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This article reviews the book, " The Return of the Housewife: Why Women are Still Cleaning Up" by Emma Casey.

Introduces the special issue's themes including frames (sociological and labour law's) on labour market inequality, gaps in labour law, complicity of labour law in inequality, and equality as transformation.

In 1909, an atypical church emerged in Toronto’s industrial core, the “People’s Institute,” which closed its doors less than two years later. Helmed by missionary C. S. Eby, the People’s Institute was an experiment designed to encourage political involvement and spread a Christian anti-capitalist ethic. This article situates the People’s Institute in the changing landscape of 1909 Toronto and within the larger trends of the labour church and the social gospel. It also argues that Eby’s experiment serves as an example of broader obstacles that prevented the long-term flourishing of left-wing approaches to Christianity in Canada.

This article examines the 2021–22 work-to-rule job action undertaken by CAAT-A, the academic division of OPSEU/SEFPO representing Ontario college faculty. Drawing on a deleted Twitter thread by a participating professor, it presents a first-hand account of the bargaining conflict between CAAT-A and the College Employer Council (CEC). The piece situates the campaign within broader tensions over Bill 124’s wage cap, workload disputes, and employer tactics such as forced-offer votes and imposed terms. It highlights CAAT-A’s phased approach to WTR, culminating in near-strike conditions before resolution through binding interest arbitration. Through the lens of digital labour activism and institutional power, the text documents how faculty used social media and collective solidarity to resist efforts to undermine democratic bargaining in Ontario’s public college system.

The post-secondary education sector is increasingly incorporating equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) frameworks into its institutions. This transition from traditional concepts of affirmative action and employment equity to a decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion (DEDI) model was very much in development both at administrative and faculty levels during my stint as Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Administration of the Agreement (JCoAA), representing a large faculty association. In regular meetings with Labour Relations, representing university administration, conceptual perspectives differed, objectives needed to be agreed upon, and goals compromised. This paper explores the broader model of justice, equity, diversity, decolonization, and inclusion (JEDDI) and the absolute importance of such a perspective for the higher education sector and labour market in general. Implementing and actualizing JEDDI is important as universities continue to diversify. Utilizing such frameworks can assist in assuaging tensions regarding academic freedom, governance, and labour practices.

Discusses the new, high quality reproductions of Henry Orenstein's mural , "Mine Mill Local 598," published in the current issue in conjunction with Elizabeth Quinlan's "Note and Correction" regarding the painting. The painting was originally reproduced on the cover of Labour/Le Travail, no. 93 (2024) as part of Quinlan's article, "Making Space for Creativity: Cultural Intiatives of Sudbury's Mine-Mill Local 598 in the Postwar Era."

The article reviews the book, "Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist," by Michael Boudreau and Bonnie Huskins.

This will be Ted McCoy's last volume as the English-language book review editor for Labour/Le Travail. The editors would like to take this opportunity to thank Ted for his service. Ted was appointed to this role in 2019 and has helped guide the review section of the journal through challenging times. In recent months, he has been generously helping to smooth the transition for Fred Burrill, who is taking on the position. Fred, of the University of New Brunswick, is no stranger to the pages of Labour/Le Travail. The editors, alongside French-language book review editor Camille Robert and managing editor Kathy Killoh, warmly welcome Fred to the editorial team. We invite the broader Labour/Le Travail community to welcome Fred too, particularly by accepting his invitations to write reviews and review essays. The review section provides an important, indeed vital, service to the intellectual life of the field, but it is very much dependent upon our collective willingness to contribute and enhance its breadth and depth. The review section of Labour/Le Travail has been the site of wide-ranging coverage and lively critical engagement for half a century; let it long remain so under the guidance of Fred and Camille.

...In this paper, we aim to contribute to the scholarly literatures and related policy debates on LGBTQ+ work and life that [the Toronto-based advocacy organization] Egale highlights, and to bring these debates into economic geography and queer and trans geographies, fields which have heretofore only minimally examined sexual orientation and gender identity and/in the workplace.

With the assistance of a Committee of experts, McMaster University partnered with the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) to develop the Caregiver Inclusive and Accommodating Organizations Standard (B701-17). The Standard provides workplace guidelines to better accommodate carer-workers through building carer-friendly workplace programs. A qualitative ex ante evaluation was undertaken to determine stakeholders’ (n=17) views regarding the significance and potential uptake of the Standard. This involved seeking feedback from stakeholders in various types of organizations across Canada, after they had read the draft Standard. Following transcription, interviews were thematically analyzed, resulting in four themes: (1) necessity; (2) impact of employer size; (3) motivators for implementation, and (4) use as an educational tool. Although initially in its early stages, the Standard now provides a key tool to improve accommodations for carer-workers.

