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Recounting the cuts to freedom of association and the collective bargaining process across Canada since the 1980s, this study challenges the notion that Canada is an international champion of human rights. With documentation on the assaults to the rights of Canadian workers, this text considers the ways governments intervene to stop the collective bargaining process and evaluates topics such as the history of collective bargaining in Canada, the role of the International Labor Office, and the future hope of restoring rights and fairness to labor laws. --Publisher's description

Using a feminist political economy lens, this paper explores the balancing of work and family by parents on social assistance in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. In all three provinces, restructuring of policy has made parents’ entitlement to assistance increasingly contingent on their employability efforts (e.g. mandatory job searches, participation in welfare-to-work programs). This entitlement relationship is implicated by simultaneous and contradictory processes embedded in neo-liberal restructuring – gendering and familization – that problematically affect parents’ ability to balance their actual or potential employability expectations with family caregiving demands. Drawing on qualitative data from 46 interviews, this paper reveals the strategies that parents then utilize to manage these competing demands so that they can maintain their family’s survival– or “stay afloat” – while living on social assistance. In terms of thematic areas, these intricately inter-related coping strategies include: learn the system; play the system; social support; pawning. The significance of these findings for feminist challenges of neo-liberalism and for meeting social justice goals (i.e. economic security; equality) is discussed.

The article reviews the book, "Working Disasters: The Politics of Recognition and Response," edited by Eric Tucker.

The article presents a comparison of the working classes in Canada and the U.S. It states that a smaller low-wage manufacturing sector exists in Canada where workers are permanently trapped in poverty. The similarity of the levels and nature of unionization and attitudes toward social provisioning between the two countries are also mentioned.

The article reviews the book, "Inside the Workplace: Findings from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey," by Barbara Kersley, Carmen Alpin, John Forth, Alex Bryson, Helen Bewley, Gill Dix and Sarah Oxenbridge.

The article reviews the book, "Mobsters, Unions and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement," by James B. Jacobs.

The article reviews the book, "American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years," by John Barnard.

Canadian labour's agitation against Asian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Many historians have highlighted labour's concerns about Asian competition in the labour market, while others have explored the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism in most segments of Canadian, and especially British Columbian, society. But these factors – while important – do not sufficiently explain labour's antipathy to Asians. They particularly fail to account for the unity against Asian immigration between unionists in different regions, the influence of campaigns for exclusion in other countries, and the class content of labour's anti-Asian rhetoric. Another under-explored issue is whether unionists approached Asians in the same way as other immigrants, minorities, and oppressed groups. Drawing on the growing literature on racialization, and focusing primarily on the 1880s, when labour's views on Asian immigration became well established, this article shows how Asians were set apart from any groups with whom labour might have sympathy or common cause. Asians were associated with oppressive forces, particularly of the emerging industrial capitalist system. This association can be seen in many of labour's stereotypes of Asians as industrial slaves, ruthless competitors in the economy, and threats to white women. These stereotypes also set Asians up as polar opposites to the basic class, race, and gender identity that labour leaders sought to foster.

From the 1870s until the Great Depression, immigration was often the question of the hour in Canada. Politicians, the media, and an array of interest groups viewed it as essential to nation building, developing the economy, and shaping Canada’s social and cultural character. One of the groups most determined to influence public debate and government policy on the issue was organized labour, and unionists were often relentless critics of immigrant recruitment. Guarding the Gates is the first detailed study of Canadian labour leaders’ approach to immigration, a key battleground in struggles between different political factions within the labour movement. --Publisher's description

This paper explores the approach of Canada's largest labour central, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC), to immigration from 1933 to 1939. This was a unique period in Canada's immigration history, as in 1930 the government responded to the onset of the Great Depression by closing the gates to almost all immigration for the first time since Confederation, and by 1933 there was no doubt that the gates would remain closed for some time. Despite this dramatic change, Canadian labour leaders stood by their longstanding views on immigration through to the end of the 1930s. Although the level of concern about immigration predictably declined, TLC leaders generally gained confidence that their established views had widespread support. This confidence encouraged unionists to pose as protectors of immigrants against hardship in Canada. It also assured them that they did not have to devote as much energy as in earlier periods to agitating for the deportation of some immigrants, or to their longtime favourite cause, restricting immigration from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. Altogether, changes in the economy and immigration rates did not necessarily entail changes in labour's attitudes. A number of other factors, including ideological trends within the movement, prevailing attitudes towards race and gender, and the efforts of groups advocating immigration served to entrench labour's views even more deeply in the 1930s.

