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The article reviews the book, "No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit": The Moral Regulation of Single Mothers in Ontario, 1920-1997, by Margaret Little.

The article reviews the book, "Taking on Goliath: The Emergence of a New Left Party and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico," by Kathleen Bruhn.

The article reviews the book, "Workers' Control in Latin America, 1930-1979," edited by Jonathan C. Brown.

Le système québécois de formation professionnelle a connu des transformations importantes au cours des années 90. La nouvelle articulation institutionnelle de ce système a été traversée par diverses influences politiques et économiques, dont une caractéristique majeure est la participation soutenue des principaux acteurs des relations industrielles. Nous proposons ici une analyse de ce que nous nommons la modernisation du système de formation professionnelle au Québec en retraçant les orientations de départ et leur logique sous-jacente, en identifiant les influences extérieures permettant de spécifier l’expérience québécoise et en concluant sur les principaux enjeux qui confrontent les acteurs.

The article reviews the book, "Réduction du temps de travail: mode d'emploi," by Jean-Pierre Mongrand.

The article reviews the book, "Labor Market Regimes and Patterns of Flexibility: A Sweden-Canada Comparison," by Axel Van Den Berg, Bengt Furaker and Leif Johansson.

This paper reports on a remarkable partnership between Saskatoon Chemicals and a local of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union. The partnership emerged after years of bitter relations and, on the basis of great union strength, progressed to involve continuous, interest-based bargaining and an extensive, jointly determined work redesign process. Both parties achieved significant benefits from the high performance partnership before the high performance work system was developed. Evidence also shows that continuous bargaining can work. Divisions within the union over its appropriate role and accountability helped to prevent co-optation, and ultimately led to a return to a more traditional labor-management relationship. The case raises important questions for unions, regarding industrial democracy in a rapidly changing work context.

The history of labour in Canada is most often understood to mean – and presented as – the history of blue-collar workers, especially men. And it is a story of union solidarity to gain wages, rights, and the like from employers. In Contracting Masculinity, Gillian Creese examines in depth the white-collar office workers union at BC Hydro, and shows how collective bargaining involves the negotiation of gender, class, and race. Over the first 50 years of the office union's existence male and female members were approximately equal in number. Yet equality has ended there. Women are concentrated at the lower rungs of the job hierarchy, while men start higher up the ladder and enjoy more job mobility; men's office work has been redefined as a wide range of 'technical' jobs, while women's work has been concentrated in a narrow range of 'clerical' positions. As well, for decades Canadian Aboriginals and people of colour were not employed by BC Hydro, which has resulted in a racialized-gendered workplace. What is the role of workers and their trade unions in constructing male and female work, a process that is often seen as the outcome solely of management decisions? How is this process of gendering also racialized, so that women and men of different race and ethnicity are differentiallv privileged at work? How do males in a white-collar union create and maintain their own image of masculinity in the face of a feminized occupation and a more militant male blue-collar union housed within the same corporation? What impact does the gender composition of union leadership have on collective bargaining? How do traditions of union solidarity affect attempts to bargain for greater equity in the office? These are the central questions that Contracting Masculinity seeks to answer in this in-depth look at a Canadian union. --Publisher's description

Using Marxist state theory as an analytical framework, this thesis explains the problems faced by the Ontario New Democratic Party government (1990-1995) in implementing a social democratic agenda. Not only was the government constrained in its ability to implement progressive policy, but it was also pushed to implement a Social Contract (involving legislated wage cuts to public sector employees) that alienated the party's base of support, making it more difficult for the party to organize in the future. Although this study relies predominantly on a reinterpretation of existing research on the topic, some primary research is used in the analysis, including interviews with members of the labour movement and former MPPs and analysis of the news media's treatment of the party/ government. Historical and class analytical perspectives are used to explain the evolution of the ONDP's structure and policies, as well as to assess the relative strength of the working class and its ability to support a social democratic political agenda. It was found that the ONDP' s unwillingness to develop a long term plan for social democracy, and its inability to act as a mass party or to build a strong working class movement, made it more difficult for the party to succeed when it formed the government. Moreover, the class nature of the capitalist state, along with pressure exerted by a well mobilized capitalist class, worked to limit the government' s options.

