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This article examines the social integration of migrant and native employees in German industrial workplaces and the impact of workplace industrial relations on it. Drawing on data from interviews with management, works councils and employees, employee surveys and company statistics from three manufacturing companies, it analyzes the positioning of employees of different origin within the companies' social structure, explores their social interaction and asks what role works councils play in fostering social integration of a heterogeneous workforce. Findings show that workplaces are not free from discrimination but, rather, "pragmatic cooperation" and collegiality prevail. It is argued that the legal framework of German co-determination and workplace actors' orientation towards universalistic rule application ("internal universalism") encourages individuals to constitute themselves as employees with common interests and foster social integration.

This dissertation explores the claim that, in advanced capitalist countries like Canada, a powerful knowledge class is assuming increasing dominance within the social relations of production. Attached to such theories are claims of trends toward post-bureaucratic organizations, rising job complexity and autonomy, and increased power within operational and strategic decision-making processes. In my study I focus on Canadian “specialist” employees (professionals and semi-professionals) and managers. I present aggregated and disaggregated data from two Canadian surveys conducted in 1983 and 2004 and complement this with original interviews with information technology (IT) workers and engineers. I find a seeming paradox within the labour process of specialists and managers, with task-level autonomy declining even as job complexity and involvement in organizational decisions are rising. I provide evidence that imperatives for profit/cost effectiveness are leading to efforts to make specialist and managerial labour and knowledge more transparent, integrated, and manageable, but this is not the same as degradation or proletarianization. In contrast to my expectation, I find boundaries in the division of labour are durable despite this “socialization” of many labour processes. I argue that a specialist-and-managerial class (SMC) exists in Canada, and will continue to exist, though it is subordinate to and exploited by the capitalist elite even as it excludes and exploits the working class through occupational closure and credential barriers. The SMC is thus contradictory, internally heterogeneous and fraying at its borders, but simultaneously resilient. The resiliency comes via possession of specific strategic knowledge and consequent ability to secure rents and/or control specific organization assets via delegated authority. Resiliency is also structural, with management in many organizations retaining an interest in separating planning and design (“conception”), on the one hand, from process and completion (“execution”), on the other, in order to maximize efficiency and productivity through more centralized control.

The article reviews the book, "Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp," edited by Geoffrey Hayes, Mike Bechtold, and Matt Symes.

The article reviews the book, "In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism From Harlem to London 1917-1939," by Minkah Makalani.

Travel is one of many extra-legal barriers that restrict access to abortion services. Paradoxically, women travel at the international, domestic, and local levels to circumvent legal and/or extra-legal barriers to access. Through an examination of four specific Canadian responses to inequality of access to abortion services relative to shifts in the legal terrain from the 1960s onwards, the authors demonstrate that travel signifies an interruption to reproductive choice. Women went to Britain and the United States for an abortion when these countries relaxed their abortion legislation. Within Canada, women sought out the services offered by the Morgentaler Clinic in Montreal in order to avoid the abortion bureaucracy that limited their right to choose. In New Brunswick, the pro-life movement successfully lobbied hospitals to restrict abortion services, and the provincial government to deny funding for abortions performed in freestanding clinics, forcing women to travel to access abortion services. Pro-choice activists in southeastern British Columbia launched a successful campaign to protect hospital abortions, ensuring that rural women had access to abortion services within their home communities. Today, 25 years after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law, abortion services are uneven at best and unattainable at worst in different regions of the country.

