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Labour migrants have been routinely categorised within social scientific thought as either abstracted economic entities or as victims of global processes beyond their understanding. A striking majority of attempts to understand processes of migration, especially in regards to "unskilled" Mexican migrant workers, have been informed primarily by macro-level economic approaches, while the social and individual factors at play have been largely pushed to the side. As such, the social lives and individual diversities of these migrants have received meagre academic attention. In acknowledgment of this gap, this current thesis focuses on the lived experiences of Hector-Alberto and Durango, two individuals engaged in a cycle of migration as participants in Canada's managed migration program, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Program. Through an ethnographic description of the everyday experiences of Hector and Durango, three relevant themes are explored: their individual relations to their work, their family, and their co-workers. As such, the present work aims to explore the varied experiences of migration and frame labour migrants as significant social actors rather than abstracted units or victims of social forces. The author encourages an engagement in a broader investigation of the "migrant experience"; to look beyond the idea of transnational migration as simply physical movements across national boundaries, but rather as groupings of processes with profound and diverse meanings to those involved. Perhaps such a perspective would play a role in revealing the complex myriad of interacting processes which combine under the umbrella term of "migration".

The article reviews several books including the "Risky Business: Nuclear Power and Public Protest in Canada," by Michael D. Mehta," "Saskatchewan: The Roots of Discontent and Protest," by John W. Warnock, and "City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia 1870-1920," by Jerome P. Bjelopara.

The article briefly reviews "Undelivered Letters to Hudson’s Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-1857," by Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss, "Wartime Images, Peacetime Wounds: The Media and the Gustafsen Lake Standoff," by Sandra Lambertus, “'We, Too, Are Americans': African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-1954," by Megan Taylor Shockley, "Promise Unfulfilled: Unions, Immigration, and the Farm Workers," by Philip L. Martin, "From Charity to Social Work: Mary E. Richmond and the Creation of an American Profession," by Elizabeth N. Agnew, "Forging America: Adventurers, Ironworkers, and America’s Industrial Revolution," by John Bezis-Selfa, "Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931," by Susie E. Porter, "The Social Bases of Nazism 1919-1933," by Detlef Mühlberger, "Women and the Labour Market in Japan’s Industrialising Economy: The Textile Industry Before the Pacific War," by Janet Hunter, "Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion," edited by William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd, "The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World," by Ursula Huws, "Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion," edited by William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd, "Parecon: Life After Capitalism," by Michael Albert, "Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left," by Susan Buck-Morss, "Memoirs of a Media Maverick," by Boyce Richardson, "Canada and the Cold War," by Reg Whitaker and Steve Hewitt, and "Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila," by Sandy Polishuk.

The article reviews the book, "Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage," by William DiFazio.

Collective bargaining and antitrust law emancipated players. The advent of free agency and related contractual provisions created a battle line over splitting revenues. Work stoppages can foster players' resisting or employers' enforcing "salary restraint mechanisms." Each major sport had a major showdown and corresponding turnaround in "survival bargaining." My framework adds "litigious and other maneuvers" as backups to the traditional strategic choices of "reconfiguring" versus "forcing" or resisting change." It expands on Walton and McKersie's "sanction as an investment device," "intra-organizational bargaining," and "attitudinal structuring" (1965). In each major turnaround management eventually achieved a stable contractual formula consistent with a three-pronged formula: (1) demonstrate a performance gap, (2) play on worst fears via sanctions or their threat, and (3) provide incentives to settle or change.

The article reviews the book, "Women and Work Culture: Britain c.1850-1950," edited by Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson.

Recounting the cuts to freedom of association and the collective bargaining process across Canada since the 1980s, this study challenges the notion that Canada is an international champion of human rights. With documentation on the assaults to the rights of Canadian workers, this text considers the ways governments intervene to stop the collective bargaining process and evaluates topics such as the history of collective bargaining in Canada, the role of the International Labor Office, and the future hope of restoring rights and fairness to labor laws. --Publisher's description

Over the span 1880 to 1900, Montreal was a city of newcomers, a majority of them women, and most of them arrived before age 30 from Britain, Europe, the United States, or rural counties of Quebec and Ontario. Young people aged 15 to 29 accounted for a third of the population and half of the recorded labour force. The authors’ analyses of 1881 census data and a 5 per cent sample for 1901 uncover a wide range of factors affecting life transitions. A substantial increase in participation of young unmarried women in the waged labour force was made possible by shifts in the timing of life transitions: the ages at which girls left school, left home, entered the work force, and married. The schedule was affected by migration, and it differed among the three principal cultural communities — French-speaking Catholic, English-speaking Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant. All three groups of women increased their rates of participation in the labour force, but the distinctions based on cultural affiliation persisted in both the scheduling of life transitions and the kinds of work in which they engaged.

Using a feminist political economy lens, this paper explores the balancing of work and family by parents on social assistance in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. In all three provinces, restructuring of policy has made parents’ entitlement to assistance increasingly contingent on their employability efforts (e.g. mandatory job searches, participation in welfare-to-work programs). This entitlement relationship is implicated by simultaneous and contradictory processes embedded in neo-liberal restructuring – gendering and familization – that problematically affect parents’ ability to balance their actual or potential employability expectations with family caregiving demands. Drawing on qualitative data from 46 interviews, this paper reveals the strategies that parents then utilize to manage these competing demands so that they can maintain their family’s survival– or “stay afloat” – while living on social assistance. In terms of thematic areas, these intricately inter-related coping strategies include: learn the system; play the system; social support; pawning. The significance of these findings for feminist challenges of neo-liberalism and for meeting social justice goals (i.e. economic security; equality) is discussed.

