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For Ukrainian Canadian leftists, the 1920s represented a golden age of domestic cultural production. The strict hierarchy that constituted the communist movement in the 1930s was not yet extant, and the realm of possibilities was limited only by the imagination of the organization itself. The material produced in this period was neither crass agitprop nor cheap melodrama. Rather, it was bottom-up expressions of proletarian high culture and organic reflections of the social, economic, and political realities that constituted the experiences of Ukrainian progressives in Canada. As such, in the 1920s, the theatre served as the movement's most effective vehicle for political propaganda and ethnocultural instruction.

The article reviews the book, "In Defence of Home Places: Environmental Activism in Nova Scotia," by Mark R. Leeming.

This study explores how teacher unions in British Columbia and Ontario attempted to influence public opinion during periods of labour conflict between 2001 and 2016. A comparative case analysis was conducted based on eight interviews with members of the British Columbia Teachers Federation, six interviews with members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, as well as documents from each union. In addition, newspaper items published in each province during the conflict period were collected. The unions’ efforts were analyzed through the framework of Habermas’ concepts of the public sphere and validity claims. Findings indicate that both unions had active public relations strategies designed to influence media coverage and discourse in the public sphere. However, most of their efforts were focused on influencing the public sphere indirectly, by using tactics that are not traditionally considered part of public relations strategies. While the unions’ efforts were similar in nature, the impact that these efforts had on influencing public opinion and producing policy change varied substantially. I argue that a combination of historical and political differences, mediated through a validity claims framework, helps explain this variation.

Because of increased market uncertainty, employers today often do not guarantee job security and employees increasingly perceive such a state, often with trepidation. Employees who have relatively insecure jobs tend to feel mistreated by their managers. This study examines the relationship between the work places where jobs are mostly insecure and employee perception of abusive supervision, and the moderating role of a relational mechanism of perceived social worth at work. The conservation of resources (COR) perspective is used to guide analysis. This perspective provides competing rationales for employee acquisition/preservation of resources and ensuing abusive supervision. In a two-wave panel survey, 271 full-time employees with various occupations completed two questionnaires. Results indicate that job insecurity is positively associated with abusive supervision. This association is stronger for employees who perceive higher social worth at work. There is limited research investigating how managerial/leadership effectiveness varies in workplaces where job’s are insecure. Moreover, a relational mechanism of social worth has rarely been used to examine the phenomenon of job insecurity. Although literature shows employees’ perception of job insecurity leads them to increase work input/effort to make themselves more valuable and worthy of remaining in the organization, this does not mean that they will be more likely to notions such as management prerogative on their employer’s authority. Ironically, leadership, in particular, tends to be undermined when jobs are insecure as our findings show that insecure subordinates tend to perceive themselves experiencing supervisory abuse. To address this malaise, practical implications for organizations, supervisors, and subordinates are proposed and complementary practices are discussed to differentiate high social-worth employees from others.

In Canada’s liberal dream, the law extends its benefits to everyone. But the law also determines who is included in that “everyone.” Migrant workers, long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education due to their lack of permanent status. Enforcing Exclusion recasts what migration status means to both the state and to non-citizens. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Sarah Marsden shows that migrants face enforcement through law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their interactions with institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards. Canadian immigration laws create a status hierarchy; those at the bottom experience markedly different access to the protections and benefits of law. This book documents the impact of Canada’s system of migration enforcement on people’s lives and questions the adequacy of human-rights-based responses in addressing its exclusionary effects. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- The Creation and Growth of Precarious Migration in Canada: “Illegal” Migration and the Liberal State -- Status, Deportability, and Illegality in Daily Life -- Working Conditions and Barriers to Substantive Remedies -- Exclusion from the Social State: Health, Education, and Income Security -- Multi-Sited Enforcement: Maintaining Subordinate Membership -- Rights and Membership: Toward Inclusion? -- Postscript -- Appendix A: Migrant Participant Profiles -- Appendix B: Sample Interview Script.

The article reviews the book, "Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy," by Bridget Kenny.

Research objective: Through relatively higher unionization rates within the casino industry, casino employment provides a counterexample to the connection between low-skill service work and low wages. The existing literature, however, suggests that casino workers embrace a commodified vision of their labour. It is of interest to understand whether and how unions are successful in decommodifying both ideologically and materially, wage entitlements in this expanding industry as this is a main mechanism through which unions challenge income inequality. This article examines the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) attempt to decommodify wages in the casino industry. Methodology: These findings are based on a case study of Casino Windsor, located in Windsor, Ontario—the automotive capital of Canada and the first city to host a resort casino outside of Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Ninety-one interviews were conducted with Windsor stakeholders (20), and automotive (43) and casino (28) workers. The local newspaper from 1994-2014 is also examined and descriptive statistics are utilized. