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Canada has not been left untouched by a new authoritarian, or ordered, populism that has seen the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union. Based on measurements of public opinion and other means developed to assess the phenomenon, this paper finds that populism in Canada is a significant political force, replacing the traditional left-right political spectrum. Not only has northern populism created a heightened partisan polarization in Canada, but it also proved to be a strong predictor of the outcome of the 2019 federal election. The authors’ research shows that 34 per cent of Canadians maintain a populist outlook. Older, less-educated, working-class Canadians are the most likely to sympathize with ordered populism, and it is more prevalent in Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is also more closely aligned with Canadians whose political sympathies lie with conservative political parties. A number of factors have contributed to the rise of ordered populism. These include economic stagnation, the growing disparity between the wealthy and the middle and working classes, a sense that society is headed in the wrong direction and a backlash against the loss of traditional core values.

Over the long term, Canada should collect better health data that looks closely at the intersecting issues of race and immigration. The low-paid and precarious positions in industries that are considered essential during the COVID-19 pandemic (sanitation, health care, and those in the food supply chain) are filled with women, recent immigrants, and racialized Canadians. Many of these workplaces are notoriously plagued with exploitative labour practices that, in many ways, contributed to the spread of the virus in the first place. Recent immigrants and racialized Canadians, notably Filipinos and Sudanese Dinka, who work in these industries, for example, meat-packing plants in Brooks, High River and Balzac, Alberta, are at great risk of negative health outcomes during this pandemic....

The message has been loud and clear: everyone needs to do their part to fight the spread of COVID-19, and that means not leaving our homes unless absolutely necessary. But for tens of thousands of people who work as cleaners across this country, this pandemic has meant having to keep showing up for work — for more demanding shifts, and under potentially hazardous working conditions. You can't telecommute if you're a cleaner or janitor. In Canada, as elsewhere in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed just how essential their work is for public health and safety. And yet, janitorial workers in Canada have for years been among the lowest-paid in the country, and classified as so-called 'low-skilled' labour. Essential, but not commanding a lot of respect. Deena Ladd is the executive director of the Workers' Action Centre, an organization in Toronto that works with people in low-wage and unstable employment. She spoke to The Sunday Edition's Michael Enright about the working conditions of cleaners in Canada. --Website description

This review of the state of labour and distributional struggles in Canada, compared to the experience of other countries, paints a cautiously optimistic picture. Canadian workers have been relatively successful in preserving their organizational and institutional power (including relatively high and stable rates of unionization). Perhaps more importantly, Canadian workers have been active in wielding that power – both through industrial conflict and political advocacy – to defend and even improve their share of the overall economic pie. --From author's conclusion

For socialists, unions are paradoxical organizations. On the one hand, unions are essential for creating a workers' organization that can oppose capital and challenge it for power. But they are also an insufficient vehicle for mobilizing those workers to transform the world. [The article is a reprint of the chapter, "Labor Unions and Movements," in the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (2019), edited by Matthew Vidal, Tomas Rotta, Tony Smith, and Paul Prew.]

Examines the political responses to deindustrialization as well as its historical roots and lived experiences.DéPOT is a partnership of over 35 research centres, industrial museums, labour archives, trade unions and other organizations across Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Canada and the United States. [Funded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Council.]

Provides brief bios of the contributors to v. 85 (Spring, 2020).

The article reviews the book, "The Case for Economic Democracy," by Andrew Cumbers.

Examines the federal state's interventions in collective bargaining, including the use of back-to-work legislation, during the 1970s and 80s under the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau.

In a 2013 exhibition publication titled It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!, John Roberts made the observation that “Over the last ten years we have become witness to an extraordinary assimilation of art theory and practice into the categories of labor and production.” Whereas once art claimed for itself a critical capacity in relation to the larger system of capitalist domination by its status as a putatively ‘autonomous’ sphere of production from which it leveraged its difference and critique, today it is largely acknowledged that there is no longer any such ‘outside’ to be aspired to. If, in the recent past, the immaterial, informational, creative, experiential, and affective elements of conceptual art were seen as potential resistant forces, in our current climate, where these forms of labor have become the dominant mode of production for the capitalist economy, these potentialities are now being widely questioned. With these developments in mind, this dissertation consists of a series of integrated articles that focus on the increasingly diffuse and interconnected circuits of global exchange and labor as they interact with specific sites and interventions of contemporary artistic production. In this, they coalesce around a general binding inquiry: does artistic labor today have the capacity to function as a critique of the (transforming) mechanisms of control and exploitation characteristic of capitalism in the twenty-first century? And if not, what does that entail about the continued political viability, and persisting social functions of contemporary artworks? Drawing on autonomist Marxist thought, the sociology of work and labor, performance studies, and critical readings on the relationship between artistic labor and recent forms of capitalist production, the chapters are organized around exhibitions and artworks which represent, critique, or (re)produce the conditions of production in late capitalism, while situating these within a global economy characterized by an uneven network of productive relations. In so doing, they trace the trajectory of labor relations and production practices as they have transformed over the last half decade through artworks and exhibitions that engage specific emblematic sites of production—the factory, the prison, and the museum (or amalgams of these spaces), and attempts to tease out places where reflection on the relationship between ‘artistic’ and ‘non-artistic’ labor in each may lead to clarity regarding the socio-political efficacy of contemporary art in an increasingly saturated and complex economic infrastructure.

