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Does Canada have a working-class movement? Though most of us think of ourselves as middle class, most of us are, in fact, part of the working class: we work for wages and are not managers. Although many of us are members of unions - the most significant organizations of the working-class movement in Canada - most people do not understand themselves to be part of this movement. Is the working-class movement a relic of the twentieth-century factory worker, no longer relevant to workers in the twenty-first century? David Camfield argues that, despite its real deficiencies, the movement is as important today as it was a hundred years ago. Drawing on the ideas of union and community activists as well as academic research, David Camfield offers an analysis of the contemporary Canadian working-class movement and how it came to be in its current state. he argues that re-energizing the movement in its current form is not enough - it needs to be reinvented to face the challenges of contemporary capitalism. Considering potential ways forward, Camfield asserts that reforming unions from below and building new workers' organizations offer the best possibilities for effecting real change within the movement. --Publisher's description

The global economic crisis and its effects have changed the context for public sector unions in Canada. There is evidence that an intensified offensive against public sector unions is beginning. Few public sector unions are prepared to respond adequately to such an offensive, as the important 2009 strike by Toronto municipal workers illustrates. In this more difficult context, change within public sector unions is increasingly urgent. The most promising direction for union renewal lies in the praxis of social movement unionism. However, there are very few signs of moves to promote this approach within Canadian public sector unions.

The book, " Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario," by Yonatan Reshef and Sandra Rastin, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "What's Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century," edited by Michael Zweig.

The article reviews the book, "Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global," by Paul Mason.

Iin British Columbia in the spring of 2004, over 40,000 hospital and long-term care facility workers, mostly members of the Hospital Employees Union [HEU], struck to defend their jobs and services against attacks from an aggressive neoliberal government and employers. This strike was distinguished by the social composition of the workforce, the fact that HEU had one of the more left-wing leaderships in the Canadian labour movement, and the determination of the strikers to persevere even in the face of back-to-work legislation. HEU'S resistance evoked an unusual degree of support that took the form of active solidarity rather than just passive sympathy. The BC labour leadership was pushed towards a confrontation of the kind that the existing regime of industrial legality was designed to prevent. This article identifies the systemic causes of the BC health care strike in public sector restructuring and the building of a lean state, explores its background, traces its trajectory, and explains and assesses its outcome. This strike highlights the significance of the character of the contemporary labour officialdom as a social layer whose conditions of existence lead it to usually oppose forms of collective action outside the bounds of industrial legality.

The article reviews the book, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire," by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

The article reviews the book, "Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870," by Beverly J. Silver.

The article reviews the book, "Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope," by Susan Weissman.

The article reviews the book, "CLR James: A Political Biography," by Kent Worcester.

Challenges from employers and governments and the limited success of public sector union responses suggest the need for renewal in Canadian public sector unions. This article engages with discussions of union renewal by way of theoretically conceptualizing the modes of union praxis relevant to Canadian unions. It then examines the nature of neoliberal public sector reform and assesses the experiences of Canadian public sector unions under neoliberalism. In this difficult context, unions that are able to make progress in the interconnected development of greater democracy and power will be more capable of channelling workers’ concerns into union activity. This, along with international and Canadian evidence, highlights the significance of the praxis of social movement unionism to union renewal in the public sector.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League of Canada, 1930–1936," by Stephen Endicott; "Labour Goes to War: The CIO and the Construction of a New Social Order, 1939–1945," by Wendy Cuthbertson; "Our Union: UAW/CAW Local 27 from 1950 to 1990," by Jason Russell; and "Union Power: Solidarity and Struggle in Niagara," by Carmela Patrias and Larry Savage.

From October 7-23, 2005, the strike by the 38,000-strong British Columbia Teachers' Federation (bCTF) was the "main event" in BC labour relations. Teachers demonstrated enormous solidarity and determination to achieve a fair negotiated settlement that they could put to a vote. The focus of this paper is not the BCTF strike itself but the remarkable sympathy strike action organized in support of BCTF, primarily by the BC division of CUPE. Such worker action is highly unusual. Since the 1940s sympathy strike action has been illegal and extremely rare. This paper sets CUPE-BC's strikes in support of BCTF in the context of the legal framework established over half a century ago and the decline of sympathy strikes that followed. It then summarizes the events of October 2005 and examines the effects and significance of the strikes and what made them possible. It concludes with a reflection on the implications of these events for the labour movement. The analysis here is shaped by the perspective that public sector unions are best able to resist hostile governments when they adopt a militant and highly democratic approach that aims to build a broad social movement, sometimes referred to as social movement unionism.

This article reviews the book, "Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories," edited by Abigail Bakan and Enakshi Dua.

A renewal of the study of public sector unionism in Canada is long overdue. This article explains why public sector unions deserve more attention from researchers than they have received of late and proposes that studies of public sector unions would benefit from adopting a new theoretical framework that conceptualizes contemporary unions as not only labour relations institutions but also as particular kinds of working-class movement organizations within a historically-specific class formation. It also identifies two obstacles to the production of accounts of contemporary public sector unions from this perspective.

The article reviews the book, "On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy," by Jukka Grunow.

The 21st century has seen growing attention to settler colonialism among academic researchers in Canada and internationally. In the Canadian context, interest has been fuelled above all by an ongoing resurgence of Indigenous activism and intellectual work, of which the most visible expression to most non-Indigenous people was the Idle No More movement of 2012–13. To date, however, little attention has been paid to settler colonialism within labour studies, broadly understood. As a modest contribution to remedying this deficiency, this article argues for the importance of understanding Canada as a settler-colonial society, proposes a conceptualization of settler colonialism from the perspective of a historical materialism reconstructed through engagement with Indigenous anticolonial thought, and offers some preliminary reflections on integrating analysis of settler colonialism into historical and contemporary research on labour.

In order to conduct better class analysis, we need class theory that rises to the challenge of understanding class as a structured social process and relationship taking place in historical time and specific cultural contexts. The study of working classes as historical formations requires the replacement of underdeveloped concepts with theory adequate to the task. This theory should incorporate the knowledge that class never exists outside of other social relations such as gender and race, but is always mediated by those relations, and vice versa. Marx, Gramsci, Thompson and autonomist Marxism, enriched with the appreciation of the multidimensional nature of social being produced by feminism and other perspectives arising from struggles against oppression, provide important resources for the development of such a theory.

This interdisciplinary dissertation aims to develop social and political theory capable of understanding social class as a structured process and relationship mediated by gender, race and other social relations and taking place in time and specific socio-material contexts, in order to analyse working classes as historical formations. It also aims to use this perspective and the existing body of historical scholarship to conduct a theoretically-rigorous study of the remaking of the Canadian working class in the 1940s. Arguing that recent theoretical work on class formation is inadequate, the dissertation critically appropriates ideas drawn from classical and contemporary scholarship to outline a theory of working classes as historical formations. An account of how dominant classes exercise power in capitalist societies is a necessary complement to this theory; the overview developed theorizes the existence of capitalist rule in differentiated forms and as inherently, but not primarily, ideological. From this perspective, the dissertation analyses the remaking of the Canadian working class in the paid workplace, community and household spheres in the 1940s. It argues that between 1941 and 1947 a broad but uneven process of class recomposition took place, focussing on such issues as the character of struggles in this period, their participants, their organizations and ideologies in order to illuminate the dynamics of change in working-class formations. In the course of struggle, both the working-class formation and capitalist rule were altered in important ways. The new formation that stabilized in the late 1940s featured improved living standards and greater unity against capital at the most elementary level. It was also shaped in important respects by a particular configuration of racist, sexist and heterosexist social relations. Unions changed from within and without, becoming generally committed to a responsible and bureaucratic practice. The CCF became the undisputed party of the English-Canadian workers' movement, weakening and marginalizing political radicalism. Although it is misleading to interpret this as working-class incorporation, working-class capacities to change society had been constrained and undermined in new ways, in part as a result of the very reforms workers wrested from employers and state power.

Contrasts business unionism and social unionism with "social movement unionism" as a model of public sector worker engagement.