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Nearly one in ten Canadians in the private sector works in the franchised sector of the economy. For the most part, franchisors operate as rentiers, extracting value from franchisees for the use of their brand. Research has demonstrated that this arrangement puts additional pressure on franchisees to extract surplus value from their employees that tend toward substandard and unlawful working conditions. In this scenario, franchisors benefit from but are only indirectly involved in the extract of surplus value. In some cases, however, the vertical controls exercised by “franchisors” over “franchisees” are so extensive, and the financial contribution of “franchisees” is so limited, that the franchisor becomes involved in directly extracting surplus value from franchisees. We explore this latter phenomenon through an excavation of the history of the legal distinction in Canadian business-format franchising in Canada and detailed studies of two recent Canadian cases in which “franchisees” successfully claimed employment status.

Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society's legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary. --Publisher's description

The Rossland Evening World, a four-page daily dedicated to the mineworkers of British Columbia's bustling West Kootenay mining town of Rossland, first appeared on May Day 1901 – just in time to do battle with local mine owners in the historic 1900–01 miners' strike. The World may have owed its existence in part to William "Big Bill" Haywood, a founder of the militant Western Federation of Miners (wfm) and the Industrial Workers of the World. On visiting the town and the prospectors' camp in the 1890s, Haywood saw that Rossland would soon grow into a thriving Pacific Northwest mountain community with a steady increase in wfm membership. He encouraged the miners to form wfm Local 38, possibly the first wfm local in Canada, and soon a dozen Kootenay locals formed wfm District Association 6. A wfm grant followed to help launch the local and the new daily. Amid growing frustration with bad working conditions and mine owners' refusal to recognize the wfm, the World became a welcome sister to the wfm's Miners' Magazine, dedicating itself to "the Interests of Organized Labor." By the fall of 1900, the strike of 1,400 miners was on, and the World published news and analysis throughout the region. Ultimately the strike was lost, but the World carried on until 1904. As its legacy, it showed how a daily newspaper could help build community support and provide a defence for the local unionized workforce.

In Australia and Canada, working holidaymaking is rationalized on the basis of encouraging cultural exchange among youth. Yet, in both countries, there is mounting evidence that working holiday programs are operating as back-door migrant work programs to help fill demands for labor in occupations and industries characterized by precarious jobs undesirable to locals. As scholarship on working holidaymakers’ labor market participation is more developed in Australia than in Canada, and administrative data available are also more extensive therein, this article sheds new light on the Canadian case vis-à-vis the Australian example. In exploring regulatory strategies adopted by these two settler states and their effects, comparative analysis of administrative data and historical and contemporary immigration and labor and employment laws and policies reveals how nationally specific program design can foster similar ends: precariousness among participants in the industries in which working holidaymakers are concentrated, including agriculture, tourism, and accommodation and food services. It also shows that stratification between working holidaymakers more closely approximating the image of the “cultural sojourner” and those who are effectively migrating for work purposes takes shape principally along the lines of source country in both countries.

The article reviews the book, "Le capital algorithmique. Accumulation, pouvoir et résistances à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle," by Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martineau.

Introduces Spector's essay on labour law, written from a Marxist perspective while he was attending Osgoode Hall law school in the early 1930s. Provides biographical background on Spector, a former Communist who became a leading Canadian Trotskyist. He briefly practiced law in Toronto before moving to New York in the later 1930s.

The article reviews the book, "Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges and the RDS Case," by Constance Backhouse.

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between public health and settler colonialism, employing age and ability as key categories of analysis. I argue that settler colonialism and public health were constitutive of one another. Public health policy weaves together notions about land, race, labour, age, and ability, to structure and stratify societies. Public health relied on white supremacist tropes to justify the state's attempts to subjugate and dispossess the Anishinaabeg in Northern Ontario. The idea of a "public" was critical and contested in the intersection of policy and the emerging social science of public health. Settler standards of public imagined a "public" that was white, male, middle-class, and adult, with a body that could be made healthy through individual effort. Settler ideas about Indigenous Peoples shaped the "public" as a racialized and age-stratified concept in Canadian public health and health policy. In this dissertation, I seek to highlight how material and symbolic age, and material and symbolic children, figured in settler-colonial processes of state formation in the context of public health policies. I examine how bureaucrats and institutions in the public and voluntary sectors constructed and portrayed Indigenous and settler health, measuring each against a middle-class standard of "public" health. To do this, I set forth four interconnected arguments. First, settler colonialism and settler public health policy were mutually constitutive. Second, disability existed alongside and entangled with age as a key framing for settler public health policies. Third, these public health policies drew from a bifurcated notion of the "public," resulting in policies focused on protection and surveillance based on racialized lines. Finally, these framings of disability, age, and the "public" had clear material impacts in Northern Ontario's settler-colonial context, enabling settlement while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples.

This dissertation compares the work and life of secondary public-school teachers in Ontario with different labour contracts during a time of crisis. The COVID public health crisis along with neoliberalism, the defunding of public education, and a climate crisis have all influenced governmental policies and the labour process of public secondary teachers in Ontario. The influences that different contracts can have on the labour process of teachers, how they feel towards their union, and the impacts on their individual health and household wellbeing before and during the first year of the COVID pandemic is the focus of this dissertation. To help explore these contexts and the influences on the life and labour of public secondary teachers in Ontario with different contracts, I have used research from studies in Labour Process Theory, precarious work, and educational labour to inform my analysis. Along with those areas of discourse, I have also used insights from research into Critical Realism and Thematic Analysis to think through and discuss the differences between the teachers I interviewed and connect their experiences with work, their union, and their individual health and household well-being to larger systems, structures, and histories. The interviews conducted revealed three points of interest: that precarious labour contracts can function as a disciplinary device, that larger contexts outside the contract shaped how the contract was experienced, and that teachers’ unions can act as a source of solidarity and security during a crisis and when there are certain associations with its purpose. This exploratory research aims to open up future areas of research into educational labour and differences between the experiences of educators with different contracts.

Bringing together ink artwork and fiction, Denison Avenue by Daniel Innes (illustrations) and Christina Wong (text) follows the elderly Wong Cho Sum, who, living in Toronto’s gentrifying Chinatown–Kensington Market, begins to collect bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband as a way to fill her days and keep grief and loneliness at bay. In her long walks around the city, Cho Sum meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighborhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind. A poignant meditation on loss, aging, gentrification, and the barriers that Chinese Canadian seniors experience in big cities, Denison Avenue beautifully combines visual art, fiction, and the endangered Toisan dialect to create a book that is truly unforgettable. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "White Space: Race, Privilege, and Cultural Economies of the Okanagan Valley," edited by Daniel J. Keyes and Luís L.M. Aguiar.

The article reviews the book, "Football in the Land of the Soviets," by Carles Viñas.

The Canadian labour market has experienced numerous changes over the last four decades. Employment has moved away from manufacturing and towards service sector jobs. Technological changes have brought computer-based technologies and, more recently, robotics and artificial intelligence to the workplace. World prices of oil and natural resources have fluctuated considerably. International trade with China and other emerging countries has risen. E-commerce has become a growing part of firms’ sales. Since March 2020, work arrangements have been altered substantially, with thousands of employees starting to work from home. In this context, how have unionization rates evolved in Canada? The goal of this note is to answer this question. --Introduction

Doug Ford’s use of notwithstanding thus becomes a declaration that he is engaged in class war. The legal niceties do not matter. He has unleashed a weapon of mass destruction. The right response is for CUPE, and all those who want to support them, to fight the fight in the same spirit. It is time to show the dominant class that without workers, they would not have anything.

Canada’s trade preference programs should be improved to raise living standards and improve working conditions and environmental policies

For many Canadians, a professor is a professor. The truth is that the professional and economic conditions of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty and contracted instructors are drastically different.

In 1992, a labour dispute that would last 18 months tore Yellowknife apart, culminating in an explosion that killed nine miners. The fallout of one of Canada’s largest mass murders still lingers in this northern city.

One hundred and fifteen years ago this September, downtown Vancouver was beset by thousands of protesters rallying against Asian immigration to Canada. Over the course of the event, moods shifted and the crowd turned violent. While the reasons for the gathering in Vancouver then and the ongoing “Freedom Convoy” today differ, there are similarities and lessons to be learned. It may seem an odd choice to study a painful chapter of Canada’s history in an already-too painful moment. However, historian Barrington Walker offers insight into its importance. “It’s not about just digging up unpleasant stories about Canada; it’s about challenging a certain notion of our historical innocence.” ...The 1907 riots did not occur in a vacuum. They were the result of years of building tension exacerbated by an economic downturn in 1907. After years of financial boom, the global demand for British Columbia’s resources slowed and unemployment reached record high levels. “Workers and politicians were looking for someone to blame,” explains historian Julie Gilmour, “and ‘cheap [Asian] labour’ had become a regular target.” --From introduction

List of labour-themed theses, including abstracts, that were mostly written by MA students at the University of New Brunswick.

The International Labour and Radical History Pamphlet Collection in the Queen Elizabeth II Library consists of more than 2200 pamphlets, representing a broad spectrum of leftist opinion that includes communists of various stripes, socialists, liberal reformers, trade unionists, civil libertarians and antiwar activists. Published for the most part between the years 1920 and 1970 (the collection also includes a number of Fabian Society publications that predate this period), the majority of the pamphlets are English-language publications from the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Canada and China. Among the topics and issues dealt with are socialist theory and practice, critiques of capitalism, war and peace, labour and the role of unions, international communism, the Vietnam war, racism and Third World liberation. Authors include Daniel DeLeon, Earl Browder, William Z Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Georgi Dimitrov, James Cannon, Howard Fast, Anna Louise Strong, Paul Robeson, Harry Pollitt, Jacques Duclos, Vyacheslav Molotov, Sergei Eisenstein, as well as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao. Canadian authors include Stewart Smith, Stanley Ryerson, William Kashtan, Dorise Nielsen, Jacob Penner, Sam Carr and Leslie Morris. However, the most significant of the Canadian titles are more than 60 works written by Tim Buck, representing a significant proportion of the writings (many of them scarce, uncommon or rare) of the longtime General Secretary of the Communist Party of Canada. --Website description