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Migrant Workers in the Canadian Maritimes is a research and knowledge dissemination platform coordinated between Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia), St. Thomas University (Fredericton, New Brunswick) and Cooper Institute (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island). It involves the establishment of a collaboration amongst community allies: The Filipino-Canadian CommUNITY of New Brunswick (FCNB); KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives (New Brunswick); United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW); Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre; and intends to examine the health and safety of temporary foreign workers (TFWs). --Website description

La littérature existante s’est intéressée aux liens entre genre et conflit entre travail et famille, mais a peu exploré l’effet modérateur des stéréotypes de genre sur les effets différenciés du genre en fonction de la direction (conflit travail-famille et conflit famille-travail) et/ou de la dimension (temps, tension, comportements, cognition). La présente recherche utilise la dernière vague de l’enquête européenne sur les conditions de travail pour étudier l’effet modérateur des stéréotypes de genre à l’échelle nationale sur les effets du genre sur quatre combinaisons (direction x dimension) du conflit entre travail et famille. Cela permet de montrer que le conflit entre travail et famille est globalement moins élevé dans les pays caractérisés par une vision plus égalitaire du genre, et que, sur deux des quatre combinaisons, et sur le conflit global, cet effet est plus marqué pour les hommes que pour les femmes. Ces résultats nous permettent de discuter avec la littérature existante, à l’aune de la théorie des rôles de genre.

The article reviews the book, "Le capital algorithmique : accumulation, pouvoir et résistance à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle," by Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martineau.

Spaces of work and economic activity cause the most significant and widespread harm to animals so are particularly significant when thinking about how to both understand and promote solidarity with animals. This chapter begins by establishing what ‘animals at work’ means and then reestablishes the importance of the concept of interspecies solidarity as both a process and goal. It expands on earlier analyses and suggests that the principles of equity and care offer complementary and compelling guidance and impetus to deepen and enrich the application of the concept of solidarity. There are three levels within which these ethical priorities can be translated into meaningful, material changes: the interpersonal, the organizational, and the governmental/legislative (or, the micro, meso, and macro level). Some workplace contexts are ethically indefensible and should be replaced through just humane jobs transitions. Others have more positive potential, and, in these cases, interspecies solidarity could result in meaningful changes.

The article reviews the book, "Le droit du travail en sociologie," by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe and Jean-Philippe Tonneau.

This article is concerned with the historical evolution of the mining industry in Canada since 1859. The focus is directed on changes that occurred in the industry and allows for the identification of four distinct mining regimes. These regimes are defined using the Regulation Theory, which connects conditions of production, technical progress, financial structures, and social relations. The identification of regimes gives a portrait of continuity and change in the industry. Continuity is present in the active role of the state, the legal framework based on Free Mining Principle and persistent speculation in the industry. Change is illustrated in price cycle, labour share and technological innovation. Interestingly, through time, price cycles have very different outcomes in financial and real economic terms. The most recent upswing in the late 1990s resulted in a punctual increase of financial assets but no significant increase in employment. Through this discussion, it becomes evident that the mechanisms underlying continuity and change have implications on the nature of state intervention and on the distribution of power between the corporate and regional actors like the workers and indigenous communities.

Unions can increase the power of workers through both collective bargaining and political avenues, potentially creating less income inequality and poverty. However, this potential may not be realized. Drawing on power resource theory, this study uses panel data to investigate the connection between unionization and two measures of after-tax inequality – the income share of the top 1% and the Gini coefficient – and three measures of poverty – the percentage of the population below the low-income cut-off, the average income of the bottom decile, and the percent of the population below the low-income measure – between Canadian provinces from 2000 to 2020. We find that unionization is negatively associated with income inequality in Canada. This relationship is statistically significant. However, we do not find evidence of any statistical association between unionization and poverty in Canada.

Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomenon of risk, upset, and misfortune has been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning. An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace accidents, domestic accidents, childhood accidents, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brought. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state. An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents--and our responses to them--reveal shared values. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Where are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites," edited by Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti.

