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The organization of working time is a central concern in today's labour market, as it is connected to experiences of work-life conflict, employment insecurity, and broader patterns of gender inequality. This article examines union responses to working time changes using a case study of four large unions, as well as a larger survey of working time provisions in major collective agreements. The article contends that working time re-regulation strategies include not only efforts to reduce hours of work, but also a range of strategies to promote employee-oriented time flexibility. These working time strategies provide some means to address growing forms of work-life conflict and working time inequalities; however, these strategies are constrained by a number of factors, including employer resistance and the need for broader-based representational and collective bargaining structures.

An analysis of three poor people's movements in twentieth century Canada serves to wrest the ideas and activist tradition of Canada's poor people from historical obscurity. Between 1932 and 1935, the Communist-inspired Vancouver unemployed councils engaged in direct actions to challenge Depression-era social policy, capital and the police. The arrival of the modern post-war welfare state did not end poverty; however. Vancouver antipoverty activists were circumscribed by society's relative affluence and organizational and sectarian debates within labour councils and the antipoverty movement. Finally, since 1989 the Toronto-based Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has extended antipoverty activism to include the issues of immigrants, First Nations, women and children. Drawing on theorist Antonio Gramsci and the socialist-anarchist tradition, this thesis posits that direct action and a subsidiarity relationship between activists and their community are essential to the success and longevity of poor people's movements.

The authors explore the contemporary employment-related experiences of people with disabilities with reference to the rise of precarious employment since the mid-1970s. ...[The] chapter offers an analysis of labour market trends; it consideres how the movement in and out of employment among people with disabilities relates to their experience of precariousness. The authors pay considerable attention to remedial legislation, such as federal and provincial pay and employment equity legislation, designed to facilitate access to employment and how, and in what ways, it influences (or fails to influence) conditions of work. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 35).

This edited collection draws together original case studies written by leading researchers in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States that examine the politics of working disasters. The essays address two fundamental questions: what gets recognized as a work disaster? And how does the state respond to one? --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Politics of Recognition and Response / Eric Tucker -- Trucking Tragedies: The Hidden Disaster of Mass Death in the Long-Haul Road Transport Industry / Michael Quinlan, Claire Mayhew, and Richard Johnstone -- The Australian Epidemic of Repetition Strain Injury: A Sociological Perspective / Andrew Hopkins -- "All Part of the Game": The Recognition of and Response to an Industrial Disaster at the Fluorspar Mines, St Lawrence, Newfoundland, 1933-1978 / Richard Rennie -- The Long Road to Action: The Silicosis Problem and Swedish Occupational Health and Safety Policy in the 20th Century / Annette Thörnquist -- Disaster, Meaning Making, and Reform in Antebellum Massachusetts / Patricia Reeve -- Regulating Safety, Regulating Profit: Cost-Cutting, Injury and Death in the British North Sea after Piper Alpha / Dave Whyte -- Courts, Crime, and Workplace / Richard Johnstone -- Blame and Causation in the Aftermath of Industrial Disasters: Nova Scotia's Coal Mines from 1858 to Westray / Susan Dodd -- Accountability and Reform in the Aftermath of the Westray Mine Explosion / Eric Tucker.

This edited collection draws together original case studies written by leading researchers in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States that examine the politics of working disasters. The essays address two fundamental questions: what gets recognized as a work disaster? And how does the state respond to one? --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Politics of Recognition and Response / Eric Tucker -- Trucking Tragedies: The Hidden Disaster of Mass Death in the Long-Haul Road Transport Industry / Michael Quinlan, Claire Mayhew, and Richard Johnstone -- The Australian Epidemic of Repetition Strain Injury: A Sociological Perspective / Andrew Hopkins -- "All Part of the Game": The Recognition of and Response to an Industrial Disaster at the Fluorspar Mines, St Lawrence, Newfoundland, 1933-1978 / Richard Rennie -- The Long Road to Action: The Silicosis Problem and Swedish Occupational Health and Safety Policy in the 20th Century / Annette Thörnquist -- Disaster, Meaning Making, and Reform in Antebellum Massachusetts / Patricia Reeve -- Regulating Safety, Regulating Profit: Cost-Cutting, Injury and Death in the British North Sea after Piper Alpha / Dave Whyte -- Courts, Crime, and Workplace / Richard Johnstone -- Blame and Causation in the Aftermath of Industrial Disasters: Nova Scotia's Coal Mines from 1858 to Westray / Susan Dodd -- Accountability and Reform in the Aftermath of the Westray Mine Explosion / Eric Tucker.

