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This article assesses one of the longest private sector strikes in Canadian history — the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6500 strike at Vale in Sudbury, 2009-2010. It argues that in the context of corporate globalization and the recent financial crisis, Vale took full advantage of its economic power to win major concessions from Local 6500. The USW's community, political, and corporate campaigns were unable to pressure the company or the federal and provincial government effectively and the result was that a powerful international corporation prevailed in its efforts to erode the material well-being of its Canadian workforce. Such a defeat, alongside the recent collective bargaining concessions by auto workers in Canada and the United States, is a major blow to the North American labour movement. Trade unions must therefore develop more successful strategies of resistance and begin the process of reforming and rejuvenating themselves as organizations defending workers. If this is not done the future of North American labour is bleak indeed.

The article reviews the book, "Uniting in Measures of Common Good: The Construction of Liberal Identities in Central Canada," by Darren Ferry.

This paper explores the structures and practices of temporary migrant worker programs (TMWP) as they operate in Canadian agriculture. Acting within highly competitive, globalized markets, agri-food employers rely on the availability of migrant workers to achieve greater flexibility in their labor arrangements, drawing on employment practices beyond those possible with a domestic workforce. Most recently, changes to Canada’s two TMWP schemes have provided employers with greater scope to shape the social composition of their workforce. The paper analyzes these changes while exploring their implications for workplace regimes in agriculture.

Few Canadian data sources allow the examination of disparities by ethnicity, language, or immigrant status in occupational exposures or health outcomes. However, it is possible to document the mechanisms that can create disparities, such as the over-representation of population groups in high-risk jobs. We evaluated, in the Montréal context, the relationship between the social composition of jobs and their associated risk level. We used data from the 2001 Statistics Canada census and from Québec's workers' compensation board for 2000-2002 to characterize job categories defined as major industrial groups crossed with three professional categories (manual, mixed, non-manual). Immigrant, visible, and linguistic minority status variables were used to describe job composition. The frequency rate of compensated health problems and the average duration of compensation determined job risk level. The relationship between the social composition and risk level of jobs was evaluated with Kendall correlations. The proportion of immigrants and minorities was positively and significantly linked to the risk level across job categories. Many relationships were significant for women only. In analyses done within manual jobs, relationships with the frequency rate reversed and were significant, except for the relationship with the proportion of individuals with knowledge of French only, which remained positive. Immigrants, visible, and linguistic minorities in Montréal are more likely to work where there is an increased level of compensated risk. Reversed relationships within manual jobs may be explained by under-reporting and under-compensation in vulnerable populations compared to those with knowledge of the province's majority language.

The article reviews the book, "Public Policy for Women: The State, Income Security and Labour Market Issues," edited by Marjorie Griffin Cohen and Jane Pulkingham.

The Human Side of Outsourcing: Psychological Theory and Management Practice, edited by Stephanie Morgan, is reviewed.

The complex story of labour unrest in Quebec’s shipbuilding industry considerably broadens understanding of Canada’s wartime industrial relations. For while trade union leaders were significant in organizing thousands of shipyard workers, and government and business opposition were givens, workers sometimes struggled in the absence of leadership to achieve their goals and inter-union conflict frequently obstructed their efforts. The spontaneity of worker struggle in Quebec shipyards was less due to union weakness, however, than to conflict between craft versus industrial-based trade unionism. Strikes in Quebec’s shipbuilding plants during 1943 also shed light on the growing failure of the Canadian government’s labour policy known as compulsory conciliation. The contextualization of labour relations in Quebec’s shipyards during that long, angry summer lends support to those historians who argue that workers’ struggle rather than politicians’ acuity had a greater impact on the eventual appearance of pc 1003 than others would allow.

Interrogating the New Economy is a collection of original essays investigating the New Economy and how changes ascribed to it have impacted labour relations, access to work, and, more generally, the social and cultural experiences of work in Canada. Based on years of participatory research, sector-specific studies, and quantitative and qualitative data collection, the work accounts for the ways in which the contemporary workplace has changed but also the extent to which older forms of work organization still remain. The collection begins with an overview of the key social and economic transformations that define the New Economy. It then illustrates these transformations through examples, including essays on wine tourism, the regeneration of mining communities, the place of student workers, and changes in the public service workplace. It also addresses unions and their responses to the restructuring of work, as well as other forms of resistance. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization," by Jeffrey S. Juris.

In nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ontario, dairywomen toiled daily with cows and manure, sour milk and greasy butter, yet without improved apparatus, agricultural education, or male support. On the provincial family farm, milking, cream-separating, and butter-making chores included various time-consuming steps, physical labour, and an array of task-specific objects. This thesis analyses agriculture, and dairying in specific, as it began the transition from traditional to industrial, and consequently from female to male. -- This dissertation touches on particular topics relevant to farmwomen's labour, including: agricultural education and improvement through science; public debate and perception surrounding gendered work; the government's role in promoting industrialization and thus defeminization; the concept of the dairyqueen in technological advertising; and, in particular, real farmwomen. These dairying 'sisters' include the well known, like Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, Laura Rose, and Eliza Jones, and the unknown, such as Mary Newsam and the Hallen sisters, while focusing on Lamira Billings and her daughters Sabra and Sally. -- This qualitative study reveals that by employing common dairy tools as a dominant, primary source, there are alternative perspectives from which to consider rural women's experiences. Analysis of material culture objects, like milking stools and pails, butter bowls and scotch hands, shallow separating pans and tin creamer cans, also allows for exploration of the tensions between projected male ideals and tangible female work - a question central to understanding gender and labour within a social history context. In addition to technologies, sources like The Farmer's Advocate, the photographs of Reuben Sallows, and early dairy advertisements, add to our understanding of the concerns surrounding dairywomen's labour during the period discussed. -- Historians have suggested that dairy work was removed from the female sphere before the turn of the twentieth century in Ontario. Male agriculture authorities, scientific experts, and government officials, indeed initiated a conscious devaluation of farmwomen's work, oriented toward the defeminization of dairying. Rather than being removed from dairy work, however, Ontario's farmwomen continued separating cream and making butter between 1813 and 1914, habitually and simply equipped with their two hands, their mother's knowledge, and their grandmother's tools.

One manifestation of the 'new managerialism' in the Canadian health care system is the increase in workplace bullying. An occupational group especially susceptible to workplace bullying is Continuing Care Assistants (CCAs) who provide personal care to long-term care home residents and individuals in their own homes in Saskatchewan. These foot soldiers of end-of-life care have no professional society or regulatory agency to advocate for their occupational status and the social value of the work they perform. The paper argues that workplace bullying cannot be understood unless it is related to the social structure from which it derives. One underlying cause of bullying among CCAs is the reorganization of their work under current health care reforms. Potential solutions to workplace bullying must start with transformative processes rooted in an understanding of these larger contextual forces.

Immigration and Integration in Canada in the Twenty-first Century, edited by John Biles, Meyer Burstein and James Frideres, is reviewed.

Since the late nineteenth century, clerical work has transformed from a small cluster of respected occupations dominated by men to a rapidly changing group of occupations 90 percent of which are held by women. Due to bureaucratization and the feminization of clerical work, clerical jobs are assumed to be routinized and simple, and clerical workers deemed easily replaceable. With further changes to the occupation caused by technology and globalization, clerical workers today have become increasingly vulnerable to unemployment, precarious employment and underemployment. In this research, an Ontario-wide survey with approximately 1200 respondents (including 120 clerical workers) and in-depth interviews with 23 Toronto clerical workers were combined to explore the employment situation of Ontario clerical workers. It is apparent that clerical workers are underemployed along all measured conventional dimensions of underemployment, including credential, performance and subjective as well as work permanence, salary levels and job opportunities. Relational practice is a largely unexamined aspect of clerical work that is often essentialized as a female trait and seldom recognized as skilled practice. In this dissertation, I argue that relational practice is critical to the successful performance of clerical roles and that relational practices are not innate but rather learned skills. I explore some ways in which clerical workers acquire these skills. I conclude by noting that recognizing and valuing relational skills will make the value of clerical workers more apparent to their employers, potentially reducing for clerical workers both their subjective sense of underemployment and their vulnerability to job loss.

The article reviews the exhibition, "Handel the Philanthropist," at the Foundling Museum in London, England in 2009.