Les modes managériales entraînent des modifications des pratiques organisationnelles. Ces modifications sont d’autant plus rapides que le cycle de vie des modes managériales s’accélère et se raccourcit, favorisant les changements organisationnels. Partant du lien existant entre l’organisation du travail et la santé des salariés, en particulier en matière de harcèlement moral l’objectif de cet article est d’examiner le lien entre les modes managériales et le harcèlement moral. À partir de l’analyse exhaustive de la jurisprudence, cette étude montre une relation ambivalente entre le harcèlement moral et les modes managériales. Si, en effet, il n’est pas possible d’établir une corrélation directe entre les deux, l’analyse montre que l’adoption d’une pratique à la mode entraine des changements organisationnels, qui constituent eux-mêmes un terreau fertile pour le harcèlement moral. Ces conséquences, pourtant, sont peu interrogées par la littérature sur le harcèlement, qui ignore les modes managériales, comme par la littérature sur les modes managériales, qui remet peu en question l’implémentation des pratiques et limite l’analyse à l’alternative adoption / rejet des pratiques à la mode.

After failing to resolve an association grievance by means of mediation and collective bargaining, the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa signed a Letter of Understanding transferring grievance settlement to library council. This decision was both novel and carried risks, but ultimately led to unionized librarians using both the forum and worker voice effectively. This article explains the grievance, explores the concept of worker voice - including the cost of using voice - and questions whether library councils are conducive to voice. I also describe the member engagement that was necessary for librarians to participate in grievance resolution and offer advice on conditions that supported effective grievance resolution.

Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on post-secondary information workers in Canada.

Objective indicators, such as minority hiring rates or number of complaints, often fail to fully represent actual discrimination in hiring processes, particularly against racial and ethnic minorities (McGonagle et al., 2016). Despite legal efforts in Quebec to increase employment of minorities, their ongoing underrepresentation points to the need to examine discrimination in terms of perceived experiences. In line with Anderson (2011), we investigated perceived discrimination in hiring (PDH), its predictors and its effect on the intention to file a discrimination complaint, rather than solely considering actual complaints. Using a quasi-experimental design, we simulated a fictitious hiring process with 361 students from French-speaking Canadian universities. First, we confirmed the three dimensions of the recently developed PDH scale: differential treatment; breach of psychological contract; and non-competency-based assessment (Haeck-Pelletier, 2022). Second, using structural equation modelling (SEM), we found mediation effects: PDH scores were higher across all dimensions when a candidate belonged to a minority group, received a negative hiring decision or did not receive feedback on test results. However, only differential treatment predicted a candidate’s intention to file a complaint. In addition to this first empirical test of Anderson’s model, the results suggest that organizations should address perceptions of unfair treatment due to minority group membership by identifying and modifying the practices that contribute to them. The eventual outcome would be a more representative workforce.

The article reviews the book, "Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression," by Chris Wright.

Dans la foulée de l’expérience de télétravail obligatoire vécue pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 et pour tirer profit à la fois des avantages du télétravail et du travail en présence, de nombreuses organisations ont récemment embrassé le travail hybride. La fonction publique québécoise s’est engagée dans cette voie, en déployant une politique-cadre en matière de télétravail qui régule le nombre de jours de télétravail hebdomadaires. La récence du déploiement à large échelle de cette modalité d’organisation du travail appelle à mieux comprendre ses effets sur la réponse attitudinale du personnel. Prenant appui sur le modèle d’acceptation de la technologie et sur la théorie du signal, cet article vise à examiner la réponse perceptuelle et attitudinale du personnel au travail hybride. À partir de données quantitatives et qualitatives collectées en octobre 2022 auprès du personnel professionnel de la fonction publique et parapublique (n = 3 904), les résultats montrent l’effet positif de l’agréabilité perçue et de l’utilité perçue d’une journée de travail en présence sur la satisfaction à l’égard du travail hybride. La satisfaction à l’endroit du travail hybride influence positivement l’adéquation personne/organisation. L’adéquation personne/organisation exerce un effet positif sur l’engagement organisationnel ainsi que sur la satisfaction au travail. Elle joue un rôle médiateur dans la relation entre la satisfaction envers l’expérience de travail hybride et l’engagement organisationnel, ainsi qu’entre la satisfaction envers l’expérience de travail hybride et la satisfaction au travail. Les résultats qualitatifs témoignent de l’absence de valeur ajoutée des jours de travail en présence, d’une insatisfaction à l’égard du manque de flexibilité et d’une perception positive à l’égard des avantages du télétravail. Ces résultats ajoutent aux connaissances empiriques quant à l’appréciation de l’adéquation personne/organisation dans un contexte de travail hybride. Ils contribuent aux connaissances managériales en soulignant l’importance de considérer les attentes et les valeurs du personnel dans le déploiement des pratiques et politiques organisationnelles.