Just when Solange De Santis had achieved success and security in the white-collar world of journalism, she decided to leave it all to work on the line during the final year and a half of a General Motors van plant in Scarborough, Ontario. --Publisher's description

Au cours de la dernière décennie, plusieurs auteurs se sont interrogés sur les facteurs qui ont fait chuter le taux de syndicalisation dans certains pays et qui sont à la source de sa stagnation dans d'autres. Parmi les facteurs de nature structurelle, le déplacement des emplois de la grande entreprise vers la petite entreprise, de l'entreprise publique vers l'entreprise privée, du secteur manufacturier vers le secteur des services constituent ceux qui reviennent le plus souvent. Dans la foulée de la restructuration des services, on peut constater au Québec comme dans d'autres pays occidentaux, un mouvement en faveur de nouvelles formes d'organisation sociale visant la production de biens et services. Ces organisations prennent la forme de petites entreprises communautaires du secteur des services privés, ajoutant ainsi à la masse de salariés, pour la plupart non syndiqués, de ce secteur. Cet article vise à évaluer le potentiel de syndicalisation des salariés du communautaire. Cette évaluation qualitative est faite à partir de données recueillies lors d'entrevues dans six entreprises types du secteur communautaire dans l'Outaouais, de commentaires rassemblés lors de réunions de groupes focus d'informateurs-clé et de rencontres avec des représentants syndicaux. Les données sont analysées à l'aide d'un modèle explicatif de la propension à se syndiquer. Suivent quelques considérations stratégiques pour les organisations syndicales intéressées par la syndicalisation de ces groupes de salariés.

The article reviews the book, "Les entreprises et l'emploi : les nouvelles formes de qualification du travail," by Annette Dubé and Daniel Mercure,

The article reviews the book, "The State of Working America, 1998-99," by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt.

The article reviews the book, "The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930," by Angus McLaren.

Historian Craig Heron introduces the 1945-48 memoir of Alfred Edwards, who worked at National Knitting MIlls, a textile mill in Hamilton, Ontario. Edwards, who had been a union activist prior to WWII, describes the changes in the relations of production that he observed upon his return to the plant from military service. He also discusses the decision of the shop union to join the Textile Workers Union of America, the struggle for local control in a bureaucratized international union, and the conflict between social democratic and communist unions at the Canadian Congress of Labour convention in Toronto in 1947.

Discusses efforts to unionize fast-food workers, in particular the drive at the McDonald's in Squamish, BC. [Note: The workers voted to decertify less than a year later, before a collective agreement was signed.]

The article reviews and comments on J. L. Granatstein's "Who Killed Canadian History?" (1998), Ken Osborne's "In Defence of History: Teaching the Past and the Meaning of Democratic Citizenship" (1995), and Bob Davis's "Whatever Happened to High School History? Burying the Political Memory of Youth: Ontario, 1945-1995" (1995).

The article reviews the book, "Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace," by Sudipta Sen.

This paper develops the concept of interlocking hierarchies [within the working class] by focusing on the Canadian situation. While emphasizing the complex dynamics of worker resistance and adaptation, the paper briefly examines the shortcomings of Canadian working-class historiography. The paper then explores the significance of interlocking hierarchies and sketches the ways in which this analytical framework can be applied, first by emphasizing gender issues and secondly by emphasizing ethnicity in the Canadian context, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (I use the term ‘‘ethnicity’’ broadly in order to avoid using the term ‘‘race’’ as much as possible, so as not to lend credence to the notion that ‘‘race’’ represents a fixed biological category.) In emphasizing ethnicity, the paper focuses first on issues concerning immigrant workers from Asia and then on issues concerning immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe. --From author's introduction

The article reviews the book, "Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America," Steven J. Ross.