributing to adverse health outcomes and persistent health inequities. The findings demonstrate that workplace racial discrimination, manifesting through inequities in hiring, promotion, retention, and interpersonal interactions, increases the risks of significant psychological, physiological, and physical health outcomes for racialized workers. Experiencing workplace racial discrimination was strongly associated with heightened risks of anxiety, depression, stress and post-traumatic stress disorders, reinforcing mental health disparities across racialized groups. In addition, workplace racial discrimination increased perceptions of work-related stress, which in turn elevated the risk of diagnosed chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke effects and musculoskeletal disorders. Physiological assessments further revealed that recalling racial discrimination experiences contributes to dysregulated cardiovascular reactivity, including elevated systolic and diastolic blood pressure, as well as mean arterial pressure values above the normal range. Particularly severe forms of racial discrimination, implicating job loss, early retirement, undesirable resignation or leaves were linked to greater blood pressure increases. When incidents of racial discrimination were reported, especially when participants received acknowledgment of their experiences, physiological responses were attenuated. These results underscore the importance of personal action, recognition, accountability and institutional action in mitigating health risks. These findings underscore how workplace psychosocial stressors trigger harmful biological and physiological responses that may result in lasting health consequences. Taken together, this research highlights workplace racial discrimination as a critical public health concern that transcends individual experiences and reflects broader organizational inequities. Conceptualizing discrimination as a chronic stressor provides an essential understanding in addressing racial health disparities. The evidence points to the urgent need for organizational reforms, robust anti-discrimination policies, and workplace practices that not only prevent discrimination but also support the mental and physical health of racialized workers. Addressing workplace racism is not solely a matter of social justice; it is a public health imperative with the potential to reduce disparities, promote workplace equity, and improve the overall well-being of diverse populations.

This article analyses the experiences of US and Canadian call centre workers and their unions with the shift from physical call centres to ‘work from home’ (WFH) arrangements. Drawing on interviews, focus groups and a worker survey, the authors find that the shift enabled new forms of spatial control grounded in worker preferences for remote work and associated with different forms of precarity. Management control over the physical location of work could increase job insecurity; control over the costs and risk associated with WFH arrangements could increase income insecurity; and control over communication between workers and with their unions could increase collective representation and voice insecurity. Local unions engaged in modes of resistance to spatial control, but with uneven success. Findings suggest that labour power requires union strategies that both defend WFH rights and develop protections targeted at forms of precarity associated with being able to work from home.

This article reviews the book, "Statesman of the Piano: Jazz, Race and History in the Life of Lou Hooper," by Sean Mills, Eric Fillion et Désirée Rochat (dir).

At the height of the Great Depression, 2,000 young, single, unemployed and homeless men decided to ride boxcars from Vancouver to Ottawa to seek work and wages from Prime Minister "Iron Heel" R.B. Bennett. Their undertaking became the On-To-Ottawa Trek. Vancouver Advocate cub reporter Mark Hunter is given the perilous assignment of infiltrating the Trek. Once accepted into the journey, can he remain incognito? Can he endure the odyssey's hardships and dangers? Also, can he survive the Trek's violent ending? Most important, can he provide objective and accurate reporting of the historic event? --Publisher's description

Exposing the deep roots and new threats of Canada's regressive right. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the global mainstreaming of hate as false narratives and conspiracy theories about equity and inclusion, immigration, COVID-19 and vaccinations, and the “gay agenda” have become permissible talking points among right-wing politicians, pundits, and influencers. In Confronting the Resurgent Right, scholars and activists take Canada’s 2022 “Freedom Convoy” as a recent manifestation of deep-rooted extremism. Providing intersectional commentary on the resurgence of the right, they demonstrate how its ideology permeates and shapes the structures of our society. Balancing evidence-based research with careful analysis of the genesis and methods of the right, this volume models pathways of resistance and charges us to work together to expose and counter the regressive forces that spew hate. --Publisher's description