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Members of the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) played a prominent role in the labour revolt of 1919, the One Big Union, and the Winnipeg General Strike. The “failure” of all three has led labour historians to focus on the inability of the party to connect with Canadian workers, an inability fuelled by dogmatism, “impossibilism,” and the exclusion of women and workers of colour. This article turns this approach on its head, pointing out that these events have been unequalled in Canadian history, and seeks to explain why this should be so. It challenges the perception of the party as being wed to evolutionary thinking that caused its members to wait around for the revolution to happen. Instead, it reveals the powerful influence of the dialectical method developed by G. W. F. Hegel; its focus on human action was the philosophical underpinning of the spc’s relentless attack on the wage system and the capitalist system’s commodification of labour power. Far from being “metaphysical” or “otherworldly,” the SPC’s insistence that workers must gain control of the product of their own labour spoke directly to them, including women and workers of colour. In the creation of the One Big Union, in the solidarity of the Winnipeg General Strike, and in the promise of the labour revolt of 1919, we find the legacy of a party committed to workers rising up.

Issue: Judicial rulings, continued decline in unionization, new types of work arrangements, employer efforts to boost retention and performance and new approaches to enforcement are shining the spotlight on the ability of workers to join together to express their views and have a say in decisions affecting their working conditions. To what extent are there gaps in opportunities for collective voice for non-unionized workers in the federally regulated private sector (FRPS)? How could they be addressed?

The article reviews the book, "Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize," by Leah Vosko.

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America’s leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer’s work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures. Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer’s contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer’s career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer’s participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer’s politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history. --Publisher's description

This report...examines the need for paid sick leave in Nova Scotia and what it should look like. Authored by a team of researchers at Acadia University, the report underlines that for paid sick leave to be effective, it must be universal, paid, adequate, permanent, accessible and employer-provided. It recommends that employers be legislated to provide 10 paid days per year to allow workers time to access preventative health services or to recover from common illnesses. Prior to the pandemic, only 46% of Nova Scotia workers had paid sick leave provided by their employers. A total of 69% of workers who earn $25,000 do not have access to paid sick leave. The data also shows that younger workers and those with high school education or less have the least access. Only 28% of those who work in seasonal, term or on-call jobs have access to paid sick leave. This report also reviews temporary sick leave policies from federal, provincial, and territorial jurisdictions in Canada to demonstrate how they must be improved.

À l’époque de l’industrialisation, le monde du travail est d’une grande brutalité. Peu de lois protègent les ouvrier.ère.s. C’est dans ce contexte qu’est fondé en 1921 le tout premier syndicat québécois non associé à un syndicat américain, la Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC), maintenant connu sous le nom de Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN). À l’occasion du 100e anniversaire de l’organisation, Savoir média revisite cette époque marquante de l’histoire du Québec avec la présentation du documentaire Les unions, qu’ossa donne ?, produit et réalisé par Hélène Choquette, avec la narration de Anne-Marie Cadieux. Au-delà des syndicats, le film met de l’avant les nombreux changements sociaux apportés par ces revendications ouvrières. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "America’s Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States," by Timothy Minchin.

The article reviews the book, "The Class Politics of Law: Essays Inspired by Harry Glasbeek," edited by Eric Tucker and Judy Fudge.

The article reviews the book, "The Two-Hundred-Million Pound Strike : The 2003 British Airways Walkout," by Ed Blissett.

Ce travail cherche à appréhender les déterminants de la résilience du personnel soignant dans le contexte de la crise sanitaire Covid-19. Son but est d’accéder à une compréhension profonde des motifs, des forces et des processus à l’oeuvre dans la dynamique complexe de la résilience.

Hamilton’s industrial age is over. In the steel capital of Canada, there are no more skies lit red by foundries at sunset, no more traffic jams at shift change. Instead, an urban renaissance is taking shape. But who wins and who loses in the city’s not-too-distant future? Is it possible to lift a downtrodden, post-industrial city out of poverty in a way that benefits people across the social spectrum, not just a wealthy elite? In Shift Change, author Stephen Dale sets up “the Hammer” as a battlefield, a laboratory, a chessboard. As investors cash in on a real estate gold rush and the all-too-familiar wheels of gentrification begin to turn, there’s still a rare opportunity for both old-guard and newcomer Hamiltonians to come together and write a different story--one in which Steeltown becomes an economically diverse and inclusive urban centre for all. What plays out in these pages and at this very moment is a real-time case study that will capture the attention and the imagination of anyone interested in equitable redevelopment, housing activism, and social justice in the North American city. -- Publisher's description

One of the world’s largest sellers of footwear, the Bata Company of Zlín, Moravia has a remarkable history that touches on crucial aspects of what made the world modern. In the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, the company Americanized its production model while also trying to Americanize its workforce. It promised a technocratic form of governance in the chaos of postwar Czechoslovakia, and during the Roaring Twenties, it became synonymous with rationalization across Europe and thus a flashpoint for a continent-wide debate. While other companies contracted in response to the Great Depression, Bata did the opposite, becoming the first shoe company to unlock the potential of globalization.As Bata expanded worldwide, it became an example of corporate national indifference, where company personnel were trained to be able to slip into and out of national identifications with ease. Such indifference, however, was seriously challenged by the geopolitical crisis of the 1930s, and by the cusp of the Second World War, Bata management had turned nationalist, even fascist.In the Kingdom of Shoes unravels the way the Bata project swept away tradition and enmeshed the lives of thousands of people around the world in the industrial production of shoes. Using a rich array of archival materials from two continents, the book answers how Bata’s rise to the world’s largest producer of shoes challenged the nation-state, democracy, and Americanization. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Les pathologies au travail," by Élisabeth Grebot.

