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Lowell, Massachusetts, had a substantial French-Canadian community in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The workforce in the mill town was predominantly female. This study focuses on single French Canadian women in Lowell from 1900 to 1920. The author uses federal census schedules to examine their employment, earnings, and living arrangements. One major finding is that most of the workers were daughters living in households headed by fathers. Housework and family care obligations fell on daughters, which added to their economic responsibilities and reduced their marriageability.

Over 100,000 Canadian workers participate annually in educational programs conducted by their union or the broader labour organizations to which their union belongs. Union-based education is the most significant nonvocational education available to working people. This activity has been going on for decades, and Jeffery Taylor's Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education in the Twentieth Century is the first comprehensive history of it. Union Learning chronicles the rise and decline of the Workers' Educational Association, the development of internal union educational programs, the consolidation of the Canadian Labour Congress's educational system after 1956, the origin and growth of the Labour College of Canada, and the patchy history of university and college involvement in labour education. Taylor argues that a new emphasis on broad-based and activist education today promises to rekindle the sense of an educational movement that was present in the labour movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The book includes a number of illustrative sidebars and photographs. The author has developed a website containing images, video and other materials related to the history of labour education in Canada: http://unionlearning.athabascau.ca. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Laboring for Rights: Unions and Sexual Diversity Across Nations," edited by Gerald Hunt.

The period between 1935 and 1945 was a key one for the Communist Party of Canada [CPC or CP] due to the tumult of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Women were key players in the success that the CPC had during this period, one in which Communist and other left-wing movements grew and were more 'respectable' than they were during the Cold War that would follow. Yet women were secondary players in the Communist movement in Vancouver. While CP women played crucial roles in raising money for the Party, setting up fighting organizations such as the Vancouver Housewives league, and supporting the Allied war effort, CP members of both sexes pushed Party women into more traditional 'feminine' roles of wives, mothers, and ornaments. The Vancouver Communist Party offered a substantial challenge to Canada''s liberal state and the CP provided radical women with an outlet to channel their abilities against capitalism. In the end, however, the CP failed to alter substantially the fundamental division of labour between radical men and women. Communists upheld the mainstream doctrine of "separate spheres": they believed that men were workers, labour organizers, and producers while left-wing and working class women were domestic, passive, and consumers. This thesis concludes that while we cannot expect radical organizations to be completely separate from the gender ideals of the period in which they existed, the CPC did little to challenge traditional gender roles.

New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Post-Industrial America, by Stephen A. Herzenberg, John A. Alic, and Howard Wial is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Les nouvelles frontières de l’inégalité : hommes et femmes sur le marché du travail," edited by Margaret Maruani.

The article reviews the book,. "Droit des relations de travail en Amérique du Nord," by Kevin Banks, Lance Compa, Leoncio Lara and Sandra Polaski.

This article reviews the book, "The Rise and Development of Collective Labour Law," edited by Marcel van der Linden et Richard Price.

This article discusses the importance of job analysis tools for training in the context of participatory ergonomic processes. It explains the major principles and challenges in the design of these tools for short-cycle repetitive tasks and for long-cycle varied tasks. The intervention framework is described and the proposed tools are presented and related to the literature. The participants' difficulties with the tools developed in both contexts studied are summarized. The discussion suggests that these difficulties are partly related to the company context and raises questions about the data relevant for the evaluation of solutions in the case of non-repetitive tasks.

The article reviews the book, "Obligation and Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870-1930," by Betsey Beattie.

Written in the early 1960s and published for the first time in Labour/Le Travail, this memoir is of interest to labour historians for its portrayal of a working-class immigrant's life. The article introduces the autobiography of Arthur Webb, who in 1901 at age 16 emigrated from the UK to Canada. Webb reminisces about his childhood years in Liverpool (he began working at age 10 and had little formal education), then describes the series of temp jobs he held as a farm hand and labourer after his arrival in rural New Brunswick. He was a soldier before and during the First World War (he was gassed at Ypres) and latterly became a firefighter in Saskatoon, retiring in 1943 due to medical unfitness. He was deeply affected by the death of his wife in 1954, but remained determined to carry on - a recurring theme.

"High performance" management systems in unionized workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist industry relations system in Canada. Microcorporatist tendencies reflect more active worker cooperation in achieving management productivity, quality and flexibility goals. Analysis of development of these tendencies in the major appliance industry suggests that microcorporatism has contradictory implications. In one direction lies the displacement labor politics by a local-centered unionism that is increasingly captured by the logic of market competition. In a second direction lies a logic of greater worker resistance related to increased worker control of labor processes.

The article reviews the book, "Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West," by Susan Buck-Morss.

L’emploi traditionnel éclate de plus en plus pour donner naissance à une grande diversité d’emplois atypiques. Ce nouveau phénomène, qui est encore mal connu, pose de nombreux défis tant aux gestionnaires qu’aux travailleurs et à la société. Un des problèmes majeurs pour gérer ces enjeux est la difficulté de cerner adéquatement l’ampleur et la nature des transformations actuelles parce que les différentes formes de travail atypique n’ont pas encore été clairement définies. La contribution de cet article est de clarifier les différentes formes de travail à l’aide de deux typologies, une typologie des formes de travail et une typologie des travailleurs. L’étude révèle que plusieurs défis importants posés par cette nouvelle réalité dépendent à la fois de la forme de travail atypique concernée et des caractéristiques des travailleurs.

The article reviews the book, "'Heal Thyself': Managing Health Care Reform," by Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Ivy Lynne Bourgeault, Jacqueline Choiniere, and Eric Mykhalouskiy.

The article reviews the book, "The Future of Social Democracy: Views of Leaders From Around the World," edited by Peter H. Russell.

At the beginning of the 20th century, charity hospital governors in Ontario began to explore the possibility of admitting paying patients to help offset the costs of providing medical charity. This transformation entailed changes in administration, as well as concerted publicity and marketing campaigns to rehabilitate the image of the hospital and to attract affluent health consumers. The subsequent construction of new hospital facilities, exclusively for the use of paying customers, was informed by an ideology that mandated the physical separation of social classes and the identification of deserving and less deserving recipients of health care services. This paper examines aspects of the design, management, marketing, and staffing of a number of southern Ontario public hospitals to illustrate how the transformation of these institutions in the years between 1900-1935 actively shaped class inequality within and outside their walls.

The paper examines South African trade unions from the late apartheid era to the present (2001). Anti-apartheid sanctions and disinvestment affected the labour movement, as did the disastrous miners' strike of 1987. Democratization in the period since has resulted in the lifting of embargoes and the phasing-out of tariffs and state subsidies for industries located near the former bantustans. There has been a growth of public sector unions and private sector unions have also reversed their decline. Generally, the unions are still a force to be reckened with, but the neoliberal turn of the ruling African National Congress, to which the unions are closely linked, poses a serious challenge.

The article reviews the book, "Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods," by Paul Rutherford.