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The article reviews the book, "The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865-1950," by Tony Rondinone.

Analyzes the impact of climate change and climate policy on employment in the tourism industry. --Editor's introduction

This book follows the life and intellectual journey of Joseph Baruch Salsberg, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who became a major figure of the Ontario Left, a leading voice for human rights in the Ontario legislature, and an important journalist in the Jewish community. His life trajectory mirrored many of the most significant transformations in Canadian political and social life in the twentieth century. Award-winning historian Gerald Tulchinsky traces Salsberg’s personal and professional journey – from his entrance into Toronto’s oppressive garment industry at age 14, which led to his becoming active in emerging trade unions, to his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party of Canada and the Workers’ Unity League. Detailing Salsberg’s time as an influential Toronto alderman and member of the Ontario legislature, the book also examines his dramatic break with communism and his embrace of a new career in journalism. Tulchinsky employs historical sources not used before to explain how Salsberg’s family life and surrounding religious and social milieu influenced his evolution as a Zionist, an important labour union leader, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, and a prominent member of Toronto’s Jewish community. --Publisher's description

Based on an online survey and in-depth interviews conducted from 2009 to 2010, this study looks at the reality of a particular group of foreign-born and foreign-trained professionals in Ontario. These are the professionals who did not get to practise their respective professions after immigration but acquired a new profession in the form of settlement work. The study identifies their pre-immigration education and work history, the reasons they left their countries of origin (or of permanent residence) for Canada, the expectations they had, the choices they made about pursuing professional practice, the efforts they put towards that or some alternative goal, and their eventual professional reconstitution as settlement workers. Following the Canadian trajectory of these dual professionals has three contributions to research into immigrant access to professions. First, their individual experiences reveal the social processes of inclusion in, and exclusion from, professional practice. Second, unlike those immigrants who are de-professionalized in the post-immigration period, our target population reinvent themselves as practitioners of a new profession and thus provide a more nuanced immigrant experience. Third, their common practice as settlement workers gives us insight into the dynamics of an emerging profession that is settlement work.

In this thesis I address the question of sympathetic action - action by one group of workers designed to aid another group of workers in their struggle with an employer, manifested most obviously through refusals by workers to cross a picket line - through the lens of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As the law currently stands in Canada, undertaking sympathetic action collectively is invariably illegal as it is considered an illegal "strike" under Canadian labour legislation. Further, workers who undertake sympathetic action - whether collectively or individually - can be subject to discipline or discharge by their employer. I argue that workers who undertake sympathetic action can have numerous motivations, ranging from economic self-interest to deeply-held political or moral beliefs (the latter manifested through the concept of "solidarity"), and that when those motivations include expressive or conscientious interests, sympathetic action should be entitled to protection by the fundamental freedoms of conscience, expression, and association found in section 2 of the Charter. I further argue that a each of these freedoms represents a different aspect of the inherent dignity and worth of an individual, and that a right to sympathetic action promotes both those freedoms and Charter values. Finally, I argue that a constitutional right to sympathetic action is a free-standing right that can exist even in the absence of a constitutional right to strike. This thesis reviews the current and historical state of Canadian law (in both the statutory labour relations regimes and in common law) regarding sympathetic action, the potential application of the Charter freedoms of conscience, expression, and association to sympathetic action, and finally options for reform that reduce or eliminate restrictions on sympathetic action and therefore make our labour relations system more in keeping with Charter values.

Despite being dubbed "the world's oldest profession," prostitution has rarely been viewed as a legitimate form of labour. Instead, it has been criminalized, sensationalized, and polemicized across the socio-political spectrum by everyone from politicians to journalists to women's groups. Interest in and concern over sex work is not grounded in the lived realities of those who work in the industry, but rather in inflammatory ideas about who is participating, how they wound up in this line of work, and what form it takes. In Selling Sex, Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love present a more nuanced, balanced, and realistic view of the sex industry. They bring together a vast collection of voices - including researchers, feminists, academics, and advocates, as well as sex workers of differing ages, genders, and sectors - to engage in a dialogue that challenges the dominant narratives surrounding the sex industry and advances the idea that sex work is in fact work. Presenting a variety of opinions and perspectives on such diverse topics as the social stigma of sex work, police violence, labour organizing, anti-prostitution feminism, human trafficking, and harm reduction, Selling Sex is an eye-opening, challenging, and necessary book. --Publisher's description

When celebrated Wobbly troubadour Joe Hill purportedly visited the Rossland Miners’ Hall in the early 1900s to lend his support to the first Canadian local of the rugged Western Federation of Miners (WFM), he no doubt shared some of his inspired verses with the mine workers who are said to have protected him. Claims of his visit are unsubstantiated, but if he did get to Rossland, British Columbia, he likely would have sung them some of his most popular tunes about struggle, resistance, and the dream of a workers’ paradise, and in so doing he would have been performing the same service that poets and songwriters had rendered working people since the earliest days of the trade union movement. This paper explores examples of that historical literary tradition through a study of smelter worker poetry found in the pages of The Commentator, a trade union newspaper published in Trail by Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) in the late 1930s and early 1940s as labour activists were striving to rekindle the union spirit at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S Company), then the world’s largest lead and zinc smelter and a key munitions manufacturer during the First and Second World Wars.

Le 12 juin 1843 restera dans la mémoire comme le « Lundi rouge » : un jour funeste, où plusieurs ouvriers irlandais affectés au creusement du canal Beauharnois trouvent la mort pour avoir réclamé de meilleures conditions de travail. Plus de deux mille « canaliers » en grève illégale subissent la charge des troupes de la garnison qui les dispersent avec une violence démesurée devant l’hôtel où logent leurs patrons – feux, sabres et chevaux contre pelles, pioches et gourdins. Cet événement tragique marque à ce jour le conflit de travail le plus sanglant de l’histoire du Canada. L’indignation générale contraint le gouvernement à instituer une des premières enquêtes publiques du pays. Une enquête biaisée, comme le démontre brillamment Roland Viau qui examine de nouvelles pièces au dossier en faisant revivre le quotidien des familles irlandaises installées le long du canal. Il aboutit à des constats troublants, révélant l’arbitraire des tribunaux envers ces travailleurs migrants honteusement exploités et méprisés, et met à jour l’existence d’une société secrète qui préfigure le mouvement syndical. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century," by Alyosha Goldstein.

Workers in Ontario, Canada are on the edge of a crisis in the enforcement of their minimum employment standards (ES). This crisis is shaped not only by well-documented deficiencies in the scope of labour protection but by the fact that the administration of the ES system has not kept pace with the increasing number of workers and workplaces requiring protection under the province’s employment standards act. Coupled with an outmoded complaint-based system, the dearth of support for ES enforcement is cultivating a situation in which an unprecedented number of workers are bearers of rights without genuine opportunities for redress. Responding to this situation, this article explores how measures augmenting the voices of workers and their advocates could contribute to improving ES enforcement in Ontario. It does so through a review of innovative practices in other common law contexts characterized by similar enforcement regimes where labour market conditions have likewise deteriorated.

Although several recent articles have underscored the importance of human resource management, employee involvement, and labour-management cooperation, there has been very little research addressing these topics from the perspective of organized labour. This study is aimed at providing some practical information about labour-management relations across the country.

This paper explores how coping styles relate to physicians' feelings of emotional exhaustion, a key dimension of burnout. We also explore whether four coping styles are more or less effective depending on certain dispositional and/or situational factors. We analyze survey data from 1,110 physicians in Western Canada. Denial is significantly related to physicians' emotional exhaustion, but it increases rather than decreases it. Physicians use denial when they experience work overload and difficult patient interactions. Furthermore, it is used by those with high negative affectivity. A highly positive outlook, however, appears to neutralize the harmful relationship between denial and emotional exhaustion. The harmful experiences related to stressful patient interactions are weakened for doctors who disengage or take a time out from the situation. We conclude that certain coping strategies are more effective depending on personality type and the type of stress encountered.

