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As climate change accelerates, extreme heat is becoming a critical occupational hazard across Canada. Yet worker protections remain fragmented, reactive, and highly uneven across sectors and provinces. This article offers a socio-legal analysis of how heat stress is governed through regulation, collective bargaining, and emerging private governance mechanisms. Drawing on a review of federal and provincial occupational health and safety statutes, a content analysis of over 50,000 collective bargaining agreements, and an assessment of ESG disclosures, Global Framework Agreements, and Worker-Driven Social Responsibility models, the study maps Canada’s evolving approach to heat protection. It finds that CBA coverage remains minimal and concentrated in a small number of unionized manufacturing settings, particularly in Ontario. While Ontario demonstrates the potential for a more coordinated model—especially if proposed legislation complements negotiated protections—the province’s current framework remains limited in scope and sectoral reach. The article argues that effective heat governance will require hybrid coordination across statutory, contractual, and voluntary domains, supported by technology, institutional linkages, and adaptive worker voice. It concludes by outlining an integrated framework for climate-era labour protection grounded in enforceable rights, dynamic bargaining, and transparent corporate accountability.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the French and British empires mobilized thousands of labourers in Canada through a system of mandatory labour known as “corvée.” This social arrangement was rooted in the feudal obligations of French peasants to landowners. Under the French regime, corvée was a custom, an obligation, and a form of obedience, a “local affair” embedded in an agricultural way of life that retainined a sense of reciprocity with mechanisms to discourage exploitation. However, with the British conquest of Quebec in 1763, and, later, the American Revolution, the corvée system assumed new dimensions. The British recognized the need for labour power in an underpopulated region and coopted the corvée customs for their own imperial ends. Though British officials retained some French statutes, they enacted new laws mobilizing the male inhabitants of New France to work in state enterprises (such as iron mining and logging), with Labourers holding little to no input into how the colonial state viewed their well-being. Leaning heavily on corvée as a form of conscription, the British army’s surging demand for workers in Quebec precipitated wide-spread protests. This crisis forced the royally appointed governor Frederick Haldimand to ratify a new provincial code regulating the use of corvée. Workers of War and Empire from New France to British America, 1688-1783 chronicles the transformation of the corvée system over a century, positioning French Canadian workers at the center of the narrative. -- Publisher's description

This book is an invitation to trouble the mobilization of “anti-Asian hate” in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together activists, organizers, academic, and artists, this book explores the historical and contemporary conditions that make theorizing “Asian Canadian” feasible. Grounded in a transnational queer and feminist lens, this book also aims to envision possible futures and solidarities. Ultimately, this collection is concerned with moments and places of tensions, confrontations, relations, and solidarity. We offer stories of insurgent encounters as people who identify as “Asian” navigate and implicate settler colonial nation-state to make new dreams, histories and intimacies. -- Publisher's description

Electric micromobilities (EMMs), including electric bikes, standup kick-style electric scooters, and electric unicycles are highly efficient and low impact modes for urban food delivery. However, the mobility they and their associated algorithmic platforms afford is implicated in a set of work practices and relations that reinforce precarious employment outcomes. Our interviews, observational and autoethnographic research in Vancouver, Canada, revealed that food delivery platforms promise flexibility and high earnings while motivating workers to toil for variable and low wages and engage in high-risk behaviour. We focused on food delivery workers using EMMs because barriers to accessing an EMM are lower than for a car, while affording greater mobility on congested city streets, incurring no parking fees, and delivering zero emission operation. However, ostensibly low financial barriers to entry mask the requirement for considerable knowledge of, and navigational skills within, the physical and virtual environments that workers must master to resist the control exercised by platforms (apps) in an intensely competitive playing field. App-based food delivery using EMMs implicates workers in a game that requires upfront investment, skill and the navigation of risk. It is a stacked game, in which mostly the house wins.

The article reviews the book, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade," by Jeff Schuhrke.

North American regimes of industrial legality provide workers with protected rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike. However, they also limit the freedom to strike. Trade unions commonly accept and enforce these limits, but at great cost to solidarity and militancy. This article examines the many ways law works against labour by restricting the freedom to strike and explores the practice of unlawful strikes in North America, including recent examples that resulted in successful outcomes. It concludes with reflections on the revival of unlawful strikes as a tactic forrebuilding and remobilizing the North American labour movement. While the article’s focus is North America, the discussion of unlawful strikes may also be relevant in other countries that limit the freedom to strike.

