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Made between 1918 and 1929, these Canadian documentary short films are a useful resource for historical research and teaching. They also complement other primary sources. Widely viewed and popular with the public at the time, they are useful for understanding how perceptions and perspectives were influenced and constructed. This specific Library and Archives Canada film collection is significant, exceeding 1,000 films. Their subjects are diverse and will be of interest to labour and social historians; better farming techniques, celebrations of industrial technology, scenic vacation spots for the leisure class and appropriate workplace behavior, are just some subjects addressed by the films in the collection. --Website description

Discusses the early 20th century films on work that were produced under the auspices of the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments. Provides detail on a select number of films, which are a significant source for labour history. Concludes by noting that the films may be viewed on the website, "The Moving Past."

The Centre for Future Work has released new research regarding union coverage and wages across different racialized categories of Canadian workers. The report also contains a review of efforts by Canadian unions to improve their representation of Black and racialized workers, and recommendations for strengthening the union movement’s practices.

Pays homage to the feminist social and cultural historian, Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023).

This article analyses the intersections of labour, social reproduction, and refugee politics through an ethnographic case study of Hungarian Romani families living in Canada. Building off of recent anthropological debates on surplus populations, the article frames the life activities of asylum-seekers as a form of labour, paying particular attention to gender and the dynamics of ‘women’s work.’ The main question explored is: what sort of life-sustaining strategies do refugees engage in when they are excluded from both wage labour and citizenship regimes? The key argument put forward is that Hungarian Romani asylum-seeking to Canada should be understood as a social reproduction strategy and a type of gendered work that has emerged in the contemporary conditions of global neoliberal capitalism. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the asylum-seeking activities of Romani families are embedded in gendered divisions of work in which gaining access to refugee status and state social support in Canada is regarded as an extension of domestic labour and familial care work, typically done by the maternal figures of the family. Moreover, the ‘women’s work’ of securing refugee support is recognized by Romani families as a legitimate form of paid work, a kind of ‘bread winning’. Reflecting on these fieldwork findings, I propose an expanded approach to social reproduction theory that is attentive to the unwaged, informal, and life-making work of refugees and surplus populations, ultimately arguing for a breakdown of the dichotomy between the ‘economic migrant’ and the ‘political refugee’ in light of the social totality of capitalism.

The article reviews the book, "Why Canada Needs Postal Banking ," by John Anderson.

The article reviews the book, "Trade Unions and the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg," by Peter Ackers.

Notre recherche recense la mise en place depuis 2008 de quatre types d’incitatifs financiers au Québec et au Canada : l’autorisation du cumul de revenu d’emploi et de rentes de retraite, un crédit d’impôt destiné à l’offre de travail, un mécanisme de bonus-malus sur les rentes de retraite et un crédit d’impôt destiné à la demande de travail. Ces changements représentent une reconfiguration de la logique institutionnelle du système de retraite orientée vers le maintien prolongé des personnes âgées en emploi. Notre travail a pour principale question de recherche d’évaluer les effets de ces incitatifs financiers sur la participation des personnes âgées au marché du travail, sur le type d’emploi occupé et sur l’intensité de celui-ci. À partir des microdonnées maîtres de l’Enquête sur la population active de 2000 à 2023 et en employant la méthode des différences dans les différences, nous avons évalué au sein d’un même modèle l’efficacité de ces quatre types d’incitatifs financiers. Nos résultats montrent que toutes les mesures ont exercé une influence modérée à la hausse sur l’activité des personnes âgées, l’incitatif le plus efficace étant la possibilité de cumuler des revenus d’emploi et des rentes de retraite. Sur le plan du temps de travail, les mesures incitatives ont peu influencé l’intensité du travail et le recours au temps partiel, ce qui s’explique par des effets opposés selon les mesures mises en place. Ces résultats mènent à la conclusion que davantage d’efforts devraient être entrepris pour accommoder les conditions d’emploi des personnes âgées pour influencer plus efficacement celles-ci à demeurer sur le marché du travail.

The article reviews the book, "Le marxisme et l'oppression des femmes. Vers une théorie unitaire," by Lise Vogel.

In 2026, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement will be up for review—and the possibility of political shakeups means that governments should start preparing now. This report assesses the functioning of CUSMA to date and suggests ways to expand on the rights-based and worker-centred novelties in the agreement that improved upon the original NAFTA. Though national elections will transform governments in all three countries between now and the 2026 review, the worker-centred trade policy of the current U.S. administration will likely live on. For political, geoeconomic and national security reasons, a bipartisan consensus has emerged on the need to renew North America’s manufacturing base and better protect workers from subsidized—financially or through weaker labour and environmental standards—foreign competition. This report examines how Canada could prepare, and goals to strive towards, starting today.

