Your search

In this article, I will analyze the ways in which Brazilian workers are using social media to organize and mobilize. Although analysis of social media use has made great progress, in the case of worker movements it still needs further development. I will focus on the experience of Brazilian app-based delivery workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their dispersion across the country, delivery workers were able to carry out two national strikes through intense use of WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Using qualitative analysis of posts from worker organizations on social media, it was possible to identify the challenges faced by these movements when using digital media. Social media helped solve some organizational and communication problems, while producing others that workers had to deal with.

This study examines the framing of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) within the context of Canadian political discourse. Through a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary speeches spanning from 2006 to 2022, it investigates how TFWs and the TFWP have been framed by members of three federal political parties: Conservatives, Liberals and the NDP. With an aim to understand influences on framing strategies, the analysis considers significant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a change in government. The findings highlight the significance of party ideology in shaping perspectives on TFWs and the TFWP, with all three parties recognizing the necessity of this group and program in achieving Canada’s economic goals. At the same time, despite their increasing significance in the economy, the study highlights the conditional inclusion of TFWs in Canada. Policymakers adapt their frames based on perceived contribution of these workers and their alignment with Canadian interests. This research illuminates the crucial role of framing in shaping policy outcomes regarding TFWs and the TFWP.

The covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted the education system in Canada from March 2020 throughout the 2020–21 school year. It also had disproportionate secondary effects on women in terms of unpaid care, economic loss, and poor mental health. This article explores the lived experience of women educators in the province of Alberta, drawing on interviews and focus groups with 39 educators. Findings indicate that the pandemic not only exacerbated the triple burden that women educators, in particular, bear but added additional layers of responsibility related to public health management, educating children at home, elder care responsibilities, and emotional labour. The essential role women educators fulfilled within the covid-19 response, at work and at home, cost them time, professional development opportunities, mental wellness, and the positive rewards that had drawn them to the educational field. Current concerns around educator burnout and retention may be mitigated by acting on the recommendations of women educators regarding the development of more equitable education systems and social policy.

Le présent article soutient que la rétention du personnel demeure une priorité essentielle pour de nombreux employeurs, même si ces derniers deviennent de moins en moins enclins à offrir des emplois stables. La recherche a montré que, face à cette précarité croissante de l’emploi, les travailleurs adoptent des stratégies individuelles de progression professionnelle axées sur la mobilité entre entreprises, lesquelles viennent renforcer les inquiétudes des employeurs en ce qui concerne le roulement du personnel. Cet article défend l’importance pour les chercheurs en relations industrielles d’étudier de plus près les pratiques organisationnelles qui restreignent la mobilité des employés, c’est-à-dire les « stratégies de capture des travailleurs ». Celles-ci se distinguent des autres pratiques en matière de mobilité du fait qu’elles sont unilatérales et qu’elles visent une réduction du roulement du personnel sans nécessairement chercher à favoriser un sentiment d’engagement ou de loyauté chez les employés.

This paper argues that employee retention remains a key priority for many employers, even as they become less likely to offer stable employment. In the face of increased job insecurity, researchers have shown that workers have adopted personalized career progression strategies that emphasize inter-firm mobility. Such strategies heighten employer concerns about employee turnover. The paper argues that the industrial relations literature would gain from closer study of organizational practices that restrict employee mobility, i.e., “worker capture strategies.” Such practices stand out from other mobility-reducing ones because they are unilateral and aim to reduce turnover without necessarily fostering a sense of commitment or loyalty among employees.

Depuis la pandémie, un nombre croissant d’employés travaillent partiellement ou totalement à distance et en présentiel selon leur volonté ou des balises définies par leur employeur. Cette étude explore (1) les liens entre l’adoption de ces modes de travail qualifiés d’« hybride » (un changement d’organisation du travail important qui a modifié, entre autres, les lieux, les heures et la charge de travail) et diverses formes de comportement hostiles parmi le personnel ; (2) les moyens de prévenir et contrer l’émergence de comportements hostiles dans un contexte de travail hybride appelé à s’intensifier.

