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Employment standards (ES) are legislated standards that set minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. In Canada, the majority of workers rely on ES for basic regulatory protection; however, a significant ‘enforcement gap’ exists. In the province of Ontario, this enforcement gap has been exacerbated in recent years due to the deregulation of ES through inadequate funding, workplace restructuring, legislative reforms that place greater emphasis on individualized complaints processes and voluntary compliance, and a formal separation of unions from ES enforcement. The implications of these developments are that, increasingly, those in precarious jobs, many of whom lack union representation, are left with insufficient regulatory protection from employer non-compliance, further heightening their insecurity. Taking the province of Ontario as our focus, in this article we critically examine alternative proposals for ES enforcement, placing our attention on those that enhance the involvement of unions in addressing ES violations. Through this analysis, we suggest that augmenting unions’ supportive roles in ES enforcement holds the potential to enhance unions’ regulatory function and offers a possible means to support the ongoing efforts of other workers’ organizations to improve employer compliance with ES.

La surqualification, définie comme la situation qui caractérise un individu dont le niveau de formation dépasse celui qui est normalement requis pour l’emploi occupé, a subi une forte tendance à la hausse au cours des vingt dernières années. Au Québec et au Canada, elle touche un tiers des travailleurs, surtout les plus jeunes. Ce phénomène, qui témoigne de l’incapacité du marché du travail à offrir à un grand nombre de personnes des emplois qui correspondent à leurs qualifications, est devenu pour tous les acteurs de la vie économique et sociale un enjeu de premier ordre. Ce livre présente un ensemble d’études récentes sur la surqualification. Son objectif est de mesurer l’étendue du phénomène du point de vue statistique et de mettre en relief les facteurs qui interviennent dans sa genèse et son développement. L’ouvrage évalue plusieurs approches et modèles analytiques et présente des résultats de recherches qui utilisent diverses bases de données. Il offre un portrait détaillé de la surqualification au Québec et au Canada. De manière plus fondamentale, il soulève la question de la valeur des diplômes sur le marché du travail et suggère des pistes de réflexion pour atteindre l’adéquation entre la formation de la main-d’œuvre et le profil des emplois. --Publisher's description

The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Teamsters Strikes of 1934," by Bryan D. Palmer.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities," edited by D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly; and "Academic Careers and the Gender Gap," by Maureen Baker.

Argues that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's exercise of political power falls outside of parliamentary and constitutional norms, such as the repeated use of omnibus bills, prerogation of Parliament, and closure of debates.

Accelerating flows of remittances are dwarfing global development aid. This study deepens our understanding of remittance impacts on the families of workers who come to Canada annually for several months under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Interviews with SAWP workers, their spouses, adult children and teachers in Mexico deepen our understanding of the impacts of these remittances. They demonstrate that the remittances are often literally a lifeline to transnational family survival, allowing them to pay for basic needs such as shelter, food, and medical care. Yet, at the same time, the remittances do not allow most of these workers and their families to escape deep poverty and significant precarity, including new forms of precarity generated by the SAWP. Instead, SAWP remittances help reduce poverty, at least temporarily, to more moderate levels while precarious poverty expands through global neoliberal underdevelopment.

"[U]ses autoethnography to convey the experience of librarians participating in faculty associations, providing a compelling narrative of the impact on the participants and the communities they represent." -- Editors' introduction.

Argues that there is an underlying narrative incoherence in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper's use of history for partisan ends. Examines the government's reaction to traditional liberal interpretations of Canadian history and national identity.

This article reviews the book, "Detroit's Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism," by Colleen Doody.

This dissertation examines workplace issues and events that shaped men’s health, and the healthcare services in support of them, in northern Ontario’s resource extraction industries. Between 1890 and 1925 there were important transformations in the hardrock mining sector including: technological innovations and refinements of the materials and devices used to extract ores; the healthcare mandated and legislatively prescribed but challenging to deliver to frontier workspaces; and how the complex interactions of the men, their work, their communities, wartime demands and collective bargaining combined to construct new definitions of masculinity. Using quantitative data from the Ontario Bureau of Mines on the numbers of annual accidents and fatalities, a clearer understanding emerges that reveals how workingmen’s bodies were understood over time. Together with newspaper accounts, the reports of coroners’ juries, personal papers, doctors’ memoirs and popular histories, the role of work and workplace conditions clarifies how health was managed or how it suffered as the exploitation of the provinces natural resources began in earnest. The impact of World War One caused a wholesale change in the scale and importance of the mines and the men that worked them. This was seen in their solidarity, strength and successful strike immediately after the war and in fewer accidents and fatalities. The pace of change, however, faded in the post-war era. The gains that were made were kept and men’s health and safety never again saw the alarming losses as those enumerated here.

In contrast with Schein's theory, which presumes a single dominant career anchor, this study proposes an original model based on a career value structure that could explain why some individuals have several dominant career anchors. Career values, which are organized according a circular logic, are grouped into four large clusters of values which are opposed by pairs: bureaucratic self-concept opposed to the protean self-concept and careerist self-concept opposed to social self-concept. Using a new career value inventory, the model was tested on a sample of 240 employees and 155 managers in a health care organization. Construct validity was demonstrated by linking career values with career anchors, proactivity and collectivism. For instance, of the four career self-concepts, only the careerist self-concept is significantly related to the managerial competence.

This article reviews the book, "Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania 1897-1959," by Robert P. Wolensky and William A. Hastie, Sr.

This article reviews the book, "Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good," by Stephen D'Arcy.

Since the 2008 revisions to the Ontario Human Rights Code, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) has been responsible for providing fair, accessible, effective and timely resolution of human rights complaints. The author, formerly vice-chair of the HRTO, reviews the implementation and oper- ation of that system over its first five years, highlighting key challenges and the HRTO's responses to them. The author describes the principal stages of the current HRTO process, including applications and responses, mediation, and the hearing on the merits. He also outlines the ongoing restructuring of Ontario's administrative justice system into clusters, the development of a sum- mary hearings procedure, the use of litigation guardians, and efforts to control misuse of the system by vexatious litigants. In his view, the figures to date show progress in the areas of access to justice and efficient caseload management, but much remains to be done. Budget pressures make it difficult to fund such resource-heavy initiatives as active review of files, early case management, and the refining of the HRTO's processes to make them more accessible to appli- cants. The experience of the HRTO since 2008 can offer significant guidance in the design offuture direct access systems in human rights and other areas of administrative justice.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left," by Martin Duberman; "The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the 'People’s Historian'" by edited by Timothy McCarthy; and"Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinn’s Legacies and the Future of Activism," edited by Stephen Bird, Adam Silver, and Joshua C. Yesnowitz.

[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