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Depuis les années 1990, le Canada reçoit un nombre croissant de travailleurs migrants temporaires, parmi lesquels des travailleurs agricoles. Au Québec, ces derniers sont surtout recrutés à travers deux programmes : le Programme des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers (principalement mexicains) et le Programme des travailleurs peu qualifiés (surtout guatémaltèques jusqu’en 2010). Ces deux programmes, qui imposent aux travailleurs un lien fixe avec leur employeur, sont gérés et mis en oeuvre par la Fondation des entreprises en recrutement de main-d’oeuvre étrangère (FERME). Cet article vise à analyser la conformité des conditions de travail des travailleurs agricoles migrants, telles que supervisées par FERME et garanties par les employeurs québécois, avec l’article 46 de la Charte québécoise, qui garantit le droit à des conditions de travail justes et raisonnables. Cette analyse met en lumière une forte dépendance des travailleurs envers leur employeur aux niveaux légal, financier et psychologique. Cette dépendance est à l’origine d’abus de la part de certains employeurs, desquels découlent des violations de l’article 46 de la Charte québécoise. L’interprétation de cet article à la lumière du droit international des droits de la personne vient enrichir le contexte interprétatif de cette disposition et conférer une importance plus grande à ce droit économique et social. Alors que le lien fixe avec l’employeur a été établi afin de retenir la main-d’oeuvre dans le secteur agricole, il devient un vecteur de vulnérabilisation accrue de ces travailleurs. Dans ce contexte, l’article se veut un jalon dans la prise de conscience de la non conformité du traitement de certains travailleurs agricoles migrants aux instruments des droits de la personne, en particulier, mais pas uniquement, au Québec.

The article reviews the book, "Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour," edited by Gerald Hunt and David Rayside.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Spring 2010 issue.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Fall 2010 issue.

This online, open access, academic journal serves as a forum to capture the plentiful and diverse scholarly work emerging on labour activities worldwide, with the aim of understanding, recording, and promoting the transition of the labour movement to a new form of global unionism, and highlighting the ways labour activities are increasingly shaped by global forces. Global Labour serves the labour studies community by soliciting academic work on a wide variety of workers and worker related issues. These range from single country to comparative to international studies of workers and their organizations in the areas of the global North and South. We are especially interested in receiving submissions from regions of the world that are often neglected in labour studies. A key area of focus is the informal sector of labour, and the accompanying shift of focus away from the traditional ‘workplace’ as well as ‘traditional workers’ as the central locus of action. Other key areas of inquiry are migration; peasant agriculture and the transition to mass agriculture; and the impact of new multilateral institutions on global labour activities. The journal also solicits articles that represent the diversity of labour identities and emergent labour strategies, forms and organization. This includes corporate restructuring, traditional trade union responses, labour service organizations, new social movements, as well as the conventional institutions that workers engage in the workplace such as works councils, sector wide bargaining institutions, institutions that mediate conflict and political parties that have links with labour. The journal seeks to explore the role of globalization in breaking down boundaries between the global/local and the public/private as they relate to labour activities. The journal does not espouse a particular political line in labour studies, but welcomes a wide variety of approaches and analysis. Our aim is to provide a global forum for scholarly work on a comparative sociology of the labour movement. --Website description

The article reviews the book, "Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000," by Giovanni Federico.

The article reviews the book," Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume Two: 1968-2000," by John English.

The article reviews the book, "Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930" by Nara B. Milanich.

Against the background of the global demographic shift towards an aging workforce and its impacts on the labour market and the economy in industrialized societies, this dissertation pinpoints six salient challenges for future litigation and policy-making in the area of labour and employment discrimination law. These include the global tendency towards abolishing mandatory retirement and increasing the eligibility age for pension benefits; legislative age-based distinctions; cost as a justification for age discrimination; performance appraisals of senior workers; and the duty to accommodate senior workers. At the core of each challenge lies a normative question regarding our conception of senior workers’ right to age equality, its importance and relative weight compared with other rights and interests. The aim of this dissertation is therefore to critically review the current understanding of this right and its moral and economic underpinning. Most notably, the dissertation contends that the prevailing conception of equality assessment (the Complete Lives Approach to equality), according to which equality should be assessed based on a comparison of the total share of resources obtained by individuals over a lifetime, has substantial implications for age discrimination discourse. As it uncovers the numerous difficulties with the complete lives approach, the dissertation develops an alternative: the Dignified Lives Approach to equality, according to which an individual should be treated with equal concern and respect, at any particular time and regardless of any comparison. The dissertation then articulates five essential principles founded in Dworkin’s notion of equal concern and respect: the principle of individual assessment, the principle of equal influence, the principle of sufficiency, the principle of social inclusion, and the principle of autonomy. When one of these principles is not respected at any particular time, a wrong is done, and the right to equality is violated. Next, the dissertation elucidates when and why unequal treatment of senior workers based on age does not respect each of these five principles and therefore constitutes unjust age discrimination. It demonstrates that senior workers’ right to age equality is a fundamental human right. Finally, it examines the above-mentioned challenges through the lens of the new Dignified Lives approach.

The article reviews the book, "Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment," edited by Leah F. Vosko, Martha MacDonald and Iain Campbell.

Globalization, Flexibilization and Working Conditions in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Sangheon Lee and Francois Eyraud, is reviewed.

No Small Change: Pension Funds and Corporate Engagement, by Tessa Hebb, is reviewed.

The Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society, edited by Herbert Grubel, is reviewed.

Drawing on data collected as part of a larger study of the experience of restructuring in the nonprofit (voluntary) social services in Canada and Australia, this article explores the responses to four overlapping interview questions regarding what drew nonprofit social service workers to the sector, what were the positive and negative aspects of working in the sector, and, if given the power, what is the one thing they would change. Responses to these questions highlight the way social service workers wish they could work, factors that impede this work, decrease worker autonomy and increase management control over their labour process. These new findings will be compared to findings from an earlier study of restructuring in the public and nonprofit Canadian social services, highlighting the way that changes in the labour process suppress or facilitate the empowerment of workers, including their capacity to dream of a better future.

Drawing on comparative, qualitative data, this article explores unionization in the Canadian and Australian nonprofit social services. The article shows that the growth of unionization in this sector in Canada had little to do with deliberate strategies for union renewal. Instead, union growth and activism rose organically from the values orientation of the predominantly female workforce and the curtailment of workplace opportunities for social justice struggles. The Australian example reflects the conflux of legal contexts, political parties, managerial approaches, and the servicing model of unionism. The article concludes with a discussion of possibilities for those seeking to revitalize the union movement.

During the era of neoliberalism, the nonprofit services sector has simultaneously been a site of (a) promarket restructuring and collective and individual resistance and (b) alternative forms of service delivery. Drawing on data collected as part of an ethnographic study in the Canadian nonprofit social services sector, this article explores the impacts of some of restructuring on professional, quasi-professional, and managerial employees in eight unionized, nonprofit social services. The data show that the adoption of social unionism has permitted some nonprofit social service workers to initiate new processes through which to have a voice in far-reaching social issues, sometimes in coalition with management and/or clients. The findings of this study point to the irrepressibility of the participatory spirit and its capacity to seek new forms and practices despite the stretched and restructured conditions of today’s nonprofit social services sector.