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The article reviews the book "Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe," by Paul Hockenos.

The article reviews the book, "La problématique du sida en milieu de travail : pour l'employé, l'employeur et les tiers," by Sylvie Grégoire.

The article reviews the book, "Perspectives occidentales du droit international des droits économiques de la personne," by Lucie Lamarche.

The article reviews the book, "The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work," by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio.

Times have changed for Canadian unions in a number of important ways. Economic restructuring has wrought fundamental transformations in workplaces, labour processes and hence in unions themselves. The union movement is now largely made up of Canadian unions rather than American/international unions. The feminization of the labour market over the last 20 years has also changed the membership of unions and their organizations. Yet there are important ways in which the union movement as a whole has not responded to these challenges. The problems derive in part from the fragmented structure of the Canadian labour movement. Yet the strategies adopted by liberal and union feminists, with their emphasis on legislative solutions, have also contributed to the marginalization of women from the unions' main business, collective bargaining.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order committed to the goal of uniting American labor. At its height in 1886, the Knights claimed the allegiance of perhaps a million workers. Despite a host of local studies by the new labor historians of the 1970s and 1980s, there has been no general study of the Knights since Norman Ware's 1929 book, and no one has ever attempted a comprehensive study of the culture of the organization. In Beyond Labor's Veil, Robert E. Weir presents a fascinating cultural portrait of the Knights across regions, covering the years 1869 to 1893. From the start, the Knights of Labor was an unusual organization, equal parts fraternal order and labor union. It was the only nineteenth-century labor organization to organize African Americans, women, and unskilled workers on an equal basis with white craftsmen. Weir goes beyond the rhetoric of public pronouncements and union politics to consider the real influence of the Knights in communities and homes as well as in the workplace. Weir explores the many cultural expressions of the Knights' ritual, religion, poetry, music, literature, material objects, graphics, and leisure. Although the Knights barely survived into the twentieth century, Weir concludes that the creative cultural expressions of the Knights enabled it to do as well as it did in the face of powerful oppositional forces. What emerges in Beyond Labor's Veil is a rich, detailed description of the Knights as its members adapted to the confusion and contradiction of America's Gilded Age. --Publisher's description

Drawing on the manuscript records of the Department of Crown Lands, its published reports, and case law, this thesis examines the illegal occupation of rural land, known as squatting in the Eastern Townships of Quebec in the period 1838 to 1866. By 1838, demographic pressure in the seigneuries, inflated land prices due to speculation, and inaccessible public land granting practices had made squatting a commonplace strategy for land acquisition. The responses to squatting of the Department of Crown Lands, the Legislature and the judiciary are analysed for what they implied about ideas of property in Lower Canada. While the Department of Crown Lands' policy of pre-emption affirmed that squatters held rights to public land because they laboured to cultivate and improve it, the legislature refused to acknowledge that squatters could acquire such rights on private land; nine out of ten bills intended to ensure ejected squatters a systematically determined remuneration for improvements made by them on the private property of absentees failed to pass into law during the period. Most were rejected by the Legislative Council which defended the interests of landed wealth. Lower Canadian courts, meanwhile, struggled to sort out laws relating to squatting. Ultimately they found that while squatters on private property owned their improvements, they had no right to the land itself. Thus the judiciary applied a bifurcated concept of property to rural land in Lower Canada despite the prevalence of liberal theories of absolute property rights during the nineteenth century.

Canadians might expect that a history of Canada's participation in the Cold War would be a self-congratulatory exercise in documenting the liberality and moderation of Canada set against the rapacious purges of the McCarthy era in the United States. Though Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse agree that there is some evidence for Canadian moderation, they argue that the smug Canadian self-image is exaggerated. Cold War Canada digs past the official moderation and uncovers a systematic state-sponsored repression of communists and the Left directed at civil servants, scientists, trade unionists, and political activists. Unlike the United States, Canada's purges were shrouded in secrecy imposed by the government and avidly supported by the RCMP security service. Whitaker and Marcuse manage to reconstruct several of the significant anti-communist campaigns. Using declassified documents, interviews, and extensive archival sources, the authors reconstruct the Gouzenko spy scandal, trace the growth of security screening of civil servants, and re-examine purges in the National Film Board and the trade unions, attacks on peace activist James G. Endicott, and the trials of Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman. Based on these examples Whitaker and Marcuse outline the creation of Canada's Cold War policy, the emergence of the new security state, and the alignment of Canada with the United States in the global Cold War. They demonstrate that Canada did take a different approach toward the threat of communism, but argue that the secret repression and silent purges used to stifle dissent and debate about Canada's own role in the Cold War had a chilling effect on the practice of liberal democracy and undermined Canadian political and economic sovereignty. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy," by Roberto Franzosi.

English/French abstracts of articles published in the issue.

English/French abstracts of articles published in the issue.

List of recent publications by the Committee.

In many industrialized countries over the past twenty years, including Canada, the supply of "good" jobs for those with low formal education has declined relative to demand. While the contributors to this volume do not agree on which labor policies are best, they share a common dissatisifaction with the current way of doing things. --Publisher's description. Includes separate bibliographies at the end of most chapters.

Most scholars and business people have traditionally regarded industrial relations in the United States and Canada to be so different from practices in other liberal democracies as to render comparison of little practical utility. Fundamental differences, such as the influence of "pure and simple" business-like philosophy on the American and Canadian labor movements in contrast to the socialist agenda of trade unions in other industrialized countries, have prompted observers to question the value of comparative analysis. Roy Adams, however, challenges this view by constructing a theoretical framework within which the comparison of industrial relations across the advanced liberal democratic world may be made comprehensible. --Publisher's description.

The article reviews the book, "Pandora's Box: Corporate Power, Free Trade, and Canadian Education," by John Calvert.

Focusing on the experiences of the Canadian Student Assembly and the Canadian Youth Congress, this article examines the ways in which the RCMP assembled information, conducted surveillance, and interpreted the activities of student and youth "radicals" from the early 1930s to the beginning of World War II. Sources for this study include surveillance and security reports filed by RCMP informants and authorities. As well as exploring new terrain in the history of youth and higher education in Canada, this study adds to the literature on the means by which liberal democratic practices were fettered by government authorities in the depression and war years.

This article examines the role of women in the Ontario Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the period 1947 to 1961. Taking a revisionist approach, it argues that the main concern of Ontario CCF women, as expressed through the Provincial Women's Committee, was with expanding the party's membership and support by attracting other women to the party, and not with advancing the equality of women, as the existing literature contends. it is further argued that women were not significantly under-represented in positions of power within the CCF, that the party's sexual division of labour was due largely to the timidity of its female members, and that the methods used to "win women for socialism" were practical and sensible under the circumstances.

The article reviews the book, "Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left," by Van Gosse.