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[E]xplores the dynamics of labour organizing amongst migrant workers in Canada, focusing on two case studies. First, [the authors] examine recent efforts to unionize migrant farmworkers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. ...[The authors] then turn to the case of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, Québec. ...[Concludes] by assessing the limits and possibilities of [various] strategies, particularly in terms of the implications for labour organizing amongst the growning number of temporary foreign workers in Canada. --From editors' introduction

Examines labor relations between the state (federal and provincial governments) and public sector workers since the 1960s, including interventions into collective bargaining through wage control legislation, wage control policies, back-to-work legislation, and emergency no-strike legislation. Concludes that while Canadian governments have generally accepted the industrial relations system, they have not accepted the outcomes of bargaining. In addition, the authors conclude that there is little evidence to support the thesis of Wellington and Winters (1969) that public sector labor unions use their power to threaten democracy by settling agreements that are contrary to the mandate and best interests of the electorate.

The article reviews the book, "The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age," by Rosanne Currarino.

In recent years, the attractiveness of temporary placement agencies for nurses has grown significantly. In a labour scarcity context, it is worth exploring the motivations that encourage nurses to choose temporary work and remain loyal to their agency. Building on the classification of Tan and Tan (2002), four sources of motivation were explored: individual or family incentives, economic incentives, professional motivations and personal preferences. Regarding family motivations, this study was mainly interested in the role of flexible working conditions offered by placement agencies. Concerning economic motivations, we examined the influence of pay conditions. Our investigation of professional motivations centered on agency nurses' opportunities for skills development. Finally, the role of personal preferences was explored via workload. The results of our study, conducted on two samples, one of 500 nurses working in nursing agencies in Quebec and the other of 99 nurses from two agencies, showed that family and professional development motivations had a positive influence on agency nurses' satisfaction. In contrast, their loyalty is more closely related to the need for flexible hours, training and skills development, job security and the possibility of choosing one's assignments. Good salary conditions are not sufficient. Nurses who choose temporary work are motivated by more than a quest for better economic conditions. They also want greater freedom of choice and self-determination, and more opportunities for professional development.

The way industrial conflict and worker resistance have been analyzed has undergone significant transformation over the past few decades. While researchers have observed the quantitative decline of traditional forms of employee resistance, others have highlighted the diversity and range of more informal employee behaviours. Following Peetz (2002), we show six distinct forms of worker resistance in response to three overlapping decollectivizing employer strategies. We locate the trajectory and significance of these employer strategies and subsequent forms of worker resistance in a neglected consideration of institutional and industrial context. The implications for the way worker resistance and misbehaviour is analyzed and theorized in an increasingly non-union world are discussed. The paper indicates the need to consider the importance of institutional factors in reassessing potential delineations between what are considered formal (and often collective) indicators of conflict, and those more informal instances of workplace misbehaviour.

Research on sex work has documented the harmful effects of criminalization on sex workers' safety. Despite this body of research, the effects of criminalization on the organization of labour within the sex industry and sex workers' suggestions for labour improvements have been largely ignored. In part, this is .due to the mostly hypothetical nature of sex work labour organizing, as many common work-related activities are illegal. When one cannot work from a fixed location, have a manager or employer, or communicate about the terms and conditions of services, focusing on labour improvements can become secondary to protecting oneself from criminal charges. However, the 2010 Ontario Superior Court ruling to decriminalize aspects of prostitution opens the door for a mole nuanced analysis of sex work as a form of labour and for the development of diverse labour organizing strategies. This article presents narratives from a qualitative study with ten current and former sex workers and two allies. It begins by highlighting interviewees' arguments in favour of a "sex is work" paradigm before presenting their suggestions for workplace improvements and ideas about effective labour organizing efforts.

In mid-February 1949, workers at the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Québec, voted to strike against the American-owned Johns-Manville Company. This work stoppage precipitated a provincial industry-wide strike that lasted for almost five months. The 1949 Asbestos strike has been incorporated into Québec's broader political historiography, and is generally regarded as a critical turning point in the history of labour and social relations in French-speaking Canada. Yet the environmental health aspects of the conflict in Asbestos remain largely unexamined. Showing how environmental health issues were a trigger for the strike and a sustained goal of the Asbestos workers seeking improvements in their conditions of work, this article demonstrates how central dust and disease were in the negotiations and arbitration hearings involving unionized workers and the company, both in 1949 and in the years that followed. It also accents the extent to which these environmental issues became health concerns that spread throughout the community. In looking at the Asbestos strike of 1949 through the lens of environmental concerns, fresh insight is gained about the nature of one of Canada's major labour conflicts, expanding our understanding of how health issues emerging in the workplace but extending well past it can affect the nature of everyday life and well being in a resource community.