[The author] critically examines the rationale offered to justify the exclusion of agricultural workers from occupational health and safety legislation [in Ontario] which lasted until 2005. The chapter is a case study of marginalized workers denied the benefit of labour law protections. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

At the height of World War II labour unrest, Montréal tramway workers, the majority of whom were French Canadian, struck over recognition of their Canadian Congress of Labour-affiliated union over two entrenched rival unions. The strike, which threatened critical wartime production in Canada's largest industrial centre, illustrates how multi-union workplaces were a source of wartime industrial disorder. Circumstances related to the strike tested the capacity of the federal government to respond in a way which was compatible with Prime Minister King's broader goals of industrial stability and national unity. King's inaction on labour law reform at this time led key cabinet ministers to pursue criminal charges against the parties involved in the tramway strike. However, legal proceedings were obverted after King intervened on a recommendation from Carl Goldenberg, who had successfully conciliated the strike. Concurrent to these events was the announcement of a wide-ranging public inquiry into national labour unrest, which eventually led to the adoption of a new labour code (PC 1003). The new federal labour law adopted provisions similar to those in the US Wagner Act, which severely limited union substitution, subjugating worker free choice and collective self-determination to the goals of capital and the state.

[This] study is important for many reasons. it relates to a large local of workers in major hotels in Toronto, owned by multinational firms. The workforce consists largely of immigrant and visible minority women with poor wages and working conditions. As Tufts points out, the gender, ethnic and income segmentation of the hotel labour market creates difficult challenges for building union solidarity and for new organizing and effective bargaining. In this context, Local 75's experience with organizing and pattern bargaining is instructive. --Editors' introduction

This article explores the “cultural project” of a hotel workers’ union in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is an examination of the efforts of HERE (now UNITE-HERE) Local 75 to transform the identity and image of hotel workers through the promotion of cultural activities involving rank-and-file members. Part of a larger union renewal project, the cultural project attempts to build solidarity by connecting with members’ lives beyond the workplace. Furthermore, the union's cultural strategies are linked to the development of the city's tourism sector, situating the union's efforts in broader processes of place promotion. The investigation seeks to identify how worker engagement with the cultural implicates organized labour in contradictory processes producing both emancipatory and oppressive economic landscapes.

This paper considers the presence of Christianity in the labour movement in early 20th-century Ontario. During this period labour leaders were unquestionably disillusioned with the established churches and did not hesitate to criticize clergy-men for their indifference and hostility to labour's cause. This disillusionment did not mean, however, that organized labour abandoned religion. Both moderate reformist and radical labour leaders articulated a non-sectarian, activist Christianity that helped them frame the issues they were concerned about. Alliances also developed between the churches and labour bodies at the national level and labour-friendly clergy and a small group of labour leaders in industrial centres in southern Ontario.

Ces dernières années, la problématique de la relation de service a conduit à l’analyse de situations de travail de plus en plus prégnantes en s’intéressant de très près au déroulement de l’activité. Cette perspective peut être poussée jusqu’à étudier le caractère sollicitant d’une activité fondée sur la confrontation aux clients et les implications de cette sollicitation sur les contraintes ressenties par les salariés dans l’exercice du travail. Il s’agit donc d’examiner les effets de l’organisation de l’activité – y compris les dispositifs de gestion qui y interviennent et l’influence du travail de l’encadrement – à l’égard des contraintes que ressentent les salariés. Cette organisation peut alléger ou renforcer ces contraintes et accentue l’envie des salariés d’en discuter pour adapter les finalités et modalités du travail.

In October 1976 one million Canadian workers walked off the job to protest the wage controls imposed by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In a memorable personal account of this historic general strike, Saint John labour activist George Vair recalls how workers in one New Brunswick city mobilized to defend themselves and their unions and defeat the unpopular program. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Guide pratique de l’arbitrage de grief au Québec," by Jean-Serge Masse.

The article reviews the book, "Justice on the Job : Perspectives on the Erosion of Collective Bargaining in the United States," edited by Richard N. Block and Sheldon Friedman.

The article reviews the book, "Normes sociales, droit du travail et mondialisation : confrontations et mutations," by Marie-Ange Moreau.

Analyzes union membership data in 24 countries (including Canada) of past and present union density rates, including explanatory factors for the differences and trends in unionization.

This chapter initiates the conversation between theory, method, evidence, and practice that is the focus of this book. It conceptualizes precarious employment, probes its dynamics in Canada, and identifies avenues for fostering understanding in the service of positive social change by way of several linked arguments set in the three major sections that follow. --Author's introduction

This interdisciplinary volume offers a multifaceted picture of precarious employment and the ways in which its principal features are reinforced or challenged by laws, policies, and labour market institutions, including trade unions and community organizations. Contributors develop more fully the concept of precarious employment and critique outmoded notions of standard and nonstandard employment. The product of a five-year Community-University Research Alliance, the volume aims to foster new social, statistical, legal, political, and economic understandings of precarious employment and to advance strategies for improving the quality and conditions of work and health. --Publisher's description

[S]ynthesizes the central findings of the volume ...[and] explores the implications of precarious employment for workers, households, and communities as well as its larger public costs and identifies several avenues for improving knowledge in an attempt to better workers' conditions of work and qaulity of health. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 39.

[A]dvances a new methodological approach to understanding precarious wage work.... This approach considers how race and gender, as they intersect with occupation, shape and, in turn, are shaped by precarious employment. Its main empirical finding is that a "racialized gendering of jobs" characterizes the contemporary Canadian labour market. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 34).