The article reviews the book, "The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon," by William M. Adler.

The article reviews the book, "Regulating the British Economy, 1660-1850," edited by Perry Gauci.

This article examines the decline in unionization that has occurred in the United States over the past half century, focusing on the role that employer opposition to unions has played, together with relatively weak labor law. It compares the U.S. experience and labor law regime to those of Canada. It finds that, compared to their Canadian counterparts, U.S. workers have much more difficulty in exercising their right to freely join and form unions and participate in collective bargaining, in large part due to ill-restrained employer opposition.

Contrasts the administrative structure of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which has undermined its effectiveness, with that of Union of Postal Workers, which in the mid-1960s transformed into a democratic, militant bargaining agent for its workers. Concludes that both unions are in a weakened state, and that only through a broader coalition of forces can the neoliberal agenda of the federal government be fought.

The article reviews the book, "Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment," by Ian Angus.

The article reviews the book, "The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good," by Richard Dienst.

To show how formal and informal jobs are not always discrete, this paper uncovers how many formal employees in the European Union are paid two wages by their formal employers, an official declared salary and an additional undeclared wage, thus allowing employers to evade their full social insurance and tax liabilities. Analyzing a 2007 Eurobarometer survey involving 26,659 face-to-face interviews in the 27 member states of the European Union (EU-27), one in 18 formal employees are found to engage in such quasi-formal employment, receiving on average one-quarter of their gross salary on an undeclared basis. Multi-level logistic regression analysis reveals that quasi-formal employment is significantly more prevalent in East-Central Europe, in smaller businesses and the construction sector, and amongst men, younger persons and the lower paid. The paper then briefly reviews what might be done to tackle this illegitimate wage practice.

Policymakers, politicians, and media outlets have declared an obesity epidemic. In doing so, they have named a variety of villains, including fast food. Despite the framing of fast food as being a leading contributor to weight gain and obesity, we have yet to understand the impact that fast food has on those who work with it every day. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the food choices, BMIs, and self perceived weights of the food service worker population. Using Pierre Bourdieu‘s concepts of habitus and field, I investigate the role of the workplace and external cultural influences, such as the family, in navigating an obseogenic workplace environment that is centered on selling highly caloric food to the Canadian public in a quick and cost effective manner. The first stage of this research addresses the question: Are food service workers more likely to be overweight or obese and perceive themselves as being overweight compared to the general population? In order to do this, I analyzed secondary survey data from the Canadian Community Health Survey cycle 5.1 (2009-2010). I used logistic regression techniques to construct models that analyze the likelihood of having high BMIs and high self perceived weights in both the food service worker and general Canadian populations. In addition to this, I sought to understand the food choices that contribute to weight gain in fast food workers. To do this, I conducted forty semi-structured qualitative interviews with workers from a variety of fast food chains. The results of my research disprove my original hypothesis that food service workers are more likely to be overweight or obese because of their frequent exposure to fast food. Instead, I found that they are less likely to be overweight or obese than the general Canadian population. Additionally, they are also less likely to perceive themselves as being overweight or obese. Through the qualitative interviews, I found that these individuals participate in a process of regulation where they monitor their food intake at work. Additionally, I found that their consumption patterns stemmed from habitus generated through cultural exposures in other areas of their lives. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues that we develop habitus through meaningful cultural exposure. We use our habitus, or engrained dispositions, to navigate hierarchical spaces or fields. Through this research, I found that workers viewed their jobs as being temporary and their cultural consumption patterns did not seem to change from their exposures to their workplaces. The majority were part time students, working in this industry to pay for living expenses and tuition. For the most part, they were raised in middle class homes where their mothers prepared food for their families from scratch on a daily basis. Fast food was viewed as a special treat and not an item to consume on a regular basis. I conclude that the meaningful exposures we have to food and cultural norms throughout life are more important in determining our food choices than our exposure to fast food restaurants.