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Full bibliography 12,879 resources
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The right to strike has been constitutionally protected in Canada since 2015. In other jurisdictions where the right to strike is explicitly recognized in the constitution, protection against strikebreaking is recognized as part of that right. Only two Canadian provinces restrict the use of replacement workers during a strike or a lockout. Quebec’s Labour Code has provisions that prohibit the use of replacement workers at the employer’s establishment. Quebec arbitrators, courts, and boards have interpreted this ill-defined concept as a strictly physical location of production, while ignoring technological advances that make remote work possible. This paper examines how the restrictive interpretation of establishment allows a form of strikebreaking that the Spanish Constitutional Court has described as “technological strikebreaking” (esquirolaje technologico), while also allowing the use of technology already at the employer’s disposal to circumvent restrictions on replacement workers even when such technology is not routinely used. The impact of technology on strikebreaking is examined through two case studies: the successive lockouts at the Journal de Québec and the Journal de Montréal. In both cases, external contributors provided the newspapers with content electronically, thus allowing uninterrupted publication. Using Katz, Kochan and Colvil’s three-tier model of collective bargaining, this paper looks at how technological strikebreaking disrupts not only the balance of bargaining power but also bargaining strategy, and how, in the case of the Journal de Montréal, it led to devastating bargaining outcomes. Though the lockouts led to a call for legislative reform in 2011, legislative change is not necessary to align existing provisions with the goal of shortening labour disputes.
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Despite changes to Canadian immigration policy to address declining labour market outcomes, many highly educated immigrants still face challenges when searching for career-related employment. Semi-structured interviews with 38 newcomer professionals in Edmonton, Alberta and Winnipeg, Manitoba illustrate significant obstacles including a lack of credential recognition, racial discrimination and a requirement for Canadian experience. Drawing from intersectional feminism and critical race theory, this study assesses the perspectives of newcomers during their employment search and explores the common desire for return-migration. Findings illustrate how the pre-arrival expectations of immigrants are incongruent with the realities of persistent labour market barriers. Newcomers consider if they should stay in Canada due to the lack of meaningful economic opportunities.
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The article reviews the book, "Cabin Crew Conflict: The British Airways Dispute, 2009–11," by Phil Taylor and Sian Moore.
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The article examines the evolution of Canadian corvée labour in the late 17th- and early 18th-century French Empire. In New France, tenants, referred to as habitants, rented land from seigneurs in exchange for several taxes. The labour tax, or corvée, required habitants to work on their seigneur’s estate for one to two days a year. Additionally, habitants were responsible for providing corvée for building any public infrastructure that the community required. From the Nine Years’ War (starting in 1688) to the construction of the Chemin du Roy (1732), colonial officials experimented with mass corvée labour mobilization in Canada. A number of factors allowed habitants to challenge authority when they felt the colonial élite had violated their right to subsistence. When drafted annually into forced labour for the construction of Québec and Montréal’s fortifications, groups of habitants refused to show up for work, called upon their superiors to protect them from service, or collectively discussed mutiny if conditions did not improve. During the first three decades of the 18th century, corvée was a negotiated process, with habitants constantly putting forth their own definitions of acceptable labour mobilization.
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The article reviews and comments on the books, "Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation," edited by Evelyn Peters and Chris Anderson, "Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax," by Ted Rutland, "Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg," by Owen Toews, and "Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death," by James Tyner.
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Obituary for Ed Finn (1926-2000), journalist, editor, trade unionist, and first leader of the Newfoundland and Labrador NDP.
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Since the mid-1950s, the Canadian government has increasingly relied on precarious and/or temporary migrant workers to meet a growing demand for care work. Restrictive immigration policies and programs that promise a pathway to permanent residency but place limitations on workers’ rights and freedoms have led to the creation of a highly vulnerable workforce that is subject to working in low-wage and undervalued sectors with few protections. This report argues that, in addition to immediate reforms to current caregiver pilot programs to help protect vulnerable migrant care workers, Canada should work toward granting permanent resident status to all migrants upon arrival. Granting migrants permanent resident status and equal access to available supports and services is key to ensuring basic human rights for all. The report ends with recommendations to achieve this goal.
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Questions the commitment of organized labour to equity, inclusion and diversity, which in practice has been treated as a side show to the bread-and-butter issues. Argues that organized labour must make major internal structural changes to confront the problems of EDI that exist both internally and externally.