Debates over worker subordination are central to discussions of the efficacy of protective labour and employment law whose central mission in a capitalist political economy, after all, is to reduce but not eliminate subordination. When protective labour and employment law seems to be fulfilling its mission discussions of worker subordination seem to ebb, but the topic becomes more urgent as the efficacy of the law declines. Not surprisingly, as labour law’s efficacy has been declining over the past several decades, we are in the midst of a revival of debates over worker subordination, the premise of this special issue. While many seek to revive the classic mission of labour and employment law, ameliorating the worst excesses of subordination, while leaving in place labour’s structural dependency on capital, the goal of this article is to revisit and elaborate a marxist political economy perspective to demonstrate that workers’ structural subordination to capital is deepening and that this limits the possibility of achieving much of the reformist agenda. While there are no easy ways of overcoming that structural subordination, a progressive reform agenda must centre that subordination and think about how labour laws might contribute to a transformative project. --Introduction

Non-profit work plays a vital role in connecting policy and community, as well as providing essential services in Canada. However, evidence suggests that despite being often engaged in equity seeking work, many non-profit organizations remain sites of inequity and marginalization among service provider staff. In this qualitative study, researchers conducted interviews with representatives from 60 organizations across the province of Alberta, Canada. Using intersectionality and thematic analysis, the study identified three key themes across issues related to the feminization of gender-equity seeking work in the third sector. First, economic exploitation, including low pay across the non-profit sector, and pay discrepancies across positions within non-profit work, impact staff in gendered and racialized ways. Second, uneven labour expectations compound exploitation through failures of performative Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), unpaid labour expectations, and gender bias both within and outside of organizational structure. Third, service provider capacities are being restricted through staff mental health challenges and burnout, staff use of the services they provide clients, and challenges with worker retention. Organizations and funders may address these inequities by demanding transparency in promotion policies to ensure women and gender-diverse people, particularly those who are racialized, have fair access to management and leadership positions, as well as by reforming funding structures to encourage more equitable pay.

The article reviews the book, "L’HUMAIN plus qu’une ressource au coeur de la gestion," edited by François Bernard Malo, James D. Thwaites and Yves Hallée.

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading work published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers. -- Publisher's description

In this report, we, the research team, are going to consider the policies that come together to create an exploitative and precarious labour conditions for migrant care workers, who are predominantly financially challenged racialized women. We have conducted a systematic narrative synthesis analysis of the policies that are relevant to migrant care workers. In our consideration of these myriad policies, we will present a narrative that emerges in the coordinated design of these policies. The narrative that has emerged presented a journey to precariousness through a heightened likelihood of human rights violations that is facilitated by a network of policies and practices. We identify policies and practices that obscure care workers and the conditions of their labour, as well as the discriminatory impact of various policies and practices that support devaluing and delegitimizing the identities and labour of care workers. Finally, we consider the ways in which multiple policies and practices come together to create significant authorities with the capacity to surveil, restrict, and punish workers.... Executive summary

Canadian higher education has been critiqued for its inequitable structures and failure to change despite claiming to be inclusive. This paper considers the experiences of 15 academic developers who engage in varied forms of institutional equity work. By focusing on how their work takes place, why they pursue equity work and their relationships with co-workers, I open a critical discussion of how prepared Canadian teaching and learning centres are to support equity work. By examining equity work and how it is supported, I intend to contribute to ongoing dialogues about the urgency of structural change in Canadian academic development workplaces.

Temporary migrant workers on closed work permits are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. To address this precarity, the Government of Canada introduced the Open Work Permit for Vulnerable Workers (OWP-V) in June 2019. This permit allows migrant workers in abusive situations, or at risk of abuse, to leave their employers and find new work in Canada for up to 12 months. Drawing from secondary literature, policy analysis and qualitative interviews with migrant support workers and experts, this research assesses the implementation of the OWP-V policy in the Maritimes by examining its benefits and critiques. This research demonstrates that although some perceive the policy as a step in the right direction, significant barriers remain that hinder the effectiveness of the OWP-V in removing migrants from abusive conditions. Further findings demonstrate that even with systemic and technological improvements, stakeholders remain dissatisfied with the policy as it fails to protect migrant workers from re-entering cycles of abuse and exploitation, serving only as temporary relief. To improve the implementation of this policy, stakeholders provided several suggestions pertaining to accessibility, language options, processing times, and inspections. Overall, this thesis argues that while these changes could help improve the working conditions of temporary migrant workers in Canada, substantial systemic issues remain.

Using collective agreement and strike data from the Canadian Federal and provincial jurisdictions for the years 1978–2019, this study examines the effect that various legislative regimes that govern public‐sector bargaining disputes have on the incidence, duration and cost of conflict. This study seeks to replicate and improve previous estimates related to this topic but also extends the analysis to examine changes to the legal environment in Canada in which labour rights have been increasingly enshrined in constitutional law through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This study finds, in contrast to previous studies, that the legislative regime impacts the way agreements are settled when disputes occur but not the likelihood of a directly negotiated agreement prior to impasse. It also highlights some differences in contract and wage settlements prior to and after the constitutionalization of labour rights in Canada.

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

This article contributes to understanding the relationship between mobilities and labour control. Focusing on the expansion of the Chinese/Asian restaurant industry in the United States during the last two decades and drawing from a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnography, the concept of spatial labour control is employed to explicate the various forms of labour control and the mechanisms that contribute to the autogenous reproduction of the industry's out-of-state work arrangement. Specifically, a spatial lens reveals paternalistic control over workers' food and housing, spatial control over workers' morals and affect, and control over workers' mobilities. Moreover, workers' constant relocation to new work destinations to combat social isolation and feelings of restlessness unintentionally reproduces the circulation of atomized labour for the industry. Such conditions are inconducive to collectively addressing labour discontent.