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The article reviews the book, "L’activité des clients : un travail ?," edited by Sophie Bernard, Marie-Anne Dujarier and Guillaume Salariale.

The article reviews the book, "Fragiles compétences," edited by Sophie Bretesché and Cathy Krohmer.

The article reviews the book, "Good Lands: A Meditation and History on the Great Plains," by Frances W. Kaye.

The article reviews the book, "Gouverner les fins de carrière à distance. Outplacement et vieillissement actif en emploi," by Thibauld Moulaert.

The article reviews the book, "Gouverner les fins de carrière à distance. Outplacement et vieillissement actif en emploi," by Thibauld Moulaert.

From its inception in 1966, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) has grown to employ approximately 20,000 workers annually, the majority from Mexico. The program has been hailed as a model that alleviates human rights concerns because, under contract, SAWP workers travel legally, receive health benefits, contribute to pensions, are represented by Canadian consular officials, and rate the program favorably. Tomorrow We?re All Going to the Harvest takes us behind the ideology and examines the daily lives of SAWP workers from Tlaxcala, Mexico (one of the leading sending states), observing the great personal and family price paid in order to experience a temporary rise in a standard of living. The book also observes the disparities of a gutted Mexican countryside versus the flourishing agriculture in Canada, where farm labor demand remains high. Drawn from extensive surveys and nearly two hundred interviews, ethnographic work in Ontario (destination of over 77 percent of migrants in the author?s sample), and quantitative data, this is much more than a case study; it situates the Tlaxcala-Canada exchange within the broader issues of migration, economics, and cultural currents. Bringing to light the historical genesis of ?complementary? labor markets and the contradictory positioning of Mexican government representatives, Leigh Binford also explores the language barriers and nonexistent worker networks in Canada, as well as the physical realities of the work itself, making this book a complete portrait of a provocative segment of migrant labor. --Publisher's description

Despite the abolition of mandatory retirement in most Canadian jurisdic- tions, statutory provisions generally still permit the denial of employment-re- lated benefits to workers aged 65 or over, or allow such benefits to be provided at a lower level than for workers under age 65. In ONA v. Chatham-Kent, an Ontario arbitrator upheld the constitutionality of provisions in that province's Human Rights Code and Employment Standards Act excluding workers over 65 from protection against age discrimination in the area of employment benefits, holding that while the impugned provisions infringed the equality rights set out in section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they were nonetheless justified under section 1 as a reasonable limit on those rights. Writing from the perspective of advocates for unions and employees, the authors review the development of the case law on mandatory retirement, drawing particular atten- tion to the "long shadow" cast by the Supreme Court of Canada's 1990 decision in McKinney. They go on to identify what they see as the flaws in the legal rea- soning of the award in Chatham-Kent, especially the arbitrator's acceptance of the notion (inherited in large part from the McKinney decision) that age is "dif- ferent" from other types of prohibited discrimination and his failure to closely scrutinize the legislature's policy choices with respect to employment benefits for older workers. Lastly, the authors extrapolate a number of lessons that may assist litigators in future challenges to statutory provisions that discriminate on the basis of age, notably the importance of framing section 15 claims by reference to intersecting grounds of discrimination (such as age and gender or disability) and of advocating for a lower level of deference to the legislature.