Current policy debates about Canada's retirement income system have failed to consider "gender risk" - i.e. the risk that Canadian women will bear a disproportionate share of welfare loss in old age. This paper argues that the continuing gender disparity in retirement income reflects Canada's heavy reli- ance on private pension instruments generated and shaped by labour markets. The author begins by looking at the relationship between gender and Canada's three-pillar retirement income system, noting that while public pensions distrib- ute benefits based on explicit policy goals, private pensions distribute them based on the "hidden hand" of market principles. She then considers the differential impact of employment-based pension plans on men and women as a function of the distinct patterns of male and female engagement in the labour market. Noting the close relationship between pension design choices and gender outcomes, she goes on to discuss the pension reforms introduced by Canadian governments in the 1960s and 1980s, in which those governments saw gender inequality as an issue to be addressed primarily by mandatory public plans rather than by voluntary private plans. Ultimately, the author contends, the gendered impact of Canada's pension system flows from the complex interaction between women's paid employment and their reproductive and caregiving work. A gender-equal pension system would recognize the unequal burden borne by women in labour markets and in families, and would pool and share the welfare risks which that inequality entails. Voluntary employment-based pension plans shaped by market imperatives at the enterprise level will not address these issues, in the author's view, nor will the type of individualized pension contemplated by the federal government's recent PRPP legislation providing for pooled savings vehicles to which employers do not contribute. What is needed, she argues, is a broad- based collective risk-sharing vehicle such as the CPP/QPP.

This thesis challenges the historiography that asserts the waterfront strike in Vancouver in 1935 was a failed militant surge by a new radical leadership in an otherwise twenty-year period of dormancy among the city's longshoremen. Using union documents, employer records, and interviews with workers, the thesis presents the entire company era, between 1923 and 1944, as a period of developing solidarity and resistance. In this context the 1935 strike and the union's leadership were a product of, not a radical departure from that continuity. The thesis shows that despite two lost strikes in 1923 and again in 1935, the administrative structures the employers established produced a resilient culture of solidarity that was in place before Partiament acted in 1944 to provide longshorement with the legal framework for union representation.

The article reviews the book, "Last Nightshift in Savar: The Story of the Spectrum Sweater Factory Collapse," by Doug Miller.

The article reviews the book, "Moving Beyond Borders: A History of British Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora," by Karen Flynn.

This article examines the approaches that historians, beginning in the mid 20th century and into the early 21st century, used to write about the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. It focuses on five major works: "The Winnipeg General Strike" by D.C. Masters; "Confrontation at Winnipeg: by David J. Bercuson; "The Workers' Revolt in Canada, 1917-1925" edited by Craig Heron; and "When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike" by Tom Mitchell and Reinhold Kramer. It identifies where the monographs depart from one another in interpretation; as well as where they remain the same. Given the layers of complexity, the interpretation of the event becomes especially salient in the 21st century as its 100th anniversary steadfastly approaches and the question of how should it be publicly presented in 2019 requires an answer soon (which the paper also addresses).

Employee Rights and Employer Wrongs: How to Identify Employee Abuse and How to Stand Up for Yourself, by Suzanne Kleinberg and Michael Kreimeh, is reviewed.

L’article s’interroge, dans la perspective de l’institutionnalisme économique de Commons, sur la relation unissant les dispositifs de participation financière au climat social, appréhendé par le biais de la perception qu’en ont les dirigeants et les salariés, d’une part, et par des indicateurs de dysfonctionnements sociaux, tels que l’absentéisme et les conflits sociaux, d’autre part. La question des caractéristiques de ces pratiques (modalités de négociation présidant à leur mise en oeuvre, types de dispositifs, mode de calcul) est également posée. L’étude empirique est fondée sur l’exploitation de l’enquête REPONSE qui représente un échantillon de 3 000 établissements français et de 8 000 salariés. Au-delà des différences de perception entre dirigeants et salariés, les résultats, obtenus à l’aide de modèles de régressions logistiques, mettent tout d’abord en évidence que plus que le montant versé, c’est l’existence même d’un dispositif de participation financière qui influence le climat social. Par ailleurs plus les dispositifs apparaissent comme désintéressés de la part de l’entreprise et meilleur est le climat social du point de vue des salariés. Les modalités de conclusion de l’accord de participation financière, notamment l’intervention des syndicats, ont également une influence sur le climat social. Compte tenu des différences de résultats pouvant exister selon que l’on s’intéresse à la perception des dirigeants, à celle des salariés ou aux indicateurs de dysfonctionnements sociaux, l’article met également en lumière l’importance pour les recherches sur le climat social de prendre en compte à la fois les dimensions objectives du climat social et la perception qu’en ont les acteurs.

