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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.

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.

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.

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).

For much of the 20th century, mining was a highly unionized sector, including in the Canadian North. From the 1960s to the 1990s, there was near-complete union coverage in mines in the northern territories, significantly increasing the share of wealth and political power claimed by many northern mining workers. Today, only two of ten producing mines are unionized: the Ekati diamond mine in the Northwest Territories (Public Service Alliance of Canada [ psac]) and the Mary River mine in Nunavut (International Union of Operating Engineers [ iuoe]). This article explores the reasons for this decline and contemporary barriers to organizing, drawing on archival research, document analysis, and interviews with Indigenous organizations, union organizers, servicing staff, and officials. Changes in labour practices – such as the use of long-distance commuting, subcontracting, impact and benefit agreements ( ibas), and the shift to smaller, more highly skilled workforces – have created a more challenging organizing environment. These external challenges are compounded by internal union issues, including a failure to prioritize northern organizing and to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities and governments. We draw on these results to suggest strategies for overcoming these barriers. These included targeting workers in the remediation phase mines and catering and housekeeping workers to gain a foothold in the sector, locating choke points in the fly-in/fly-out production process, investing in offices and permanent organizing staff in northern cities, and working to decolonize unions through education and meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities.

This research explores the intersection of precarious legal status and precarious employment of migrants who came to Canada with a temporary status, whether for work, study, or protection purposes. Drawing on data collected from 148 interviews with precarious-status migrants, the article investigates how transitions in status impact employment trajectories. It builds upon a mixed-method analysis, identifying how employment precarity intensifies with increased status insecurity, which results in progressive deskilling and the degradation of working conditions over time. By foregrounding deskilling as a cumulative and temporal process, this study demonstrates how Canada’s temporary migration regime systematically deteriorates migrant workers’ skills and opportunities, extending precarity beyond the immediate moment of employment. This analysis contributes to an understanding of the lived experiences of migrant workers, highlighting the long-term effects of migration policies and regulations on employment and working conditions.

This article reviews the book, "Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future," by Tom Fraser.

This article analyzes a neoliberal redefinition of citizenship as market participation through the lens of prison labour in Canadian federal penitentiaries. We focus on corcan, a special operating agency of Correctional Service Canada, which employs approximately 4,000 prisoners in various industries. Despite performing tasks like those of free workers, incarcerated individuals are not recognized as employees under Canadian law and are excluded from employment protections. corcan emphasizes employability as a key criterion for evaluating an offender’s rehabilitation. In effect, many prisoners must demonstrate evidence of compliance with a specific model of labour-market participation in order to be paroled, and to be restored to the liberties and rights of citizenship. We highlight the ideological and practical implications of this transformation, suggesting that prison labour serves as both a means of maintaining prison discipline and a window into the logic of a market-driven society. We conclude by exploring the broader significance of these changes for understanding citizenship and labour relations.

This article reviews the book, "Law at Work: The Coercion and Co-option of the Working Class," by Harry Glasbeek.

Strategies designed to revive the declining union movement require new resources and new members for success. For this, many unions often used closed or agency shops. We compare these with the now dominant open shop as well as the union default. These options are assessed by asking how effective would each be at securing both members and resources for unions; and how much would each option protect and/or advance worker's autonomy in terms of various individual freedoms? Though closed and agency shops have many merits, especially in relation to the open shop, we conclude that the union default is superior to both.

This article takes up the challenge of examining whether, and to what extent, existing labour laws in Canada are equipped to respond to new technological changes in the workplace. While the notion that technology changes labour is not new, both the types of technology associated with this new wave of change, and their rapid deployment, make this an urgently needed inquiry, given their impacts on material working conditions. Further, given that core statutory provisions regulating labour relations in Canada have remained relatively unchanged over the past 50 years, there is reason to speculate about their continued relevance, or suitability to respond to new technology in the workplace. --From Introduction

This article reviews the book, "Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics," by Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage.

This article analyzes Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians organizing in Canada through three local case studies in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto, showing how struggles over unpaid caring labour generated feminist alliances across race, class, sexuality, and immigration status. Using interviews with movement leaders and rank-and-file activists alongside private and public archival collections, it traces both solidarities and conflicts between these Marxist feminist groups, low-income mothers, immigrant women’s organizations, Indigenous women, and mainstream feminist bodies such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The authors argue that Canadian Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians activism was locally vibrant, transnationally connected, and has left a durable legacy in contemporary organizing around welfare rights, immigrant domestic workers, queer politics, and the recognition of women’s unpaid and underpaid care work.