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“Building The Power” is a fascinating look into the history of LiUNA Local 1611, documenting the dramatic events and accomplishments of its members since 1937, written by Local 1611’s Strategic Researcher and labour activist Mark Warrior. In 1953, Stacey Warner, while organizing pipeline workers, was threatened with a shotgun by a company thug hired for the sole purpose of intimidation. The police did not take notice. In 1981, the Labour Relations Board ignored the fact that the employer offered union member a $1,000 bribe to change his vote—right at the Labour Relations Board office—when LiUNA Local 1070 was attempting to certify his bargaining unit. Ignoring naked violence had been replaced by ignoring blatant lawbreaking. But the result was not the same. Warner succeeded in organizing the workers. These are examples of the conflict and often dangerous scenarios those in the Labour Movement have faced in their effort to secure workers’ right and fair working wages and safe working conditions. --Website description

This thesis examines contemporary popular and news media representation of motherhood and labour in Canada and the United States. I explore what texts about motherhood and maternal labour suggest about gendered responsibilities to citizenship in neoliberal conditions. Building on important feminist research in the fields of citizenship, care, and the welfare state, I ask how are mothers being socially responsibilized toward multiple forms of labour simultaneously and to what effect? By engaging feminist theories of citizenship and bridging this field with feminist theories of science, media, and affect, I demonstrate how, under neoliberal conditions and in precarious circumstances, the ways in which women appear to juggle their commitments to paid and unpaid labour, determines how mainstream discourses reflect their value as citizens. This dissertation uses feminist critical discourse analysis to assess how, as women are responsibilized toward unpaid intimate work in newly empirical ways at the same time that they are encouraged to pursue career success in full-time paid employment, contemporary women in Canada and the United States are encouraged to rise above welfare retrenchment and inadequate provision by juggling “it all.” My thesis is an intersectional feminist project that interrogates questions of gendered citizenship and maternal affect, and I join feminist political theorists in applying pressure to the field of citizenship studies to centre reproduction in discussion of gendered welfare.

The article reviews the book, "Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution," by James Ferguson.

Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring escaped slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, many Loyalist families brought slaves with them when they settled in the Maritime colonies of British North America. Once there, slaves used their traditions of survival, resistance, and kinship networks to negotiate their new reality. Harvey Amani Whitfield’s book, the first on slavery in the Maritimes, is a startling corrective to the enduring and triumphant narrative of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie," by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf.

In recent years, environmental organizations and labour unions have begun to more seriously campaign for the promotion of green jobs as a way to address the twin problems of climate change and economic stagnation, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. They variously suggest that green jobs will be created through increased investment in green sectors; for some, this requires public investment and the adoption of a Green New Deal (GND) policy orientation, while for others this requires only increased private investment in green industries. The former emphasize that since green sectors are more labour-intensive than traditional industries, investment in green infrastructure could thus generate comparatively more employment per dollar invested. At the heart of these proposals is the proposition that capitalist economic growth could be made consistent with social and ecological justice. This dissertation is a critical engagement with the propositions of the green jobs campaign through the concrete examination of two diverse cases of residential (i.e. post-consumer) recycling, a quintessentially green sector, in Buenos Aires and Toronto. Defining recycling as the (global) production of value from waste, the analysis pays particular attention to both the labour process and historical development of recycling. Through a combination of qualitative document analysis, archival research, and qualitative interviews, this thesis argues that purely market-coordinated recycling is not able to simultaneously deliver large-scale employment creation and improved socio-ecological outcomes because of the inherent tension between labour intensiveness and methods of increasing productivity. This tension, in turn, is rooted in the distributive conflict characteristic of capitalist production, the resolution of which requires increased economic growth. From an ecological perspective, then, this is simply a deferment of the problem. In line with proponents of the Green New Deal, this dissertation argues that mediation of this tension in a direction favourable to both ecological and social concerns requires collective intervention. However, going beyond the Green New Deal, it concludes that commitment to social and ecological justice requires moving in the direction of decommodified, cooperative production and collective consumption.

Profile of Sam Berg, a former junior hockey player who in October 2014 agreed to become the representative plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the three major junion hockey leagues: the Ontario Hockey League, the Western Hockey League, and the Quebec Major Junion Hockey League.

Labour market policy in Canada has undergone profound reforms over the past several decades. Successive federal and provincial governments have sought to “activate” the unemployed through measures such as Employment Insurance (EI) retrenchment and employment service models that stress individual responsibility for the problem of unemployment. This paper analyzes a little known attempt by federal officials to implement statistical profiling of the unemployed in employment service delivery during the mid-1990s. Known as the Service Outcome Measurement System (SOMS) and intended for use by frontline employment counsellors, the technology computed personal data about unemployed service users to predict the employment outcomes of different service options.

