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This paper is based on work history interviews with a group of nine Toronto theatre workers covering a three-year period. During the interviews, participants did not spontaneously mention 13.1 per cent of their jobs in the creative cultural sector. Because forgotten work fails to register in surveys attempting to assess cultural workers’ contributions to the economy or to ameliorate their precarious conditions, it is important to explore why and how such work could go unreported. We locate the forgetting of cultural work in relation to the complexity and stresses of cultural workers’ schedules and to a discourse that opposes a devotion to art to the pursuit of money. Further, we explore how the participants’ particular tendency to forget their shortest-term jobs is informed by another discourse that prioritizes the building of a goals-based, coherent résumé. Last, we suggest that their surprising propensity to also forget their longest-term jobs can be understood in reference to the “piecework” model of cultural work and to a lack of socially supported remembering strategies. Based on these findings, we recommend improvements to the design of surveys on cultural workers’ work history.

Adelle Blackett tells the story behind the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention No. 189, and its accompanying Recommendation No. 201 which in 2011 created the first comprehensive international standards to extend fundamental protections and rights to the millions of domestic workers laboring in other peoples' homes throughout the world. As the principal legal architect, Blackett is able to take us behind the scenes to show us how Convention No. 189 transgresses the everyday law of the household workplace to embrace domestic workers' human rights claim to be both workers like any other, and workers like no other. In doing so, she discusses the importance of understanding historical forms of invisibility, recognizes the influence of the domestic workers themselves, and weaves in poignant experiences, infusing the discussion of laws and standards with intimate examples and sophisticated analyses. Looking to the future, she ponders how international institutions such as the ILO will address labor market informality alongside national and regional law reform. Regardless of what comes next, Everyday Transgressions establishes that domestic workers' victory is a victory for the ILO and for all those who struggle for an inclusive, transnational vision of labor law, rooted in social justice. --Publisher's description

The third instalment in Jim Blanchard's popular history of early Winnipeg, 'A Diminished Roar' presents a city in the midst of enormous change. Once the fastest growing city in Canada, by 1920 Winnipeg was losing its dominant position in western Canada. As the decade began, Winnipeggers were reeling from the chaos of the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But it was the divisions exposed by the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike which left the deepest marks. As Winnipeg wrestled with its changing fortunes, its citizens looked for new ways to imagine the city's future and identity. Beginning with the opening of the magnificent new provincial legislature building in 1920, A Diminished Roar guides readers through this decade of political and social turmoil. At City Hall, two very different politicians dominated the scene. Winnipeg's first Labour mayor, S.J. Farmer, pushed for more public services. His rival, Ralph Webb, would act as the city's chief 'booster' as mayor, encouraging U.S. tourists with the promise of 'snowballs and highballs.' Meanwhile, promoters tried to rekindle the city's spirits with plans for new public projects, such as a grand boulevard through the middle of the city, a new amusement park, and the start of professional horse racing. In the midst of the Jazz Age, Winnipeg's teenagers grappled with 'problems of the heart, ' and social groups like the Gyro Club organized masked balls for the city's elite. --Publisher's description

The Sixties were time of conflict and change in Canada and beyond. Radical social movements and countercultures challenged the conservatism of the preceding decade, rejected traditional forms of politics, and demanded an alternative based on the principles of social justice, individual freedom and an end to oppression on all fronts. Yet in Canada a unique political movement emerged which embraced these principles but proposed that New Left social movements – the student and anti-war movements, the women’s liberation movement and Canadian nationalists – could bring about radical political change not only through street protests and sit-ins, but also through participation in electoral politics. The Waffle movement, which formed around the “Manifesto for an Independent and Socialist Canada” and challenged the leadership of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 1969 to 1973, represents a dynamic convergence of many of the social movements that comprised the New Left in Canada. The Waffle argued that the NDP should promote socialist measures to combat American economic domination and ensure Canadian independence while simultaneously engaging with extra-parliamentary struggles. NDP and trade-union leaders, reluctant to adopt such a radical approach, expelled the Waffle from the Ontario NDP in 1972. Despite its short life-span, the Waffle had a considerable influence on Canadian politics and the issues that it raised – Canadian economic dependency, Quebec’s right to self-determination, women’s equality, and the decline of the manufacturing sector, among others – continue to resonate to this day. Furthermore, the Waffle’s impact on Canadian nationalism and its legacy in the NDP, labour and women’s movements, radical left and academia remain contested. The Waffle’s successes and failures represent a potentially revealing perspective on Canadian politics and society during a period of rapid social change, the Sixties. While the existing historiography has sketched the outlines of the Waffle’s history, the focus overall has been limited to analyses of internal leadership disputes and the experience of the Ontario Waffle in particular. Abundant research materials now exist to support a wider and more intensive examination. Through an analysis of the Waffle, focusing on grassroots activists as well as the movement’s leadership, this dissertation demonstrates important connections between the Waffle and other New Left social movements. This interconnectivity is particularly significant, as it indicates that the Waffle occupied a unique place in the international New Left, specifically a convergence of social movements which sought to engage with electoral politics through an existing political party, the NDP. The dissertation also revises the movement/party dichotomy which has dominated much of the Waffle/NDP historiography. Finally, my study of the Waffle, a group active from 1969-75, indicates the flaws of applying a declension narrative to the Canadian Sixties, instead demonstrating the value of a “long Sixties” approach. As the clock ticked down on the 1960s, the Canadian New Left neither died nor retreated into cynicism nor lashed out in violence. Instead, its diverse elements, led by the Waffle, nurtured the wild dream of redirecting and leading to triumph an established political party.

The article reviews the book, "Sept ans de vie professionnelle des jeunes : entre opportunités et contraintes," edited by Arnaud Dupray and Emmanuel Quenson.

The Embassy of Italy, the Consulate General of Italy in Toronto and Villa Charities join together with authors Paola Breda and Marino Toppan to present a ground-breaking new history of the Italian-Canadian immigration experience, finally including the previously untold story of the thousands of Italian Fallen Workers who died building this beautiful country — a story that’s destined to become a new piece of Canadian History. Compiled after decades of research by Toppan, this epic new volume includes countless contributions from across the country, from scholars of Italian-Canadian history and the families of the fallen themselves. This ground breaking new book includes profiles of those in the Italian community in Canada who triumphed with incredible successes, those who died in tragic circumstances, as well as in-depth studies on immigration patterns, labour history, socio-adaptive patterns, labour action, strife and hardships experienced, and many more themes in the Italian-Canadian identity. It even coins a new phrase: Canadianità! --from book launch publicity release, May 23, 2019

At the intersection of three highways, the Douglas Hotel, in Manitoba’s central-west, is a place to stop for a coffee, a meal, or a night’s accommodation. Like elsewhere on the Canadian prairies, the daily labour required of these services falls largely to a migrant workforce. Bringing together historic political economy with feminist political economy, I draw on the presence of this workforce, comprised of 71 Filipino service and hospitality workers, in Douglas as an entry point into an extended exploration of the workings of social reproduction under globalized capitalism historically and at the beginning of the 21st Century. Sensitive to the transnationality that characterizes the lives of these workers, this multi-sited ethnographic study reads the details of everyday life in Manitoba and the Philippines through the historic and present-day political economy of each site. Offering this parallel yet integrated account, I highlight the variability of migrant experience in Canada at the sub-national level, as well as the ways in which receiving-states and private enterprise collaborate in the creation of labour markets. Low-wage and low–status, the labour market in question demands a kind of corporate, commodified care work that ensures the bodily reproduction of the Hotel’s guests and the material reproduction of the Hotel itself. Following from the objectives of their migration, the labour these workers perform at the Hotel also supports the survival and well-being of family in the Philippines. However, in addition to ensuring the material reproduction of non-migrant kin, through their use of digital communication technology and social media, these migrants contribute to the reproduction of migrant subjectivities, and subsequently, respond to the needs of global capital and the Philippine state. Thus, identifying the various, scaled forms of social reproduction in which the Hotel’s migrant workers participate, this thesis offers a multi-faceted, transnational account of reproduction, incorporating migrants, their families, their employer, and multiple state players. While not reproductive as conventionally defined, their labour at the Hotel provides insight into the patterning and re-patterning of social reproduction, and its associated labour, under global capital. Moreover, it demonstrates the centrality of those processes to operations of capitalism.

Canadian labour and working-class history has, to a great extent, been bedevilled in its attempts to understand national trends by the cleavages of gender, region, industry, race, language, and culture. This article argues that one possible way out of this impasse lies in foregrounding the particular relationship between colonial exploitation and class exploitation in our settler colonial economy, both in terms of class formation and in the ongoing project of social reproduction. The adoption of a "settler order framework" seeks to build on important recent works attempting to understand Indigenous peoples' participation in the ranks of those who toil, struggle, and dream of freedom from capitalism, by integrating the fundamental reality of settler workers' ongoing theft of Indigenous land and resources into the story of the Canadian working class.

The 21st century has seen growing attention to settler colonialism among academic researchers in Canada and internationally. In the Canadian context, interest has been fuelled above all by an ongoing resurgence of Indigenous activism and intellectual work, of which the most visible expression to most non-Indigenous people was the Idle No More movement of 2012–13. To date, however, little attention has been paid to settler colonialism within labour studies, broadly understood. As a modest contribution to remedying this deficiency, this article argues for the importance of understanding Canada as a settler-colonial society, proposes a conceptualization of settler colonialism from the perspective of a historical materialism reconstructed through engagement with Indigenous anticolonial thought, and offers some preliminary reflections on integrating analysis of settler colonialism into historical and contemporary research on labour.

Joseph R. Smallwood was, for lack of a better term, a Newfoundlander for Newfoundland. Or so, that is how he portrayed himself. Under the first ten years of Confederation, Smallwood pushed a program of rapid industrialization. This program was largely unsuccessful. So, when the IWA [International Woodworkers of America] declared a strike on the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company in January 1959, which posed a significant threat to the province’s most prosperous industry (pulp and paper), Smallwood leapt into action. Rather than support the loggers’ elected union, he banned the IWA in favour of a provincial union that was to be run by Max Lane, President of the Fishermen’s Federation. Utilizing key documents from the Smallwood Collections at Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, this thesis examines the factors that led up to this decision, its outcome and ultimately, and why Smallwood chose to do what he did.

Canada’s unions are proud to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination with the release of a ground-breaking report on the impacts of Islamophobia in the workplace. [This report] explores the rise of anti-Muslim attitudes and discrimination in Canada. It provides recommendations for employers, trade unions, and government on how to address this pernicious phenomenon. --Website description

The article reviews the book, "Les discriminations au travail," by Stéphane Carcillo et Marie-Anne Valfort.

Two-part poem in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919: 1) Prologue; or An introduction to (bourgeois) political economy; 2) Winnipeg: The strike, May-June 1919.

The article reviews the book, "Au coeur des cabinets d’audit et de conseil. De la distinction à la soumission," by Sébastien Stenger.

L’arrivée des plateformes numériques dans le paysage du travail canadien s’accompagne d’un recours croissant aux conventions imposant l’arbitrage (ou clauses compromissoires) comme mode de résolution des conflits. Les travailleurs de plateformes souhaitant faire reconnaître leur statut de salarié au sens des lois sur les normes d’emploi doivent donc s’adresser à un forum privé, parfois situé à l’extérieur du Canada. C’est dans ce contexte que l’invalidation d’une telle clause dans l’affaire Heller v Uber Technologies Inc par la Cour d’appel d’Ontario prend toute son importance. La Cour suprême ayant accepté d’entendre l’appel, empruntera-t-elle la voie du droit américain et permettra-t-elle que ces clauses fassent obstacle aux recours collectifs revendiquant la reconnaissance du statut de salarié ? Notre étude des jugements tant ontariens qu’américains sur la validité des clauses compromissoires liant Uber à ses chauffeurs révèle, à cet égard, le caractère déterminant de l’approche choisie par les tribunaux.

The article reviews the book, "Handbook on In-Work Poverty," edited by Henning Lohmann and Ive Marx.

La charge de travail des cadres est un phénomène bien documenté : la littérature sur le sujet souligne, entre autres, l’intensification du travail des cadres, ainsi que les effets des réorganisations sur cette intensification. Une étude de cas dans une administration ayant vécu une réorganisation, confrontée à la menace de l’ouverture à la concurrence et caractérisée par un modèle corporatiste, illustre ces points, tout en les accompagnant d’un constat qui incite à approfondir l’analyse. En effet, une première analyse quantitative descriptive révèle que la charge de travail, et surtout le travail « inintéressant », vont croissant quand on s’élève dans la hiérarchie, phénomène qui peut sembler à prime abord étonnant. Une enquête approfondie, qui combine approches quantitative et qualitative, et qui s’inscrit dans le cadre théorique de l’analyse systémique des organisations, permet alors de montrer en quoi la charge de travail est le fruit de facteurs variés. Ceux-ci peuvent être liés à l’ouverture à la concurrence, à la mise en place d’un système de reddition de compte contraignant, mais également à des stratégies mises en place par les différents acteurs afin de gérer leur travail en fonction des ressources à leur disposition et de leur position dans le système. Une typologie nous a conduite à identifier quatre groupes de cadres caractérisés par des perceptions et des stratégies homogènes relatives à la charge de travail. L’analyse systémique permet, ensuite, de comprendre ces stratégies à l’aune du système de l’établissement. Finalement, cette enquête souligne la structuration systémique de la charge de travail des cadres, tout comme l’intérêt d’une méthodologie mixte pour l’appréhender.

The article reviews by the book, "West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London's Industrialized Marshland, 1839-1914," by Jim Clifford.

The article reviews the book, "I Am Not a Tractor: How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won," by Susan L. Marquis.