The article reviews the book, "Working Disasters: The Politics of Recognition and Response," edited by Eric Tucker.

The article presents a comparison of the working classes in Canada and the U.S. It states that a smaller low-wage manufacturing sector exists in Canada where workers are permanently trapped in poverty. The similarity of the levels and nature of unionization and attitudes toward social provisioning between the two countries are also mentioned.

Growing recognition of transnational practices and identities is changing the way scholars and activists ask questions about migration. Organizing the Transnational articulates a multi-level cultural politics of transnationalism to frame contemporary analyses of immigration and diasporas. With chapters by academics and activists working from diverse perspectives, the volume moves beyond the conventional focus on states and migrants to consider a wide array of institutions, actors, and forms of mobilization that shape transnational engagements and communities. Its unique approach will inform the work of researchers, practitioners, and activists interested in the dynamics of transnational social spaces. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Inside the Workplace: Findings from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey," by Barbara Kersley, Carmen Alpin, John Forth, Alex Bryson, Helen Bewley, Gill Dix and Sarah Oxenbridge.

The article reviews the book, "Mobsters, Unions and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement," by James B. Jacobs.

The article reviews the book, "American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years," by John Barnard.

Canadian labour's agitation against Asian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Many historians have highlighted labour's concerns about Asian competition in the labour market, while others have explored the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism in most segments of Canadian, and especially British Columbian, society. But these factors – while important – do not sufficiently explain labour's antipathy to Asians. They particularly fail to account for the unity against Asian immigration between unionists in different regions, the influence of campaigns for exclusion in other countries, and the class content of labour's anti-Asian rhetoric. Another under-explored issue is whether unionists approached Asians in the same way as other immigrants, minorities, and oppressed groups. Drawing on the growing literature on racialization, and focusing primarily on the 1880s, when labour's views on Asian immigration became well established, this article shows how Asians were set apart from any groups with whom labour might have sympathy or common cause. Asians were associated with oppressive forces, particularly of the emerging industrial capitalist system. This association can be seen in many of labour's stereotypes of Asians as industrial slaves, ruthless competitors in the economy, and threats to white women. These stereotypes also set Asians up as polar opposites to the basic class, race, and gender identity that labour leaders sought to foster.

From the 1870s until the Great Depression, immigration was often the question of the hour in Canada. Politicians, the media, and an array of interest groups viewed it as essential to nation building, developing the economy, and shaping Canada’s social and cultural character. One of the groups most determined to influence public debate and government policy on the issue was organized labour, and unionists were often relentless critics of immigrant recruitment. Guarding the Gates is the first detailed study of Canadian labour leaders’ approach to immigration, a key battleground in struggles between different political factions within the labour movement. --Publisher's description

This paper explores the approach of Canada's largest labour central, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC), to immigration from 1933 to 1939. This was a unique period in Canada's immigration history, as in 1930 the government responded to the onset of the Great Depression by closing the gates to almost all immigration for the first time since Confederation, and by 1933 there was no doubt that the gates would remain closed for some time. Despite this dramatic change, Canadian labour leaders stood by their longstanding views on immigration through to the end of the 1930s. Although the level of concern about immigration predictably declined, TLC leaders generally gained confidence that their established views had widespread support. This confidence encouraged unionists to pose as protectors of immigrants against hardship in Canada. It also assured them that they did not have to devote as much energy as in earlier periods to agitating for the deportation of some immigrants, or to their longtime favourite cause, restricting immigration from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. Altogether, changes in the economy and immigration rates did not necessarily entail changes in labour's attitudes. A number of other factors, including ideological trends within the movement, prevailing attitudes towards race and gender, and the efforts of groups advocating immigration served to entrench labour's views even more deeply in the 1930s.

The article focuses on the underlying conditions contributing to the Winnipeg General Strike in Manitoba in 1919. It serves as a significant expression of the liberal view of the necessary reforms to handle industrial conflict and to provide for a more just economy. It states that the legitimate demands of labor could be accommodated within the existing constitutional framework with the developing economic maturity of Canada in the early 20th century and efficient state management of the economy.

This thesis examines what the two sides of class-- capital and working class --have meant in left parlance, what these meanings imply about class struggle, and how they were put into political practice through Communist Parties and trade unions. Ideas about class and strategies for class struggle continue to be central to the left, as the various ways these are conceptualized give rise to very different answers to some common and persistent questions: Who is legitimately a worker and when? Why, how and with what result are certain struggles delayed or subsumed within others? At what point does self-criticism cross over to counter-revolutionary dissent? And what might continuing schisms over these questions tell us about traditional left organizations? The thesis traces the development of 'the left' from its key conceptual subject, the working class, through its two most widely-adopted organizational strategies in order to examine the poverty of the left's analytical and political traditions, particularly as regards (1) the notion of socialism as an alternative management plan and (2) ideas about capital and working class that stressed the embodiments of power relations rather than those relations themselves, and which were lifted directly from capital's own definitions of productivity. Finally, the thesis argues that insights from long-neglected Marxisms, certain critical post-structuralisms and the political strategies of some emergent anti-capitalist networks together offer the opportunity to produce a more fluid, and more liberatory left, imbued with: (1) an understanding of class as a relationship that does not inhere to individuals or organizations, and (2) a notion of the working class as a permanent resistance that has nothing whatever to do with a particular ideology or strategy; with (3) an analysis which emphasizes situational relationships of power that are at once racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed; and (4) a political approach which draws means and ends together in an emphasis on resistance as the troubling of order, and revolution as a process of refusal.