In the early part of the Dirty Thirties, the Canadian prairie city was a relatively safe haven. Having faced recession before the Great War and then again in the early 1920s, municipalities already had relief apparatuses in place to deal with poverty and unemployment. Until 1933, responsibilty for the care of the urban poor remained with local governments, but when the farms failed that year, and the Depression deepened, western Canadian cities suffered tremendously. Recognizing the severity of the crisis, the national government intervened. Evolving federal programs and policies took over responsibility for the delivery of relief to the single unemployed, while the government simultaneously withdrew financing for all public works projects. Setting municipal relief administrations of the 1930s within a wider literature on welfare and urban poor relief, Strikwerda highlights the legacy on which relief policymakers relied in determining policy directions, as well as the experiences of the individuals and families who depended on relief for their survival. Focusing on three prairie cities—Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg—Strikwerda argues that municipal officials used their power to set policy to address what they perceived to be the most serious threats to the social order stemming from the economic crisis. By analyzing the differing ways in which local relief programs treated married and single men, he also explores important gendered dynamics at work in the response of city administrators to the social and economic upheaval of the Depression. Probing the mindset of local elites struggling in extraordinary circumstances, The Wages of Relief describes the enduring impact of the policy changes made in the 1930s in the direction of a broad, national approach to unemployment—an approach that ushered in Canada’s modern welfare system. --Publisher's description

Labour geography has yet to pay full attention to the experiences of public sector workers and their employer (the state). This article addresses this lacuna and provides some insight into the labour geographies of public sector workers through an empirical analysis of the centralization of governance, employment relations, and collective bargaining in Ontario, Canada’s publicly-funded elementary and secondary schools. This case demonstrates how one particular group of public sector workers – teachers – and their unions located and exercised agency in the arenas of politics and collective bargaining through a rescaling of their activities from the local to the provincial level. The paper also argues that the rescaling of politics and collective bargaining is problematic. Questions remain regarding whether or not Ontario’s teachers were able to increase their aggregate bargaining power through centralization or merely transferred agency and authority from one scale to another. Moreover, the paper engages with the fast-developing geographies of education literature, and is consistent with an outward-looking approach that links education to wider political and economic processes. In so doing, it extends the scope of the geographies of education to the employees of publicly-funded schools and their administrative bodies, and suggests value a theoretically- and empirically-informed dialogue between geographers interested in education and those interested in labour.

This article examines the professional practices of a sample of 21 Canadian ergonomists from across Canada, focusing on the manner in which they report negotiating the intersection of safety and productivity in their work. Results indicate that ergonomic practice is directed primarily to safety concerns. A minority of study participants addressed productivity concerns, either as secondary or primary outcomes of ergonomic applications. In either instance, efforts to highlight the contribution of ergonomics to production did not significantly disrupt the dominant safety oriented perception of the field. Financial considerations were major determinants of whether recommendations were implemented. An irony of the dominant understanding of ergonomics as oriented to safety, with little reference to performance aspects, is that this provides the main basis for its growing presence in workplaces but also limits its applications.

Manufacturing Mennonites examines the efforts of Mennonite intellectuals and business leaders to redefine the group's ethno-religious identity in response to changing economic and social conditions after 1945. As the industrial workplace was one of the most significant venues in which competing identity claims were contested during this period, Janis Thiessen explores how Mennonite workers responded to such redefinitions and how they affected class relations. Through unprecedented access to extensive private company records, Thiessen provides an innovative comparison of three businesses founded, owned, and originally staffed by Mennonites: the printing firm Friesens Corporation, the window manufacturer Loewen, and the furniture manufacturer Palliser. Complemented with interviews with workers, managers, and business owners, Manufacturing Mennonites pioneers two important new trajectories for scholarship - how religion can affect business history, and how class relations have influenced religious history. --Publisher's description

