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The aim: to rejuvenate study and understanding of class relations in advanced capitalism. The book is an original synthesis of theorizing about class grounded in the production process, revealing a distinct tripartite class structure of owners, managers and non-managerial workers. Changes since the 1980s are traced and significant increases of non-managerial professional employees and middle managers are documented beyond any prior empirical research. Higher levels of oppositional and revolutionary class consciousness are conceptualized in terms of support for rights of capital and labour, and the extent of their expression in employed labour forces is estimated in terms only previously attempted briefly in the wake of 1960s protest movements. Connections between objective class positions and levels of class consciousness are analyzed in unprecedented depth; the solidary hegemonic consciousness of corporate capitalists, declining pro-capital oppositional consciousness among other employers and upper managers, and the pro-labour oppositional consciousness of pluralities of non-managerial workers (including professional employees) are all documented more fully than in prior studies. Strategic connections between class, class consciousness and issues of poverty and global warming are identified. Contending class forces’ engagement in actions toward an imminent system tipping point are uniquely traced. Main sources of evidence are all the national surveys in G7 and Nordic countries in the 1980s that provide relevant data, and the author’s unique Canadian national surveys in 2004, 2010 and 2016, supplemented by interviews with class leaders. A website encourages further class-based studies of advanced capitalism with similar measures to aid ecological sustainability and economic democracy. --Publisher's description (WorldCat record)

This article is about recent changes in the union strategy of Spanish platform workers. Using a socio-spatial approach to labour processes and disputes, we first describe the context of union organizing: how the business model of delivery platforms has evolved and how it is regulated in Spain. We then analyze the first initiatives to organize couriers in Spain. These initiatives can be classified under the heading of community unionism and have focused on specific spaces of union activism (state regulation and community support). Next, we explore how their newly won employee status has caused couriers to adopt more conventional forms of union organizing and focus on other spaces. Finally, we discuss the main challenges of reconciling union models with the working world of delivery platforms.

Employees living with disabilities often experience negative social attitudes about disability from employers and co-workers in their workplaces, as well as both overt and subtle forms of violence, discrimination, and harassment.... Our findings show that ableism often shows up in the context of employees needing accommodations to best do their job and is also present in the daily experiences of existing as a person living with a disability in a workplace. --From Introduction

Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts toward state-led economic development. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale industrial planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. State corporate entities, such as Industrial Estates Limited, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province’s efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This article examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia’s “new industries” that emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this Stellarton-based firm reveals how structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within sectors that were completely distinct from the province’s cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This case includes a reflection on the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia and represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies.

Introduces the theme of deindustrialization in Canada including history, gender, regions, technology, and resistance Summarizes the various contributions to this special issue of the journal.

The article reviews the book, "The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program," by Pallavi Banerjee.

An organization expects its employees to comply with job standardization to improve its production efficiency, while also expecting them to make suggestions to improve their job performance. Are the two goals compatible? Does job standardization turn employees into active speakers or stifled ones? This study is about how and why job standardization influences employee voice. I use conservation of resources (COR) theory to articulate competing hypotheses and a mediating process for the individual mechanism of employees’ role orientation in their job. In a three-wave panel survey, 232 employees completed questionnaires. The results are consistent with the resource conservation argument of COR theory: job standardization is resource-depleting and tends to narrow the role orientation of employees, who thus focus on resource conservation to fulfill job requirements and are in turn less likely to consume resources and voice suggestions. This study provides a specific, job-related way for managers to keep employee voice from being stifled or ignored. Job standardization should consider the relative importance of employee voice and be classified as discipline-related or job-content-related.

Le développement du travail de plateforme a vu naître, dans différents contextes nationaux, des mobilisations pour défendre les intérêts et faire reconnaître les spécificités de travailleur·es situé·es aux marges des relations industrielles. L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner, suivant une perspective comparative et intersectionnelle, l’accompagnement syndical des mobilisations de chauffeurs VTC et de livreurs de repas en France. À partir d’une enquête qualitative sur des collectifs suivis par la CFDT et la CGT, il met en évidence les défis et les obstacles communs auxquels ces organisations sont aujourd’hui confrontées pour soutenir l’action collective de travailleur·es précaires et racisé·es.