When Harvey Murphy, the pugnacious western regional director of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, learned that his friend and fellow leftist, American opera star Paul Robeson, was not going to be allowed to cross the Canada-United States border to sing at the Vancouver Mine-Mill convention on February 1, 1952, he didn’t mourn, he organized. First, he organized an impromptu concert where Robeson sang through long-distance phone lines to the delight of convention delegates. Then he promised a much bigger concert that May at the Peace Arch near the Canada-United States border at Blaine, Washington. If the American authorities wouldn’t let Robeson come to the convention, Murphy reasoned, they would take the convention to Robeson. Those authorities had quietly pulled Robeson’s passport in 1950. Had they needed to defend the suspension of the singer’s constitutional right to free passage, they might have said it was a matter of national security; they were protecting the nation from a threat of Communist infiltration. But they needed no such defence. After all, it was the McCarthy era and Communist sympathizers like Robeson were fair game.

Dans cet article, nous analysons l’activité de travail d’opérateurs en situation de handicap, en prenant en compte leur santé, leur sécurité, leurs compétences professionnelles et les activités de médiation des moniteurs d’atelier qui les encadrent, avec l’objectif de préciser des caractéristiques de ce que pourraient être des situations capacitantes pour ces opérateurs. Nous présentons deux études ergonomiques réalisées dans des ateliers de travail protégé en France, au sein d’un établissement et service d’aide par le travail (ESAT). La notion « d’environnement capacitant » nous sert de fil directeur pour aborder les conditions de travail des personnes en situation de handicap mais aussi les situations d’apprentissage qui leur sont proposées. Nous avons ainsi identifié des postes de travail et du matériel qui conduisent à des postures inadaptées et dangereuses ; des stratégies de travail qui permettent aux opérateurs de se préserver mais qui sont aussi limitées et insuffisantes, et des difficultés qui leur font courir des risques. Nous soulignons également des difficultés d’apprentissage en situation. Les moniteurs d’atelier ont un rôle central. Leurs activités de médiation sont un déterminant du développement possible des opérateurs handicapés : d’une part, parce que leur rôle pédagogique est important et, d’autre part, parce qu’ils prennent en charge une partie de la gestion des risques des opérateurs. Ils ont donc une véritable activité de prévention des risques d’atteinte à la santé de ces opérateurs. Toutefois, leurs propres conditions de travail, leur manque de connaissances sur les handicaps et leur faible accès à des formations limitent leurs apports à la fois sur le plan pédagogique et sur le plan de la prévention des risques. Concevoir des situations capacitantes pour des opérateurs en atelier protégé passe par l’amélioration des conditions de travail des opérateurs handicapés, mais aussi par l’amélioration des conditions de travail et d’accès à des formations des moniteurs.

The article reviews the book, "I'm Neither Here nor There: Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles With Migration and Poverty," by Patricia Zavella.

Institutionalized forgetting about the scope of the Trotskyist experience in the United States was on display in every venue following the deaths of Peter Rafael Bloch (1921-2008), an authority on Puerto Rican artistic culture, and George Perle (born George Perlman, 1915-2009), a Pulitzer Prize-winning music theorist and composer once married to the sculptress and painter Laura Slobe (1909-58). Nothing written even hinted that the two iconoclasts were in the past highly educated and committed Marxists, or that revolutionary ideas oxygenated their cultural thinking at crucial moments. Alarm over memory loss of this type is the motive for this present essay, which appraises the lives of Bloch, Perle, and Slobe along with other "Bohemians" who sought a vexed amalgam of unconstrained cultural creativity, personal freedom, and disciplined "Bolshevik" politics in the Socialist Workers Party (swp) during the late 1940s and 1950s. What can be recovered of the political and personal passions of many "outlaw" lives on the Left, of cultural revolutionaries and sexual non-conformists, especially from those who infused anti-capitalism with anti-Stalinism, are only fragmentary narratives to be steered warily into coherency. For the postwar decade, one must write a kind of ghostly history, the reconstruction of the presence of an absence in a time of persecution.

The article reviews the book, "Woody Guthrie, American Radical," by William Kaufman.

This paper examines the impact of unions on employment growth in a longitudinal sample of Canadian workplaces collected during the period 2001-2006. To facilitate comparability with earlier Canadian results, we segment our analysis by industrial sector and establishment size, and find that unions suppress employment growth only in larger manufacturing establishments, and actually seem to promote employment growth among smaller service sector establishments. These results differ substantially from results found twenty-one years previously. We extend previous analysis by examining whether a declining union wage premium may have played a role in these results, and find suggestive evidence for such a contention.

This paper presents a case study of pregnancy/parental leave arrangements among faculty members at a mid-sized Canadian University from 2000-2010. The data show that leave arrangements were very inconsistent across faculties, across and within departments, and even for individual faculty members who had taken more than one leave. The majority of problematic cases were instances where a faculty member began or ended a leave in the middle of an academic term. Without specific language in their collective agreement, these faculty members often negotiated circumstances that carried individual penalties for duties that were unassigned in light of the leave. This research has implications for unions who must be particularly vigilant and active in professional environments where individual negotiation takes place and union consciousness is lower. It also emphasizes the burden placed on parents when the bearing and rearing of children is framed as an individual right rather than an issue of social reproduction. The paper uses data from a sample of collective agreements across Canadian universities to make recommendations to clarify the procedures for pregnancy and parental leave.

Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this interpretation by exploring how these communities were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance. Far from being homogeneous, these company towns are shown to be unique communities with equally unique histories. Company Towns provides a multi-layered, international comparison between the development of two settlements—the mining community of Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and the mill town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. White pinpoints crucial differences between the towns' experiences by contrasting each region's histories from various perspectives—business, urban, labour, civic, and socio-cultural. Company Towns also makes use of a sizable collection of previously neglected oral history sources and town records, providing an illuminating portrait of divergence that defies efforts to impose structure on the company town phenomenon. --Publisher's description

In 1927, Gabriel Sylliboy, the Grand Chief of the Mi'kmaw of Atlantic Canada, was charged with trapping muskrats out of season. At appeal in July 1928, Sylliboy and five other men recalled conversations with parents, grandparents, and community members to explain how they understood a treaty their people had signed with the British in 1752. Using this testimony as a starting point, William Wicken traces Mi'kmaw memories of the treaty, arguing that as colonization altered Mi'kmaw society, community interpretations of the treaty changed as well. The Sylliboy case was part of a broader debate within Canada about Aboriginal peoples' legal status within Confederation. In using the 1752 treaty to try and establish a legal identity separate from that of other Nova Scotians, Mi'kmaw leaders contested federal and provincial attempts to force their assimilation into Anglo-Canadian society. Integrating matters of governance and legality with an exploration of historical memory, The Colonization of Mi'kmaw Memory and History offers a nuanced understanding of how and why individuals and communities recall the past."--Publisher's description. Contents: Part 1: Why the Men Testified. 1. Accounting for Alex Gillis's actions: the Mi'kmaq in rural society -- 2. Why Nova Scotia prosecuted Gabriel Sylliboy -- 3. Moving to appeal: Mi'kmaw and government motivations. Part 2: How the Men Remembered. 4. Parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, 1794-1853. 5. Reserve life, 1850-1881: remembering the treaty. Part 3: Why the Men Remembered. 6. The demography of Mi'kmaw communities, 1871-1911 -- 7. Moving into the city: the King's Road Reserve and the politics of relocation. Appendix: The Federal and DIA censuses, 1871-1911.

The essays in [this book] create a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the contributors offer varied perspectives on the ways women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The essays address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations. --Publisher's description. Contents: Aboriginal women and work across the 49th Parallel : historical antecedents and new challenges / Joan Sangster -- Making a living : Anishinaabe women in Michigan's changing economy / Alice Littlefield -- Procuring passage : Southern Australian Aboriginal women and the early maritime industry of sealing / Lynette Russell -- The contours of agency : women's work, race, and Queensland's indentured labor trade / Tracey Banivanua Mar -- From "superabundance" to dependency : women agriculturalists and the negotiation of colonialism and capitalism for reservation-era Lummi / Chris Friday -- "We were real Skookum women" : The shíshálh economy and the logging industry on the Pacific Northwest Coast / Susan Roy and Ruth Taylor -- Unraveling the narratives of nostalgia : Navajo weavers and globalization / Kathy M'Closkey -- Labor and leisure in the "enchanted summer land" : Anishinaabe women's work and the growth of Wisconsin tourism, 1900-1940 / Melissa Rohde -- Nimble fingers and strong backs : First Nations and Métis women in fur trade and rural economies / Sherry Farrell Racette -- Northfork Mono women's agricultural work, "productive coexistence," and social well-being in the San Joaquin Valley, California, circa 1850-1950 / Heather A. Howard -- Diverted mothering among American Indian domestic servants, 1920-1940 / Margaret D. Jacobs -- Charity or industry? American Indian women and work relief in the New Deal era / Colleen O'Neill -- "An Indian teacher among Indians": Native women as federal employees / Cathleen D. Cahill -- "Assaulting the ears of government" : the Indian homemakers' clubs and the Maori Women's Welfare League in their formative years / Aroha Harris and Mary Jane Logan McCallum -- Politically purposeful work : Ojibwe women's labor and leadership in postwar Minneapolis / Brenda J. Child -- Maori sovereignty, Black feminism, and the New Zealand trade union movement / Cybèle Locke -- Beading lesson / Beth H. Piatote.