The article focuses on the underlying conditions contributing to the Winnipeg General Strike in Manitoba in 1919. It serves as a significant expression of the liberal view of the necessary reforms to handle industrial conflict and to provide for a more just economy. It states that the legitimate demands of labor could be accommodated within the existing constitutional framework with the developing economic maturity of Canada in the early 20th century and efficient state management of the economy.

This thesis examines what the two sides of class-- capital and working class --have meant in left parlance, what these meanings imply about class struggle, and how they were put into political practice through Communist Parties and trade unions. Ideas about class and strategies for class struggle continue to be central to the left, as the various ways these are conceptualized give rise to very different answers to some common and persistent questions: Who is legitimately a worker and when? Why, how and with what result are certain struggles delayed or subsumed within others? At what point does self-criticism cross over to counter-revolutionary dissent? And what might continuing schisms over these questions tell us about traditional left organizations? The thesis traces the development of 'the left' from its key conceptual subject, the working class, through its two most widely-adopted organizational strategies in order to examine the poverty of the left's analytical and political traditions, particularly as regards (1) the notion of socialism as an alternative management plan and (2) ideas about capital and working class that stressed the embodiments of power relations rather than those relations themselves, and which were lifted directly from capital's own definitions of productivity. Finally, the thesis argues that insights from long-neglected Marxisms, certain critical post-structuralisms and the political strategies of some emergent anti-capitalist networks together offer the opportunity to produce a more fluid, and more liberatory left, imbued with: (1) an understanding of class as a relationship that does not inhere to individuals or organizations, and (2) a notion of the working class as a permanent resistance that has nothing whatever to do with a particular ideology or strategy; with (3) an analysis which emphasizes situational relationships of power that are at once racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed; and (4) a political approach which draws means and ends together in an emphasis on resistance as the troubling of order, and revolution as a process of refusal.

The article reviews the book, "The Politics of Working Life," by Paul Edwards and Judy Wajcman.

Detailed study, including interviews with the participants, of the United Steelworkers' campaign to organize the workers at a call centre in Sudbury, Ontario, in 1999.

The article reviews the book, "Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present," by Ellen Reese.

When work is 'boundless' and 'seamless' where and how do workers' lives intersect with the space-time continuum of place-based communities? Who and what are they accountable to? Telemediation is fragmenting work across increasingly complex, transnational networks. Workers in these networks must negotiate through a multitude of temporal, contractual and trans-cultural milieus. This paper traces the trajectory of the work experience using case studies of telemediated work relationships in various points in the global supply chain and analyses the implications of telemediated spaces for the quality of workers' lives. Drawing on an analysis of case studies conducted by the EMERGENCE Canada project, this paper argues that telemediated work represents a shift in the scale at which many aspects of daily life unfold, and that some of the assumptions upon which workers' lives are governed must be reconsidered.

The history of British Columbia’s economy in the twentieth century is inextricably bound to the development of the forest industry. In this comprehensive study, Gordon Hak approaches the forest industry from the perspectives of workers and employers, examining the two main sets of institutions that structured the relationship during the Fordist era: the companies and the unions. Drawing on theories of the labour process, Fordism, and discursive subjectivity, Hak relates daily routines of production and profit-making to broader forces of unionism, business ideology, ecological protest, technological change, and corporate concentration. The struggle of the small-business sector to survive in the face of corporate growth, the history of the industry on the Coast and in the Interior, the transformations in capital-labour relations during the period, government forest policy, and the forest industry’s encounter with the emerging environmental movement are all considered in this eloquent analysis. With its critical historical perspective, Capital and Labour in the British Columbia Forest Industry will be essential reading for anyone interested in the business, natural resource, political, social, and labour history of the province. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada," by Anna Pratt.

Through an analysis of qualitative, ethnographic data, I locate the narratives of nine Mexican women married to migrants within the context of capitalist globalization, state policies, and local gender ideologies. In doing so, advocate for a theoretical approach to migration which combines elements of structural theories of migration and network theoretical approaches. These women's narratives position them at the juncture of capitalism and other social relations, and show them to be active agents in migration. Not only is their labour critical to the maintenance of migration patterns and the capitalist relations into which migrants and non-migrants are incorporated, but women's labour is also imbued with social meanings.

The widespread use of outsourcing in the service industry has major consequences for the employment relationship. In particular, outsourcing diminishes absolute employer control of firm operations. This article focuses on this new relationship through a study of the occupational health and safety requirements established in connection with the outsourcing of public bus transport in Denmark.