Introduces and reprints the "Red Haggis" comic strip that ran in 1934 in the Young Worker, the weekly publication of the Young Communist League of Canada. The strip's hero, Red Haggis, is depicted as a pugnacious amalgam of Popeye the Sailor Man and "the hard man" of the Scottish working-class tradition. The artist - signed as "Crawford" in the strip - has not been definitively identified.

Migrant Work by Another Name explores the complexities of Canada's evolving international migration and employment policy landscape. It critically examines the shift towards “mobility” programs under the recently inaugurated International Mobility Program (IMP). This shift occurs alongside the contraction of certain streams within Canada’s long-standing Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The book investigates the implications of policy changes, influenced at once by public outcry over migrant worker exploitation and persistent demands for labour in the face of qualitative labour shortages in high-income countries like Canada. Grounded in a decolonial feminist political economy approach, Leah F. Vosko employs a mixed methods analysis to contrast the narrative of “mobility” with the persistent realities of precarity among transnational workers. The book features in-depth case studies of the three largest IMP subprograms – Working Holiday, Post-Graduation, and Spousal Work Permit programs – revealing how these initiatives, despite being touted as promoting mobility, provide for temporary migrant work by another name and perpetuate distinct forms of precarity. This critical perspective challenges the notion of progress in contemporary migration policies, shedding light on the ongoing challenges faced by transnational workers in Canada. -- Publisher's description

This dissertation explores the evolution and politics behind the concept of the ‘dependent contractor’ in Ontario, from its earliest incarnations in the late 1970s to its current usage in the gig economy, as interpreted and applied by the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB). It examines how the Board’s interpretation and application of dependent contractor provisions has impacted workers whose employment status falls somewhere between traditional notions of independent contractor and employee, i.e. the ‘grey area’ as the Board has referred to it, over a period of changing employment relationships and of increasingly precarious work. The research tracks these changes over time, examining how previous OLRB jurisprudence on dependent contractors can be seen to impact its decisions in more contemporary contexts (e.g Foodora, 2020) and what this might tell us about the Board’s understanding of employment relations in a changing capitalist economy. The analysis seeks to place the actions of the OLRB into a broader social context to assess what factors have influenced the Board’s decisions and gauge how it understands both its potential to address employment inequities and the limits it faces in doing so within a capitalist economy. This dissertation argues that the OLRB operated with an implicit industrial pluralist understanding of labour-capital relations and made decisions informed by that approach and, in doing so, lacked an appreciation of how capitalist workplaces were changing over time in a way that evaded control via that understanding. It further argues that while bodies such as the OLRB have some autonomy from capitalists and the capitalist state, they are unable to, nor are they designed to, overcome or dramatically alter the power imbalances that exist in capitalist civil society.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

This article explores the challenges facing injured migrant farm workers in the workers’ compensation system in Canada's province of Ontario, with a focus on their fight for return to work justice. Told from the perspective of one of the lawyers who represented the workers, it highlights a recent victory achieved by 4 workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in defending their rights to workers’ compensation support. The workers’ compensation tribunal decided that the workers’ compensation board must evaluate these workers’ ability to return to work, access retraining, and receive compensation based on their labor markets in Jamaica—instead of based on fictional job prospects in Ontario. The tribunal also called out the need to consider systemic anti-Black racism in workers’ compensation law and policy. The article analyzes how this legal victory could reshape workers’ compensation policy in Ontario for injured migrant farm workers. It also discusses the implications of the win for injured workers in other temporary work programs and precarious employment sectors.

Analyzes the state of trade unionism in France with particular reference to union participation in the pensions movement of 2023 and the formation of a left-wing popular front during the 2024 national election. Argues that this return to the political sphere by unions during a time of crisis is in contrast to their narrow, industrial relations focus (called "démocratie social") that has predominated over the past 30 years. Concludes that political unionism and a class-based focus on the broader representation of work are the strategic challenges. The text is an address originally given by the author at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal, on June 19, 2024.

The Employment Standards Database is a research database for comparing employment standards, awareness and violations across national/regional context. It brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. --Website description