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For decades, public sector unions in Canada have been plagued by austerity, privatization, taxpayer backlash and restrictions on union rights. In recent years, the intensity of state-led attacks against public sector workers has reached a fevered pitch, raising the question of the role of public sector unions in protecting their members and the broader public interest. Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity examines the unique characteristics of public sector unionism in a Canadian context. Contributors to this multi-disciplinary collection explore both the strategic possibilities and challenges facing public sector unions that are intent on resisting austerity, enhancing their power and connecting their interests as workers with those of citizens who desire a more just and equitable public sphere. --Publisher's description

[The article shows] how management in the post-war period – in this case [Hobbs Hardware in] the mid-1970s – orchestrated effective campaigns to keep low-wage workers out of unions. This is especially true for those workers who toiled in seemingly inconsequential workplaces that were part of the growing service sector, and where unionization was largely prevented. The fact that unionization did not expand into the service sector would have lasting consequences for workers in service industries, for class relations across sectors, and for the Canadian labour movement. [The] analysis utilizes archival documents, but also relies on the memories of three former Hobbs workers.... --From author's introduction

The article reviews the book, "Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth Century Boston," by David A. Zonderman.

Since the 1960s, if not before, oral history and working-class history have been a dynamic duo, complimenting and overlapping, but also challenging and questioning each other. Both lay and professional historians have been in the forefront of efforts to recuperate, interpret, and preserve the oral histories of working-class individuals and communities across the globe. They created written histories, archival collections, museum exhibits, and community projects that gave workers, their families, and their communities -- those who were less likely to leave archival and written sources for posterity -- a new voice, and a new place in history. Working-class oral history has also encompassed far more than recovery and preservation. Labour historians have enriched the field of oral history by addressing questions about method, theory, and approach, by offering critical reflections on our assumptions and expectations about oral history practice. Oral history has similarly enriched the field of working-class history, posing new questions, challenging existing interpretations, and encouraging the diversification of the themes and subjects we study. In recognition of this dynamic relationship, and the ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between oral and working-class history, Oral History Forum commissioned this special issue. --Introduction

Explores the variable relationship of unions with the federal and provincial NDP (or the Parti Québécois), especially when it was the governing party. Concludes that while electoral participation may still be significant, broader mobilization is necessary for change to be achieved.

Analyzes the conservative character of professional unions, which in recent decades have become more militant as a result of cutbacks and the erosion of their role.

Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation.

The article reviews the book, "Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present," edited by Dario Azzellini and Immanuel Ness.

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.