Il est bien connu que les immigrants rencontrent plusieurs difficultés d’intégration dans le marché du travail canadien. Notamment, ils gagnent des salaires inférieurs aux natifs et ils sont plus susceptibles que ces derniers d’occuper des emplois précaires ou pour lesquels ils sont surqualifiés. Dans cette recherche, nous avons traité de ces trois problèmes sous l’angle de la qualité d’emploi. À partir des données des recensements de la population de 1991 à 2006, nous avons comparé l’évolution de la qualité d’emploi des immigrants et des natifs au Canada, mais aussi au Québec, en Ontario et en Colombie-Britannique. Ces comparaisons ont mis en évidence la hausse du retard de qualité d’emploi des immigrants par rapport aux natifs dans tous les lieux analysés, mais plus particulièrement au Québec. Le désavantage des immigrants persiste même lorsqu’on tient compte du capital humain, des caractéristiques démographiques et du taux de chômage à l’entrée dans le marché du travail. La scolarité, l’expérience professionnelle globale et les connaissances linguistiques améliorent la qualité d’emploi des immigrants et des natifs. Toutefois, lorsqu’on fait la distinction entre l’expérience de travail canadienne et l’expérience de travail étrangère, on s’aperçoit que ce dernier type d’expérience réduit la qualité d’emploi des immigrants. Dans ces circonstances, nous trouvons incohérent que le Canada et le Québec continuent à insister sur ce critère dans leur grille de sélection des travailleurs qualifiés. Pour valoriser les candidats les plus jeunes ayant peu d’expérience de travail dans leur pays d’origine, nous suggérons d’accroître l’importance accordée à l’âge dans ces grilles au détriment de l’expérience. Les jeunes, les étudiants étrangers et les travailleurs temporaires qui possèdent déjà une expérience de travail au Canada nous apparaissent comme des candidats à l’immigration par excellence. Par contre, les résultats obtenus à l’aide de la méthode de décomposition de Blinder-Oaxaca ont montré que l’écart de qualité d’emploi entre les immigrants et les natifs découle d’un traitement défavorable envers les immigrants dans le marché du travail. Cela signifie que les immigrants sont pénalisés au chapitre de la qualité d’emploi à la base, et ce, peu importe leurs caractéristiques. Dans ce contexte, la portée de tout ajustement aux grilles de sélection risque d’être limitée. Nous proposons donc d’agir également en aval du problème à l’aide des politiques d’aide à l’intégration des immigrants. Pour ce faire, une meilleure concertation entre les acteurs du marché du travail est nécessaire. Les ordres professionnels, le gouvernement, les employeurs et les immigrants eux-mêmes doivent s’engager afin d’établir des parcours accélérés pour la reconnaissance des compétences des nouveaux arrivants. Nos résultats indiquent aussi que le traitement défavorable à l’égard des immigrants dans le marché du travail est plus prononcé au Québec qu’en Ontario et en Colombie-Britannique. Il se peut que la société québécoise soit plus réfractaire à l’immigration vu son caractère francophone et minoritaire dans le reste de l’Amérique du Nord. Pourtant, le désir de protéger la langue française motive le Québec à s’impliquer activement en matière d’immigration depuis longtemps et la grille de sélection québécoise insiste déjà sur ce critère. D’ailleurs, près des deux tiers des nouveaux arrivants au Québec connaissent le français en 2011. It is well documented that immigrants face many difficulties in the Canadian labour market. Particularly, compared to native-born, they earn lower wages, occupy more precarious jobs and are often overqualified. In this research, we discuss these three issues in terms of job quality. Using the data from the 1991 to 2006 Canadian population censuses, we compare the trends in job quality of immigrants and native-born in Canada, Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. These comparisons highlight the rising gap in job quality between immigrants and native-born in the four geographical areas, but especially in Quebec. This gap persists even after controlling human capital, demographic variables and unemployment rate at entry in the labour market. Overall, we found that education, work experience and language skills improve the job quality of immigrants and their native-born counterparts. However, when we separate Canadian and foreign work experience, we find that the latter type of experience reduces job quality of immigrants. In these circumstances, it is counterproductive that Canada and Quebec continue to insist on this criterion in the point systems. We also suggest increasing the importance of age in the point systems in order to encourage the admission of younger candidates with little or no foreign experience. Youth, foreign students and temporary workers who already have work experience in Canada appear to be ideal candidates for immigration. Nevertheless, using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method, we show that the job quality gap between immigrants and natives is mainly due to unfavourable treatment of immigrants in the labour market. This means that immigrants are penalized in terms of job quality regardless of their characteristics. In this context, the selection of the best candidates for immigration may produce a limited effect. We therefore suggest acting downstream with public policy to support employment integration of immigrants. To do so, a better coordination between all actors in the labour market is required. Professional orders, government, employers and immigrants must establish accelerated pathways of skills recognition for newcomers. In addition, our results indicate that the treatment of immigrants in the labour market is more problematic in Quebec compared to Ontario and British Columbia. It is likely that Quebec society is less open to immigration given its francophone character and its minority status in North America. Since the beginning, the desire to protect the French language motivates Quebec to be actively involved in immigration and the Quebec point system already emphasizes this criterion. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of newcomers to Quebec speak French in 2011.

