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The study examines how Aboriginal workers and workers of colour experience union solidarity and explores the necessary conditions for the remaking of solidarity and the renewal of the labour movement. Grounded in anti-colonial discursive framework, the study analyzes the cultures and practices of labour solidarity through the lived experiences of Aboriginal activist and activists of colour within the Canadian labour movement. Utilizing the research methodologies of participatory action research, arts-informed research and critical autobiography, the research draws on the richness of the participants’ collective experiences and visual images co-created during the inquiry. The study also relies on the researcher’s self-narrative as a long time labour activist as a key part of the embodied knowledge production and sense making of a movement that is under enormous challenges and internal competing tension exacerbated by the neoliberal agenda. The findings reveal sense of profound gap between what participants experience as daily practices of solidarity and what they envisioned. Through the research process, the study explores and demonstrates the importance and potential of a more holistic and integrative critical education approach on anti-racism and decolonization. The study proposes a pedagogical framework on solidarity building with four interlinking components – rediscovering, restoring, reimagining and reclaiming – as a way to make whole for many Aboriginal activists and activists of colour within the labour movement. The pedagogy of solidarity offers a transformative process for activists to build solidarity across constituencies in the pursuit of labour renewal and social justice movement building.

The article discusses the involvement of Aboriginal women in trade unions in Canada. Holly Page of the British Columbia Government and Service Employees Union (BCGEU) explains that unions are a jump-start for social justice and care about the Aboriginal community. Particular focus is given to the challenges facing Aboriginal women including poverty. Information on the "Unionism on Turtle Island" developed by Darla Leard's Saskatchewan Federation of Labour Aboriginal Committee is presented.

The article examines the impact of labor market reorganizations on women in the Quebec province of Canada. An overview of an employment model (modèle de la centrifugation de l’emploi vers les marchés périphériques (coeur-périphérie) proposed by sociologist Jean-Pierre Durant is presented. Based on results from the Institut de la statistique de Québec (ISQ), the authors claim that dynamic centrifuge employment leads to the hierarchical reorganization of labor markets based on gender. It is suggested that women are more confined to atypical work conditions such as part-time work with lower wages and restrained employment benefits. Also examined is the relationship between atypical work development and the precarious work conditions of women.

Women have always been under-represented in the professoriate, despite purported regulation of Australian universities under both state and federal sex discrimination and equal opportunity regulatory frameworks. Research from Australia and around the world has highlighted longstanding problems for the career trajectories of women in academia, such as ingrained sex segregation both within and across disciplines, and the masculine culture of universities evident in the undervaluing of teaching activities for the purposes of promotion, an area where women have historically dominated. This paper discusses the relationship between such issues and the policies designed to address them, in order to illustrate how and why these regulatory frameworks are not achieving their aims.

Personal care homes have become increasingly dependent on the employment of immigrant care workers. This qualitative study explored the high concentration of Filipino health care aides in personal care homes from their own perspectives, as well as that of policy stakeholders. In depth interviews were conducted with seven Filipino health care aides working in personal care homes in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders examined the policy context of the health care aide labour force. The study identified several factors that influenced the migration and employment of Filipino health care aides including: poverty and unemployment, migrant social networks, barriers in the labour market and financial incentives. The lack of regulations for health care aides sustained the flow of immigrant labour and enabled the expansion of social networks. Although their employment decisions were primarily based on financial need, health care aides valued their work and viewed themselves as critical care providers.

The article reviews the book, "Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco," by Teresa Gowan.

Rapid resource development in northern and rural Canada is leading to unprecedented social, political, economic and environmental changes in a number of communities. In particular, gendered identities and divisions of labour in northern Canadian communities are poised to be dramatically altered by increasing labour demands, shifting time-use patterns, and intensifying income inequalities. Through a feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis of print media coverage of gendered issues in Fort McMurray, and semi-structured interviews with thirty-two women working in either the male-dominated oil sector or the female-dominated social services sector, this dissertation examines how women in Fort McMurray, Alberta—the host community for the Athabasca oil sands—negotiate their identities and make sense of the opportunities and challenges associated with the recent oil boom. Drawing on materialist feminist and feminist poststructuralist theory, this dissertation first elaborates a comprehensive analytical framework for investigating gender in the context of natural resource extraction. This framework contends that gendered identities are inherently multiple, and divisions of labour are embedded in particular temporal and spatial contexts. Furthermore, this framework examines discursive and material contradictions in diverse gendered experiences of resource extraction in order to move beyond universalizing gendered interests and identities. Second, this dissertation examines how discursively constructed female subject positions in local and global print media over the past decade adopt a frame of frontier masculinity. I demonstrate that these subject positions become resources upon which women in Fort McMurray draw on to negotiate their identities in ways that perpetuate a sense of dependency and anomalousness. Finally, I explore how neoliberal discourses of individualism and meritocracy provide a potential site of resistance to hegemonic frontier masculinity in women’s narratives of their opportunities and challenges. However, I ultimately argue that neoliberal discourses and practices do not prove transformative of gendered identities and divisions of labour because women are only able to partially engage with neoliberal subjectivity, which neglects collective interests and wellbeing.

Organisations operating in today's market are facing an upcoming shift in workforce demographics. A majority of today's current workforce belong to the Baby Boomer generation (individuals born between 1946 and 1964). Many of these workers have already reached retirement age with many more reaching retirement age in the near future. The workers who are next in chronological line to fill the vacancies created by these departures belong to Generation X. There has been much speculation in the popular press concerning these workers, their work histories, and their workplace expectations. There has also been extensive study of the employment relationship (the psychological contract), a worker's assessment of that relationship, and the outcomes associated with it. However, there is no model directly tying worker experiences to the psychological contract and in turn outcomes of the psychological contract. This case study applied qualitative and quantitative methodologies to investigate the role work experiences play in the formation of the psychological contract with a present employer and the outcomes associated with it. Survey data were collected and in-depth personal interviews were completed with 66 Generation X middle level managers working for one of Canada's top employers competing in the knowledge sector. Findings suggest that several key work experiences in the labour market as well as experiences with a present employer are influential in perceptions of the relationship employees have with their employer, how they assess that relationship, and ultimately the outcomes of engagement and trust. The study concludes with: (1) a model illustrating the relationships between workers' experiences and the psychological contract process, and (2) a typology of worker types based on the effects of previous work experiences and perceptions of experiences with a current employer.

In 1944 the first social democratic government in North America was elected in the province of Saskatchewan. The new government of Premier Tommy Douglas intended to introduce plans to insure both medical and hospital services immediately following the election; however, because of financial limitations, it decided instead to establish a provincewide system of hospital insurance. The Saskatchewan Hospital Insurance Plan, established in 1947 and funded mainly from provincial tax revenue, provided free inpatient hospital care for all residents of the province. ...on July 1, 1962, the date the Medical Care Insurance Plan was to go into effect, more than 90 percent of the province's doctors withdrew their services. This strike, although relatively short–it only lasted twenty-three days–was very bitter....

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....