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In recent years K-12 school systems from New York to Mexico City to Toronto, serving vastly divergent students and communities, have been subject to strikingly similar waves of neoliberal policies by governments. A key manifestation has been the de-professionalization or deskilling of teachers. Organized labours response has been highly uneven geographically. Professional autonomy means a capacity and freedom of teachers to exercise their judgement in interpreting broad curriculum guidelines, into their day to day classroom activities. It is the primary obstacle to the further neoliberalization of education. The expansion of standardized instructional and evaluative techniques and technologies are necessary for opening new markets within schools and for weakening the collective power of teachers and their unions. Their proponents are limited by the existence of the classroom as a space of labour autonomy, run by experienced and highly educated teachers. Recognizing the significant crossover of policy at the North American scale alongside significant economic and political linkages, this dissertation centres on case studies in three cities, New York, Mexico City and Toronto. This dissertation assesses challenges to teachers professional autonomy from 2001 to 2016 across five dimensions of comparison. First are changes in governance, namely the centralization of authority, often legitimized by mobilizing policies from elsewhere. Second are policies which have shifted workplace power relations between principals and teachers, as with School Based Management programs that download budgetary, discipline and dismissal practices to school administrators. Third are the effect of standardized testing of students and teachers on the latters capacity to exercise professional judgement in the classroom through designing unique lesson plans, pedagogy and evaluation. Fourth is the creation of school choice for schools competing for enrolment and thereby funding, which has tended to perpetuate class and racial segregation. Finally, the ability of teachers unions to construct a multi scalar strategy is considered, including alliances with parents, communities and other sectors of labour. This dissertation concludes with recommendations for how teachers unions could respond to the challenge to professional autonomy with a stronger engagement on teacher practice and professional self-regulation.

This article reviews the book, "American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and their Struggle for Social and Political Justice," by Albert J. Raboteau.

L’externalisation, qui donne lieu à l’intégration indirecte du travail dans l’organisation productive, pose des défis importants pour la représentation collective des travailleuses et des travailleurs. C’est que le droit du travail a été établi en fonction d’un tout autre modèle organisationnel. Afin de mieux comprendre ces défis, nous avons mené trois études de cas sur la représentation collective en contexte d’externalisation des services publics d’aide à domicile au Québec durant la période 2003-2013. Les travailleuses concernées — majoritairement des femmes — occupent des emplois précaires chez trois types de prestataires privés intégrés à des réseaux locaux de services: entreprises d’économie sociale en aide domestique (EESAD), usagers du programme Chèque emploi-service (CES) et agences de location de personnel. Nous avons examiné si des pratiques de représentation collective de ces travailleuses existent et quels acteurs sociaux les portent. Nous avons aussi vérifié si ces pratiques se confinent à l’intérieur des frontières de l’entité identifiée comme l’employeur au sens juridique ou si elles sont « réticulaires », étendant la solidarité à la sphère du pouvoir stratégique (Appay, 1997) exercé par les autorités publiques dans les réseaux. Nos résultats montrent l’absence d’une représentation collective réticulaire dans ces réseaux locaux de services où la dévalorisation sexuée du travail, contrée en partie dans le secteur public, revient en force. Le personnel de 15% des EESAD est syndiqué, mais les pratiques de représentation syndicale n’interpellent que l’employeur reconnu au sens juridique, les EESAD. Dans les agences de location de personnel intégrées à ces réseaux locaux, aucune forme de représentation collective n’existe, ni dans le programme CES. Cependant, une action collective interpellant les autorités publiques au sujet des conditions d’emploi dans le CES a eu un certain succès ponctuel. Portée par une coalition d’associations locales représentant des personnes vivant avec des limitations fonctionnelles, elle ouvre la voie à l’idée d’alliances salariées-usagers autour de la qualité des services et de l’emploi.

This article integrates the employment strain model with the social stress model in order to reveal the mechanisms that explain the relation between precarious employment and mental well-being. This model is applied to the case of temporary agency employment by analysing 41 in-depth interviews with temporary agency workers from Canada. The results show how temporary agency workers perceive employment-related uncertainties and efforts mainly as negative and to a lesser extent as positive experiences, respectively evoking strain or activation. Further, it is revealed how uncertainties and efforts mutually reinforce each other, which increases strain, and how support can serve as a buffer.

