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Cet article identifie quels sont, parmi 21 objectifs et 23 comportements des parties durant la conciliation, ceux qui sont reliés à l'efficacité du processus. Les données ont été recueillies par questionnaire auprès de 732 porte-parole patronaux et syndicaux ayant oeuvré en conciliation volontaire au Québec en 1987-88. Le résultat le plus frappant est que les objectifs poursuivis par chacune des parties n'agissent à peu près pas sur l'issue du processus.

The article reviews the book, "Histoire de la FTQ, 1965-1992: La plus grande centrale syndicale au Québec," by Louis Fournier.

The article reviews the book, "The Splendid Vision: Centennial History of the National Council of Women of Canada, 1893-1994," by Naomi E.S Griffiths.

En France, comme dans la plupart des pays européens depuis les années quatre-vingts, se développe l'idée que face à un taux de chômage à deux chiffres une issue à l'état d'anomie dans lequel s'installe la société peut venir d'une flexibilité massive de la force de travail. L'article étudie comment émergent, dans les actions engagées autour des licenciements et des reconversions d'emploi, les éléments essentiels constitutifs d'un mythe des temps modernes énonçant la capacité des élites à produire une modernisation régulée de nos sociétés industrielles. L'auteur approche cette question en l'insérant dans le cadre plus large d'une sociologie du temps social.

The article reviews the book, "Cohésion sociale et emploi," edited by B. Eme and J.L. Laville.

This thesis points to an oversight in the literature about foreign domestic workers. Foreign domestic workers have, too often, been portrayed as one-dimensional victims — a group of powerless women vainly struggling for a respectable place in Canadian society. This portrayal, however, while it can explain their disadvantage along class and gender analyses, assumes a concept of power which dismisses their ability to resist. This thesis argues that foreign domestic workers, although occupying a highly disadvantaged position relative to others in society, are not only victims but actors. This argument acknowledges that their lives in Canada are only part of their grander life histories. When foreign domestic workers are placed at the centre of analysis, as subjects rather than objects, I was able to investigate a multifaceted notion of power. Fifteen foreign domestic workers from the Philippines were interviewed and specific questions were asked about their day to day lives, their background, and their ambitions. Their answers reveal a profound understanding of who they are as women, and as domestic workers. Some clearly understand the connections between the economic crisis in the Philippines and their role in that crisis. The interviews also show that domestic workers contemplated their situations beyond the present, and that they recount their lives in episodes of opportunities as well as constraints. Finally, what is most revealing is the strategies they employ to get through their days. Overall, the interviews with foreign domestic workers illustrate that when they are viewed as active social agents, they articulate power at various levels corresponding with their overlapping social roles and multiple levels of struggle.

Canadian women's history, though relatively new in the history of the profession, is now considered by some to be passé, past its prime, out of touch with the realities of the postmodern world of the 1990s. In fact, there is also a new interpretation of the historical evolution of Canadian women's history emerging, which situates women's history in the one dimensional past, gender history in the three dimensional future. ...[W]e need to re-examine the Canadian women's history which was actually written over the last twenty years as well as the current direction of gender history, then assess the theoretical and political underpinnings of both. We may actually find more overlapping continuities, similarities and problems. --Introduction than stark contrasts and oppositions.

Between 1920 and 1960 wage-earning women in factories and offices experienced dramatic shifts in their employment conditions, the result of both the Depression and the expansion of work opportunities during the Second World War. Earning Respect examines the lives of white and blue-collar women workers in Peterborough during this period and notes the emerging changes in their work lives, as working daughters gradually became working mothers. Joan Sangster focuses in particular on four large workplaces, examining the gendered division of labour, women's work culture, and the forces that encouraged women's accommodation and resistance on the job. She also connects women's wage work to their social and familial lives and to the larger community context, exploring wage-earning women's 'identities,' their attempts to cope with economic and family crises, the gendered definitions of working-class respectability, and the nature of paternalism in a small Ontario manufacturing city. Sangster draws upon oral histories as well as archival research as she traces the construction of class and gender relations in 'small town' industrialized Ontario in the mid-twentieth century. She uses this local study to explore key themes and theoretical debate in contemporary women's and working-class history. --Publisher's description

In 1963, the Ontario Government established a Women's Bureau within the Department of Labour to do research, public relations work, and policy development relating to working women in the province. This article examines the early evolution of the Women's Bureau from 1963 to 1970 assessing the reasons for its establishment and the successes and failures of its early programs designed to aid working women. The Bureau urged the government to consider anti-discrimination legislation, and in 1970 it helped to develop new legislation designed to enhance women's equality by legalizing maternity leave, banning discrimination based on marital status, and abolishing job posting by sex. Drawing on recent debates about the state and employment policy, particularly those looking at the relationship between feminist and labour activists and the state, this article asks whose interests the Bureau represented, and whether or not this state-initiated legislation designed to enhance gender equality was effective, either in the short or long term.

Current arguments about the causes of differing union density rates in the US and Canada range from public opinion hypothesis and differences in labor law, to increased US managerial hostility. Survey data on managers' and workers' attitudes in the 2 countries are used to examine the competing arguments. Using questions that probe opinions toward various aspects of union-firm relations, it is found that managers' attitudes in the 2 countries do not differ. This finding suggests that increased US managerial hostility is not the cause of the divergent unionization rates. US workers are the most militant of the 4 groups, with Canadian workers in the middle, between managers and US workers.

The article reviews the book, "Fourmies et les premier mai," edited by Madeleine Rebérioux.

The article reviews the book, "Family, Church, and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and New Worlds, 1850-1930," by Royden K. Loewen.

The article reviews the book, "The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919: An Illustrated History," by J. M. Bumsted.

A study tests a macroeconomic strike model widely used to study the incidence of labor conflict in developed countries on data from the world-at-large. Previous investigations of the influence of labor demand and worker wage expectations on strike frequency have produced contradictory results. Perhaps one reason for this is that these studies have left out all but the most developed countries and have rarely been comparative. The study uses a data set that includes data for 41 countries (approximately half of which are considered developing) from 1953-1985.

The article reviews the book, "Projecting capitalism: a history of the internationalization of the construction industry," by Marc Linder.

Cet article porte sur les approches utilisées dans les organisations pour amener les superviseurs à adopter un mode de gestion plus participatif de la sécurité au travail avec leurs employés. Les données présentées sont basées sur cinq études de cas réalisées selon un devis commun et analysées de façon comparative. Utilisant l'approche systémique du changement organisationnel, les auteurs développent le concept de stratégie de changement pour analyser les approches organisationnelles observées, en faisant l'hypothèse que ce sont les stratégies plus systématiques qui auront comme effets d'accroître l'utilisation de la gestion participative de la prévention par les superviseurs, et de réduire le taux de fréquence des accidents. Les résultats confirment largement les hypothèses, mais l'analyse montre aussi que les stratégies non efficaces, au plan des effets escomptés, ont néanmoins une fonction d'utilité qui est discutée.

This thesis evolved out of an attempt to analyze aboriginal agency and resistance in the aftermath of the Mohawk conflict at Oka, Quebec, which took place in the summer of 1990. However, the existing political economy literature on aboriginal oppression founded in the "staple theory" outlined by Harold Adams Innis does not account for the historical significance of aboriginal resistance in Canada. The thesis undertakes a critique of the inherent assumptions in staple theory--its anthropologism, its fetish of the commodity form, and its geographical determinism--which effectively reduce aboriginal peoples to the position of passive victims in contemporary capitalist society. An alternative historiography is then proposed which considers Canadian economic and political development as the outcome of struggle. The agency of aboriginal peoples is understood in terms of their specific and changing historical position as producers, from the early fur trade to the forging of a capitalist economy and post-colonial state. If the rise of commodity wheat production is the key to the transition to capitalism in Canada, it follows that the aboriginal struggle to retain their land rights was an important obstacle to such development. The aboriginal struggle for land continues to be an obstacle to capitalist expansion; in the current context of economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement, such resistance has international implications. In the current climate of scapegoating and cutbacks which accompany the restructuring process, aboriginal aspirations for land and self-determination also coincide with the aims of other social movements to oppose such attacks. In fact, aboriginal self-determination is central to the broader project for social change in Canada.

The aim of this study was to explore the interrelationship between collective bargaining and pay equity. A qualitative case study methodology was used. Eighty-six interviews were conducted with union and management pay equity negotiators, labour lawyers, Pay Equity Commission Review Officers, and other informants. A collection of documentary evidence supplemented these interviews. The empirical work focused on explaining issues of structure, style and power in pay equity bargaining and the complex intertwinings of the structural properties of gender and class were considered crucial to an explanation of these. The key structural dynamic in the negotiation of pay equity was found to be the degree and effectiveness of a labour-feminist politic combined with employer/state commitment, which are themselves interconnected and represent the transformative face of gender and class power relations. The thesis, in providing a theoretically informed discussion of detailed case study material, contributes towards the debate on the effectiveness of collective bargaining as a vehicle for implementing equal pay policy. It also informs the debate on labour-management cooperation in labour relations, especially in public sector collective bargaining. Because legislated pay equity is bargained within a new set of legal parameters, the study may also aid our understanding of the relationship between collective bargaining and the law. Finally, the thesis attempts to unravel the interwoven complexities of gender and class power relations in the collective bargaining process.

Employment Security and the Labor Market: Interdisclipinary Approaches and International Evidence, edited by C.F. Buechtemann, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Working for the Union: British Trade Union Officers," by John Kelly and Edmund Heery.