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The article reviews the books "Global Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System" by Murray E.G. Smith, "In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives" by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, and "The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development" by Michael A. Lebowitz.

My thesis examines the role and regulation of private, for-profit employment agencies in the British Columbia labour market with respect to the recruitment of temporary foreign workers. In it, I reviewed the historical origins of employment agency legislation in Canada. I go on to describe Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program in connection with the transfer of federal immigration authority to the provinces. I also present a case study demonstrating how temporary foreign workers are recruited for the Live-in Caregiver Program in British Columbia, and use the study as a basis for comparing British Columbia’s employment agency legislation with the agency licensing regimes in the other Western Provinces. I conclude that Manitoba’s recent Worker Recruitment and Protection Act frames a best practice model for the protection of foreign workers during the recruitment process, and I encourage other provinces like British Columbia to develop and legislatively frame a similar set of best practices.

The article reviews the book, "Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th-Century Jobs for a 21st-Century Workforce," edited by Kathleen Christensen and Barbara Schneider.

This article seeks to engage Jansen and Young’s recent research on the impact of changing federal campaign finance laws on the relationship between organized labour and the New Democratic Party. Jansen and Young use models from mainstream comparative politics to argue that unions and the NDP retain links due to a “shared ideological commitment” to social democracy, rather than an expectation of mutual rewards and despite changes in the global economy. We critically assess the evidence, method of comparison, and theoretical assumptions informing their claims and find many aspects unconvincing. Instead, we propose that better explanations of this enduring yet strained relationship can be formulated by drawing insights from Canadian political economy, labour history and working class politics, and comparative social democracy.

This article considers the state of unionism today and argues that in strategizing for more workers' power and effective worker representation, unions have -- unsurprisingly -- focussed upon the primary domain that workers occupy: the labour market and workplaces, applying a particular repertoire of tools. While social conditions beyond the terrain of work have always mattered and sometimes been recognized by activists and theorists, these are often under-attended in analysis and strategy. Significant changes in the three interacting domains of work, household and community life since the mid-1970s in many industrialized countries have changed the circumstances in which workers' create collective power, and this is empirically illustrated by the Australian case. Understanding the three domains of work, home and community and the ways they interact and are changing is important to efforts to improve workers' lives. The article ends with consideration of implications for unions' industrial objectives, the tools applied and the way they build power.

"Interrogating the New Economy: Restructuring Work in the 21st Century," edited by Norene Pupo and Mark Thomas.

The article reviews the book, "City of Love and Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties," by Lawrence Aronsen.

The article reviews the book, "Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s," by Robert Cohen.

This chapter focuses on women employed in labour-intensive agriculture in the global North, specifically women from rural Mexico who take up waged work as migrant workers in Canadian agriculture. It uses the term 'migrant worker' to refer to people employed in Canada under temporary visas who do not hold Canadian citizenship or permanent residency. Global restructuring of agrifood markets has resulted in rising levels of female employment in high value agriculture in the global South. Women tend to form a smaller percentage of the permanent workforce employed in commercial agriculture, often constituting the majority of the temporary, seasonal, and casual workforce that provides the greater portion of labour. The chapter shows the systems of labour control and forms of work organization made possible through these programs rely on multiple, reinforcing and contextual systems of oppression, particularly the power relations based on gender, race, and class, among others. --Introduction Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations in which global processes that reconstitute gender and class interconnect with and take shape in a particular form of locality - the rural. The book is innovative in that it: - responds to calls for more critical work on the rural 'other' - contributes to scholarship on gender and rurality, but does so through the lens of class. This book places the question of gender, rurality and difference at its centre through its focus on class - addresses the urban bias of much class scholarship as well as the lack of gender analysis in much rural and class academic work - focuses on the ways that class mediates the construction and practices of rural men/masculinities and rural women/femininities - challenges prevalent (and divergent) assumptions with chapters utilising contemporary theorisations of class With the empirical strongly grounded in theory, this book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.

The article reviews the book, "Commonwealth," by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

In its landmark decision in B.C. Health extending protection to collective bargaining under section 2(d) of the Charter, the Supreme Court of Canada relied heavily on international labour law and principles, especially as defined by the International Labour Organization. In particular, the Court treated as a "cornerstone" of the international law in this area the opinions of the ILO’s Committee of Experts and Committee on Freedom of Association (CFA), and cited those opinions in support of its finding that freedom of association under ILO conventions includes a right to bargain collectively. This paper argues that in B.C. Health and other cases involving constitutional labour rights, the Supreme Court has misunderstood and oversimplified the ILO supervisory process....

The article reviews the book, "The Guy in the Green Truck: A Biography of John St. Amand," by James N. McCrorie.

The article reviews "Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism," edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, the 46th volume (2010 edition) of the annual Socialist Register.