This article provides an overview of some key issues related to immigration in Quebec. Quebec stands out from the rest of Canada in terms of the origin of its immigrants, who come mainly from francophone countries. Quebec immigrants are relatively better educated than those elsewhere in Canada, but have higher unemployment rates. Our overview of the research examining the impact of immigration on the economy found that immigration has a relatively small impact. Given the above, we suggest that immigration in Quebec should be maintained at current levels–at least in the short term–but that selection and integration policies should be improved by, among other things, putting more emphasis on the needs of employers. In addition, candidates with Canadian or Quebec experience should be favoured. Finally, the impact of these policies will be limited without more openness to immigrants on the part of employers.

This article reviews the book, "Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada," by Douglas McCalla.

This article reviews the book, "Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia's Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal," by Sharon McConnell-Sidorick.

This article provides a statistical picture of the economic well-being of Canadian children. We discuss changes in families, nationally and by province. We outline how Canadian policy in support of children has changed and how it differs across regions. Changes or differences in median incomes, in income distributions and in child poverty both before and after taxes and transfers, at different points of time, in different kinds of families, and in different provinces constitute the core of the article. Finally, the economic well-being of Canadian children in 2010 is compared with that of children in eight other affluent countries.

This article reviews the book, "The Making of Working-Class Religion," by Matthew Pehl.

While concerns and debates about an increased presence of non-citizen guest workers in agriculture in Canada have only more recently begun to enter the public arena, this dissertation probes how migrant agricultural workers have occupied a longer and more complex place in Canadian history than most Canadians may approximate. It explores the historical precedents of seasonal farm labour in Canada through the lens of the interior or the personal on the one hand, through an oral history approach, and the external or the structural on the other, in dialogue with existing scholarship and through a critical assessment of the archive. Specifically, it considers the evolution of seasonal farm work in Manitoba and British Columbia, and traces the eventual rise of an “offshore” labour scheme as a dominant model for agriculture at a national scale. Taking 1974 as a point of departure for the study of circular farm labour migration between Mexico and Canada, the study revisits questions surrounding Canadian views of what constitutes the ideal or injurious migrant worker, to ask critical questions about how managed farm labour migration schemes evolved in Canadian history. In addition, the dissertation explores how Mexican farm workers’ migration to Canada since 1974 formed a part of a wider and extended world of Mexican migration, and seeks to record and celebrate Mexican contributions to modern Canadian agriculture in historical contexts involving diverse actors. In exploring the contexts that have driven Mexican out-migration and transnational integration, it bridges oral accounts with a broader history that sets Mexican northward migration in hemispheric context. It reads agricultural migration upon various planes, including corporeality, experience, identity, masculinity, legality, “contra-modernity,” and the management of mobilities.

The focus of this research is the economic, social and health impacts of a living wage for employees in Ontario who were previously earning less than a living wage. The living wage is a calculation based on how much it costs for a family to live in a specific region. The rise of living wage campaigns is a response to the prevalence of low wage work. This research explains the significance of a living wage from the perspectives of workers compared to current research which concentrates on labour market impacts and how this policy affects businesses. Lived experience is emphasized as an important type of knowledge by including the voices of workers through qualitative interviews. Their experiences highlight how low-income and precarious work can affect workers’ lives and how the living wage addresses these problems. Their experiences also demonstrate how a living wage is a vast improvement from the minimum wage but also reveal the shortfalls of the current living wage framework. Overall, the living wage has a significant impact on the economic, social and health aspects of living wage workers, but falls short as an all-encompassing solution for achieving a decent standard of work. Issues such as unaffordable housing, high tuition costs, lack of job opportunities for young workers and precarious work all contribute to an insufficient living wage. These types of social policies from governments and decent work provided by employers need to assist the living wage in achieving a good standard of living for all workers.

The article reviews the book, "On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy," by Jukka Grunow.

The article reviews the book, "Escape from the Staples Trap: Canadian Political Economy After Left-Nationalism," by Paul Kellogg.

