Your search

The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George." On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two gay men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor. --Publisher's description

Wage lien laws have immense potential to help workers collect owed wages. Because liens can secure rights to property before full adjudication, workers can rest assured that real assets will exist should they prevail and scofflaw employers cannot easily hide assets from collections. Despite the proven usefulness of wage lien laws, opponents frequently argue that broad lien regimes would restrict credit.

While recognizing the importance of human capital in the success of non-profit organizations, existing research has primarily focused on talent management (TM) in large multinational organizations, mainly those in the private sectors of North America, Asia and Europe. In this article, we adopt a theory-driven approach and build on previous conceptualizations of TM to examine the perspectives of 30 Canadian nonprofit and for-profit decision-makers. Results show that Canadian decision-makers have a unique inclusive and competitive view of TM. Their view is defined predominantly by humanistic (acquired talent, inclusive, input and output) and competitive factors (reliance on recruitment and skill development). This study contributes a new perspective by providing empirical insights from managers of Canadian enterprises and pointing to implications for broader discussion, conceptualization and practice in the field.

This book takes its title from the phrase for “I work” in Lunaape, the traditional language of Munsee Delaware people, and was inspired by the work of the Munsee Delaware Language and History Group. Written for the descendants and communities of children who attended Mount Elgin and intended as a resource for all Canadians, Nii Ndahlohke tells the story of student life at Mount Elgin Industrial School between 1890 and 1915. Like the school itself, Nii Ndahlohke is structured in two sections. The first focuses on boys’ work, including maintenance and farm labour, the second on girls’ work, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry. In Nii Ndahlohke readers will find a valuable piece of local, Indigenous, and Canadian history that depicts the nature of “education” provided at Canada’s Indian residential schools and the exploitation of children’s labour in order to keep school operating costs down. This history honours the students of Mount Elgin even as it reveals the injustice of Indian policy, segregated schooling, and racism in Canada. --Publisher's description

This research explores how racialized sensibility emerged through the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver and links the riots in Vancouver to the riots in Bellingham earlier in the same year. It uses mixed methods to collect data on portraits, photographs, images, editorials, and documents, employing archival ethnography to read documents along and against the grain (Stoler, 2002; 2012) to make sense of the time period and the sensibilities that underpinned the riots. Archival ethnography helps bring to light the accounts, conversations, and dialogues of colonial agents and actors, and to interpret missing data in the archive. Missing data in the archive consists of historical documents that are overlooked, misinterpreted, or destroyed. My thesis also accounts for gaps, silences, and erasures in the archive by applying critical fabulation to rearrange and reconstruct intersecting viewpoints (see Hartman, 1997; 2008; 2019). To provide a thicker analysis of archival documents, this research interprets olfactory and auditory senses as integral to the making of these riots (see Simmel, 1908/2002; see Campt, 2017; see Lee, 2010; see Mawani, 2009; see Russell, 2019; see also Blaikie, 2002). It is only through the process of combining mixed-methods, theory, and practice that the missing data in the archive can be reimagined and written as part of the historical narrative.

The article reviews the book, "Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital," by Katie Hindmarch-Watson.

In March and April 2021, we conducted semi-structured interviews with academic librarians from across Canada about their experiences working through COVID-19 thus far. Topics included workload, collegiality, and overall satisfaction with their working conditions during a pandemic. Themes emerged around job scurity, meaningful work, workload shifts, working from home, relationships with colleagues and administrators, and hopes for the future. While individual experiences varied greatly, the biggest uniting factor was the care and deliberation that characterized both our participants’ framing of work that was meaningful to them as well as their ideal relationships with colleagues and administrators. This research connects to previous literature on vocational awe and emotional labour in libraries. For librarians, this study connects isolated individual situations with the overall picture of what our work looked and felt like during the COVID-19 pandemic. For library administrators, we have identified some general trends, which can provide insight in the areas of communication, flexibility, and institutional support as we work toward a post-pandemic new normal.

The Prison for Women, Kingston Penitentiary, and Collins Bay Penitentiary each offered an increasing variety of vocational training opportunities to incarcerated people in the mid-20th century. This article examines vocational training in these Kingston-area prisons from 1950 to the mid-1960s and argues that access to these programs was based largely on gender and age. Foucault's idea of governmentality supports analysis of how the Penitentiary Service of Canada, reformers, and prisoners understood the process of learning how to work. Women incarcerated at the Prison for Women were trained in fields that mirrored domestic labour, and limited numbers of younger women were given access to trial vocational training in women-dominated fields such as hairdressing. Young men in their teens and twenties incarcerated at Collins Bay Penitentiary were given access to skilled trades, while older men at Kingston Penitentiary could try to qualify for transfer to Collins Bay Penitentiary by taking basic educational course upgrades. These vocational programs were supported by the John Howard Society of Ontario and the Elizabeth Fry Society of Kingston, local prisoner aid societies that helped formerly incarcerated people find jobs and coordinated with prison administration to bolster rehabilitation programs.

The article reviews the book, "Disruptive Prisoners: Resistance, Reform, and the New Deal," by Chris Clarkson and Melissa Munn.

