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Mennonite political theology, at least as manifested by church pronouncements on communism and labor unions, has been both more and less progressive than the ideology of the broader North American society. When the United States and Canadian governments were obsessed with tracking down enemy “reds” within, Mennonites passed resolutions that cautioned against the identification of Christianity with anti-communism. However, while the Second World War and the decade immediately following saw the expansion of labor unions as North Americans flocked to join them, Mennonites issued statements warning against the compromise of Christian principles that union membership would entail. --Introduction

Discusses the evolution of the Mennonite approach to labour relations in Manitoba with reference to an unsuccessful unionization drive at Palliser Furniture in Winnipeg in the 1990s.

In a contemporary labour market that includes growing levels of precarious employment, the regulation of minimum employment standards is intricately connected to conditions of economic security. With a focus on the role of neoliberal labour market policies in promoting "flexible" employment standards legislation - particularly in the areas of minimum wages and working time - Mark Thomas argues that shifts toward "flexible" legislation have played a central role in producing patterns of labour market inequality. Using an analytic framework that situates employment standards within the context of the broader social relations that shape processes of labour market regulation, Thomas constructs a case study of employment standards legislation in Ontario from 1884 to 2004. Drawing from political economy scholarship, and using a qualitative research methodology, he analyses class, race, and gender dimensions of legislative developments, highlighting the ways in which shifts towards "flexible" employment standards have exacerbated longstanding racialized and gendered inequities. Regulating Flexibility argues that in order to counter current trends towards increased insecurity, employment standards should not be treated as a secondary form of labour protection but as a cornerstone in a progressive project of labour market re-regulation. --Publisher's description

An acknowledgement speech by Mark Thompson, Professor Emeritus, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, is presented. Firstly, Thompson would like to thank Laval University and his colleagues and friends in the Department of industrial relations for this great honor, one of the great moments of his life. This honor is even more significant taking into account the major role that the Department plays in the study of industrial relations in Canada. Thompson also would like to address the graduates. They were fortunate to study various subjects in industrial relations with well-known professors. In the future, they will have many occasions to recall what they learned in their studies.

Professor Mark Thompson is recipient of an honorary doctorate in the Social Sciences. Thompson undertook university studies in the US, initially at Notre Dame University and subsequently at Cornell University, where he oriented his studies toward the field of Industrial Relations. Following his studies, military service as an officer, and two years at the International Labour Organization, Thompson chose the university sector and pursued his career at the University of British Columbia (UBC). That career would last more than thirty years and, in the meantime, he also became a Canadian citizen. During the years he spent at UBC, Thompson devoted himself to integrating the various components of his profession in a very convincing way. The first component was research and publication. The second component was direct intervention in the areas of mediation and arbitration. The third component was his work within professional associations, the Canadian Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association in the US.

During the interwar years, friends Annie Buller and Beckie Buhay established careers with the Communist Party of Canada and forged a uniquely Communist militant femininity that led to their eventual canonization by the Party as ideal comrades. Using a biographical approach to women’s working-class history, this thesis examines these women’s significant contributions to the CPC’s political project as gendered work. It also demonstrates that although their representation of themselves as comrades was organized around their understanding of themselves as workers, it was shaped too by particularities of ethnicity, gender, and other factors that were all subsumed in the Party’s egalitarian rhetoric. Additionally, in exploring how their lifelong friendship supported their construction of Communist militant femininity, and thus enabled their work, this thesis contributes to a developing historiography of friendship that focusses on its work rather than its nature, and that is inclusive of the friendships of working-class women.

The article reviews the book, "The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets," by Tito Boeri and Jan van Ours.

L’étude vise à combler le manque de connaissance sur la préparation à la négociation collective et, plus particulièrement, celle des employeurs. Malgré qu’elle soit considérée comme une phase de première importance du processus de la négociation collective, les études de terrain sur le sujet sont quasi inexistantes. Le modèle de la préparation patronale à la négociation collective utilisé a été testé à partir d’un échantillon de 232 répondants provenant des organisations syndiquées du Québec, à l’exception des fonctions publiques provinciale et fédérale. Les résultats de l’analyse montrent que, globalement, la préparation des employeurs est jugée comme étant une activité importante, surtout la préparation politique, suivie des préparations synoptique et technique. Pour la première fois à notre connaissance, une étude présente ce que font concrètement les organisations en guise de préparation, tout en permettant une analyse théorique de la dynamique de cette phase du processus de la négociation collective.

Can soft regulatory approaches and corporate social responsibility ever be substitute methods for pursuing meaningfully across the globe violations of labour standards? Our analysis shows the limits of country, government, and hard-law based international labour regulation, but also the ambiguities and challenges of soft labour regulation. We introduce an updated model of international labour regulation and create a conceptual framework for analyzing labour regulation. We provide some insights into how regulation has developed over the last decades and discuss some of the challenges it faces. Our assessment of the various regulatory regimes is based on the simple premise of whether they can provide a venue for workers' rights violations to be redressed. We aim to provide a broad overview and an attempt at generalizing the findings and "lessons learnt" so far from an international and comparative industrial relations perspective.

This paper proposes a conceptual model for understanding emerging changes in a North American labour union. UNITE-HERE, largely representing textile and hospitality workers, has been at the forefront of debates on union revitalization in the US and Canada. UNITE-HERE is often characterized as a successful example of North American union renewal, but I argue that this often oversimplifies many complex and contradictory labour strategies. Much of the labour union renewal literature remains prescriptive and is only beginning to escape false binaries such as business versus social unionism, the servicing versus organizing model, or ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ administration. In this paper, I attempt to conceptualize the strategies adopted by the union as they exist in relation to the changing political economic landscape. I characterize the current labour practices as ‘Schumpeterian unionism’, a model which captures the shifting, contradictory, and multi-scalar relationships labour has with the broader community, capital and the state. The model is illustrated with a case study of UNITE-HERE Local 75’s response to the 2003 SARS outbreak through their establishment of a Hospitality Workers Resource Centre to service unemployed workers.

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.

Changes to the global economy over the past few decades along with growing support for neo-liberal policies in Canada have led to an increase in precarious, low-wage frontline service work. These kinds of occupations often involve sustained interaction with clients and have high job demands, low job control and insufficient monetary reward. Further, many of these jobs also tend to be gendered (i.e., they involve a large degree of ‘emotional’ labour or care work that is predominantly carried out by female workers). Working conditions such as these can have a negative impact on the mental health of frontline service workers leading to psychological distress and depression. Chronic stress or cumulative stressful life events can also increase vulnerability to depression. While these stressors can be exacerbated by poor working conditions, they can also exist independently of them. Comparative research across two or more frontline service occupations, similar in broad strokes but differing in workplace characteristics, is especially needed to understand how structural and contextual factors in the workplace and over the life course interact to produce depression. This thesis presents data from my supervisor (Dr. Cecilia Benoit) and colleagues’ 4-wave longitudinal study entitled “Interactive service workers’ occupational health and safety and access to health services” (Benoit, Jansson, Leadbeater & McCarthy, 2005). This is a study of three types of frontline service jobs – two in the formal economy (hairstyling and food and beverage service) and one in the shadow/informal economy (sex industry). Results of this secondary analysis demonstrate that not only do working conditions have a significant impact on the mental health of frontline service workers but that stressful life events also have very strong explanatory power in understanding why certain workers experience depression more than others. The findings indicate that sex workers have the highest levels of depression, in comparison to stylists and servers. Yet sex workers report protective factors in their jobs, including higher comparative decision latitude, that contradict much of the current literature on sex work. The thesis concludes with policy recommendations and gives direction for further research in the area of frontline service work and depression.

The article reviews the book, "Transforming or Reforming Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Community Economic Development," by John Loxley.

The article reviews the book, "Un débat en analyse du travail : deux méthodes en synergie dans l’étude d’une situation d’enseignement," by Daniel Faïta et Bruno Maggi.

The article reviews the book, "Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871," by Catharine Anne Wilson.

Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means - such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales - to the forces driving labour market insecurity. --Publisher's description

This paper explores the history of Ontario’s labour laws as they relate to agricultural workers, examines the way these laws have been interpreted by the judiciary, provides an overview of the most recent case affirming the right of agricultural workers to bargain, and analyzes the likely effects of the Court of Appeal’s recent decision. In so doing, it provides commentary on the relationship between the labour movement, human rights and the legal system more generally, and provides specific commentary on this situation as applies to agricultural workers in Ontario.

Labour rights are increasingly being constructed as human rights. While this construction is gaining popularity, there is still considerable opposition to it. Recently, the debate has made its way to the pages of Just Labour. Building upon a pragmatic approach utilized by feminist legal scholars, the present article seeks to continue this important dialogue and offers an alternative that combines elements of both rights-based pluralism and critical legal scholarship. It contends that the labour movement ought to employ a multi-faceted strategy to protect and promote the rights of working people. Such a strategy recognizes the limitations of rights-discourse, but also recognizes its potential benefits. The paper argues that the labour movement cannot rely solely on rights-discourse to protect its interests but that it should also not be dismissed out of hand. Thus, the construction of labour rights as human rights can be only part of the labour movement's broader fight back strategy.

The article reviews the book, "Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States," by David Rayside.