The article reviews the book, "Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision," by Samantha Majic.

The nature of work arrangements in the film industry and the professional characteristics of cultural workers involved in film production impact the legal qualification of these workers. They highlight the difficult task of classifying actual work arrangements in one specific legal category: either an “employment relationship” or a “contract for services relationship”. If adequate legal frameworks are not in place to capture the reality of those work arrangements properly, the legal qualification may lead to uncertainty detrimental to workers’ access to collective representation. This uncertainty opens the door to work conflicts and contestations of different types. This paper builds a dialogue between two disciplines, legal analysis and cultural labour analysis, by comparing two locally embedded case studies: the “Hobbit Law” in New Zealand and the “Spiderwick Case” in Quebec (Canada). Firstly, we outline our theoretical and methodological approach, drawing on literature on cultural labour studies as well as legal analysis. Secondly, we compare the legal status of cultural workers and collective representation within each of our cases. Thirdly, we present full accounts of the chronology, conflicts and contestations within our two cases, as well as outlining the legislative outcomes in each. And finally, in comparing these cases, we illustrate the difficulty of legally qualifying these relations, the uncertainty this engenders and the differing impacts these difficulties have had on collective action in each industry. We emphasize that each case, with their vastly differing outcomes, provides evidence of both the inclusion of cultural workers within the boundaries of specific legislation fostering collective representation of artists (in the Spiderwick Case) and the exclusion of cultural workers from the boundaries of labour legislation enabling collective representation of employees (in the Hobbit Case). This is telling because these cases both took place in a location attracting Hollywood’s productions and, for both, this power of attraction remains crucial for the local industry. Understanding the impact of local cultural work regulation in the context of major global productions still lacks sustained attention and in this paper, we build a dialogue between our two cases to begin to remedy this.

The article reviews the book, "Decolonizing Employment: Aboriginal Inclusion in Canada's Labour Market," by Shauna MacKinnon.

This article reviews the book, "Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canada's Museums," by Caitlin Gordon-Walker.

Le contrat de franchise consiste à transmettre au franchisé le savoir-faire du franchiseur, moyennant des contreparties financières. Cependant, la transmission de ce savoir-faire va au-delà de la simple mise à disposition d’une « recette ». Elle se prolonge par une assistance de tous les instants délivrée par le franchiseur au franchisé. À certains égards, cette relation contractuelle ne ressemble-t-elle pas à celle d’un employeur avec le salarié ? Cet article étudie la relation émanant de ce contrat à l’aide des facteurs juridiques (le caractère subordonnant de la relation contractuelle) et économiques (la puissance économique du franchiseur) qui la structurent. L’étude s’appuie tant sur une analyse sociojuridique de la jurisprudence québécoise (1994-2016) au moyen d’une appréhension du contenu relationnel de ce contrat, que sur la littérature économique dans le but de comprendre les éléments de subordination et de puissance économique qui empreignent cette relation. Le constat révèle que la relation de franchise comporte de fortes composantes de subordination et d’inégalité de puissance économique pour le franchisé, engendrant un assujettissement aussi réel que celui mis en place par le salariat, même s’il n’est pas institué formellement par le contrat de franchisage. Plusieurs pistes d’action sont proposées. Si la requalification de certains contrats de franchise en contrat de travail semble une avenue préconisée par plusieurs pays, nos tribunaux y sont peu enclins. La deuxième piste d’action résiderait dans l’adoption d’une loi encadrant l’établissement et le contenu des contrats de franchise afin de réduire l’asymétrie informationnelle existante entre franchiseur et franchisé, ainsi que de mieux encadrer les qualités du « concept » sur lequel s’appuient les franchiseurs pour séduire les franchisés. Une troisième piste serait de reconnaître l’inégalité de puissance économique, point de départ de la reconnaissance « d’un droit de la dépendance dans l’indépendance » capable d’appréhender ces multiples situations d’entrepreneuriat dépendant dont la franchise n’est qu’un exemple.

This article reviews the book, "Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization," edited by Kim Scipes.

The article reviews the book, "Redesigning Work: A Blueprint for Canada’s Future Well-being and Prosperity," by Graham Lowe and Frank Graves.