Canada's major cities have faced the humanitarian disaster of homelessness for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare a massive deficit in social programs and widespread inattention to human rights. Are municipal public services designed to essentially produce displacement? Or can we do something to end the growing problem of urban homelessness in Canada? In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe illuminate this infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography. Contributors to the book, including those with lived experience of homelessness in Toronto, report on the realities of the situation and how people responded: by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, and by rising up against encampment evictions. The book provides particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic. This collection of first-hand accounts shows how people are fighting back for homes. It also mourns the hundreds of preventable deaths that resulted from an unjust shelter system and the lack of a national housing program. Offering rich stories of care, mutual aid, and solidarity, Displacement City provides a vivid account of a national tragedy. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Grossières indécences : Pratiques et identités homosexuelles à Montréal, 1880–1929," by Dominic Dagenais

This dissertation brings together multiple discourses, including surveillance studies, autonomist Marxism and posthumanism, as the groundwork for a novel discussion of contemporary visual art— in particular surveillance art, that is, art that addresses and problematizes the omnipresent digital monitoring now part of everyday life. Because in this dissertation contemporary art is defined as necessarily political, aesthetic (in the Kantian sense) and responsive to conditions of current history and society, I use Marxist theory to identify the particular features of contemporary capitalism that this art is responding to. I first characterize post-Fordist capitalism, focusing on the increasing reliance on extracting network value from what Maurizio Lazzarato called immaterial labour. I discuss Marx’s theories of formal and real subsumption vis-a-vis their impacts on production, technology and subjectivity, and conclude that we need a new term that adequately emphasizes the novel imbrication of technology and subjectivity. In particular, I claim that surveillance capitalism, rising from military technologies and research, characterizes capitalist valorization under hypersubsumption. I then look at the impact of surveillance on labour and subjectivity, with a particular focus on unwaged immaterial activities. Do these activities count as work? To answer that, I propose looking at a combination of Marx’s concept of unproductive labour with a modified type of constant capital. I conclude that the effects of hypersubsumption on labour, consumption and production have produced a new type of capitalist subjectivity: coerced posthumanism, which I contrast with Marx’s authentic species-being. In order glimpse a post-capitalist species-being, I articulate a theory of contemporary art by bringing together Jacques Rancière’s dissensus with Peter Osborne’s notion of contemporary art; both theorists show how contemporary art is necessarily political— what’s more, it is oriented towards an open future. I then apply their ideas to particular artists who have responded to capitalist surveillance by creating ‘artveillance’ (art about surveillance). I evaluate the political effectiveness of three categories of artveillance as experiments in post-capitalist sensoriums.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted employment across Canada. While several reports show an increase in job loss and unemployment, there is little mention of changes in types of employment during the pandemic. Drawing on the Canadian Labour Force Surveys from 2017-2021, this article explored how the pandemic affected nonstandard employment rates while examining whether these impacts differed by certain sociodemographic variables. Namely, differences in rates of nonstandard employment were explored by gender, immigrant status, and age group. The main finding was that rates of nonstandard wage work (temporary and part-time employment) decreased during the first initial lockdown and returned to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020. Meanwhile, own-account and part-time self-employment increased during the first wave of the pandemic. While these increases were uniformly experienced across different groups of workers, there is some evidence of widening or narrowing gaps in rates of nonstandard employment depending on the sociodemographic group.

The primary objective of this review is to identify and analyze potential markers of racism and discrimination in immigration policy that impact migrant workers in Canada, most specifically those in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Caregiver Streams that are part of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. The review also examines the International Mobility Program, albeit from a more limited perspective, due to a still nascent, yet fast-growing, literature on the subject.Footnote5 Overall, studies and reports mostly focus on substandard conditions of labour, lack of access, or restricted access, to social services and permanent residence pathways that are typically available to workers from higher-waged and higher-skilled categories. Indeed, most of the literature, including reports from non-profit organizations, and parliamentary committees refer to issues of “abuse and exploitation” in temporary migration programs, including in specific segments of the International Mobility Program. --Executive summary

The article reviews the book, "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and The Fracture of Society," by Binyamin Appelbaum.

This article reviews the book, "The Third Pillar. How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind," by Rajan Raghuram.

Canada’s largest and most famous example of class conflict, the Winnipeg General Strike, redefined local, national, and international conversations around class, politics, region, ethnicity, and gender. The Strike’s centenary occasioned a re-examination of this critical moment in working-class history, when 300 social justice activists, organizers, scholars, trade unionists, artists, and labour rights advocates gathered in Winnipeg in 2019. Probing the meaning of the General Strike in new and innovative ways, For a Better World includes a selection of contributions from the conference as well as others’ explorations of the character of class confrontation in the aftermath of the First World War. Editors Naylor, Hinther, and Mochoruk depict key events of 1919, detailing the dynamic and complex historiography of the Strike and the larger Workers’ Revolt that reverberated around the world and shaped the century following the war. The chapters delve into intersections of race, class, and gender. Settler colonialism’s impact on the conflict is also examined. Placing the struggle in Winnipeg within a broader national and international context, several contributors explore parallel strikes in Edmonton, Crowsnest Pass, Montreal, Kansas City, and Seattle. For a Better World interrogates types of commemoration and remembrance, current legacies of the Strike, and its ongoing influence. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate that the Winnipeg General Strike continues to mobilize—revealing our radical past and helping us to think imaginatively about collective action in the future. --Publisher's description

New labour market intermediaries, such as those using digital platforms, are challenging not only temporary help agencies but also traditional employer–employee relationships. A new conceptual scheme is proposed to distinguish between three functions: a) allocating the work; b) entering into a contract with the worker; and c) managing and organizing the work.

The article reviews the book, "Inclusion des personnes d’origine étrangère sur le marché de l’emploi. Bilan des politiques en Wallonie.," edited by Altay Manço et Leïla Scheurette.

The article reviews the book, "Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History," edited by Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith.