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The article reviews the book, "Too Great a Burden to Bear: The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas," by Christopher B. Bean.

Les syndicats internationaux prennent de l'expansion dans l'industrie de la construction au Québec, entre 1887 et 1930, et en viennent à dominer le paysage syndical. Ces années sont aussi celles où les syndicats parviennent parfois à faire passer les relations de travail de rapport brut avec les employeurs à la négociation et à la signature de contrats collectifs de travail.</p><p>Comme dans le reste de l'Amérique du Nord, les syndicats internationaux de la construction apportent un modèle de relations de travail qui comporte des différences par rapport à celui qui domine dans l'industrie manufacturière. Comme les syndicats dans ces industries, ceux de la construction désirent parvenir à un contrôle partagé de leur milieu de travail en imposant ou en négociant des contrats précisant l'échelle des salaires, les heures de travail, le rôle des agents syndicaux et l'arbitrage des conflits. Mais ils attachent une importance primordiale à l'obtention de l'atelier syndical fermé et à la mise sur pied de bureaux de placement. Il faut dire que la fluidité des lieux de travail et l'instabilité des emplois font en sorte que les ouvriers de la construction, plus que les autres travailleurs, vivent dans l'insécurité. La stratégie utilisée par les syndicats pour pallier à cette insécurité et améliorer les conditions de travail consiste à regrouper la grande majorité des ouvriers d'un métier dans une ville donnée et à obtenir l'atelier syndical fermé sur les chantiers. Ils y greffent les bureaux de placement pour leurs membres, ce qui rend l'appartenance syndicale attrayante, car elle devient source de travail pour les syndiqués. Elle représente aussi une forme de gestion paritaire de la demande de main-d'oeuvre et pour les syndicats, un certain contrôle de l'offre de travail. Pendant la période étudiée, la syndicalisation des ouvriers de la construction leur vaut des avantages significatifs en termes de salaires, d'heures de travail et de règles régissant l'organisation du travail. À Montréal, les briqueteurs et charpentiers-menuisiers doublent leur salaire réel de 1901 à 1930 et voient leur semaine de travail réduite de 60 à 44 heures pour certains d'entre eux.

This article reviews the book, "If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement," by Fran Quigley.

This article uses a case study of a highly publicized 1970 controversy over Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ flight attendant uniforms—specifically, a switch from mini to midi skirt—as a case study in business-labor relations concerning the regulation of women workers’ bodily appearance. Using company and union records and employing a historical, materialist, and feminist analysis, we trace how notions of aesthetic and emotional labor changed over time in relation to the political economy, gender ideologies, and the agency of workers themselves. The flight attendants’ reluctance to challenge the airline’s sexist advertising indicated how both accommodation and resistance were intertwined in complex ways in the workplace. Their acceptance of more “thigh in the sky” had much to do with a highly regulated and disciplined workplace, an entrenched division of labor on the airplane, and gendered notions of beauty and glamour in the industry, including women’s strategic use of beauty on the job to their own advantage.

This article reviews the book, "Kill it to save it – An Autopsy of Capitalism’s Triumph over Democracy," by Corey Dolgon.

This article uses campaign finance data to trace the changing landscape of party-union relations in Ontario. In an analysis of six provincial elections that took place between 1995 and 2014, the authors demonstrate that significant segments of the province's labour movement have abandoned exclusive electoral alliances with the New Democratic Party in favour of multi-partisan strategic voting campaigns designed to block the election of Progressive Conservative candidates.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Canadian unions have scored a number of important Supreme Court victories, securing constitutional rights to picket, bargain collectively, and strike. Unions in Court documents the evolution of the Canadian labour movement’s engagement with the Charter, demonstrating how and why labour’s long-standing distrust of the legal system has given way to a controversial, Charter-based legal strategy. This book’s in-depth examination of constitutional labour rights will have critical implications for labour movements as well as activists in other fields. --Publisher's description.

This article reviews the book, "Migration, Precarity and Global Governance – Challenges and Opportunities for Labour," edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Ronaldo Munck, Branka Likic-Brboric and Anders Neergaard.

This thesis is an attempt to provide a critical history of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) during the Popular Front era, roughly November 1935 to September 1939. This study contains a detailed examination of the various stages of the Popular Front in Canada (the united front, the height of the Popular Front, and the Democratic front), with special attention paid to the CPC’s activities in: the youth movement, the labour movement, the unemployed movement, the peace movement, and the anti-fascist movement. From this I conclude that the implementation of the Popular Front, the transformation of the CPC from a revolutionary party to a bourgeois party, was not a smooth process, but instead was punctuated and resisted by elements within the CPC in what can be considered a process of class struggle internal to the CPC itself.

The Hunters' Lodge was a secretive, grassroots American social movement that arose during the Patriot War in support of the Canadian Rebellions of 1837–38. However, despite the large number of participants, we know little about those who took part. This article decentres the military narratives that dominate the existing historiography by providing a collective cultural biography (or prosopography) of the Lodge's leadership elected in September 1838 at a Patriot Congress in Cleveland. An examination of the life trajectories of these men indicates their shared prewar participation in three related social movements: freethought, free banking, and Freemasonry. A closer cultural examination of the development and intersection of these movements reveals common ties within the Hunters' Lodge to Owenite utopian socialism as it moved from its communitarian phase to its involvement with an emerging American labour movement. These ties would place the Patriot War participants at the far left of the Democratic Party and in opposition to the concentration of land, wealth, and political power in the developing evangelical-antimasonic-Whig alliance in the aftermath of the financial panic of 1837.

