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To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.

This article analyses past and future work at the International Labour Organization (‘ILO’) with reference to the transformational analysis offered by Karl Polanyi, examining how constitutional statements made through ILO Declarations reflect countermovement to market dominance. These policy shifts at the ILO are also analysed in relation to the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic and social), which arguably map onto Polanyi’s three fictitious commodities (with a focus on labour as emblematic of social concerns). It is argued that the emphasis on social justice and sustainability in the 2019 ILO Global Commission Report, including the proposal for a Universal Labour Guarantee, provides significant resistance to the economic orthodoxy regarding the future of work promoted by the World Bank Group and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (‘OECD’). However, this narrative of ILO countermovement also exposes a lack of balanced regulation which requires more inclusive voice on the global stage.

This dissertation examines Canada’s program to employ prisoners of war (POWs) in Canada during the Second World War as a means of understanding how labour projects and the communities and natural environment in which they occurred shaped the POWs’ wartime experiences. The use of POW labourers, including civilian internees, enemy merchant seamen, and combatant prisoners, occurred in response to a nationwide labour shortage. Between May 1943 and November 1946, there were almost 300 small, isolated labour projects across the country employing, at its peak, over 14,000 POWs. Most prisoners were employed in either logging or agriculture, work that not only provided them with relative freedom, but offered prisoners unprecedented contact with Canada and its people. Work would therefore not only boost production but, it was hoped, instil POWs with Canadian mores and values through interaction with guards, civilians, and the natural environment. Rather than attempt a narrative encompassing almost 300 labour projects, this dissertation examines POW labour through a series of five case studies. The first examines prisoners cutting fuelwood in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park while the second and third examine POWs cutting pulpwood in Northwestern Ontario for the Ontario-Minnesota Pulp & Paper Co. and Abitibi Power & Paper Co., respectively. The fourth case study examines POWs employed by Donnell & Mudge in its tannery in New Toronto, Ontario and the fifth examines the practice of employing POWs in farm work in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Through these case studies, this dissertation examines how how internment officials employed remote parts of Canada as a physical boundary to prevent escape attempts, while also using it as a space to provide POWs with relative freedom as an inducement to work, and how work challenged definitions of who or what was the “enemy”. With significantly more freedom than the typical internee, POWs interacted with civilians and guards on a more familiar level, resulting in illicit fraternizations and relationships between POWs and Canadians. Although such fraternization also triggered considerable protest, these interactions reveal a great deal regarding POWs’ opinions of and attitudes towards Canada and its people as well as Canadian attitudes towards POWs.

The article reviews the book, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.

The article reviews the book, "Les nouvelles sociologies du travail. Introduction à la sociologie de l’activité," par Pascal Ughetto.

Dans la tourmente d’une récente intervention législative au Québec qui restreint le port de signes religieux pour certains agents et agentes de l’État occupant une fonction d’autorité, une volonté d’étendre cette nouvelle conception de la neutralité au sein d’espaces privés, comme l’entreprise, pourrait émerger. La validité d’une politique interdisant le port de signes religieux en milieu de travail doit, toutefois, être analysée à l’aune de la liberté de religion et du droit à l’égalité des travailleurs, ce qui sollicitera inévitablement l’interprétation du juge. À cet égard, la France dispose de précédents très précis sur cette question, alors que le Québec fait l’objet d’une riche jurisprudence en matière d’accommodement raisonnable pour motifs religieux, qui permet aussi d’y répondre. Or, en présence d’une problématique identique dans l’entreprise, qui mobilise de surcroît les mêmes droits fondamentaux des travailleurs, un regard croisé entre la France et le Québec révèle les chemins diamétralement opposés empruntés par les juges de chacun de ces espaces nationaux. Ces divergences s’observent aussi bien à l’occasion du contrôle de la légitimité de l’interdiction de signes religieux adoptée par l’employeur qu’au moment de circonscrire les mesures qu’il devra prendre afin d’éviter le congédiement du salarié. Plus encore, le fardeau financier que l’entreprise aura à supporter, au terme de cet exercice, se situe aux antipodes. Dans l’ensemble, cette analyse comparative met en évidence l’impact décisif du travail interprétatif du juge sur la protection de l’emploi, en ne manquant pas de discuter des possibilités que la logique française se transporte en droit québécois.

The article reviews the book, "Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy," by Alvin Finkel.

The article reviews the book, "The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age," by Zachary J. Violette.

The article reviews the book, "Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work," by Alex Rosenblat.

The following is an exchange sparked by Jim Selby’s presentation piece in Labour/Le Travail vol. 83. Since debates about the labour movement’s strategies – past, present and future – raise important questions, we have printed Marion Pollack’s response to Selby’s article and, in keeping with journal protocol, his final response. —Eds.

The article reviews the books, "Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation," by Jack Reid, and "Thumbing a Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada," by Linda Mahood.

The article reviews the book, "Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada," by Esyllt W. Jones.

The article reviews the book, "Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison," by Ted McCoy.

