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[Reviews] the history and trends of income inequality in Canada, examining how a growing gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to drive today's political and economic processes, including volatile stock markets, troubled housing markets, and a newly escalated attack on labour that paints unions as yesterday's answer to yesterday's problems. --Introduction

Travailler ne met plus à l’abri de la pauvreté et peut enfermer dans la précarité. Car la société salariale est affaiblie par les transformations des interventions entrepreneuriales et étatiques. De plus en plus de travailleurs et, surtout, de travailleuses n’ont plus accès aux protections collectives et sociales qui leur donnaient un appui pour mener des projets professionnels et de vie. L’heure est à la remarchandisation du travail. Pour étayer le phénomène de la pauvreté en emploi et en mesurer l’ampleur au Québec, l’ouvrage propose de nouvelles constructions statistiques qui reposent sur une définition extensive de la notion de travailleur. Le choix de cette définition – définition qui s’accorde avec le caractère multidimensionnel de la pauvreté en emploi – se trouve justifié par les travaux de recherche menés par les membres du Groupe interuniversitaire et inter­disciplinaire de recherche sur l’emploi, la pauvreté et la protection sociale (GIREPS). L’ouvrage met en lumière les différents facteurs de développement des formes d’emploi qui enferment dans la pauvreté et la précarité des travailleuses et travailleurs canadiens, résidents ou immigrants temporaires rendus vulnérables par leur position sociale. Il porte un regard à la fois sur les mutations du travail et de l’emploi, sur les transformations des États-providence et sur leur rôle dans l’informalisation du travail et de l’économie, sur les modalités de gestion de la main-d’œuvre par les entreprises ainsi que sur la réactualisation des rapports sociaux de classe, de genre et de race. Il montre que la forte remontée des inégalités socioéconomiques ne résulte d’aucun déterminisme, mais de l’absence ou de la remise en cause des protections légales ou collectives. Il expose comment le retour de la pauvreté en emploi s’inscrit dans la mise en concurrence des travailleurs à l’échelle planétaire. Il se conclut, enfin, sur les formes d’action collective qui interpellent les formes institutionnalisées et nourrissent de nouvelles aspirations et revendications possiblement communes. --Résumé de l'éditeur

The Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in thirty-three countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, twenty-seven European Union (EU) member countries and three non-European Union member countries. ...The introduction provides basic information on the CPD’s conceptual approach to precarious employment in a comparative perspective, an explanation of CPD methodology, and an outline of the design principles behind the creation of harmonized variables used in the statistical tables. These principles are further developed and demonstrated in three interactive modules: forms of precarious employment, temporal and spatial dynamics, and health and social care. --Website description

There is both a lack of theoretical development as well as detailed empirical evidence on the organizational contexts that foster union renewal. Scholars have argued that the integration of social identities into unions and sustained 'lay' participation are key to renewal. This article seeks to identify organizational structures and processes that contribute to incorporating immigrant identities and fostering democratic participation in unions. Empirical analysis is based on ethnographic observations conducted in four local branches within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of the USA that underwent the Justice for Janitors campaign. The approach taken treats union renewal as a complex and non-linear process unfolding over time -- in each city, the campaign entered the complex social structures of local unions, disrupting old processes and structures, and creating new ones. Despite the fact that all four local unions experienced external revitalization owing to the campaign, internal renewal was most successful in Los Angeles, least in Washington DC, and somewhat successful in Boston and Houston. The findings demonstrate the difficulty of achieving transformative change in unions, yet point to key organizational elements that may help achieve it.

Dreams of steady employment in the mining sector led thousands of Ukrainian immigrants to northern Ontario in the early 1900s. As a child, historian Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her baba’s stories about Sudbury’s small but polarized community and what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression. According to Baba grew out of those stories, out of a granddaughter’s desire to capture the experiences of her grandparents’ generation on paper. Eighty-two interviews conducted by Stacey and her grandmother, Olga, laid the groundwork for this insightful and deeply personal social history of one of Canada’s most colourful ethnic communities. The interview process also brought to light the challenges of doing collaborative oral history with community members, particularly as Stacey lost authority to her baba, wrestled it back, and eventually came to share it, and as interviewees met questions with nostalgic reminiscences, subversive humour, or impenetrable silence. By providing a realistic glimpse into the hard work that goes into making communities partners in oral history research, this book provides a new paradigm for studying the politics of memory, one that recognizes that people are not passive recipients of their histories but rather counter and create narratives about the past by invoking alternative ways of remembering. --Publisher's description

This thesis explores the precarious nature of backstage work within the live music industry. Live music is replacing recorded music as the economic core of the music industry. Live music is a unique sector, in that it is valued for its ephemerality. Given the ephemerality of concerts, new frameworks are required to understand technical and logistical production of live music. Labour arrangements in live music reflect sweeping trends in the labour market. Backstage workers are employed in flexible, contract and contingent arrangements leading to precarious livelihoods. This thesis argues that labour precaritization in the live music industry is part of an accumulation strategy by suggesting that employers exploit the affective, emotive and cathartic nature of live music to reduce wages and extract surplus from workers. Essentially, workers are willing to accept a psychic wage in lieu a living wage. This arrangement can be called `lifestyle labour' in that workers are willing to accept lifestyle components as part of their wage.

This article examines Pierre Elliott Trudeau's relationship with labour and social democratic organizations, 1949-1959. Using historiographic works, reflections from contemporary historical figures, and Trudeau's archival fonds, this essay demonstrates that his connections to labour and the left were motivated by his desire to enrich liberal democracy in both Quebec and Canada. Supporting labour unions and the provincial/federal Cooperative Commonwealth Federation during the early 1950s was imperative, as labour was a force for change and democratic renewal, and the CCF was the party with the strongest commitment to popular democracy, especially when contrasted with a Liberal Party and Union Nationale, which were dominated by regressive and financial interests. Using various theoretical approaches, including Ian McKay's Liberal Order Framework and Antonio Gramsci's concept of "trasformismo," I seek to show how Trudeau's leftist forays were informed by the desire to transform liberalism and capitalism in such a way that maintained their essences while inoculating them from their core flaws. This process of liberal transformation and hegemony is further emphasized in the later stages of the 1950s, as Trudeau began to reject social democratic and labour parties, arguing that they put their goals aside and join forces with liberals to fight for democracy first.

Considers the current regulatory environment for temporary employment workers in Quebec. Concludes that the legislative failure to regulate has resulted in abusive practices that undermine labour law.

Compares the legal regimes of British Columbia and Manitoba for employment agencies that recruit women from the Philippines to work as caregivers in Canadian homes. Concludes that the Manitoba regulatory framework is much more effective in protecting caregivers from the abusive practices of these agencies.

This article reconsiders the shift in Canada from an exclusively government-regulated occupational health and safety system to the Internal Responsibility System (IRS). The IRS gives workers rights, or “voice,” to manage, know about, and refuse unsafe working conditions. I present new evidence that worker voice and the IRS have weakened with the decline of unions and the rise of precarious employment. Survey data are analyzed from Ontario workers who rated the likelihood that raising a health and safety concern with their current employer would negatively affect their future employment. My analysis models how workers’ sex, race, unionization, sector, and degree of employment precarity affect their probability of exercising voice. Results of a logistic regression suggest the most precariously employed are the least likely to use voice. Consequently, I argue that the IRS should be supplemented with more external oversight in sectors where employment is most insecure.

[Examines] the prevalence of both precarious and stable employment in the labour market stretching from Hamilton in the west to Whitby in the east, and centred on the City of Toronto. [The report] expands the discussion of the social consequences of Canada’s polarizing income distribution by examining the effects of precarious employment on people’s lives. It explores how employment precarity and income together shape social outcomes. What makes this issue all the more important is our finding that barely 50% of people in our study are in jobs that are both permanent and full-time. --Website description. Contents: Background -- Part 1: The rise of precarious employment -- Part 2: The characteristics of the precariously employed -- Part 3: Precarity and household well-being -- Part 4: Precarity and the well-being of children -- Part 5: Precarity and community connection -- Part 6: Options for change -- Appendix A: How we collected our data -- Appendix B: Defining individuals in precarious employment -- Appendix C: How we determined low, middle, and high household income brackets -- Bibliography.

This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers' efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns-Port Alice and Port Alberni-to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers' struggles to 'defend place'; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Spring 2013 issue.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Fall 2013 issue.

The Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies (CAWLS) is an academic association for scholars interested in work, workers, and labour. --Website

Mobility for work is not new, but it is changing. Across the world a wide range of people are mobile for work – women and men, citizens and temporary foreign workers, new workers and those near retirement. From hours-long daily commutes, to travel that takes workers away from home for days, weeks, months and even years; from mobility within work (truck driving, shipping and others) to mobility to get to and from work; from cars and buses, to trains, ships and planes; from highly-paid top executive jobs, to minimum-wage service jobs; from natural resource dependent industry to natural wonder dependent tourism – the types of mobility are many and changing. The On the Move Partnership is a multi-year national scale research program with international links, investigating employment-related geographical mobility and its consequences for workers, families, employers, communities, and Canadian municipal, provincial and federal governments. --Website description

La vie professionnelle : âge, expérience et santé à l’épreuve des conditions de travail, edited by Anne-Françoise Molinié, Corinne Gaudart and Valérie Pueyo, is reviewed.

The article reviews and comments on the books "They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California," by Don Mitchell, "Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico," by Deborah Cohen, and "Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest," by Brinda Sarathy.