The article reviews the book, "Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995," by Cheryl Higashida.

Working-class poliltical activity at the municipal level in Regina began in 1914 on the initiative of members of the Regina Trades and Labour Council. Early on trade unionists reached out to the city's middle class, and together they founded a succession of Labour political parties in the 1920s. After 1930 members of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees also became involved. Success came in 1935, when the Civic Labour League, an informal alliance of social democrats and communists, won the mayoralty and a majority of the aldermanic seats on city council. Labour maintained its hold over City Hall until the end of the decade, but it did not accomplish much. It could not convince the province's Liberal government to take over full responsibility for the cost of relief or enact a special city charter that would give Regina wider powers (to construct social housing for example) and new sources of revenue. Then in 1939 Labour's political fortunes shifted dramatically. Accusations of communist influence in the selection of the Labour slate played into the hands of the city's business community, Regina's daily newspapers, and the Civic Voters' Association, which was founded on the eve of the civic election, and Labour suffered a crushing defeat.

Examines the "politicization of caring" and the contest for the public trust between nurses and the state since 1960. Concludes that nurse militancy demonstrates how the battle against austerity can be fought.

Drawing on nurses strikes in many countries [including Canada], this article situates nurse militancy within the context of health care restructuring and neo-liberalism, the gendered construction of nursing work, the feminization of union density and of strikes, and gendered militancy. It explores the emergence of a militant discourse among nurses focussed on the public interest, what I call the politicisation of caring, which has supported a new approach to the ethics of striking. --Author's introduction

We investigate differences in labour market transition rates between high and low minimum wage regimes using Canadian data spanning 1979–2008. We find that higher minimum wages result in lower hiring rates but also lower job separation rates. Importantly, the reduced separation rates are due mainly to reductions in layoffs, occur in the first six months of a job and are present for unskilled workers of all ages. Thus, jobs in higher minimum wage regimes are more stable but harder to get. For older workers, these effects are almost exactly offsetting, resulting in little impact on the employment rate.

The article reviews and comments on "Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America" by Carolyn M. Goldstein, "Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America" by Rebecca Jo Plant, and "Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States" by Kristin Celello.

The article reviews the book, "Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety," by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift.

Canadian data on strike frequency, duration, and volume imply that the strike is withering away. Some research also suggests that strike duration is countercyclical. However, the early twenty‐first century was anomalous from the viewpoint of these expectations. After 2001, mean strike duration increased and was not countercyclical. This paper explains the anomaly by arguing that employers are seeking to scale back the wage gains of previous decades in the face of mounting public debt and the whip of an increasingly unfettered market. These conditions apparently motivate some workers to endure protracted work stoppages, irrespective of the phase of the business cycle, in an effort to protect their rights.

We offer an explanation for the phenomenon of declining democratic engagement by assuming that what happens at work is the primary driver of what occurs outside of the workplace. If workers are exposed to the formalities of collective bargaining and union representation, they also perhaps increase their attachment to, and willingness to participate in, structures of democratic governance outside of the workplace as well. In order for this argument to hold, one first needs to test whether individual union members are more prone to vote and participate in civil society than non-members: other research refers to this as the union voting premium. We find that the voice effect of unionism on democratic participation is significant and is larger for groups that are significantly under-represented when it comes to voting, namely those with fewer years of education, immigrants, and younger workers. We also discuss the legal implications of these findings.

The article reviews the book, "Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal," by Bettina Bradbury.

In the mid-1970s, three employee groups at Carleton University changed campus labour relations dramatically: the professors and librarians who belonged to the Carleton University Academic Staff formed the first Ontario faculty union in June 1975; nine months later the Ontario Labour Relations Board certified the Carleton University Support Staff Association as the bargaining agent for the administrative and technical staff. The history of faculty labour action at Carleton has been told but not that of either academic librarians or support staff so this case of unionism provides a unique opportunity to compare their experiences. Working primarily with oral histories, I argue that status was critical to mobilizing labour action at Carleton. These employees—many of whom were women—wanted a fair workplace but deliberately chose an independent association over a trade union because such “solidarity by association” was compatible with their deeply held beliefs about their work and place on campus.