Many large cities in North America have jurisdiction over licensing rules that shape the employment and health conditions of ride-hail and taxi drivers. Yet there is a lack of research on the role of licensing agencies relating to the occupational health and safety (OHS) of taxi drivers. Most taxi and ride-hail drivers in Canada are self-employed workers and are, by default, exempt from OHS and worker compensation laws. Additionally, municipal licensing regimes in Canada and the US have undergone various changes as a result of pressures from new platform-based ride-hail services, like Uber and Lyft. The analysis is part of a larger study on the health and safety conditions faced by ride-hail drivers. The research approach adopted a multi-level sampling and analysis strategy with the aim of connecting taxi drivers’ everyday work experiences to company and sector practices, and with various regulatory arenas, including municipal licensing, taxation and car insurance. In this paper, the analysis draws from in-depth interviews at these different levels: with taxi and ride-hail drivers, with taxi and ride-hail managers, and with key informants in government, law, insurance, tax and elsewhere. The paper identifies features and impacts of municipal deregulation in the era of on-demand taxi services, focusing on a large Canadian city in a province where municipal authorities regulate the vehicle-for-hire sector. The research identified regulatory changes that included removing centralized taxi vehicle inspections, cancelling mandatory driver training, and instigating rapid changes to competition in the taxi workforce by issuing unlimited numbers of ride-hail licenses. Our analysis indicates that regulatory changes adopted by the city administration have compounded work vulnerabilities and hazards for taxi drivers, while extending hazardous conditions to ride-hail drivers. These hazards suggest the need for interventions at a range of levels, actors and agencies, rather than solely by city licensing officials.

I locate this study within the context of my own work and experiences as an academic librarian and the disconnect that I have often felt between what I consider my role and the value of my work to be versus the perception and understanding of that role, the work, and its value by others. Overwhelmingly, librarians working at Canadian universities are considered academic staff, if not faculty. However, the role and fit of the academic librarian within the academic enterprise is overshadowed and frequently misunderstood. As the subaltern, librarians’ expertise and contribution to the university’s academic mission is often sidelined: the nature of the work too frequently viewed through an organizational rather than an academic lens and characterized as preoccupied with a structured set of regularized responsibilities. The goal of this study is to make visible the processes that shape the work experiences of academic librarians such as they are. Two research questions served as the impetus for this study: How is it that the academic librarian’s lesser status is the ideal at Canadian universities? What are the social processes that shape this ideal? This study is informed by the epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of institutional ethnography: a research approach developed by the Canadian social theorist and sociologist, Dorothy Smith. Institutional ethnography considers the everyday, lived experiences of people as the research problematic—a term used by Smith to focus the inquiry on the actual, social, and active world as it is lived and experienced by people. An institutional ethnography progresses through layers, in this case the progression is from the academic librarian, to the library, to the institution, and beyond, to reveal how power structures external to the local setting influence daily life. To understand how the everyday world is put together so that things happen as they do, the focus of the investigation is on individual experiences and what people are doing relationally. However, in institutional ethnography the actions and experiences of people within a particular setting are not regarded as representative. Rather, the local experience is regarded as a window into the role of power. It is a politically charged and activist type of scholarship. Because institutional ethnography is concerned with explicating the actual rather than formulating or advancing the theoretical, the emphasis is on discovery rather than hypothesis testing. The findings of this study reveal how the value of librarians’ work is socially constructed and based on work that is perceived as women’s work; how the work of librarians is organized as library work rather than academic work; how accreditation bodies and the professions privilege the library over the librarian; and how institutional policies and practices position the librarian as academic on the margins of the academy. These social processes reveal how things come about so that librarians’ experiences as academic staff are such as they are. However, it is ideologies that help us understand why things are the way they are. I propose that two ideological codes—women’s work and the library—permeate our social consciousness, including speech, text, and talk, and infuse librarians’ work with particularizing characteristics. Ultimately, the findings of this study tie librarians’ work experiences to the necessary and gendered exploitation of labour that happens within a capitalist mode of production.

Mental health challenges appear to be extremely prolific and challenging for correctional service employees, affecting persons working in community, institutional, and administrative correctional services. Focusing specifically on correctional workers employed by the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, we shed light on their interpretations of the complexities of their occupational work and of how their work affects staff. Using a qualitative thematic approach to data analyses, we show that participants (n = 67) encounter barriers to treatment seeking, which they describe as tremendous, starting with benefits, wages, and shift work. We let the voices of staff elucidate what is needed to create a healthier correctional workforce. Recommendations include more training opportunities and programs; quarterly, semiannual, or annual appointments with a mental health professional who can assess changes in the mental health status of employees; offsite assessments to ensure confidentiality; and team building opportunities to reduce interpersonal conflict at work and increase moral by improving the work environment.

The article reviews the book, "Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics," by Jorge J. Santos, Jr .

The article reviews the book, "A Primer on American Labor Law," by William Gould IV.

Peter Findlay’s documentary film Company Town provides a welcome opening to initiate discussion and debate about the closure of General Motor’s once massive (it had 23,000 workers at one time) and historically central auto and truck complex and supplier plants. Behind the film’s basic narrative is a countdown from the period between the announcement (November 2018) of the closure and the actual end of production (December 2019). It creates space to raise issues such as the power and strategic orientation of the union and its leadership, the nature of the industry and competition in this era of late neoliberal capitalism, the consciousness and lives of auto and parts workers, and the possibilities of alternatives. --Introduction

The article reviews the book, "Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History," by Richard J. Evans.