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The lengthy and raucous 1986 Gainers meatpacking plant strike in Edmonton, Alberta was one of the most important events in recent Alberta labour history. In the midst of the economic crisis of the 1980s and the rise of neo-liberal ideas, the strike marked a backlash by both the labour movement and ordinary citizens against attacks on workers and unions. Characterized by widely covered picket line violence, repressive police and court actions, and government unresponsiveness, the strike generated massive solidarity within and beyond the labour movement. This solidarity originated in a rejection of the neo-liberal new reality of Alberta typified by high unemployment, anti-union laws and practices, and lack of government welfare support, and it generated a provincial change the law campaign, national boycott, and rising class consciousness. The working class mobilization during the Gainers strike was a watershed for the Alberta labour movement.

This research examines the everyday experiences of immigrant women working informally in the City of Toronto (Canada). The study is based on analysis of original in depth interview (n = 27) and focus group data (n = 19). The thesis begins from the belief that the choice of highly educated immigrant women, with and without professional work experiences from their home countries, to do informal work in Canada is part of a fact that they are going through a particularly intensive process of change. With special attention to the potential for critical transformative learning (e.g. Mezirow; Freire) - how this change is produced, experienced, and addressed is the key focus in this study. The study considers three avenues of experience potentially influencing change in the lives of immigrant women post-immigration: i) the ways of knowing, frames of reference, and worldviews of these women as shaped by the complex relationship between their private (e.g. as mothers and wives) and public (e.g. as community members and informal product/service workers) lives; ii) the various economic and cultural relations and shifting locations that mediate how the individual makes choices regarding (formal and/or informal) work activities; and, iii) the social relations shaping the changing experiences and interpretations of interlocking systems of power relations involving gender, race, class and disability.Agentive participation and learning in the context of economic participation are key in understanding women's choices, experiences, and outcomes in the context of their work and life experiences in Canada. This study reveals the multidimensional, often contradictory, processes of change that individuals in marginalized situations post-immigration go through and their awareness of and influence over these change processes. The analysis suggests a multilayered process that supports and sometimes inhibits the creation of a new foundation for various types of transformative learning trajectories; one that keeps the loose threads together and moves people towards and along a path they individually or collectively choose to follow in order to find meaning and realize positive change.

The article reviews the book "Negotiating Risk, Seeking Security, Eroding Solidarity: Life and Work on the Border" by Holly Gibbs, Belinda Leach, and Charlotte A.B. Yates.

Nordic Lights: Work, Management and Welfare in Scandinavia, edited by Ake Sandberg, is reviewed.

This article reviews the book, "Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana's World War II Home Front," by Matthew L. Basso.

It is well known that unions and collective bargaining allows workers to achieve progress in areas such as compensation, working conditions, and other "economic issues". This report examines how unions have also had a positive influence in their communities, in society at large and on the quality of our democracy. The Rand Formula is a formula dating back to 1946 when a decision was made during an arbitration hearing by Justice Ivan Rand that union dues would be paid by all employees benefitting from the collective agreement, not just signed union members. This means the employer deducts the dues from all employee paychecks and then forwards those funds to the union. The Rand Formula prevents employees from benefitting from the work of the union, while not paying union dues.

This article reviews the book, "Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era," by Stephen J. Silvia.

In 2006 Ontario undertook major reforms to its human rights enforcement regime, eliminating the human rights commission's "gatekeeper" function and introducing a "direct access" modelfor the adjudication of complaints. Drawing on extensive primary research, this paper explores the historical antecedents to current debates about the appropriate model for human rights enforcement, by describing and analyzing four themes associated with the enactment of Ontario's 'fair practices" statutes in the 1950s - predecessors of the present-day Human Rights Code. As the author explains, those statutes prohibited particular types of discrimination based on race, religion, nationality and other grounds, and were enforced through an administrative process that was intended to have a remedial rather than punitive focus. The first theme relates to a tension in the arguments advanced by the social activists who campaigned for fair prac- tices: those arguments had both a "negative" aspect, which highlighted the harm caused by discrimination and the immorality of discriminatory conduct, and a "positive" aspect, which emphasized the importance of creating equal opportunity. The second theme is the idea of the public responsibility of both governments and citizens to act against discrimination. The third theme con- cerns the views expressed by fair practices activists on the role to be played by law's coercive power, particularly the distinction they drew between prejudice and discrimination, and the emphasis they placed on conciliation as opposed to adjudication in the enforcement process. The fourth and final theme arises from the actual experience of using fair practices legislation to achieve social change. In the author's view, each of those themes raises ongoing questions about the enforcement of human rights statutes, and more generally about the potential of law as an instrument in the struggle against inequality.

The article pays homage to the life and work of US historian Robert H. Babcock (1931-2014), a Canadian studies specialist who was known especially for his book, "Gompers in Canada."

Young people today in Canada face a reality vastly different from the one 20 or 30 years ago, economically and socially. This paper will examine how young workers are experiencing various changing realities such as: student debt, precarious employment (unemployment, under-employment, and unwaged work), reduced job security (including unionization), rising inequality, changing wealth/debt dynamics and, less quantifiably, diminished social cohesion and community connection as a result of growing insecurity. While this paper will examine the issue from a national perspective, it will also identify how some of these trends are being played out — or differ — in Newfoundland and Labrador.

This article reviews the book, "Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor," by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson.