Seafaring remains one of the most adventurous yet dangerous forms of work. Compared to shore-based industrial workers, seafarers suffer a risk of fatality that is up to 11 times higher. Workplace fatality is proved to be harmful to the social, financial and health conditions of surviving families. Although there has been an increase in attention given to the improvement of seafarers’ health and working conditions at sea, the effects of death at sea on surviving families has remained neglected by both researchers and policymakers.Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with eight surviving family members in 2013 and 2014, this study investigates seafarers’ surviving families’ experiences of raising death compensation claims in China, which has the world’s largest population of seafarers. The work-related fatalities occurred between 2005 and 2013. At the time of the study, 2.4 years had elapsed on average since the deaths took place. All research participants reported considerable difficulties in communicating with crewing agencies and contacting ship owners when making compensation claims.This study shows that surviving families are in a vulnerable position when in conflict with companies. It also reveals that weak state prevention forces surviving families to defend their rights through protests. The absence of regulation over organizations involved in foreign-related employment relationships exacerbates the economic loss and mental harm suffered by surviving families following the occurrence of workplace fatalities. Furthermore, current legal and administrative procedures are unable to restore justice and provide therapeutic help for surviving families. Consequently, surviving families have suffered considerable financial loss and additional psychological harm in claim processes.

Some years ago, both Ontario and British Columbia amended their employment standards legislation to require employees in unionized workplaces to adjudicate their employment standards claims through their collective agree- ments. Unions at the time objected to the downloading of costs of public rights enforcement onto grievance arbitration - rightly, in the author's view, because grievance arbitration is designed to resolve disputes arising from private law generated by collective bargaining, not to enforce individual rights conferred by public law. By placing employment standards claims within the exclusive juris- diction of arbitrators, the amendments made those statutory rights part of the "bundle" that is subject to the compromises and tradeoffs inherent in collective agreement dispute resolution. The author acknowledges that there are compel- ling reasons to consolidate the adjudication of workplace disputes, including the potential for duplicative litigation, and the fact that private and public rights are closely intertwined in the modern workplace. What is needed, she suggests, is a custom-designed public tribunal, along the lines of a "labour court," with plenary jurisdiction to enforce both public and private rights, operating on prin- ciples that recognize society's interest in access to justice and equality before the law. She calls for further research to determine the impact of blending public and private rights enforcement systems on collective bargaining as an institution and on the welfare of unionized employees.

Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around refusing the dispossession of Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that the resistance's goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. --Publisher's description.

In Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan (SFL v. Saskatchewan, 2015), the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that freedom of association in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms includes a collective ability for workers to strike. This decision was the latest in a series of cases in which the Supreme Court ruled that workers’ abilities to collectively bargain and strike are essential components of the constitutional protection of freedom of association. Using these decisions as a starting point, this paper reviews the uneven way that the court has elevated the associational freedoms of workers. The paper argues that the court’s balancing act between the collective freedoms of workers and the individual rights of employers conceals the material imbalance that has historically shaped capitalist social relations both inside and outside of the state. The paper argues further that these decisions have opened an important legal space for new mobilization strategies for working-class activists.

Announces the co-editorship of Charles Smith and Joan Sangster for this volume, and gratefully acknowledges the work of former editors as well as funding from OPSEU. The journal is a joint partnership of the Canadian Committee on Labour History and the Canadian Association of Work Studies. Seeks submissions that reflect new directions in the study of the workplace and labour, including analyses of labour and the state, feminist political economy, strikes and workplace conflict, union renewal, new models of worker organizing, environmental justice, Indigenous struggles inside and outside the workplace, global workers’ movements, anti-racism campaigns, lgbtq2s struggles. Also welcomes contributions on the social world of work, e.g., popular and working-class cultures, the gendered and racialized experiences of workers, the intersections between colonialism and labour, and the many permutations of labour in the past and present – informal, paid, unpaid, coerced, voluntary.

This article reviews the book, "Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers," edited by Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger.

The article reviews the book, "The Future of Work: Super-Exploitation and Social Precariousness in the 21st Century," by Adrián Sotelo Valencia.

This article reviews the book, "Worth Fighting For: Canada's Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror," edited by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney.

The article reviews the book, "Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex," by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

Paid work associated with digital platform businesses (in taxi, delivery, maintenance and other functions) embodies features which complicate the application of traditional labour regulations and employment standards. This article reviews the extent of this type of work in Australia, and its main characteristics. It then considers the applicability of existing employment regulations to these ‘gig’ jobs, citing both Australian and international legislation and case law. There is considerable uncertainty regarding the scope of traditional regulations, minimum standards and remedies in the realm of irregular digitally mediated work. Regulators and policymakers should consider how to strengthen and expand the regulatory framework governing gig work. The article notes five major options in this regard: enforcement of existing laws; clarifying or expanding definitions of ‘employment’; creating a new category of ‘independent worker’; creating rights for ‘workers’, not employees; and reconsidering the concept of an ‘employer’. We review the pros and cons of these approaches and urge regulators to be creative and ambitious in better protecting the minimum standards and conditions of workers in these situations.