Le développement des emplois « atypiques » au Québec donne lieu à la mise en évidence de nouveaux enjeux sociaux et politiques dans un contexte de flexibilité de la main-d’oeuvre. La segmentation du marché du travail qui en découle se caractérise par une précarisation du salariat, définie comme un processus structurel de détérioration des conditions de travail et d’emploi. La sociologie s’intéresse particulièrement aux conséquences de ces mutations sur les conditions de vie à travers l’analyse des perceptions subjectives des acteurs concernés. Ainsi, le rapport au travail incluant les conditions matérielles, l’accomplissement des tâches et la socialisation comporte une dichotomie articulée autour de la satisfaction du salarié, source de valorisation ou de la non-satisfaction, entraînant un mal-être. Les transformations récentes du monde du travail construisent des parcours professionnels morcelés et incertains et nécessitent une réévaluation de leurs impacts sur ce rapport, encore peu documentée. Que signifie occuper un emploi atypique pour ces travailleurs ? La valeur associée au travail est-elle remise en cause ? Les indices contenus dans leurs parcours professionnels constituent-ils une réalité nouvelle ? Basé sur les résultats d’une recherche qualitative menée en 2009 auprès de résidents d’un quartier défavorisé du centre-ville de Montréal, ayant occupé des emplois « atypiques », cet article permet d’entrer au coeur des dynamiques relationnelles des milieux de travail québécois, de comprendre en quoi elles participent à la construction de parcours professionnels spécifiques et d’identifier leurs conséquences sur le rapport au travail et à l’emploi de ces travailleurs. Les différentes expériences étudiées apportent un éclairage sur le phénomène de la précarisation du travail et suggèrent des perspectives tant scientifiques que politiques.

The article reviews the book, "Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice," edited by Christine Ramsay.

In February 2011, a wave of creative direct action swept across postal depots in the city of Edmonton which saw rank-and-file workers organizing outside of the channels of formal-legal unionism. Fighting against management’s imposition of compulsory overtime as a staffing measure, Letter Carriers and other “outside” postal workers relied on solidarity and resistance at the point of production in a successful campaign to put an end to this practice. The relevance of this particular struggle to the Canadian labour movement is twofold. First, the intensified workloads of Edmonton postal workers reflect a wider shift in the nature of employment relationships away from the existence of employer support as part of the rise of neoliberal capitalism. Second, the choice of workers to organize at a distance from the historically militant Canadian Union of Postal Workers reveals both the predicament facing labour of a highly restrictive formal labour relations system as well as an alternative path of resistance. For Edmonton postal workers, this path was forged in large part as a result of the influence of IWW dual-carder organizers and, more specifically, their introduction of a mode of union praxis known as solidarity unionism.

Canadian employers have a common law obligation to give reasonable notice when terminating an employment relationship without cause. In deter- mining the appropriate length of the notice period, trial judges hearing wrongful dismissal claims must consider a range of factors, including what are known as the Bardal factors. In this paper, the author presents and analyzes the results of his empirical study of appeal court decisions reviewing trial court awards of reasonable notice across Canada from 2000 to 2011, and examines the impact of the Bardal factors (as well as several others) on outcomes at the appellate level. The study finds that appeal courts have not treated all of the Bardal factors equally, but appear to have given the most weight to the employee's age and length of tenure. Other factors found to have significant predictive value on the length of reasonable notice awards were the employee's gender and whether a successful claim for Wallace damages was made. The data also indicate that employee appeals have succeeded relatively more often than employer appeals, and that the length of notice ordered by appellate courts seems to have plateaued over time. In light of his conclusion that only a narrow range of considerations significantly affect notice awards, the author argues that the current system of judicial assessment of reasonable notice could well be replaced by a less expen- sive and time-consuming statutory scheme that would incorporate a formula for applying the relevant factors and would be administered by employment standards tribunals rather than by the courts.