The article reviews the book, "Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism," byAndrew Feffer.

his article examines rank-and-file organizing in Windsor’s automobile factories during the 1970s. In particular, I look at the history of two organizations: Workers’ Unity and the New Tendency’s Auto Worker Group. I demonstrate how these groups were part of the North American New Left’s broader turn toward Marxism and the working class that contributed to the emergence of radical rank-and-file movements that challenged both management and bureaucratized trade union leaders. In Windsor, New Left auto workers embraced forms of autonomist Marxist politics concerned primarily with working-class self-activity at the point of production, and these activists formed connections with influential theorists and organizations in Detroit and Italy. Putting these intellectual exchanges into action, the rank-and-file organizations in Windsor used direct action in an attempt to improve working conditions and develop a radical culture of democracy on the shop floor. Although these groups were relatively short lived, their history tells us much about the trajectory of the New Left in Canada and the ways that former student activists grappled with the radical potential of 1970s working-class militancy.

It is generally accepted that employment regulation offers mechanisms to generate orderly economic growth as well as provide for the protection of workers. Both these efficiency and equity arguments particularly pertain to developing country contexts. The evolution and impact of employment law and industrial relations institutions in large developing countries is of growing interest to western scholars, but small developing countries have been ignored. This lack of research inhibits understanding of the political economy of employment regulation in developing country contexts. This article explores developments in labour regulation in three small developing countries in the South Pacific—Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea—that have been impacted by globalization and international labour regulation in different ways. The comparative research adopts a stakeholder analysis approach based on programs of qualitative interviews and documentary analysis. The paper identifies a number of structural and agency constraints on the development and effective implementation of employment regulatory systems that primarily reflect political factors. These include disorganized employment relations, under-developed civil society institutions, concentration of power networks, the under-resourcing and compartmentalization of state institutions and a broader context of political change and instability. These factors, which are related to country size as well as stage of development, subvert the introduction, implementation and review of employment regulation even where efficiency and equity arguments may be accepted by policymakers. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications and need for future research.

Facing a global health pandemic and an uncooperative administration, the King's University College Faculty Association decided it was time to unionize. Now they're stronger than ever. --Editor's note

In the mid-1990s, the province of Ontario instituted a new model of “managed competition” to govern a significant portion of home care services delivery. The new model, based on competitive bidding for the delivery of home care services, deepened reliance on private and increasingly for-profit “service provider organizations.” In time, the outcomes of the transition to managed competition – particularly increased employment precarity and turnover – grew increasingly salient and became captured in prior literature. However, a series of subsequent responses to these outcomes also began to emerge, ostensibly aimed at improving work and employment conditions in this sector. This article provides a historical analysis of various responses to the heightened employment precarity wrought by the managed competition regime in Ontario home care, with a focus on personal support workers (psws) insofar as they have historically tended to experience the most precarious conditions among the primary home care occupations. The analysis suggests that the core institutional arrangement of fissured work and organizational relations, coupled with a hyperdecentralized bargaining structure, was a key constraint and mediating factor. The most dramatic policy measure aimed at employment precarity, the 2014 psw Wage Enhancement Initiative, constituted a major, ad hoc overriding of this structure that had until then delivered wage restraint so successfully that it challenged the government’s own health human resources objectives. This reliance on such an extraordinary ad hoc instrument, without addressing the core institutional structure, severely restricts the degree of improvement in psw employment outcomes capable of being produced by collective bargaining in Ontario home care.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise traite du rapport qu’entretiennent les grandes entreprises minières avec les collectivités locales, dans un contexte nordique. À partir du cas québécois de l’exploitation du minerai de fer, nous tentons d’apporter un éclairage nouveau à l’idée communément admise selon laquelle l’implantation, sur des territoires enclavés, de grands projets extractifs, constitue un vecteur de développement régional important. La démarche d’économie politique proposée prend pour objet les modes de gestion des ressources humaines et financières privilégiés dans le secteur minier de la Côte-Nord. Les données recueillies dans le cadre d’une analyse documentaire et d’une série d’entretiens semi-dirigés, menés à l’hiver 2019, convergent vers la thèse suivante : la diminution des retombées économiques constatée dans cette région est attribuable à la déterritorialisation de l’organisation contemporaine du travail dans les mines ainsi qu’à l’émergence de stratégies de restructuration épousant la dynamique du cycle de commodités.

The article reviews the book, "Améliorer la gestion du changement dans les organisations," edited by Martin Lauzier and Nathalie Lemieux.

The article reviews the book, "Petit traité de management pour les habitants d’Essos, de Westeros et d’ailleurs," by Marine Agogué, Stéphane Deschaintre, and Cyrille Sardais.

The article reviews the book, "Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668-1786," by Scott P. Stephen.

This literature review presents an overview of the existing academic research on workers’ experiences of sexual harassment in order to better understand the factors influencing workers’ responses to these forms of harassment. We focus on the understudied intersection of precarious work and sexual harassment to address and investigate the higher rates of unwanted sexual attention reported by workers engaged in precarious work. --From Introduction