Considering the increasing levels of unemployment and underemployment, and the limited evidence concerning the impact of underemployment on health, my study examines the relations between subjective, objective, and time-related underemployment and employees’ health-related quality of life, as manifested through self-rated health, activity limitations and work-related stress. The study compares an expanded model of work-health relations that, along with the factors addressed by control-demand, and social capital theories, includes characteristics of the physical work environment, and employees’ economic class. In addition to the commonly examined factors related to employment and health (control-demand and social capital), my study explores the impact of the work environment (hazards, discomfort and physical demands) and economic class to determine the specific effects of underemployment on an employee’s health-related quality of life. My main argument is that underemployment, in conjunction with lower economic class, higher exposure to a harmful work environment, lack of control over work, and lower social capital, contributes to increased work-related stress and diminishes health-related quality of life. The study applies a mixed methodological approach based on data from the Canadian Work and Lifelong Learning Survey and the US General Social Survey, and qualitative analysis of interviews from the Ontario Survey on Education-Job Requirements Matching. Evidence based on cross-sectional and qualitative data analysis provides consistent findings and confirms the main assumption that high levels of underemployment have a significant effect on employees’ health-related quality of life. The study shows that employees’ economic class, characteristics of work environment and control over work carry the highest associations with health-related quality of life, while underemployment has a significant additive association with health-related quality of life, most importantly with work-related stress.

A fire in Salem, Mass., in 1914 and an explosion in Halifax, N.S., in 1917 provide an opportunity to explore working-class institutions and organizations in the United States-Canada borderlands. In a historical moment in which the state greatly expanded its responsibility to give protection and rescue to its citizens, after these two disasters ordinary survivors preferred to depend on their friends, neighbors, and family members. This dissertation examines which institutions--including formal organizations like unions and fraternal societies as well as informal groups like families and neighborhoods--were most relevant and useful to working-class survivors. Families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Those traditions were put to unusual purposes and extreme stress when the disasters happened. They were also challenged by new agents of the state, who were given extraordinary powers in the wake of the disasters. This dissertation describes how the working-class people who most directly experienced the disasters understood them and their cities starkly differently than the professionalized relief authorities. Using a wide array of sources--including government documents, published accounts, archived ephemeral, oral histories, photographs, newspapers in two languages, and the case files of the Halifax Relief Commission--the dissertation describes how elites imposed a progressive state on what they imagined to be a fractured and chaotic social landscape. It argues that "the people" for whom reformers claimed to speak had their own durable, alternative modes of support and rescue that they quickly and effectively mobilized in times of crisis, but which remained illegible to elites. By demonstrating the personal, ideological, political, and practical ties between New England and Nova Scotia and Quebec, it also emphasizes the importance of studying American and Canadian history together, not only comparatively but as a transnational, North American whole.

This paper presents empirical evidence about HRM practices in Chilean organizations with the aims of providing an overview of employment relations and adding to limited existing literature. Research was conducted in a sample of 2000 Chilean workers in the Metropolitan Region. The paper argues that HRM practices in Chilean organizations illustrate the normative perspective of modern HRM discourse, where managers understand the nature of employment relationships to be the control of workers. While HRM processes are articulated under a discourse of worker emancipation, in reality, discursive practices perpetuate patterns of subordination that have historically shaped employment relations in Chile.

This report is a fully updated and concise discussion of leading cases in workplace violence (including physical and mental harrassment) and the various laws that apply to them, including human rights, health & safety, workplace insurance and the Criminal Code of Canada. This edition will help you to identify what constitutes violence, what obligations are created by the common law and what employers need to do to protect their workers and themselves. --Publisher's description

Much has written about the growth of legislative interference in collective bargaining and the right to strike in Canada in the latter part of the 20th century. However, consideration of the specifically gendered impacts of this interference has been largely neglected. This paper argues that suspension of collective bargaining rights and the right to strike impacts women workers in unique and disproportionate ways. Two cursory case studies from Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador provide examples of how suspension of bargaining rights has a differential impact on women. The paper calls attention to the need for a heightened focus on the specifically gendered impacts of neoliberal governments´ growing propensity to suspend collective bargaining rights in Canada.

The article reviews the book, "Regulating Flexibility: The Political Economy of Employment Standards," by Mark P. Thomas.