The presence of migrant workers has become a central feature of labour markets in highly developed countries. The International Labour Organisation estimates that in 2013 there were 112 million resident migrant workers in the 58 highest-income countries, who made up 16% of the workforce. Non-resident workers have also increasingly become part of the labour available for employment in other states, often on a temporary basis. This work takes a thematic and comparative approach to examine the profound implications of contemporary labour migration for employment law regimes in highly developed countries. In so doing, it aims to promote greater recognition of labour migration-related questions, and of the interests of migrant workers, within employment law scholarship. The work comprises original analyses by leading scholars of migration and employment law at the European Union level, and in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The specific position of migrant workers is addressed, for example as regards equality of treatment, or the position in employment law of migrant workers without a right to work. The work also explores the effects of migration levels and patterns upon general employment law - including the law relating to collective bargaining, and remedies against exploitation. --Publisher's description

La croissance du travail sur plateforme numérique a perturbé et réorganisé la réglementation sur l’emploi. La littérature a abordé ce sujet sous différents angles, mais souvent de manière fragmentée et sans expliquer clairement pourquoi et comment les conflits sur le plan réglementaire à propos du travail sur plateforme numérique surviennent. En utilisant le cadre de Beckert (2010) pour étudier la manière dont les domaines changent, l’auteur a effectué une revue critique de la littérature sur : 1) les rôles des institutions, des réseaux et des cadres dans la réglementation du travail sur plateforme numérique; 2) le pouvoir de réglementation que ces structures confèrent aux acteurs et aux organisations; et 3) les interrelations possibles entre ces structures. Les résultats démontrent l’existence d’une littérature abondante sur la portée de la réglementation institutionnelle et le pouvoir réglementaire des réseaux, mais beaucoup moins sur le rôle plus large de l’État dans ce domaine et les cadres qui guident les préférences des acteurs en matière de réglementation. Les axes de la recherche à réaliser dans le futur sont abordés.

The expansion of platform work has disrupted and reordered employment regulation. The literature has contributed to this subject from different angles, although often in a fragmented way and without clearly explaining why and how regulatory conflict arises over platform work. Using Beckert's (2010) framework for study of how fields change, the author conducted a critical literature review on: 1) the roles of institutions, networks and frames in regulating platform work; 2) the regulatory power these structures provide to actors and organizations; and 3) the possible interrelationships between these structures. The results show the existence of a substantial literature on the scope of institutional regulation and the regulatory power of networks, but much less on the broader role of the state in this field, and the framing processes that guide the actors’ preferences for regulation. Future lines of research are discussed.

This thematic chapter connects the ever-present “social question” (struggles on remuneration and hours of work, exploitation of wage workers) with the “socio-ecological question”. The “waged jobs vs the environment” trade‐off is a point of tension in the relationship between trade‐unions and green movements. Trade unions need an assurance regarding the jobs that would be lost in a transition away from fossil fuels. However, this chapter questions the myth that working-class people do not care about the environment and health, showing examples in Morocco, Zambia, Italy, Peru, Canada, Colombia, South Africa, Kazakhstan, and Argelia. In mining conflicts, in factories and in plantations, trade unions fought for a long time for the rights of exploited workers in struggles linking grievances on low wages and bad conditions of work with health issues. Much before there was a discussion on Just Transitions, there was a working-class environmentalism on issues of health and safety at work, such as asbestosis.

Despite persistent depictions to the contrary, coercion pervades the modern work experience and, in many significant respects, is underwritten by the power of the state. This article outlines some of the ways in which long-standing interventions by Canadian (and British) states continue to affect workplace relations today. To appreciate the scope of this effect, it is necessary to trespass across a number of disciplinary boundaries to include topics such as immigration, deportation, political policing, the legal foundations of employment law, the continuing influence of the British Poor Laws, and the role of prisons and prison labour in helping to regulate work standards. States acted to support proletarianization in a comprehensive way, but their tendency to favour large-scale, "labour-saving" building projects has often undermined the actual effectiveness of their efforts at social control. These patterns still haunt prison policy, as I will show toward the end of the article in discussing the Toronto South Detention Centre.

