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This article examines occupational health and safety (OHS), with a particular focus on youth apprentices. It uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the incidence of injuries among youth apprentices, and their experiences related to health and safety at work in Canada. Analysis of large-scale national surveys suggests a high incidence of work-related injuries among youth and low participation rates of younger workers in formal OHS training. A survey of 173 former Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program (OYAP) and Registered Apprenticeship Program in Alberta (RAP) participants finds that one-fifth suffered serious occupational injuries, which required time off work. The results from this study have important implications for youth apprenticeship programs, particularly the OHS- and trade-specific knowledge required for youth to work safely during and following their apprenticeship training.

This paper considers the likelihood of whether freedom of association under section 2(d) of the Charter will be held to include a constitutional right to strike - a question which the Supreme Court of Canada will have an opportun- ity to answer when it hears the upcoming appeal in the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour case. The authors note that the prospects for the recognition of such a right have changed dramatically in the five years since the Supreme Court concluded in B.C. Health that the Charter provided protection for a limited process of collective bargaining. The main reason for this shift is the Court's subsequent decision in the Fraser case, holding that collective bargaining is merely a "derivative right" of freedom of association and that an infringement of section 2(d) in the labour relations context will be found only where the impugned legislation or state action has the effect of making it "impossible" for employees to collectively pursue workplace goals. The authors go on to review how this "effective impossibility" test has been applied by appellate courts in Ontario, British Columbia and the federal jurisdiction in recent freedom of asso- ciation claims. In their view, the restrictive approach now taken by the courts makes it highly unlikely that section 2(d) will be found to protect a right to strike. Even if strike activity is held to attract constitutional protection, they argue, such protection would apply only in very limited situations.

My dissertation project examines women’s family lives, career trajectories, and status attainment. I draw on the concept of the work-family interface to highlight how work and families operate as contextual layers that cross-over in shaping definitions and appraisals of mothers as workers and workers as mothers. Utilizing data on married mothers’ complete working histories, I demonstrate that job exits due to motherhood negatively impact women’s occupational status attainment (SES), but I also show that women face penalties when changing jobs involuntarily and also due to personal reasons not tied to the maternal role. Importantly, in each instance, I demonstrate that these effects operate independently of the non-employment durations they engender, offering broad support for the status characteristics framework which points to the role of employer appraisals of women’s work commitment in shaping their SES outcomes. I also bring families back into the discussion of the work-family interface via the construction of a family-level framework that draws on mothers’, fathers’ and children’s attitudes about maternal employment as a platform for the development of discrete family configurations. I reveal a wide array of family attitude configurations that underscore that maternal employment continues to be contested moral terrain in some families while it is ii supported in others. In particular, I show that in egalitarian families—where maternal employment is not seen as a risk to ‘good’ mothering—mothers report more positive experiences of family and marital relations, less housework and more paid work, and higher earnings. I argue that family contexts represent an important yet understudied contextual reality that is more than the sum of individual views and which have unique consequences for women’s family lives and status trajectories.

The article reviews the book, "Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada," by Alan Filewood.

Boom, Bust and Crisis: Labour, Corporate Power and Politics in Canada, edited by John Peters, is reviewed.

This article reviews the English-speaking literature on Spanish and German industrial relations published in the top 10 journals between 2000 and 2010. Our analysis contributes to the debate about the relevance of industrial relations by establishing the state of the art in research on Spain using Germany as a point of comparison. Apart from indicating deficiencies in research on Spain, the results reveal a greater convergence in research regarding its restricted multidisciplinary character, its focus on the international level and a strong emphasis on empirical, quantitative work with analysis conducted at various levels. At the same time some path dependency continues to exist, particularly concerning the active participants in research and the subjects for investigation. We conclude by discussing whether the research on Spain should require normative preconceptions in order to orient policymakers -- an aspect that has been largely overlooked when discussing the rejuvenation of industrial relations.

One of the reforms proposed for Ontario's broader public sector by the Drummond Report is the establishment of centralized bar- gaining structures. As Chaykowski and Hickey have argued, such a reform "must consider whether, how, and in what context, alterna- tive bargaining structures and enhanced coordination could yield outcomes which promote efficiencies and improve value."' In this regard, the transformation of bargaining structures in the Canadian construction industry offers some lessons on structural realignment.

The article reviews the book, "Boom, Bust and Crisis: Labour Corporate Power and Politics in Canada," edited by John Peters.

Analyzes the tendency of public sector unions towards social unionist strategies, including in collective bargaining and mobilizing broader public support for services.

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.