This article critically examines the 1983 British Columbia (BC) Solidarity experience, a period that marked the first comprehensive neoliberal policy revolution in Canada. It also marked the launch of an extensive movement of extra‐parliamentary resistance to neoliberal attempts to undo social and economic gains achieved during the period of Keynesian consensus. The character of this progressive movement of trade unions, social groups and civil society was however limited to “defensive defiance”. A number of questions are posed such as: What was the nature of the resistance to neoliberalism in BC in 1983, and to what extent did it succeed? Leftist analysts hotly debated these questions at the time, and a review in hindsight of their views is instructive. And to what degree have the neoliberal agenda and strategy and tactics changed in the ensuing years? Our review in this article suggests both a remarkable continuity and some fundamental changes. Analysis of these events therefore remains historically relevant to those concerned with pan‐Canadian political trends.

The article reviews the book, "NAFTA and Labor in North America," by Norman Caulfield.

As many of the traditionally unionized sectors of the economy experience crisis, unions are turning to social unionist strategies of coalition-building and community mobilization as a means of defending jobs through external solidarity. This paper explores the politics and dynamics of the Canadian Auto Workers' (caw) organization of a union-community coalition and rally in Windsor, Ontario as a means of defending the manufacturing base. The paper contends that while Windsor's May 2007 Manufacturing Matters rally was quite successful in its short-term aims, due to the caw's strong mobilizing structures and longstanding relationships between local unions and community organizations, internal coalition dynamics and framing processes led to decisions which limited the longer-term capacities of the campaign. The coalition opted to emphasize place over class as the unifying element, to produce non-adversarial discourses and tactics so as to avoid appearing anti-business, and to marginalize more militant talk and tactics. These outcomes raise questions about both the sustainability for ongoing solidarity and mobilization amongst the Windsor working class, and the capacity of the local labour movement to articulate counter-hegemonic interpretations of economic problems and promote policy options not dominated by the needs and interests of economic and political elites.

The article reviews the book, "Union Revitalisation in Advanced Economies: Assessing the Contribution of Union Organising," edited by Gregor Gall.

Historically, teachers’ unions have been some of the major organizational sites of social justice leadership in K-12 education (Kuehn, 2007; M. Murphy, 1990; Urban, 1982), but until the mid 1990s, the term “social justice unionism” (Peterson & Charney, 1999) had little currency in teacher union circles. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the concept of social justice unionism in context. In particular, I asked how teacher union activists contributed and responded to the institutionalization of social justice in their organization. I used a critical constructionist (Ball, 1987; Berger & Luckmann, 1966; D. E. Smith, 1987) perspective to analyze 25 career history (Goodson, 1994) interviews with teachers, staff and elected officials affiliated with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation between 1967 and 2007, and found that successive generations of union-involved activists dedicated to labour solidarity, feminism, multiculturalism, anti-colonialism and anti-homophobia used networks of like-minded colleagues to counter bureaucratic norms within their organization, the education system and society. A qualitative depiction of these changes suggests that they were layered, multi-dimensional and uneven. They played out on a contested, uphill gradient shaped, but not determined, by four factors: the organizational prioritization of teacher welfare over social justice; historically persistent micro-political struggles between two federation caucuses; the centralizing tendencies of union leadership in response to the provincial government’s centralization of educational authority; and broader ruling relations in Canadian society. Still, despite this uphill gradient, all activist networks left a durable trace on federation history. The major significance of this finding for critical theorists and social justice activists is a modestly hopeful alternative to the traditional conceptions of change embedded in organizational theory: revolution, evolution or despair.

La Loi relative à l'extension juridique des conventions collectives de travail est adoptée par le gouvernement du Québec en 1934 pour protéger les travailleurs frappés par la crise économique et favoriser leur syndicalisation. Fruit de revendications des syndicats catholiques, elle porte un modèle particulier de relations de travail qui ne s'imposera pas ailleurs en Amérique du Nord. La loi, qui mise sur la collaboration patronale-syndicale, permet au gouvernement d'étendre par décret à toutes les entreprises d'un secteur industriel, dans un territoire déterminé, les termes d''une convention collective conclue par un syndicat. Sa philosophie est issue de la doctrine sociale de l'Église catholique avec comme but ultime la formation de corporation professionnelle, cellule de base de la société corporatiste. La loi est adoptée une année avant le Wagner Act, la «Magna Carta» du mouvement syndical aux États-Unis, qui inspire l'adoption de lois similaires Canada et au Québec pendant la Deuxième Guerre. Cette loi apporte une dure concurrence à la loi des décrets qui demeure présente cependant dans les industries où la concurrence est vive et où la main d'œuvre représente une forte proportion des coûts de production. Dans les années 1970, la loi connaît un regain d'intérêt du coté des syndicats et des spécialistes de relations indus- trielles afin de faciliter l'accréditation sectorielle ou multi patronale. On juge que le cadre de négociation très décentralisé selon le Code du travail ne répond plus aux transformations du marché du travail. Depuis les années 1980, le régime des décrets est touché par la libéralisation des relations de travail dans le sillage du courant de pensée néolibéral. Dans cet esprit, le gouvernement abolit en 1999 les décrets de l'industrie du vêtement, ce qui affecte 23 000 sala- riés. Au Québec comme ailleurs, c'est tout le système de relations de travail né des années 1930 qui s'érode à mesure que le gouvernement se laisse gagner par la déréglementation des rapports collectifs de travail.

Working Life: Renewing Labour Process Analysis, edited by Paul Thompson and Chris Smith, is reviewed.