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This paper analyzes the political dynamics between a newly elected, right-leaning provincial government and a left-leaning public sector union that resulted in the privatization of 4000 health support housekeeping jobs in southwestern British Columbia in less than a year. The article documents how government set the stage for privatization, the struggle that ensued when the union resisted concessionary bargaining, and the new challenges that emerged for both union and management once housekeeping and other support services were taken over by multi-national service corporations. This case is significant because the size and scope of this privatization and the legislation that facilitated it are unprecedented in Canadian history.

Ce mémoire relate l’expérience du Front d’action politique des salariés à Montréal (FRAP) de 1970 à 1974, un parti municipal émanant directement des milieux syndicaux et populaires. Après avoir présenté les grands traits de la conjoncture sociale, économique et politique de la décennie 1960 au Québec, nous analysons les conditions objectives qui ont favorisé l’émergence du FRAP à Montréal (problèmes sociaux, administration municipale autoritaire, logements insalubres, etc.). Le FRAP est fondé en mai 1970 et présente des candidats contre le maire Jean Drapeau aux élections du 25 octobre suivant. La Crise d’octobre et l’imposition de la Loi des mesures de guerre déroutent le FRAP qui ne fait élire aucun candidat. Les mois et années qui suivent, les groupes sociaux s’éloignent du FRÀP et ce dernier a vainement espéré que les organisations syndicales de la région de Montréal concrétisent l’idée qui avait été à l’origine de sa création, à savoir un parti politique propre aux travailleurs et aux travailleuses. Le FRAP met fin à ses activités au début de l’année 1974 quelques mois avant la naissance d’un nouveau parti municipal, le Rassemblement des citoyens de Montréal (RCM).

During the night of April 10, 1734, Montréal burned. Marie-Joseph Angélique, a twenty-nine-year-old slave, was arrested, tried, and found guilty of starting the blaze that consumed forty-six buildings. Suspecting that she had not acted alone and angered that she had maintained her innocence, Angélique's condemners tortured her after the trial. She confessed but named no accomplices. Before Angélique was hanged, she was paraded through the city. Afterward, her corpse was burned. Angélique, who had been born in Portugal, faded into the shadows of Canadian history, vaguely remembered as the alleged arsonist behind an early catastrophic fire. The result of fifteen years of research, [this book] vividly tells the story of this strong-willed woman. Afua Cooper draws on extensive trial records that offer, in Angélique's own words, a detailed portrait of her life and a sense of what slavery was like in Canada at the time. Predating other first-person accounts by more than forty years, these records constitute what is arguably the oldest slave narrative in the New World. Cooper sheds new light on the largely misunderstood or ignored history of slavery in Canada. She refutes the myth that Canada was a haven at the end of the Underground Railroad. Cooper also provides a context for Canada in the larger picture of transatlantic slavery while re-creating the tragic life of one woman who refused to accept bondage. --Publisher's description

In an environment of global economic competition, corporations and the state have focused their strategies of competitive adjustment on labour flexibility and deregulation and reductions in social expenditures. In many countries, these policies led to the abandonment of full employment and increases in precarious or non-regulated employment. This article analyzes the main political and institutional elements of labour within Canada and Brazil, as well as recent changes in their employment regimes and labour market structures. Key research findings show us that greater labour market flexibility in both countries resulted in a reduction of labour rights that has contributed to the precariousness of work, increasing inequality in Canada, and higher levels of underemployment and poverty in Brazil.

The article reviews the book, "Prévenir et gérer les plaintes de harcèlement au travail," by Groupe d’aide et d’information sur le harcèlement sexuel au travail.,

The article reviews the book, "Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America," by Mark Simpson.

How are national and international labour laws responding to the challenge of globalization as it re-shapes the workplaces of the world? This collection of essays by leading legal scholars and lawyers from Europe and the Americas was first published in 2006. It addresses the implications of globalization for the legal regulation of the workplace. It examines the role of international labour standards and the contribution of the International Labour Organization, and assesses the success of the European experiment with continental employment standards. It explores the prospects for hemispheric co-operation on labour standards in the Americas, and deals with the impact of international labour standards on the rights of women and migrant workers. As the nature and organization of work around the world is being decisively transformed, new regional and international institutions are emerging that may provide the platform for new labour standards, and for protecting existing ones. --Publisher's description

Case study based on multi-year ethnography of the efforts of a group of workers organizing with Toronto Organizing for Fair Employment (TOFFE), now the Workers' Action Centre of toronto, an active community partner in the Community University Research Alliance on Contingent Work. [The authors] attempt to conceptualize community unionism by locating the efforts of TOFFE in relation to two intersecting continua - a continuum of location that includes constitituency, site, and issue-based organizing, and a continuum of process, defined by hierarchical organizations at one pole, and particpatory organizations at the other pole. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 39.

The article reviews the book, "Key Issues in Women's Work: Female Diversity and the Polarisation of Women's Employment," second edition, by Catherine Hakim.

The article reviews the book, "Varieties of Unionism, Strategies for Union revitalization in a Globalizing Economy," edited by Carola M. Frege and John Kelly.

The article reviews the book, "Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada's Great War," by Robert Rutherdale.

[The author] is concerned with the way the mainstream labour movement has historically treated non-white workers in precarious employment and the role of history in shaping contemporary practices. Das Gupta's offers a qualitative analysis of the perceptions and experiences of labour activists of colour and of alternative advocacy strategies for building more inclusive resistance movements. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

The article reviews the book, "Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham," by Horace Huntley and David Montgomery.

[C]onsiders the effects of contracting-out of public employment services for employment place workers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the workers seeking employment whom they serve. In so doing, [the author] reveals a range of important connections, from linkages at the policy level between changing immigration policy and the provision of employment supports at the provincial level, to connections, by way of a common attachment to precarious employment, between community workers, working largely in serial fixed-term temporary contracts contingent on public funding, and their clients. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 37.

Editorial introduction to the issue.

The article reviews the book, "Fight or Pay: Soldiers' Families in the Great War," by Diamond Morton.

Discusses the historic strike in which three miners were killed. Describes the strike's origins, how workers organized, the bloody confrontation with the police, and the subsequent settlement.

This paper examines the recent arrival of neutrality agreements in Canada. These are agreements between unions and employers that define the conditions under which union organizing will take place at facilities controlled by the employer. The history of neutrality agreements in the U.S. is reviewed, as is the emergence of these agreements in Canada. Neutrality agreements are a model of private ordering that operate without direct guidance from the state, yet their form and application are influenced by state law. The author examines neutrality agreements from the perspective of decentred regulatory theory, in which regulation is used by the state to steer the private creation of norms that are consistent with state policy. Using Ontario's labour laws as an example, the author explores the role of law in the emergence, form, and likely contribution of neutrality agreements to Canadian industrial relations.