This article reflects on the pedagogical tensions that emerged through a collective play creation process with migrant farm workers employed under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s conception of emancipation, the article considers how participants engaged in a theatre-based project that explored their lived experiences of unfree labour. While the process opened space for collective self-expression and aesthetic rupture, it also exposed the ambivalence and risk entangled with acts of visibility within systems of surveillance and control. Through an analysis of post-performance dialogue, the article contends that critical pedagogy under constraint must reckon with refusal and partial subjectification as politically meaningful. Emancipatory education, in this view, may emerge not through the orchestration of overt resistance, but through the negotiation of fragile and embodied expressions that unsettle dominant scripts.

Discusses Orenstein's painting, "Mine Mill Local 598," which was reproduced on the cover of Labour/Le Travail, no. 93 (Spring 2024). Included are new, colour reproductions of the panels of the 39-foot-long mural, which Orenstein painted during a 1956 residency in Sudbury. The painting was thought to be no longer extant because of a 2008 fire, but in fact it is still held in the Sudbury union's collection.

In this paper, I explore a particular formation of institutional racism within academic organizations. First, I detail the recent positive recognition of systemic barriers to inclusion in Canada through the rhetoric and policies from national research funding agencies, university managements, and faculty unions. I go on to suggest, however, that there is a contradiction in the promotional framing of these commitments as ‘inclusive excellence’ because the discourse of excellence implies that the institution is already performing at peak function and hence needs no systemic organizational change. I argue that this contradiction undermines the development of genuine motivations to address exclusions and reduces equity policies to tokenistic promotional branding. The excellence discourse appeals to the vanity of the academics who are being encouraged to be more inclusive, a vanity of ‘excellence’ that is a manifestation of the broader epistemological understanding of our profession as both very intelligent and neutral or objective in our approach to generating and assessing knowledge. This professional epistemology anchors our understanding of why the profession looks the way it does: white ethnic dominance is taken as a reflection of objective merit, which then prevents any consideration of whiteness as a contributing privilege to entering and progressing through the academy. I term this equation of whiteness with our professional capacities as ‘professional snowblindness’ because it prevents recognition of the whiteness of the profession precisely through recourse to our professional skills and capacities. I argue that this ‘snowblindness’ is the particular formation of institutional racism in the academy and, crucially, that it needs to be named and discussed if we are to create genuine motivations for equity.

Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on seeing equity as labour justice.

The article reviews the book, "Rethinking Feminist History and Theory: Essays on Gender, Class, and Labour" edited by Lisa Pasolli and Julia Smith

In this article, I pursue the ‘desperate athlete’—a familiar figure for me, a basketball coach and trainer—by arguing serious organised team sport athletes are neo-indentured labourers by illustrating the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport. This article contributes the original analogy ‘indentured’ to the philosophy of sport which is a stronger claim than what other scholars have argued, and in turn provides the neo-indentured desperate athlete as a framework and mode of understanding and to make sense of how serious organised team sport athletes are constructed, explained by way of Foucauldian concepts of objectification, discursive power relations and bio-power. It is an effort to introduce the original concept of the neo-indentured ‘desperate athlete’ and develop that figure as an important subject deserving of scholarly inquiry into the philosophy of discipline in team sport. To ignore the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport would be an example of sport discourse dismissing the inconvenient; so too would be ignoring the ‘desperate athlete’.

The logic of the corporate food regime requires a system of labour based on migration. Free trade agreements have entrenched a drive for ever-expanding export agriculture and resulted in both a devastation of peasant agriculture, creating migrant workers, and an increased need for temporary labour on Canadian farms. Family farmers in Canada face labour challenges exacerbated by the current food regime and, for some, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is seen as an answer to those challenges. However, the SAWP is based on systemic exploitation of migrant workers. This paper seeks to assess the role of migrant labour in Canadian food systems and reveal the contradictions, tensions, and possibilities of farmers acting in solidarity with migrant farmworkers by exploring the formation and political direction of the National Farmers Union’s Migrant Worker Solidarity Working Group (MWSWG).

The loss of manufacturing jobs is an ongoing challenge for organized labour in Canada and a trend that has been happening for several decades. The loss of full-time, unionized factory work in Canada is commonly thought to have started in the 1990s or 2000s, but the possibility of deindustrialization was already evident in the late 1960s. This article examines the closure of the Kelvinator of Canada plant in London, Ontario, in 1969. That closure illustrates the impact of industrial job loss on workers during a period when Canada’s economy was prosperous and its manufacturing sector was robust. This analysis also reveals how a branch plant opened and expanded in Canada, and why it closed. Appliance manufacturing has never been as prominent in discussions of industrial job loss as other sectors, like automotive, but the Kelvinator closure reveals, over 55 years after it happened, that losing the London plant had a lasting impact on workers and their community while serving as a harbinger of future deindustrialization.

The article reviews the book, "Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor," by Kim Kelly.