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The articles reviews the book, "Performants… et licenciés – Enquête sur la banalisation des licenciements," by Mélanie Guyonvarc’h.

This chapter draws upon research conducted on retail work from 2009 to 2016 and it highlights the most significant patterns and findings about union avoidance and how anti-unionism is manifested in retail stores on an ongoing basis and in organizing attempts. --Author

The article reviews the book, "Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres," by Jamie Woodcock.

This article reviews the book, "Defying Expectations: The Case of UFCW Local 401," by Jason Foster.

The article reviews the book, "Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia," edited by Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist.

The articles reviews the book, "Hard Labor: The Battle that Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA," by Sam Smith.

This article reviews the book, "The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West," by Mark A. Lause.

The article reviews the book, "Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial Relations since the 1970s," by Lucio Baccaro and Chris Howell.

The 1921 Canadian Census is exploited to examine the labour market attainment of Canadian women. Acknowledging the general context of Catholic and Protestant divide and the tensions between francophones and anglophones during the WWI, special attention is paid to the influences of religious affiliation, ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency. Working urban women, overwhelmingly unmarried, are found to earn between 68 and 29% less than their male counterparts, depending on occupation and religio-linguistic group. The gender earnings gap is found to be the largest among francophone Catholics. When the sample is restricted to unmarried urban women, francophone Catholic females are found at a large disadvantage compared with anglophone Catholic and Protestant females. Bilingual Catholic women, mostly of French Canadian ethnicity, were the second lowest earning group in Canada of 1921. Bilingual Protestant women, on the other hand, are found to have had the most favourable labour market outcomes. The cumulative weight of the results indicates that among religious affiliation, ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency, ethnicity had exercised the strongest influence on the labour market attainment of Canadian women at that time.

In the neoliberal academy, professors who disclose any form of impairment risk raising concerns about their fitness to perform their jobs. Academics are expected to deliver highly measurable outcomes from their work in order to build a positive reputation among their peers. But given the negativity that typically characterizes the disability discourse in Western cultures, it is all too easy for the scholarly community to infer that differentness equates to ineptness. Thus, individualist and ableist discourses are central to the discussion of power relations and care of the self in the contemporary academy. The focus of this doctoral thesis is “diversable” professors performing under neoliberal academic regimes. The term “diversability” is used to designate people with disabilities—particularly of an invisible nature—while debunking the fallacious connotation of incompetence habitually attached to their differentness. Combining self-narrative and postmodern-grounded theory, this study derives valuable insights from the stories of 16 professors, both tenured and untenured, who reveal how they navigate disability, as well as the intersecting dimensions of differentness attached to their self-identities. The findings suggest that diversable professors, in spite of an academic environment embedded in disability avoidance—and the usual structural contingencies that can prevent scholars from fully demonstrating their value—can present counter-narratives that include positive constructions of self-identity as good teachers, researchers and advocates for social justice. This research also uncovers inadequacies in the academy itself—but not without a message of hope for remedial change.

The articles reviews the book, "Les peurs au travail," edited by Alain Max Guénette and Sophie Le Garrec.

Over the past few decades, the impact and influence of the media have grown to exceed any other source of public opinion. Union density has steeply declined during this same time period, so the public perception of unions has been increasingly derived from highly selective representations in the media rather than direct experience. This chapter analyzes the increasing influence of the media on the labour movement and provides insight into how unions can ensure that they are represented fairly in the media.

Le Comité d’hygiène, de sécurité et des conditions de travail (CHSCT) s’avère, en France, une pièce maitresse des dispositifs de prévention des risques et d’amélioration des conditions de travail dans les entreprises. Bien que son rôle soit de plus en plus reconnu, il a souvent des difficultés à fonctionner et à trouver sa place dans le paysage des relations professionnelles.

The article reviews the book, "The Daunting Enterprise of the Law -- Essays in Honour of Harry W. Arthurs," edited by Simon Archer, Daniel Drache, and Peer Zumbansen.