Drawing from the gender wage gap literature, we explore four possible causes of sexual minority earnings gaps: (1) variation in human capital and labor force participation, (2) occupational and industrial sorting, (3) differences in the institutional organization of the public and private sector, and (4) different returns to marriage and parenthood. Using the 2006 Census of Canada, we find that heterosexual men earn more than gay men, followed by lesbians and heterosexual women. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions show that industry of employment, rather than occupation, disadvantages gay men, lesbians, and heterosexual women. High levels of educational attainment lead to employment in lucrative occupations, but sexual minorities earn significantly less than heterosexual men within these occupations. Wage gaps are reduced in the public sector for heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians. Finally, we find that heterosexual women experience a motherhood penalty, heterosexual men experience a fatherhood premium, and both receive a premium for marriage; however, the presence of children and marriage have no effect on the earnings of either gay men or lesbians in conjugal relationships.

This paper examines the effect of Inuit and Innu women’s participation in environmental assessment (EA) processes on EA recommendations, impact benefit agreement (IBA) negotiations, and women’s employment experiences at Voisey’s Bay Mine, Labrador. The literature on Indigenous participation in EAs has been critiqued for being overly process oriented and for neglecting to examine how power influences EA decision making. In this regard, two issues have emerged as critical to participation in EAs: how EA processes are influenced by other institutions that may help or hinder participation and whether EAs enable marginalized groups within Indigenous communities to influence development outcomes. To address these issues we examine the case of the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Mine in Labrador, in which Indigenous women’s groups made several collective submissions pertaining to employment throughout the EA process. We compare the submissions that Inuit and Innu women’s groups made to the EA panel in the late 1990s to the final EA recommendations and then compare these recommendations to employment-related provisions in the IBA. Finally we compare IBA provisions to workers’ perceptions of gender relations at the mine in 2010. Semi-structured interviews revealed that, notwithstanding the recommendations by women’s groups concerning employment throughout the EA process, women working at the site experienced gendered employment barriers similar to those experienced by women in mining elsewhere. We suggest that the ineffective translation of EA submissions into EA regulations and the IBA, coupled with persistent masculinity within the mining industry, weakened the effect of women’s requests for a comprehensive program to hire and train Indigenous women.

Information technology implementation in health care settings is contributing to work intensification and overwork for social workers and nurses. But strong professional and personal values lead workers to endure these conditions and prop up an increasingly “efficient” and lean health care system. A study done in Ontario, Canada, examines these circumstances and forms the basis for this article’s contribution to the deskilling/upskilling debate in labour process theory.

The article discusses the research and scholarship of feminist scholars on family sociology in Canada from the 1960s through the mid 2010s, including the feminist sociology of families. The relationship between neoliberalism and gender, including the alleged indifference of neoliberal government policies to gender of income earners, is discussed. An overview of Canada's national statistics agency Statistics Canada's data on labor, including on domestic labor, gender divisions in labor, women's employment and unpaid household work, is provided.

Research and advocacy group sponsored by McMaster University and United Way Toronto.

English/French abstracts of article published in the Fall 2015 volume.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Spring 2015 issue.

List of contributors to the Fall 2015 volume.

The article reviews the book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Pikkety.

In recognizing a constitutional right to strike in its Saskatchewan Federation of Labour decision, the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed that workers in Canada are entitled to freedom of association rights that are at least equivalent to those provided by international human rights instruments. This paper considers the implications of this principle for employees in the private sector, where unionization rates have been in continual decline for sev- eral decades, by focusing on the potential of "minority" unionism for realizing Canada's international law obligations. The author notes that the ILO's super- visory committees have approved three options as being consistent with ILO principles on freedom of association: minority worker associations, each of which has full rights to represent its own members; unions which, though not representing a majority of the workers in the bargaining unit, are recognized as being the "most representative," and as such have the right to conclude a col- lective agreement applicable to all the workers; and unions certified under the North American Wagner Act model, through a majoritarian procedure. Thus, while ILO member-states are permitted to adopt legislation based on majoritar- ian exclusivity, such legislation cannot have the effect of depriving non-majority unions of the right to bargain collectively on behalf of their members, in those workplaces where no exclusive agent has been certified. With a view to ensuring that labour law and practice in Canada conform to international standards, the author proposes that every Canadian jurisdiction revise its legislation to provide for certification of the "most representative" minority union in a work- place, while retaining the existing procedures for certification of an exclusive bargaining agent. Under this proposal, the most representative union (or coali- tion of unions) in a bargaining unit would have all the rights and duties of an exclusive agent, but not an exclusive right of representation. In this way, the author contends, Canada could live up to its international law commitment to "promote" collective bargaining.

This thesis explores the political experience of men in the Department of National Defence’s work relief camps in British Columbia from 1932 to 1935, when single, homeless, unemployed, and physically fit men accessed government unemployment relief living and working according to the administration’s policies. In these camps the men found a government administration eager to teach them work discipline, a collection of charities and private groups that promoted an ideal of the working class man in troubled economic times, and organizers with the Relief Camp Workers’ Union attempting to shape strikes that challenged government authority. In this thesis I argue that the unemployed vacillated between these different influences to challenge the government’s palliative relief while also ensuring that they maintained access to relief for as long as possible. This was accomplished by shaping multi-faceted relationships with the government, the union, private charities, and fellow campers.