Queer history in Canada has often centred around metropolitan areas, like Toronto and Montreal, usually foregrounding social movements. This means that queer histories of the periphery are often overlooked, and that histories of metropole are taken as representative of the national context. In this thesis, I examine queer oral histories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Through these oral histories I aim to complicate dominant narratives in both queer history and histories of deindustrialization in Canada. Cape Breton is a former steel and coal region in Nova Scotia that underwent a comparatively slow, state-managed deindustrialization in the latter half of the 20th century. Today, like in deindustrialized areas across the world, the “structure of feeling” of industrial life remains, despite plant and mine closure. Often, histories of deindustrialization center around a mythologized white male (and indubitably heterosexual) breadwinner, centering not just workers, but the specific function that masculine industrial labour played in the social reproduction of the Fordist accord in the household. By taking up the life stories of queer people, we can critically examine this centring of the nuclear family in deindustrialization studies. In the first chapter, I offer a theoretical and historiographical intervention arguing for a queer investigation of deindustrialization. In the second chapter, I apply this line of thinking to oral histories of Cape Breton queers, arguing that these narrators’ desires for queer history and queer future are ultimately filtered through the prism of deindustrialization’s half-life.

The article reviews the book, "Perceptions de justice et santé au travail. L’organisation à l’épreuve," edited by Stéphane Moulin.

This thesis examines the experiences of pupils-cum-inmates who attended the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (OIB) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Customary assessments of segregated education, which investigate administrators’ campaigns to implement pedagogical or curricular advancements, have characterized institutionalization as educational and emancipatory. Instead, this project challenges identity-centric, rights-based narratives by reframing the OIB as constitutive of Ontario’s carceral apparatus. Drawing upon first-person testimony gathered during four investigations into the OIB conducted by the Government of Ontario, the analysis demonstrates that capitalist development dispossessed blind Canadians from waged labour, generating an underclass of precarious and oft-wageless proletarians. Institutionalization socialized the workers-in-training within a prison-like environment where punishments like whippings and beatings, solitary confinement, and material deprivation were commonplace. Educational opportunities were haphazard and irregular, while living and working conditions were uncomfortable, bordering on intolerable. Biomedical understandings of blindness rationalized the mistreatment of inmates, as administrators attempted to reintegrate graduates into waged labour. Children and adolescents survived by developing cultures of delinquency and transgression; inmates, especially working-class inmates, organized popular resistance movements that challenged institutional authority. Educational authorities responded by overseeing the repression of working-class culture. By funneling graduates into either working-class occupations or “gentlemanly” and “learned” professions, institutionalization fomented processes of class formation, creating, first, an underclass of labourers and musicians and, second, a vanguard of capitalists and professionals.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to renewed discussion of decent work for people at the margins of the labour market. This article explores public policy on platform workers across three liberal market economies, namely the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, taking the pandemic as a focal point. Liberal market economies are generally difficult environments for unions, and we examine the nature of union political pressure on the state to enhance protections for platform workers and the extent to which policy has changed in each state. We find uneven levels of such union pressure, with the most limited attention afforded by Irish unions. In the United Kingdom, the unions did exert some influence through strategic litigation, creating a policy problem for the government. More progressive policies are evident in Canada, where the government recognises that platform workers’ precarious position has undesirable consequences for the state.

The article reviews the book, "Regards croisés sur la grève d'Amoco à Hawkesbury, une histoire ouvrière de l'Ontario français," by Andréane Gagnon.