The article reviews the book, "After Prison: Navigating Employment and Reintegration," edited by Rose Ricciardelli and Adrienne M.F. Peters.

This article explores the role of race in structuring the movement of seasonal tobacco workers from the Southern United States to Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. Over this period, tens of thousands of southern migrant workers of varying skill levels travelled to Ontario to take up jobs in all aspects of tobacco production. Participation in the movement was limited exclusively to white workers until 1966, when it was integrated at the behest of American officials fearful of contravening the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Methodologically, the article follows Michel-Rolph Trouillot and is an exercise in uncovering silences in the archive, as civil servants in both countries and employer representatives in Ontario were extremely hesitant about mentioning the movement’s racial character on record. Beyond methodology, the findings presented here contribute to a deeper understanding of the uneven nature of the “deracialization” of Canada’s immigration policies in the 1960s and to charting more of Canada’s role in the construction and maintenance of transnational systems of white supremacy.

This article reviews the book, "Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial Relations since the 1970s" by Lucio Baccaro and Chris Howell.

In 1931, eight leaders of the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) were convicted under Section 98 – a federal law that criminalized the advocacy of radical politics – and the party was declared illegal in Canada. The Canadian Labour Defense League (cldl), the party’s ancillary organization responsible for legal matters, conducted an intense campaign directed at securing both the release of the party’s leaders and the repeal of Section 98. This campaign included the distribution of pamphlets, the organization of demonstrations, and even the production of a dramatic play, entitled Eight Men Speak. Canadian state officials, led by Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, responded to the party’s efforts oppressively. Prison guards fired shots into cpc general secretary Tim Buck’s cell in Kingston Penitentiary, and Bennett himself had Eight Men Speak banned from performance in Toronto. Such kneejerk reactions, however, afforded cldl leaders opportunities to conduct meaningful work. This article argues that the cldl skillfully accentuated its own repression, keeping Section 98 relevant to Canada’s voting populace and placing capitalism and the Canadian state on trial in the eyes of the Canadian public.

Why are unions weaker in the US than in Canada, two otherwise similar countries? This difference has shaped politics, policy, and levels of inequality. Conventional wisdom points to differences in political cultures, party systems, and labor laws. But Barry Eidlin’s systematic analysis of archival and statistical data shows the limits of conventional wisdom, and presents a novel explanation for the cross-border difference. He shows that it resulted from different ruling party responses to worker upsurge during the Great Depression and World War II. Paradoxically, US labor’s long-term decline resulted from what was initially a more pro-labor ruling party response, while Canadian labor’s relative long-term strength resulted from a more hostile ruling party response. These struggles embedded ‘the class idea’ more deeply in policies, institutions, and practices than in the US. In an age of growing economic inequality and broken systems of political representation, Eidlin’s analysis offers insight for those seeking to understand these trends, as well as those seeking to change them. --Publisher's description

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Canada appeared to escape the austerity implemented elsewhere, but this was spin hiding the reality. A closer look reveals that the provinces--responsible for delivering essential public and social services such as education and healthcare--shouldered the burden. The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity examines public-sector austerity in the provinces and territories, specifically addressing how austerity was implemented, what forms austerity agendas took (from regressive taxes and new user fees to public-sector layoffs and privatization schemes), and what, if any, political responses resulted. Contributors focus on the period from 2007 to 2015, the global financial crisis and the period of fiscal consolidation that followed, while also providing a longer historical context--austerity is not a new phenomenon. A granular examination of each jurisdiction identifies how changing fiscal conditions have affected the delivery of public services and restructured public finances, highlighting the consequences such changes have had for public-sector workers and users of public services. The first book of its kind in Canada, The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity challenges conventional wisdom by showing that Canada did not escape post-crisis austerity, and that its recovery has been vastly overstated. -- Publisher's description