In this paper, the author argues that by imposing a duty to accommodate on unions in the Renaud case, the Supreme Court of Canada intended primarily to encourage unions to cooperate with employer efforts to accommodate, and did not seek to make unions co-liable for all discrimination embedded in collect- ive agreements. The Court's decision was ambiguous, however, and subsequent tribunals and courts have distorted its original intent by imposing joint (and sometimes sole) liability on unions for discrimination in situations in which they had no meaningful control over bargaining outcomes or no independent abil- ity to accommodate the claimant, or in which unions' representative role was not properly considered. Unions have largely avoided Renaud-based liability because, in the decades since that decision, workplace human rights claims have increasingly been dealt with through grievance arbitration (where unions are not vulnerable to co-liability claims) rather than before human rights tribunals. The author sees this as a generally positive development which permits human rights claims to be integrated with collective agreement claims and places pri- mary accountability for workplace discrimination on employers, who are best placed to remedy the discrimination. She acknowledges, however, that dealing with workplace discrimination at arbitration could create conflicts of interest, which may require reconsideration of some aspects of current procedure. She concludes that Renaud has largely done the job the Supreme Court intended, although it has done so by influencing union behaviour in arbitration rather than by making unions directly accountable for compliance with statutory human rights norms. She expresses continuing concern about Renaud's ambiguities and calls on the Supreme Court to clarify Renaud's message in light of modern conceptions of the duty to accommodate and the realities of workplace power distribution.

This article reviews the book, "The War and its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century," by Helen Graham.

Les Salariés de l'incertitude. Solidarité, reconnaissance et équilibre de vie au travail, by Diane Bellemare, is reviewed.

Canadian labour law has ensured that all workers who benefit from collective agreements contribute to the cost of maintaining those agreements through union dues. Today the security of unions is under attack within Ontario, and elsewhere in Canada. This paper looks at how Conservative proposals, imported from the US, would threaten union security in Ontario by removing the Rand Formula requirement of mandatory dues payment, and allowing workers to opt out of the bargaining unit. The Rand Formula is a formula dating back to 1946 when a decision was made during an arbitration hearing by Justice Ivan Rand that union dues would be paid by all employees benefitting from the collective agreement, not just signed union members. This means the employer deducts the dues from all employee paychecks and then forwards those funds to the union. The Rand Formula prevents employees from benefitting from the work of the union, while not paying union dues.

Canada’s system of industrial legality has routinely limited the collective abilities of workers to strike. Under the conditions of neoliberal globalization, those limitations have intensified. Yet, in 1997, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, waged a successful strike against Pepsi-Cola Canada. In addition to defeating the company, the union also expanded workers’ collective rights through a successful constitutional challenge to restrictive common-law rules limiting secondary picketing. This paper examines the history of that strike, exploring the multifaceted strategies that the workers undertook to challenge the company, the state, and the existing law. It argues that workers were successful because they utilized tactics of civil disobedience to defend their abilities to picket. Recognizing that success, the paper is also critical of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision and its evolution of common-law torts to limit workers’ collective action. The paper concludes by arguing that the Pepsi conflict highlights the importance of civil disobedience in building workers’ movements while emphasizing the inherent limitations of constitutional challenges to further workers’ collective freedoms in Canada.

In this article, I examine the Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC), an independent, grassroots, socialist-feminist union that organized workers in unorganized industries in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. I look at SORWUC’s role in Canadian labour history in general, and its efforts to organize workers in the service industry in particular. My central thesis is that SORWUC’s socialist-feminist unionism and commitment to organizing unorganized workers positioned the union as radically differ­ent from the mainstream labour movement. This difference both helped and hindered the union. Specifically, SORWUC’s experiences organizing workers at Bimini pub and Muckamuck restaurant in British Columbia demonstrate that although its alternative structure and strategies aided organizing and strike efforts, these factors made little difference in the union’s dealings with the labour relations boards and the courts: in both cases, the action or inaction of the state ultimately determined the outcome. Although SORWUC no longer exists, it remains an important historical example of how workers in Canada have been and can be organized. SORWUC thus offers important lessons about service worker organizing, alternative forms of unionization, and the powerful role of the state in labour relations in the postwar period.

Relatively little attention has been paid to understanding and addressing the potential health-related barriers faced by older workers to stay at work. Using three representative samples from the Canadian Community Health Survey, we examined the relationship between seven physical chronic conditions and labour market participation in Canada between 2000 and 2005. We found that all conditions were associated with an increased probability of not being able to work due to health reasons. In our adjusted models, heart disease was associated with the greatest probability of not working due to health reasons. Arthritis was associated with the largest population attributable fraction. Other variables associated with not being able to work due to health reasons included older age, female gender and lower educational attainment. We also found particular combinations of chronic conditions (heart disease and diabetes; and arthritis and back pain) were associated with a greater risk than the separate effects of each condition independently. The results of this study demonstrate that chronic conditions are associated with labour market participation limitations to differing extents. Strategies to keep older workers in the labour market in Canada will need to address barriers to staying at work that result from the presence of chronic conditions, and particular combinations of conditions.

"[D]escribes the early history of librarianship at the University of Toronto, including the evolution of library education and the fight for recognition and status of librarians." -- Editors' introduction.

The article reviews the book, "An Environmental History of Canada," by Laurel Sefton MacDowell.