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Research Objective and Questions: We aimed to examine court rulings on disputes between network platforms and labour providers in order to understand the nature of the employment relations and the broader consequences for society as a whole. We addressed two questions: What is the attitude and role of the courts in resolving disputes between Internet network platforms and labour providers in China within a civil law system? What are the prospects that legal innovations will improve protection for platform labour providers who fall outside the scope of labour law, in order to counter the unregulated expansion of digital capitalism at the expense of the under-/unprotected? Methodology: We primarily used secondary data, namely 102 publicly available Court decisions from 2014 to 2019. The case decision reports were downloaded from the Supreme People’s Court “Network of Court Decision Papers.” Results: Disputes occurred mainly in cities that have the most developed platforms and an independent worker model of employment. They mainly involved network platforms that provide such services as driving, food delivery and courier services. All of the disputes involved road accidents, and over half occurred in Beijing and Shanghai—two leading cities in China that have dense populations. Dispute cases rose sharply, peaked in 2017, started to drop in 2018 and fell even more in 2019. The disputes seem to have educated people on both sides, with the result that more precautions are being taken. Contributions: Our study makes three contributions. First, we identified three types of platform employment in China, the motives of the platforms in their choice of labour utilization and the legal implications in terms of labour and third-party protection. Second, we examined the attitude and role of the courts in judging disputes between network platforms and labour providers within legal constraints. Third, we propose that socialization of contract service should be central to platform employment.
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Pays homage to Panitch's life and work as an activist, academic, and writer. Discusses Panitch's origins in Winnipeg's left-wing Jewish community, his tutelage as a graduate student under Ralph Miliband in England, and his wide-ranging engagement as a Marxist political scientist. The author also reflects on his near half-century friendship with Panitch that began in London, England, in 1972.
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Employee voice in China remains an under-researched topic from an industrial relations perspective. We investigated the relationship between family dependents (children and elderly) and migrant worker silence, with town-fellow organizations as a moderator, based on the data of the 2014 Guangdong Migrant Workers Survey. The findings reveal that migrant workers with dependent children are more likely to keep silent when their labour rights and interests are violated at the workplace, while family responsibilities for dependent elderly family members do not have significant impacts on migrant workers’ silence. In addition, town-fellow organizations weaken the association between family responsibilities for elderly dependents and silence. Our study contributes to the existing literature on employee voice and provides evidence on the role of town-fellow organizations in China as an informal, emerging institutional actor that regulates labour relations through their involvement in dispute resolution.
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The article reviews the book, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution," by Toby Green.
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Over the past two decades, the use of private security agencies has become a common fixture of academic labour disputes.
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Unifor President Jerry Dias called it “a home run.” The media headlines were all about “reopening the Oshawa plant.” Unifor, the union that represents workers at the Detroit Three auto companies in Canada, announced a tentative agreement with General Motors Canada on November 5 that included a $1.3 billion investment to “restart” the Oshawa Assembly Plant. GM had ended vehicle assembly there last year, eliminating the jobs of 5,000 assembly and supplier workers. The prospect of jobs returning is very welcome. What’s missing from the news coverage, though, is the reality that GM is not really reopening the old plant. Instead the new operation will be a “pop-up” assembly plant—designed to meet the short-term need for additional production of hugely profitable pickup trucks. The company is making no long-term commitments to the workers it will hire, nor to the community where its pickups and profits will be made. In effect, GM will open a brand new plant inside the shell of the old plant—with an almost entirely new workforce, an inferior wage scale, fewer benefits, and no job security.
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Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements. - Introduction
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The living wage rate for Charlottetown, PEI is $19.30 per hour. This 2020 living wage is calculated to follow the principles and methodology laid out in the Canadian Living Wage Framework. The calculation for Charlottetown follows how the wage has been calculated in our Atlantic Canadian jurisdictions, including the most recent report with wages calculated for various communities in Nova Scotia, as well as Saint John in New Brunswick. In 2019, the living wage was calculated for St. John’s in Newfoundland and Labrador.
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After unionizing gig economy workers, Ontario’s courier union Foodsters United found themselves without an employer when Foodora filed for bankruptcy. Now they’re exploring how worker cooperatives could use the efficiency of platform structures to bypass corporate exploitation.
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A $30-million settlement of three class actions over the alleged failure to pay junior hockey players the minimum wage has been thrown into jeopardy after three judges refused to sign off on the agreement.
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Foodsters United and the campaign to organize gig workers in Ontario – Three months after Foodora couriers won the right to unionize – a historic win for app-based workers – Foodora announced it was leaving Canada. Five worker leaders talk about the highs and lows of the campaign, and what’s next for Foodsters United.
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The history of farm labour in Canada has been profoundly shaped by questions of inclusion and exclusion – especially at the border. Drawing on transnational research on Ontario’s tobacco workforce and looking in particular at migrations from the southern United States and the Caribbean, this talk will demonstrate how often-racist immigration policies and labour practices determined not only who could enter the Canadian farm labour market, but also the conditions of workers’ participation and their ability to attain a decent livelihood. Edward Dunsworth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. A historian of migration, labour, and Canada in the world, his current book project uses a case study of Ontario’s tobacco sector to advance a significant reinterpretation of the histories of farm labour and temporary foreign worker programs in Canada. This talk was delivered Sept. 18 [2020] as the first talk in the 2020 Shannon Lecture series; the theme for this year's series is 'Human Rights in the History of Canada'.
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