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The article reviews the book, "Working Girls in the West: Representations of Wage-Earning Women," by Lindsey McMaster.

[S]ummarizes thirty years of effort by equity advocates to realize a feminist-inspired vision of a union movement that is inclusive and democratic, and that seeks to advance the interests of all working people, unionized or not. ...[The author] argues that the union renewal literature has not acknowledged the gendering of the labour movement, or the role that women's organizing has played in transofrming the labour movement and helping it to reposition itself in the face of neo-liberal globalization, thus assuring its future survival. --Editor's introduction

The growth of precarious work since the 1970s has emerged as a core contemporary concern within politics, in the media, and among researchers. Uncertain and unpredictable work contrasts with the relative security that characterized the three decades following World War II. Precarious work constitutes a global challenge that has a wide range of consequences cutting across many areas of concern to sociologists. Hence, it is increasingly important to understand the new workplace arrangements that generate precarious work and worker insecurity. A focus on employment relations forms the foundation of theories of the institutions and structures that generate precarious work and the cultural and individual factors that influence people's responses to uncertainty. Sociologists are well-positioned to explain, offer insight, and provide input into public policy about such changes and the state of contemporary employment relations.

The article reviews the book, "Bar Codes: Women in the Legal Profession," by Jean McKenzie Leiper.

The article reviews the book, "Crossing Boundaries: Women's Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s-1940s," part 80 of the Uppsala Studies in Economic History series, edited by Pernilla Jonsson, Silke Neunsinger, and Joan Sangster.

The article reviews the book, "For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865," by Robert M. Zieger.

This article examines Canada’s federal Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) from the perspective of international human-rights and labour norms pertaining to the protection of migrant workers. Showing that the current legal framework of the LCP restricts migrant caregivers from effectively exercising a range of human and labour rights, the author argues for the removal of the labour (im)migration program’s unnecessary structural obstacles and proposes a reformulation of the LCP under the principles and guidelines of the International Labour Organization’s Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration, in order to transform this controversial labour policy into a decent work opportunity.

The article reviews the book, "Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour," edited by Gerald Hunt and David Rayside.

The article reviews the book, "Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario," by Elise Chenier.

Across most developed nations, including Canada, parallel systems of social welfare and employment insurance have increasingly been replaced by programs that emphasize work as a means to achieve welfare goals within the so-called re-employment framework. Various authors have drawn attention to the tension between the goal of long-term sustainable employment, and re-employment-based strategies that emphasize short-term and stand-alone interventions. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of one such program in Canada, the Targeted Wage Subsidy. This program seeks to place the most marginal qualifying participants in employment by offering employers a financial inducement. By paying close attention to the experiences of those tasked with monitoring and implementing the program in Toronto, we identify various ways in which program design elements may systematically disadvantage the intended recipients. These program delivery mechanisms are shaped both in the practices of implementing agents, as well as by the public accountability framework that enforces rigid timelines and reporting requirements, resulting in a practice commonly referred to by employment service providers as "creaming". Our observations lead us to question whether the target population is, in fact, the one benefiting from these return-to-work supports.

The article reviews the book, "The View From Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity: Salem Bland: A Canadian Odyssey," Book One, by Richard Allen.

The Handbook of Human Resource Management Education: Promoting an Effective and Efficient Curriculum, edited by Vida Gulbinas Scarpello, is reviewed.

Many analysts of Brazilian industrial relations share a determinist vision of the country's trade unionism, according to which the unions maintain a paradoxical yet atavistic relationship with the heavy body of laws that provide them with advantages while limiting their freedom. We tested this vision by conducting field enquiries into the daily activities of two Brazilian unions: the ABC Metalworkers Union and the Seamstress Union for the Sao Paulo and Osasco Region. In this article, we present the results of our case studies and what they reveal about Brazilian trade unionism's relationship with the labour legislation. We also briefly discuss former trade union leader and current President Lula's recent attempts to reform the country's labour relations system.

The article reviews the book, "Reclaiming the Canadian Left," by Richard Ziegler.

On December 5, 2009, an international symposium took place at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, on the question, "Is there a constitutional right to strike in Canada?" In organizing that meeting, I invited leading labour and constitutional law scholars, practitioners and judges from Europe, South Africa, Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as from across Canada, to attend in order to help answer the most pressing issue facing students and practitioners of Canadian labour law today.

This paper looks into how a "strike" should be defined under Canadian law. Although labour boards and courts in Canada claim to apply an "objective" definition, whereby a "strike" means any con- certed cessation of work, the author argues that this approach is incap- able of providing a coherent answer to the question of which work stoppages are strikes and which are not. What is needed, rather, and what accurately reflects the understanding of "strike" embodied in labour relations statutes and cases decided at common law, is a subjec- tive definition that is based on the reason for the work stoppage. Thus, in the author's view, a strike is a timely (and hence legal) cessation of work if it is engaged in by a group of workers who are negotiating (or renego- tiating) their agreement with an employer, in an effort to induce the employer to come to terms. The author warns, however, that any attempt to constitutionalize the right to strike through the Charter freedom of association in s. 2(d), rather than through the guarantee of equality in s. 15, will inevitably draw courts into the mistaken exercise of trying to create a 'judicial labour code."

Judges in Canada now adhere to the view that it is their task to draft labour codes for Canadians - a position recently and fully embraced by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Fraser v. Ontario (Attorney General).' Some commentators believe this is a sound legal development. Others are equivocal. I think it is a very serious mistake. Given the alternatives, it is a strange and undesirable turn of legal events. But the strangeness does not end with the mere fact that we now live with what I call a "judicial labour code" (JLC). There is more. Judges undertaking this exercise, enthusiastically but nonetheless disconcertingly, insist that their nascent labour code happens to contain most of the provisions inserted over the years by Canadian legis- lators in an overtly political effort to "balance" or (in Paul Weiler's term) to "reconcile" the interests of labour and capital. Those provisions relate, for example, to the duty to bargain, to unfair labour. --Introduction

The relevance and continuing existence of industrial relations, as a field of academic study, is facing a number of challenges, particularly in English-speaking countries, as union membership declines, collective bargaining coverage shrinks and the number of strikes wanes each year. Yet issues of employment and workplace relations remain significant to economic prosperity and social harmony, particularly with the changing nature of work and of employment contracts. Furthermore, there are a number of other means by which employee voice is heard, through the agency of non-government organizations, community groups and various consultative bodies. In order to reinforce its relevance, industrial relations needs to include new actors, cover a wider range of issues and adopt a multi-level approach which incorporates both local and global dimensions.

The article reviews the book, "Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-Border Campaigns," edited by Kate Bronfenbrenner.