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The article reviews the book, "'A Happy Holiday': English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism 1870-1930," by Cecilia Morgan.

The last two decades have seen an emergence of new forms of international employee representation within multinational corporations (MNCs). In EU member states, the management at MNCs find themselves having to deal with statutory European Works Councils (EWCs) while at a more global level some studies show a multiplication of solidarity networks and cross-border union alliances put in place by reinvigorated Global Union Federations (GUFs). In order to evaluate the extent to which these cross-border alliances can support the development of transnational collective bargaining within MNCs, this article draws on a single case study conducted recently in a Canadian MNC in the commercial printing industry, namely Quebecor World Inc. In recent years, before the dismantling of this Canadian multinational, union officials sought to coordinate the various unions in this company internationally and to open up a new space for collective bargaining at the transnational level by negotiating an international framework agreement with its management.

The article reviews the book, "Pubs, Pulpits and Prairie Fires" by Elroy Deimert.

From the late 19th to the late 20th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. As asbestos was used more and more in building materials and household appliances, its harmful effect on human health, such as asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, became apparent. The dangers surrounding the mineral led to the collapse of the industry in the 1980s. While the market demand and medical rejection of asbestos were international, they were also experienced in the mining and processing communities at the core of the global industry. In the town of Asbestos, Quebec, home of the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world, we can see how this process of market boom and bust shaped a fierce local cultural identity. This dissertation examines the global asbestos industry from a local perspective, showing how the people of Asbestos, Quebec had international reach through the work they did and the industry they continue to support today. This thesis explores how the boundaries between humans and the environment were blurred in Asbestos as a strong cultural identity was created through the interaction between people and the natural world. This work advances our understanding of the interdependence of the local-global relationship between resource industries and international trade networks, illustrating the ways it shapes communities and how communities shape it. Bringing bodies of land, human bodies, and the body politic of Asbestos, Quebec into the history of the global asbestos trade helps demonstrate how this local cultural identity grew to influence national policy and global debates on commodity flows, occupational health, and environmental justice.

The "no" vote in the Irish referendum of June 2008 on the Lisbon Treaty — reversed in October 2009 — threw the European Union into crisis. Yet it reflected a familiar pattern of popular rejection of initiatives on European integration. This article provides an overview of such referendums in western Europe. It is evident that while mainstream trade unions (or at least their leaders) have usually endorsed the integration process, in most countries where referendums have been held their members have voted otherwise. Such rejection has often been based on "progressive" rather than "reactionary" grounds. Popular attitudes are malleable, but it requires a major strategic re-orientation if unions are to reconnect with their members in order to build a popular movement for a genuinely social Europe.

The article reviews the book, "Raise Shit: Social Action Saving Lives," by Susan Boyd, Donald MacPherson, and Bud Osborn.

The 1950 Vancouver convention of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) opened against the backdrop of the Korean War and tense Cold War debates within Canada’s social democratic party. Providing a window into this moment of ideological tension, the gathering demonstrates how leftists sought to forge domestic and foreign policies amenable to the narrow public opinion of the McCarthy era. The convention also illuminates the complex character of British Columbia’s postwar left and the broader intellectual and political milieu of the early Cold War years in Canada – debates over the prohibition of atomic weapons and the relationship between markets and the state that would culminate in the ccf’s Winnipeg Declaration of Principles later in the 1950s. Finally, the Vancouver convention highlights the role of Trotskyists within the ccf, a strategy of ‘entryism’ that has been explored only peripherally in the historiography of social democracy in Canada. The ideological confrontation at Vancouver left the ccf squarely in the hands of ‘moderates,’ shaping ccf strategy and policy for its final decade of political activity, while muting the Canadian left’s independent voice in domestic and international affairs.

The article reviews a number of books, including: "Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home" by Chris Arsenault; "The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy" by Yves Engler; "Afghanistan and Canada: Is There an Alternative to War?" edited by Lucia Kowaluk and Steven Staples; and three others.

This study focuses on the effectiveness of the federal Employment Equity Act (EEA). We assess the EEA with regard to female employees using quantitative data from employer reports published under the provisions of the EEA and the Canadian Census. Data in this study cover the period 1997 to 2004. The most significant finding is that employment equity has increased over time, but at a diminishing rate. If fact, there now may be something of a downturn in employment equity for women in the industries covered by the EEA. Several policy implications following from the study are provided.

One Hundred Years of Social Work is the first comprehensive history of social work as a profession in English Canada. Organized chronologically, it provides a critical and compelling look at the internal struggles and debates in the social work profession over the course of a century and investigates the responses of social workers to several important events. A central theme in the book is the long-standing struggle of the professional association (the Canadian Association of Social Workers) and individual social workers to reconcile advancement of professional status with the promotion social action. The book chronicles the early history of the secularization and professionalization of social work and examines social workers roles during both world wars, the Depression, and in the era of postwar reconstruction. It includes sections on civil defence, the Cold War, unionization, social work education, regulation of the profession, and other key developments up to the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as personal interviews and secondary literature, the authors provide strong academic evidence of a profession that has endured many important changes and continues to advocate for a just society and a responsive social welfare state. --Publisher's description

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, by Marshall Ganz, is reviewed.

Since well before the official endorsement of "peace, order and good government" in the British North America Act of 1867, Canada has understood itself as a peace keeping and socially-progressive collective. Both before and after the BNA Act, Canadian poets critiqued as well as celebrated this persistent national mythology, offering their poetry as social commentary and as impetus to change. This thesis considers the shifting understanding of the role of Canadian poets in shaping the nation and in establishing social justice. After tracing a history of theoretical understandings of social justice with specific attention to the arrival and evolution of such theory within Canada, the thesis reads poetry from before Confederation to the end of the Second World War in relation to its political and social moment. The first chapter investigates Canadian poetry from its beginnings to 1900, and through consideration of the poems of Alexander McLachlan, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Archibald Lampman, among others, charts the persistent concern with what the historian Ian McKay calls "imagining otherwise;" that is, the desire to discover in Canada a place with the potential to envision alternatives, free from the hierarchies and injustices of the old world. These poets use the space of their work to reimagine labour and to explore the benefits of cooperation, and they persistently return to the role of the poet in crafting the just state they imagine. The second chapter turns to the Canadian modernist understanding of literary inheritance and re-creation Through a focus on F.R. Scott, the chapter considers the nation's artistic response to the Depression, as well as the influence of America's Federal One program, which extended employment to the nation's artists. The third chapter investigates modernist collectives in greater detail, reading the artistic and critical output of such artistic collaborations as Masses, Contemporary Verse, Preview and First Statement as challenges to the Canadian definition of artistic responsibility. Across the time periods considered, this thesis investigates ways in which poets balance idealism and pragmatism, commitments of form and content, and concern for the welfare of the individual and the wellbeing of the collective.

The article reviews the book, "Sojourner Truth's America," by Margaret Washington.

The article reviews the book, "The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution," by Mobo Gao.

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which involved approximately 30,000 workers, is Canada's best-known strike. When the State Trembled recovers the hitherto untold story of the Citizens' Committee of 1000, formed by Winnipeg's business elite in order to crush the revolt and sustain the status quo. This account, by the authors of the award-winning Walk Towards the Gallows, reveals that the Citizens drew upon and extended a wide repertoire of anti-labour tactics to undermine working-class unity, battle for the hearts and minds of the middle class, and stigmatize the general strike as a criminal action. Newly discovered correspondence between leading Citizen lawyer A.J. Andrews and Acting Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen illuminates the strategizing and cooperation that took place between the state and the Citizens. While the strike's break was a crushing defeat for the labour movement, the later prosecution of its leaders on charges of sedition reveals abiding fears of radicalism and continuing struggles between capital and labour on the terrain of politics and law. --Publisher's description. Contents: Permitted by Authority of the Strike Committee -- Who? Who? Who-oo? -- Seven Hundred and Four Years Ago at Runnymede -- The Anointing of A.J. Andrews -- The Flag-Flapping Stage -- To Reach the Leaders in this Revolutionary Movement -- Time to Act -- Enough Evidence to Convict the Whole Strike Committee -- The Road through Bloody Saturday -- The Only Way to Deal with Bolshevism -- They are all dangerous: Immigration Hearings -- They Started the Fire: Preliminary Hearing -- Poor Harry Daskaluk -- Duty to God, Country, and Family: The Russell Trial.

Cet article examine la gestion des ressources humaines qui était faite à l’usine de la General Engineering Company de Scarborough, durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. L’étude de ce cas, conceptualisée de manière à y inclure les caractéristiques structurelles de l’économie capitaliste ainsi que l’interventionnisme gouvernemental, démontre à quel point le secteur privé et le marché de l’emploi furent des facteurs déterminants dans la transformation des conditions de travail pendant cette période. L’importance de la production de certains articles militaires pour l’effort de guerre conditionna une collaboration entre le gouvernement et les entreprises privées pour garantir une stabilité de la main-d’oeuvre. Les stratégies utilisées pour assurer une continuité de la production, telles que le choix d’une main-d’oeuvre féminine, l’adoption de mesures issues du welfare capitalism ou la lutte aux syndicats externes, contribuèrent à transformer le milieu de travail et à développer un climat propre à cette période de guerre et aux usines financées par le gouvernement fédéral.

Cet article se concentre sur l’acteur patronal et ses préférences en matière de structures de négociation collective. Les nouvelles réalités économiques, conjuguées aux nouvelles stratégies organisationnelles et étatiques, conduiraient les employeurs dans bon nombre de pays à vouloir décentraliser les structures de négociation. Il y a toutefois des cas d’exception auxquels nous portons une attention particulière. Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude auprès des employeurs de l’industrie du vêtement pour hommes au Québec où prévaut toujours la négociation coordonnée malgré les pressions de la mondialisation. Pour analyser cette réponse différenciée des employeurs, nous avons utilisé une méthodologie qualitative. Grâce à des entretiens en profondeur et une analyse documentaire, nous avons construit un cadre analytique regroupant quatre types de facteurs en mesure d’influencer les préférences patronales pour des structures de négociation centralisées ou décentralisées : économique, organisationnel, institutionnel et stratégique.Au plan empirique, nous dégageons deux principaux constats de nos observations. D’abord, nous avons observé une volonté partagée par les parties patronale et syndicale à poursuivre une négociation coordonnée. Notons toutefois qu’une certaine hétérogénéité dans la propension des employeurs à adhérer à ce type de négociation a pu être remarquée surtout en raison de la diversité des firmes en termes de taille, de marchés desservis et de capacité de payer. Ensuite, nos résultats suggèrent une tension entre les influences exercées par les facteurs considérés dans l’étude : d’une part, les facteurs économiques et organisationnels influencent les acteurs patronaux vers l’individualisation des négociations collectives ; d’autre part, les facteurs institutionnels, en imposant certaines contraintes qui limitent leurs choix stratégiques, influencent les employeurs vers l’action collective. Au plan théorique, les résultats démontrent que les facteurs généralement associés à la mondialisation ne surdéterminent pas le comportement des acteurs. Au contraire, les acteurs conservent une marge de manoeuvre pour réagir aux pressions de l’environnement. En fonction du contexte institutionnel en place, différentes réponses peuvent ainsi être offertes par les employeurs en regard du type de structure de négociation à privilégier.

The article reviews the book, "Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History," by Rebecca Hill.

The article reviews the book, "Travail et genre : regards croisés France, Europe, Amérique latine," edited by Luis L.M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod