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Neo-liberal ideology has attempted to set different groups of workers--employed and unemployed, public and private sector, unionized and non-unionized--in opposition to each other. A successful response will require more than clear philosophical principles. It will require detailed, difficult, and long-term political efforts to construct solidarity. At the same time, that practical political work requires principles. The most effective principles on the basis of which solidarity can be built are those that disclose shared interests. The life-value principles underlying the most significant achievements of the union movement are the best means by which the shared interests of all workers can be disclosed. (English)

Canada’s nursing homes have become increasingly dependent on immigrant health care aides. More than any other ethnic group, Filipino women are over-represented among health care aides in the Canadian health care system. This qualitative study explored the employment experiences of Filipino health care aides in nursing homes from their own perspectives as well as those of policy stakeholders. Fourteen in-depth interviews were conducted with Filipino health care aides and long-term-care policy stakeholders in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The results indicated that migrant social networks act as pathways linking immigrant women with employment opportunities in nursing homes. The composition of the labour force is also shaped by management strategies and labour market accommodations that respond to, and reinforce, these social networks. These findings have implications for workforce planning and the quality of care provision in nursing homes.

The article reviews the book, "Valuing Care Work: Comparative Perspectives," edited by Cecilia Benoit and Helga Hallgrimsdottir.

[Analyzes] the impact of both climate change and climate policy on employment in construction. --Editor's introduction

The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

This article explores the experiences of transnational agricultural migrant workers in Canada's guestworker programs. Examined through a gendered lens, it focuses on migrants' experiences as parents to children whom they must leave behind in their communities of origin when they migrate. Drawing on interview and ethnographic data, this article argues that transnational parents, especially mothers, face a unique set of challenges and barriers as participants in these programs. It explores how the injustices in the immigration-labor regime that migrants confront as racialized, non-citizen farm workers impact parents' ability to focus on their primary motivation to migrate—their children—thereby limiting their ability to fulfill idealized forms of motherhood and fatherhood and hindering their parent-child relationships. It also demonstrates that migrant mothers frequently experience increased feelings of self-doubt, guilt and inadequacy as transnational parents, which, in turn, diminishes the benefits of their migration.

The article reviews the book, "Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman," by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich.

Introduces the second of the two-part series in the journal on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Making of the English Working Class" by E.P. Thompson. Articles include: "The Lost Causes of E. P. Thompson" by Dipesh Chakrabarty; "Class Formation, Politics, Structures of Feeling" by Geoff Eley; "Comrade Thompson and Saint Foucault" by Todd McCallum; "Exploitation: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?" by James Epstein; "Looking Back and Ahead" by August Carbonella; "The Making dans les eaux troubles de l’historiographie québécoise : réception hésitante d’un livre en avant de son temps" by Robert Tremblay; "Who now reads E.P. Thompson? Or, (Re)reading The Making at UQAM" by Magda Fahrni; and "Individual Statements on E.P. Thompson" by, respectively, Jesse Lemisch, Alice Kessler-Harris, and June Hannam.

The article introduces the first of a two-part series in the journal on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Making of the English Working Class" by British historian E.P. Thompson. In addition to describing their own responses, the authors discuss how the book has influenced working-class studies, its political impact, Thompson's Marxism, and his critique of Methodism. The articles in the presentation include: "E.P. Thompson’s Capital: Political Economy in The Making" by Michael Merrill; "Among the Autodidacts: The Making of E.P. Thompson" by Margaret C. Jacob; “The something that has called itself ‘Marxism’” by Peter Way; "The Face of Power" by Tina Loo; "A Definitive ‘And fookin’ Amen to that!" by David Levine; "Frame Breaking Then and Now" by Rebecca Hill; and "The Privilege of History" by Sean Cadigan.

Examines back-to-work legislation and various other measures that federal/provincial governments have used on public sector unions since 1975, as well as related court decisons under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Concludes that greater solidarity is needed to counter the governmental resort to coercion.

Special Issue Introduction: This special issue interrogates race as a labour. The “labor of race,” writes David Theo Goldberg in his book "The Threat of Race" (2009:4, emphasis in original), “is the work for which the category and its assumptions are employed to effect and rationalize social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation.” Race, for Goldberg, is a “foundational code” that has been built by “racial thinkers,” that is “the day-laborers, the brick-layers, of racial foundations” (2009:4). Understanding race as a labour underscores the ontological unreality of race, which is now, of course, the constructivist orthodoxy in critical sociologies of race. In other words, conceptualizing race as a labour asserts race as an accomplishment, however unstable: an historical, social, economic, and cultural achievement that designates a constantly shifting political grammar. At the same time, understanding race as a labour, or the labour of race, demands that we ask to what work race is put. Following Zygmunt Bauman’s (2004) theorization of “wasted lives,” race might be theorized as a method of social ordering.

The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline" by Alice Mah.

The article reviews the book, "For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America," by John Curl.

The decline in trade union membership in a number of countries has led to concerns over a ‘representation gap’, where workers are deprived of a voice not only in regard to their workplace grievances, but also in regard to their contributions to productivity and the quality of working life. While a number of alternatives have been raised, including joint consultation and works councils, there are concerns that these alternatives may further weaken union organization by establishing rival forms of organization. This article examines the interwar experience with three types of workplace non-union employee representation in Canada, Germany, the US and the UK. Where management recognizes unions and unions actively ensure that they dominate these representation mechanisms, they can enhance union organization.

The article reviews the book, "Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788-1920s: 'We like to be free in this country,'" by Patricia A. McCormack.

Contrary to government official discourses that present the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) as a ‘human and just’ labour migration model, in this paper, the SAWP is presented as a migrant labour regime that functions as labour apartheid system of discipline and control, which is in place to satisfy the needs of capitalist development in the Canadian agricultural industry. By identifying the parallels and similarities of the differential treatment of Black migrant workers under South African apartheid with the differential treatment to which migrant farm workers are subjected under the SAWP, I explore how coercive migrant labour regimes of work function today in the context of heightened neoliberal hegemony and state multiculturalism. Through empirical evidences and theoretical claims, I identify main constitutive elements and forms of governance that cause workers to living and experiencing apartheid conditions; I explain how these forms of governance actually work on the ground, and how are they embodied, lived and contested by migrant farm workers participating in the program. I also delve in workers’ politics and their expressions of resistance and contestation to such system as they speak directly to the ways they experience apartheid conditions and the particular forms of how racism is inflicted over them. The SAWP presents an interesting opportunity to closely examine the ways in which colonialism works, how it is manifested today through labour and immigration schemes, and how these regimes are contested and challenged through migrant farm workers’ political subjectivities. In this respect, this paper paves the way for future movement-related research study of seasonal agricultural workers, which can generate collective insight and knowledge to support the organizing efforts of the precarious migrant workers in Canada.

[D]iscusses the surprising silence in English-language academic publishing on climate warming since 1995, finding that four-fifths of the research published is grey literature: reports and commissioned research, rather than publications in traditional, peer-reviewed journals. Why have the mainstream social sciences failed to invest in this important new field of research? What are the implications? -- Editor's introduction

The article reviews the book, "L’intervention en ergonomie," by Marie Saint-Vincent, Nicole Vézina, Marie Bellemare, Denys Denis, Élise Ledoux and Daniel Imbeau.

The article reviews the book, "Judging Homosexuals: A History of Gay Persecution in Quebec and France," by Patrice Corriveau.

The Psychology of Assessment Centers, edited by Duncan J. R. Jackson, Charles E. Lance and Brian J. Hoffman, is reviewed.