In 2019, Regina’s Co-operative Refinery Complex locked out the 730 members of Unifor Local 594 amid record profits in an aggressive drive for significant pension concessions. Marred by sweeping antipicketing injunctions, an enormous scab operation, police repression, and general public enmity, the lockout suggests two overlapping trends. First, the union’s adherence to co-operative and conciliatory bargaining had left it ill equipped to confront—either in the workplace or the public sphere—management’s costcutting agenda in the centre of Saskatchewan’s now hegemonic petrostate. Second, a marked tension developed between community outreach efforts and the circumstances in which legal industrial action was ineffective and civil disobedience emerged.

Unionization and collective bargaining continue to deliver material gains for workers by way of higher wages and access to supplementary benefits like health insurance and pensions. While researchers have charted a declining union wage advantage over the last few decades, collective bargaining still yields important gains for workers. Unions have sought to remedy stagnating real wages and growing inflation by seeking wage increases that align with the cost of living through bargaining processes and labour militancy. This report provides comparison of wages and benefits for unionized and non-unionized workers across industries in Canada and in the province of Saskatchewan by drawing from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) as well as custom tabulations acquired from Statistics Canada, retrieved from the LFS. --Executive summary

With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labor organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International. The contrast reveals similarities, divergences and trade-offs, with important implications for the future potential for building global organizations of informal workers.

The article reviews the book, "Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea," by Eric W. Sager.

The rise of rentier capitalism in advanced capitalist countries has detrimentally affected large numbers of worker and impaired the efficacy of protective labour and employment laws. However, capitalist rent-seeking is not unique to rentier capitalism, but rather has taken a variety of forms over time. This chapter begins by exploring the evolving meaning of rent and changing practices of capitalist rent-seeking. It then considers the ways in which workers responded to those practices in both rent-rich and rent-poor sectors of the economy, including through the enactment of labour and employment laws appropriate to, but only partially successful in addressing labour exploitation in each sector. The chapter then considers the impact of rentier capitalism on work in productivist firms and the efficacy of existing protective labour and employment laws. It concludes by considering possible reforms to protective laws for rentier capitalism while recognizing their limits in worlds built on structures generative of labour exploitation.

... Occupational health and safety regulation sits atop these structures of risk creation and distribution and historically has been shaped by the struggles of working people to limit the harm that unbridled capitalism would have otherwise inflicted upon them. The results, which are the subject of this chapter, have varied over time and place, and have secured real improvements for some workers. Given space limitations, the remainder of this chapter focuses on OHS regulation in advanced capitalist countries, with a concentration on the English-speaking world. The next section outlines the broad lines of the historical development of OHS regulation, beginning from the rise of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century through to the last decades of the twentieth century and the creation of a new mode of regulation, variously called regulated selfregulation or mandated partial self-regulation. The following section considers various debates over the performance of that regime, including the relation between self-regulation and state enforcement, the practice of state enforcement and the efficacy of worker participation rights. Finally, the last section of the chapter examines emerging OHS challenges to the regulatory regime. --From introduction

Nearly one in ten Canadians in the private sector works in the franchised sector of the economy. For the most part, franchisors operate as rentiers, extracting value from franchisees for the use of their brand. Research has demonstrated that this arrangement puts additional pressure on franchisees to extract surplus value from their employees that tend toward substandard and unlawful working conditions. In this scenario, franchisors benefit from but are only indirectly involved in the extract of surplus value. In some cases, however, the vertical controls exercised by “franchisors” over “franchisees” are so extensive, and the financial contribution of “franchisees” is so limited, that the franchisor becomes involved in directly extracting surplus value from franchisees. We explore this latter phenomenon through an excavation of the history of the legal distinction in Canadian business-format franchising in Canada and detailed studies of two recent Canadian cases in which “franchisees” successfully claimed employment status.

Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society's legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary. --Publisher's description

The Rossland Evening World, a four-page daily dedicated to the mineworkers of British Columbia's bustling West Kootenay mining town of Rossland, first appeared on May Day 1901 – just in time to do battle with local mine owners in the historic 1900–01 miners' strike. The World may have owed its existence in part to William "Big Bill" Haywood, a founder of the militant Western Federation of Miners (wfm) and the Industrial Workers of the World. On visiting the town and the prospectors' camp in the 1890s, Haywood saw that Rossland would soon grow into a thriving Pacific Northwest mountain community with a steady increase in wfm membership. He encouraged the miners to form wfm Local 38, possibly the first wfm local in Canada, and soon a dozen Kootenay locals formed wfm District Association 6. A wfm grant followed to help launch the local and the new daily. Amid growing frustration with bad working conditions and mine owners' refusal to recognize the wfm, the World became a welcome sister to the wfm's Miners' Magazine, dedicating itself to "the Interests of Organized Labor." By the fall of 1900, the strike of 1,400 miners was on, and the World published news and analysis throughout the region. Ultimately the strike was lost, but the World carried on until 1904. As its legacy, it showed how a daily newspaper could help build community support and provide a defence for the local unionized workforce.

In Australia and Canada, working holidaymaking is rationalized on the basis of encouraging cultural exchange among youth. Yet, in both countries, there is mounting evidence that working holiday programs are operating as back-door migrant work programs to help fill demands for labor in occupations and industries characterized by precarious jobs undesirable to locals. As scholarship on working holidaymakers’ labor market participation is more developed in Australia than in Canada, and administrative data available are also more extensive therein, this article sheds new light on the Canadian case vis-à-vis the Australian example. In exploring regulatory strategies adopted by these two settler states and their effects, comparative analysis of administrative data and historical and contemporary immigration and labor and employment laws and policies reveals how nationally specific program design can foster similar ends: precariousness among participants in the industries in which working holidaymakers are concentrated, including agriculture, tourism, and accommodation and food services. It also shows that stratification between working holidaymakers more closely approximating the image of the “cultural sojourner” and those who are effectively migrating for work purposes takes shape principally along the lines of source country in both countries.

The article reviews the book, "Le capital algorithmique. Accumulation, pouvoir et résistances à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle," by Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martineau.

Introduces Spector's essay on labour law, written from a Marxist perspective while he was attending Osgoode Hall law school in the early 1930s. Provides biographical background on Spector, a former Communist who became a leading Canadian Trotskyist. He briefly practiced law in Toronto before moving to New York in the later 1930s.

The article reviews the book, "Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges and the RDS Case," by Constance Backhouse.

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between public health and settler colonialism, employing age and ability as key categories of analysis. I argue that settler colonialism and public health were constitutive of one another. Public health policy weaves together notions about land, race, labour, age, and ability, to structure and stratify societies. Public health relied on white supremacist tropes to justify the state's attempts to subjugate and dispossess the Anishinaabeg in Northern Ontario. The idea of a "public" was critical and contested in the intersection of policy and the emerging social science of public health. Settler standards of public imagined a "public" that was white, male, middle-class, and adult, with a body that could be made healthy through individual effort. Settler ideas about Indigenous Peoples shaped the "public" as a racialized and age-stratified concept in Canadian public health and health policy. In this dissertation, I seek to highlight how material and symbolic age, and material and symbolic children, figured in settler-colonial processes of state formation in the context of public health policies. I examine how bureaucrats and institutions in the public and voluntary sectors constructed and portrayed Indigenous and settler health, measuring each against a middle-class standard of "public" health. To do this, I set forth four interconnected arguments. First, settler colonialism and settler public health policy were mutually constitutive. Second, disability existed alongside and entangled with age as a key framing for settler public health policies. Third, these public health policies drew from a bifurcated notion of the "public," resulting in policies focused on protection and surveillance based on racialized lines. Finally, these framings of disability, age, and the "public" had clear material impacts in Northern Ontario's settler-colonial context, enabling settlement while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples.