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The article reviews and comments on the books, "Amplify: Graphic Narratives of Feminist Resistance," by Norah Bowman and Meg Braem, art by Dominique Hui; "Direct Action Gets the Goods: A Graphic History of the Strike in Canada," by Graphic History Collective with Althea Balmes, Gord Hill, Orion Keresztesi, and David Lester; "1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike," by Graphic History Collective and David Lester; and "Christie Pitts," by Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau.

Au-delà des importantes questions soulevées quant à la validité constitutionnelle de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État, qui alimenteront sans doute les débats politiques et juridiques au cours de la prochaine décennie, est-il vrai de prétendre que cette loi établit un nouveau régime de séparation du religieux et de l’État au Québec? Le présent article a pour objectif de démontrer que les seuls changements concrets que la Loi sur la laïcité imposera aux règles actuellement applicables au Québec se résument à deux interdictions concernant le port de certains signes religieux. Pour le reste, la Loi sur la laïcité se borne essentiellement à codifier des règles et des principes qui s’appliquaient déjà aux agents et agentes des institutions publiques du Québec et qui continueront de s’appliquer même si la Loi sur la laïcité devait être abrogée ou déclarée inconstitutionnelle par les tribunaux au cours des prochaines années.

Review essay of "The New ndp: Moderation, Modernization, and Political Marketing" (2019) by David McGrane and "Party of Conscience: The CCF, the ndp, and Social Democracy in Canada" (2018) edited by Roberta Lexier, Stephanie Bangarth and Jon Weier.

On November 26, 2018, General Motors announced a number of plant closures in North America, the largest of which was in Oshawa, Ontario. The Oshawa facility, once the largest auto complex on the continent, was to end all its assembly operations by the end of 2019. ...This pamphlet provides background material on Oshawa and joins Green Jobs Oshawa in encouraging workers elsewhere to prepare now for the threats to their jobs and productive capacity that will inevitably come. --From introduction. Contents: Introduction: Realizing ‘Just Transitions’: The Struggle for Plant Conversion at GM Oshawa -- Mission Statement of Green Jobs Oshawa -- Unifor Settlement with GM – Footprint or Toe Tag? / Tony Leah -- GM Oshawa: Lowered Expectations Unexplored Opportunities; The GM Strike and the Historical Convergence of Possibilities / Sam Gindin -- Bringing SNC-Lavalin to Mind During an Uninspiring Federal Election / Leo Panitch -- Take It Over: The Struggle for Green Production in Oshawa / Linda McQuaig -- Green Jobs Oshawa and a Just Transition / Rebecca Keetch -- Why GM’s Oshawa Assembly Line Shutdown is a Black Eye for Unifor’s Jerry Dias / Jennifer Wells -- Appendix: Feasibility Study for the Green Conversion of the GM Oshawa Facility: Possibilities for Sustainable Community Wealth: Summary Overview / Russ Christianson. Contents: Introduction: Realizing ‘Just Transitions’: The Struggle for Plant Conversion at GM Oshawa -- Mission Statement of Green Jobs Oshawa -- Unifor Settlement with GM – Footprint or Toe Tag? / Tony Leah -- GM Oshawa: Lowered Expectations Unexplored Opportunities; The GM Strike and the Historical Convergence of Possibilities / Sam Gindin -- Bringing SNC-Lavalin to Mind During an Uninspiring Federal Election / Leo Panitch -- Take It Over: The Struggle for Green Production in Oshawa / Linda McQuaig -- Green Jobs Oshawa and a Just Transition / Rebecca Keetch -- Why GM’s Oshawa Assembly Line Shutdown is a Black Eye for Unifor’s Jerry Dias / Jennifer Wells -- Appendix: Feasibility Study for the Green Conversion of the GM Oshawa Facility: Possibilities for Sustainable Community Wealth: Summary Overview / Russ Christianson.

This thematic issue is an effort to understand how digitalization is disrupting and reordering the regulation of work and employment. It also examines how these concerns may lead to organizational and institutional experimentation.

Ce numéro thématique cherche à comprendre comment le numérique est venu perturber et réorganiser la régulation du travail et de l’emploi et comment il peut conduire à des formes d’expérimentation organisationnelle et institutionnelle.

In 1893 the Keewatin Lumber and Power Company planned the first hydroelectric generating station on the north shore of Lake of the Woods (near present-day Kenora, Ontario). Approximately fifty years later, federal officials seeking employment for Canadian veterans turned to Northwestern Ontario and its underutilized water resources, envisioning a manufacturing hub on the Precambrian Shield. Between 1950 and 1958, the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario remodeled the Winnipeg River drainage basin to produce power for federally-sanctioned peacetime industries, namely pulp and paper production. To redesign the Winnipeg River drainage basin, however, hydro officials needed to encroach on Anishinabek lands: both federally-recognized reserves and unrecognized, but heavily occupied, ancestral territories. This dissertation tells the story of how Anishinabek families used a diverse array of strategies adaptation, cooperation, and passive resistance to manage environmental change caused by Whitedog Falls Generating Station. Anishinabek families worked to stabilize their communities in an era of imposed environmental and economic change. Historians have long argued that hydroelectric development is necessarily at odds with Indigenous culture and subsistence economies. This dissertation provides a counter-narrative, arguing that cultural and economic damage, although linked to environmental damage, correlated more strongly with Anishinabek exclusion from resource negotiations. Moreover, this work complicates historical representations of a uniform Indigenous response to development. Given limited negotiations between the Hydro-Electric Power Commission and local First Nations, Anishinabek families did not respond to industrial incursions with one representative voice. The process of development itself, I argue, prevented a unified community response. As a result, Anishinabek communities fractured in response to hydroelectric development.

The article reviews the book, "L’art du sens dans les organisations," edited by Jean-Luc Moriceau, Hugo Letiche and Marie-Astrid Letheule.

The article reviews the book, "Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle," by Jamie Woodcock.

Although Canada’s migrant labour program is seen by some as a model of best practices, rights shortfalls and exploitation of workers are well documented. Through migration policy, federal authorities determine who can hire migrant workers, and the conditions under which they are employed, through the provision of work permits. Despite its authority over work permits, the federal government has historically had little to do with the regulation of working conditions. In 2015, the federal government introduced a new regulatory enforcement system - unique internationally for its attempt to enforce migrants’ workplace rights through federal migration policy - under which employers must comply with contractual employment terms, uphold provincial workplace standards, and make efforts to maintain a workplace free of abuse. Drawing on enforcement data, and frontline law and policy documents, we critically assess the new enforcement system, concluding that it holds both promise and peril for migrant workers.

Through two-part intergenerational oral histories, this thesis explores the intersections of labour, gender, and lived religion in the lives of twelve Southern Alberta, Dutch Reformed women from family farms from the 1950s to 2019. By focusing on the broader lived experience of the women interviewed, and not just their physical labour on the farm, this thesis argues that women’s roles on the family farm were crucial, while complicating the narrative of farm women’s roles to show their multiple and often conflicting identities.

Economically depressed communities across North America have opened casinos based on the promise of creating “good jobs.” Some scholars find that workers benefit from casinos via employment and wage growth, while others find that casinos exploit host communities, including their workers. Yet, little research addresses whom casinos employ and how workers experience the quality of employment. Existing research is based on geographic areas that house multiple casinos where workers have the mobility to move between different casino operators. Across North America, however, casinos are being adopted in economically depressed areas and in limited-licence states with large distances between casinos. Using the case study of Casino Windsor – located in Canada’s economically struggling automotive capital, Windsor, Ontario – this article speaks to whether casinos offer “good jobs” when a single casino exists in an economically struggling area. Based on 48 interviews with Windsor stakeholders and casino workers, media coverage, and descriptive statistics, these findings provide an alternative story of the employment implications of casino development when casino workers are immobile. The immobility of Casino Windsor workers results from a high unemployment rate, the absence of other employment offering comparable remuneration, and an international border. This scenario allows management to rule through disciplinary actions while still reaping the benefits of worker “loyalty” and effort. With states/provinces justifying casino developments to economically devitalized host communities by promising the creation of “good jobs,” researchers and policymakers must consider whether such developments will create and potentially exploit a captive labour supply, leading to the development of not-so-good casino jobs.

Background and objectives: Globally, sex workers experience labour rights abuses, disproportionate burdens of workplace violence, and restrictions on safer ways of working (i.e., collectively and in indoor venues) due to criminalization. These inequities are often exacerbated among im/migrant sex workers, who may additionally face precarious legal status, restrictive immigration policies and racialized policing. Despite implementation of “end-demand” legislation (legal models aimed at ending clients’ demand for sexual services) in dozens of countries, little empirical research has explored how end-demand laws impact sex workers’ labour conditions. This dissertation sought to explore how end-demand laws and prohibitive immigration policy impact labour conditions, health and rights among im/migrant and indoor sex workers in Vancouver. Methods: This dissertation drew on quantitative and qualitative data collected from AESHA (An Evaluation of Sex Workers’ Health Access), a community-based open prospective cohort of 900+ women sex workers across Vancouver, Canada, who complete bi-annual interviewer-administered questionnaires and voluntary sexual health testing. Mixed methods (explanatory and confounder bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses; interrupted time series; coding of semi-structured interview data) were used to elucidate the impacts of end-demand laws and resulting law enforcement practices on indoor and im/migrant sex workers’ labour environments. Results: This dissertation found that end-demand legislation in Canada failed to improve sex workers’ access to justice, restricted access to supportive third parties and safer indoor venues, heightened the vulnerability of sex work venues to violence, and limited access to occupational health resources (condoms, community-led services); with negative implications exacerbated among im/migrant sex workers. Conclusion: These findings extend limited existing research on the impacts of end-demand legislation, and demonstrate that end-demand criminalization reproduces the harms of full criminalization models. These results have important implications for legislative, policy, and law enforcement reforms towards enabling safe labour environments among im/migrant and indoor sex workers. This dissertation calls for the decriminalization of sex work; removal of prohibitions on im/migrant sex work; sensitivity and anti-stigma trainings among authorities; dedicated efforts to address systemic racism in sex work policing; promoting rights-based municipal occupational health standards; and increasing support for sex worker-led outreach; to promote sex workers’ labour and human rights.

This article analyzes the politics surrounding the 1970s/early 1980s introduction of work-incentive measures for “welfare mothers” in Ontario. It uses governance and assemblage theory to analyze the substance and dynamics of the debates in this area as they involved state officials, social policy and social welfare advocates, and welfare mother activists. Using a wide array of archival documents and media accounts, the article uncovers the discursive and other kinds of practices that government officials used in seeking to contain the debate and foreclose more radical possibilities, as well as the role that progressive groups sometimes played in reinforcing official expertise. The article concludes that the work incentives for welfare mothers measures were not just benign policy but mechanisms that screened out the political and, ultimately, further disempowered and marginalized welfare mothers. Such programs operate to this day to reinforce a worldview that ignores structural oppression and inequality.

The article reviews the book, "Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England," by Jared Ross Hardesty.

L’adéquation formation-emploi a fait couler beaucoup d’encre au cours des dernières années, car elle présente des défis importants auxquels tant les entreprises que les pouvoirs publics cherchent à répondre. Il s’agit d’une notion polysémique que l’on doit s’assurer de bien cerner parce que la littérature regorge d’une multitude de vocables et de mesures utilisés pour décrire les situations d’inadéquation formation-emploi et d’écarts observés dans le marché du travail.

This is a study of 933 academic promotions from associate to full professor in Ontario, Canada for the period 2010-2014. Publicly available sources provided a bibliometric profile including gender, year of promotion, university, academic discipline, salary, type and number of publications and number of authors for each promotion to full professor. We found a large gender gap in academic promotions favouring men, which is explained mainly by a structural focus on male-dominated academic disciplines. We also found large differences in numbers of publications by academic discipline, which was substantially reduced after considering the number of authors per publication. Business professors were paid substantially more than other professors at the time of promotion. Our study focused on publications, and given this limitation the results should be taken in the context that there are multiple considerations for promotion. Publication quality and impact, grants and patents, were not adjusted for.

From mining to sex work and from the classroom to the docks, violence has always been a part of work. This collection of essays highlights the many different forms and expressions of violence that have arisen under capitalism in the last two hundred years, as well as how historians of working-class life and labour have understood violence. The editors draw together diverse case studies, integrating analysis of class, age, gender, sexuality, and race into the scholarship. Essays span the United States and Canadian border, exploring gender violence, sexual harassment, the violent kidnapping of union organizers, the violence of inadequate health and safety protections, the culture of violence in state institutions, the mythology of working-class violence, and the changing nature of violence in extractive industries. The Violence of Work theorizes and historicizes violence as an integral part of working life, making it possible to understand the full scope and causes of workplace violence over time. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction: Accounting for violence / Jeremy Milloy -- The perils of sex work in Montreal: seeking security and justice in the face of violence, 1810-1842 / Mary Anne Poutanen -- The rules of discipline: workers and the culture of violence in progressive-era reform schools / James Schmidt -- The "new solution": anti-labour kidnapping, D.B. McKay, and the legacy of the second Seminole War / Chad Pearson -- Billy Gohl: labour, violence, and myth in the early twentieth-century Pacific Northwest / Aaron Goings -- Slow violence and hidden injuries: the work of strip mining in the American west / Ryan Driskell Tate -- The murder of Lori Dupont : violence, harassment, and occupational health and safety in Ontarion / Sarah Jessup -- "By the nuimbers" : workers' compensation and the (further) conventionalization of workplace violence / Robert Storey -- Gender violence in the hospitality industry: panic buttons, pants, and protest / Emily E. LB. Twarog.

This article explores the hidden work of workers employed in precarious jobs which are characterized by part-time and temporary contracts, limited control over work schedules, and poor access to regulatory protection. Through 77 semi-structured interviews with workers in low-wage, precarious jobs in Ontario, Canada, we examine workers’ attempts to challenge the precarity they face when confronted by workplace conditions violating the Ontario Employment Standards Act (ESA), such as not being paid minimum wages, not being paid for overtime, being fired wrongfully or being subject to reprisals. We argue that these challenges involve hidden work, which is neither acknowledged nor recognized in the current ESA enforcement regime. We examine three types of hidden work that involve (1) creating a sense of positive self-worth amidst disempowering practices; (2) engaging in advocacy vis-à-vis employers, sometimes through launching official claims with the Ontario Ministry of Labour; and (3) developing strategies to avoid the costs of precarity in the future. We argue that this hidden work of challenging precarity needs to be formally recognized and that concrete strategies for doing so might lead to more robust protection for workers, particularly within ESA enforcement practices.

The article reviews the book, "Le travail à l’épreuve des nouvelles temporalités," edited by Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay et Sid Ahmed Soussi.