This dissertation honours and pays tribute to Sudbury residents and many others for whom labour strikes played a significant role in shaping their lives. Set in the context of a public history theatrical experiment, this study investigates local and community memories pertaining to Sudbury mining strikes in the postwar period from 1958 through to 2010. Archival research and oral history interviews were conducted on major labour strikes in this era and that research was used to script, rehearse, and stage a theatrical play. Interviews with audience members and performers were also conducted at all stages of the process. This process allows the dissertation to consider the perspectives of both performers and audience members, each enacting their roles as producers and consumers of public history. The dissertation also assesses the value of this form of history making, as it relates to the formation of historical consciousness, both then and now, of individuals within the Sudbury community. This study argues that public history as theatre has the potential to provide an effective and affecting means to nurture critical, reflexive historical consciousness both on and off the stage.

Discusses the role of the Canadian militia and army in crushing strikes, protest, and dissent, as well as the privileged class backgrounds of military officers and their connections to elite clubs and institutions.

Provides a historical assessment of the NDP-labour relationship that became more distanced and defensive in the neoliberal era, especially at the provincial level. Whether there will be a rapprochement in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic remains to be determined. A revised version of the essay published in the first edition (2012).

Canada has one of the highest rates of low-wage work among advanced industrial economies. In a labour market characterized by the ongoing fallout from COVID-19, deepening income inequality, increasingly uncertain job tenure, and steadily diluted union representation, the living wage movement offers a response. Rising Up traces the history and international context of living wage movements across Canada. Contributors to this astute and compassionate collection of essays examine union- and community-based approaches to organizing in marginalized communities, the role of social reproduction, migrant labour, and media (mis)representations, among other key topics. In the 1970s, the balance of political and economic power began to shift in favour of business, as trade unions weakened and governments proved unwilling to check corporate power. By the 2000s, austerity measures had dismantled social services spending, facilitating the growth of precarious, often gendered or racialized low-waged employment. Rapidly increasing wealth and income inequality has followed in the wake of these deteriorating labour market conditions and mounting social disparities.As more and more workers in Canada and elsewhere face permanent low-paid work, Rising Up will stimulate debate about living wages and social inequality, promoting alternatives to a neoliberalized labour market. --Publisher's description

Our empirical analysis is based on Statistics Canada’s worker-firm matched data set, the 2003 Workplace and Employee Survey (WES). The sample size is substantial: about 4,000 workers over the age of 50 and 12,000 between the ages of 25 and 49. Training was a focus of the survey, which offers a wealth of worker-related and firm-related training variables. We found that the mean probability of receiving training was 9.3 percentage points higher for younger workers than for older ones. Almost half of the gap is explained by older workers having fewer training-associated characteristics (personal, employment, workplace, human resource practices and occupation/industry/region), and slightly more than half by them having a lower propensity to receive training, this being the gap that remained after we controlled for differences in training-associated characteristics. Their lower propensity to receive training likely reflects the higher opportunity cost of lost wages during the time spent in training, possible higher psychological costs and lower expected benefits due to their shorter remaining work-life and lower productivity gains from training, as discussed in the literature. The lower propensity of older workers to receive training tended to prevail across 54 different training measures, with notable exceptions discussed in detail. We found that older workers can be trained, but their training should be redesigned in several ways: by making instruction slower and self-paced; by assigning hands-on practical exercises; by providing modular training components to be taken in stages; by familiarizing the trainees with new equipment; and by minimizing required reading and amount of material covered. The concept of “one-size-fits- all” does not apply to the design and implementation of training programs for older workers.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to knowledge of profit-sharing by utilizing a before-and-after analysis of panel data to assess whether the effects of profit-sharing adoption on productivity growth vary, depending on whether a profit-sharing adopter utilizes work teams or not, while controlling for numerous variables that may affect these results within a carefully constructed sample of Canadian establishments. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderating role of teamwork in the relationship between profit-sharing and productivity growth. Besides the implications for profit-sharing, ascertaining whether profit-sharing and work teams are complementary practices would have important implications for understanding how to develop more effective work teams, a topic of ongoing interest. We utilized a longitudinal research design to compare within-firm productivity growth during the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to profit-sharing adoption and within-firm productivity growth during the same periods in firms that had not adopted profit-sharing. Overall, our results suggest that use of team-based production plays an important moderating role in the success of employee profit-sharing—at least in terms of workplace productivity growth. Establishments that had adopted profit-sharing showed a substantial and highly significant increase in workplace productivity over both the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to adoption, but only if they had work teams. These findings are in line with the notion that work teams help to mitigate potential shirking behaviour in profit-sharing firms (Freeman, Kruse and Blasi, 2010) and are also in line with the argument that work teams serve as an effective mechanism to help translate the purported motivational and other benefits of profit-sharing into tangible productivity gains (Heywood and Jirjahn, 2009).