Nova Scotians understand economic hardships at both the personal and community levels. This is especially true for the residents of Pictou County. With the eclipse of coal, steel, and heavy manufacturing, successive governments looked to tourism to augment an eroding economic base and to commemorate the working lives of Nova Scotians. This article offers an analysis of the initial decision to construct and maintain the Museum of Industry in a region of the province subjected to sequential phases of deindustrialization. The venture, officially opened to regular attendance in 1995, is the largest facility in the province’s impressive system of 28 regional museums. The creation of the museum, however, was fraught with uncertainty and narrowly avoided financial collapse and plans to disperse the collection of artifacts. The project was subsequently left straddling an uneasy divide between celebrating industrial heritage and tempering controversies of economic and environmental development. Despite Nova Scotia’s proud heritage of worker resistance and union activism, visitors may exit the museum with the ambiguous message that while working lives are often harsh and riven with uncertainty, optimism for the future must prevail. The implication is that the appropriate response is selective anodyne forms of nostalgia, even resignation, but not resentment of the human and environmental costs of deindustrialization.

The article reviews the book, "Ineligible: Single Mothers Under Welfare Surveillance," by Krys Maki.

This fascinating book uncovers the little-known, surprisingly radical history of the Portuguese immigrant women who worked as night-time office cleaners and daytime “cleaning ladies” in postwar Toronto. Drawing on union records, newspapers, and interviews, feminist labour historians Susana P. Miranda and Franca Iacovetta piece together the lives of immigrant women who bucked convention by reshaping domestic labour and by leading union drives, striking for workers’ rights, and taking on corporate capital in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. Despite being sidelined within the labour movement and subjected to harsh working conditions in the commercial cleaning industry, the women forged critical alliances with local activists to shape picket-line culture and make an indelible mark on their communities. Richly detailed and engagingly written, Cleaning Up is an archival treasure about an undersung piece of working-class history in urban North America. --Publisher's description

Dans un contexte mondial où l’expansion de l’économie de plateformes numériques dans les secteurs du transport de personnes et de la livraison de repas suscite les mobilisations des travailleurs, le contexte japonais est caractérisé par une double « étrangeté », à savoir une absence apparente des travailleurs de plateformes dans le secteur du transport de personnes alors que les mobilisations y ont été importantes et une faible mobilisation dans le secteur de la livraison de repas où le nombre de livreurs a véritablement explosé. À partir d’une enquête qualitative menée auprès de divers acteurs actifs dans les deux secteurs, l’article montre comment le syndicalisme japonais a réagi face au capitalisme de plateforme.

The article reviews the book, "How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour," by Sian Lazar.

The Lingan strike of 1882–83 was the last in a series of strikes over a two-decade period on Cape Breton Island's Sydney coalfield. With the use of untapped local sources, this article reconstructs the history of this understudied strike within a broader history of social relations on the coalfield. The migration of labourers from the island's backland farms – predominantly from Highland enclave settlements – to the coal mines played a decisive role in shaping the era's new coal mining villages and the character of social conflict. By the early 1880s, structural change associated with National Policy industrialism was eroding the old authority of the coal operators, and miners embraced the Provincial Workmen's Association (pwa) to advance their claims in long-standing and highly localized contestations. Ultimately the coal communities themselves imposed the emergent trade unionism. The Lingan strike marked a transition to a new political order on the coalfield, structured by the place of the coal mines within the wider Cape Breton countryside and built upon a powerful localism and moral economy that recast the public sphere and the miners' place in it.

COVID-19’s impact on the home care sector has been devastating. Across Canada, it is well documented that workers and older people receiving care have experienced gruelling and isolating working and living conditions respectively. In Manitoba, most home care workers are im/migrants. While there is some emerging research on the experiences of im/migrant home care workers in Manitoba, there is a dearth of public knowledge about their experiences working and living in the province. As the provincial government struggles to recruit and retain home care workers, there is an increasing need for more research on im/migrant home care workers already in Manitoba. --Website description