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"High performance" management systems in unionized workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist industry relations system in Canada. Microcorporatist tendencies reflect more active worker cooperation in achieving management productivity, quality and flexibility goals. Analysis of development of these tendencies in the major appliance industry suggests that microcorporatism has contradictory implications. In one direction lies the displacement labor politics by a local-centered unionism that is increasingly captured by the logic of market competition. In a second direction lies a logic of greater worker resistance related to increased worker control of labor processes.

Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Clean Clothes: A Global Movement to End Sweatshops," by Liesbeth Sluiter.

The article reviews and comments extensivley on the books "Capitalism Comes to the Backcountry: The Goodyear Invasion of Napanee," by Bryan Palmer and "Working at Inglis: The Life and Death of Canadian Factory," David Sobel and Susan Meurer.

At the heart of Canada's "Fordist" class compromise after World War II lay a new unionism which reinforced managerial control in the workplace. By repudiating rank-and-file initiatives against various dimensions of management control of the labour process, the new unionism displaced a potentially transformative kind of unionism that arose during the war. The significance of this transition is explored through a comparative examination of the relations between union leaders and members at two autoworker locals, one of which exemplified the ran-and-file-oriented local unionism of the war years, the other the new centralized unionism which came in its wake. It is argued that this transition to a new unionism was a key contributor to the marginalization of class-based politics in Canada after the war.

The article reviews the book, "Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept," by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter.

The industrial relations system at Magna International is an example of an integrated, coherent, non-union human resource management strategy. It includes significant mechanisms of worker voice and conflict resolution as substitutes for union representation. Potential labor-management conflicts associated with Taylorized labor processes are often translated into group problem-solving. Redistributive conflicts are re-framed as mutual gains through profit-sharing. Corporate communications promote an ethos of competitiveness. Individualized pay and promotion schemes, segmented internal labor markets, and the exposure of individual plants to competitive pressures, promote cultures of labor cooperation in the pursuit of productivity gains. The success of this union avoidance model is situated in a context of the erosion of unionized labor relations, the disciplinary effects of precarious labor markets, and the vulnerability of workplaces to transnational competitive forces. Continued success is predicated on Magna's ability to survive sectoral and macroeconomic restructuring forces which are, in large measure, beyond management's control.

The emergence of internationalized production in the context of weakening state regulation of labour rights and of increasing employer dominance in industrial relations systems raises significant questions about the nature and future of worker representation. A crucial issue is the transferability of company-specific models of worker voice across national boundaries. This issue is the focus of this case study of Magna International, a leading member of a small group of transnational automotive parts manufacturing firms that are central to the contemporary restructuring of the international automotive industry. The paper compares the transformation of worker representation at Magna in Canada and Mexico. In crossing international borders, the Magna industrial relations model has taken on national and local features of the host country. However, the underlying industrial relations structure is one which has elicited a successful reconfiguration and containment of much, although by no means all, of the adversarialism inherent in labour-management relations. This reconfiguration has aligned worker representation to an essentially unitarist project oriented to management's productivity goals. More than merely suppressing independent unions, Magna has constructed a coherent, management--dominated model of worker representation in both Canada and Mexico. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of this model for independent unionism.

Accelerating flows of remittances are dwarfing global development aid. This study deepens our understanding of remittance impacts on the families of workers who come to Canada annually for several months under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Interviews with SAWP workers, their spouses, adult children and teachers in Mexico deepen our understanding of the impacts of these remittances. They demonstrate that the remittances are often literally a lifeline to transnational family survival, allowing them to pay for basic needs such as shelter, food, and medical care. Yet, at the same time, the remittances do not allow most of these workers and their families to escape deep poverty and significant precarity, including new forms of precarity generated by the SAWP. Instead, SAWP remittances help reduce poverty, at least temporarily, to more moderate levels while precarious poverty expands through global neoliberal underdevelopment.

Under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), migrant workers come to Canada for up to eight months each year, without their families, to work as temporary foreign workers in agriculture. Using a ‘whole worker’ industrial relations approach, which emphasizes intersections among work, family and community relations, this article assesses the impacts of these repeated separations on the wellbeing and cohesion of Mexican workers’ transnational families. The analysis is based primarily on 74 in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted in Spanish with male workers, their spouses and children, and with the children’s teachers. Assessment criteria include effects on children’s health and educational success, children’s behaviour, mothers’ abilities to cope with added roles and work, and emotional relations among workers, children and spouses. The study findings suggest that families are often negatively impacted by these repeated separations, with particular consequences for the mental and physical health of children. Children’s behavioural challenges often include poor school performance, involvement in crime, drug and alcohol abuse (especially among sons), and early pregnancies among daughters. As temporary ‘single moms,’ wives often have difficulty coping with extra functions and burdens, and lack of support when their husbands are working in Canada. Typically, there are profound emotional consequences for workers and, frequently, strained family relations. The article concludes by offering practical policy recommendations to lessen negative impacts on SAWP workers and their families, including higher remittances; improved access to labour rights and standards; and new options for family reunification.

Every day millions of Canadians go out to work. They labour in factories, offices, restaurants, and retail stores, on ships, and deep in mines. And every day millions of other Canadians, mostly women, begin work in their homes, performing the many tasks that ensure the well-being of their families and ultimately, the reproduction of the paid labour force. Yet, for all its undoubted importance, there has been remarkably little systematic research into the past and present dynamics of the world of work in Canada. The essays in this volume enhance our understanding of Canadians on the job. Focusing on specific industries and kinds of work, from logging and longshoring to restaurant work and the needle trades, the contributors consider such issues as job skill, mass production, and the transformation of resource industries. They raise questions about how particular jobs are structured and changed over time, the role of workers' resistance and trade unions in shaping the lives of workers, and the impact of technology. Together these essays clarify a fundamental characteristic shared by all labour processes: they are shaped and conditioned by the social, economic, and political struggles of labour and capital both inside and outside the workplace. They argue that technological change, as well as all the transformations in the workplace, must become a social process that we all control. --Publisher's description. Contents: On the job in Canada / Craig Heron and Robert Storey (pages 3-46) -- Dimensions of paternalism: Discipline and culture in Canadian railway operations in the 1850s / Paul Craven and Tom Traves (pages 47-74) -- Work control, the labour process, and nineteen-century Canadian printers / Gregory S. Kealey (pages 75-101) -- Contested terrain: workers' control in the Cape Breton coal mines in the 1920s / David Frank (pages 102-123) -- Keeping house in God's country: Canadian women at work in the home  / Veronica Strong-Boag (pages 124-151) -- Skill and gender in the Canadian clothing industry, 1890-1940 / Mercedes Steedman (pages 152-176) -- Mechanization, feminization, and managerial control in the early twentieth-century Canadian office / Graham S. Lowe (pages 177-209) -- Work and struggle in the Canadian steel industry, 1900-1950 / Craig Heron and Robert Storey (pages 210-244) -- Logging pulpwood in Northern Ontario / Ian Radforth (pages 245-280) -- On the waterfront: longshoring in Canada / John Bellamy Foster (pages 281-308) -- Life in a fast-food factory / Ester Reiter (pages 309-326) -- Autoworkers on the firing line / Don Wells (pages 327-352).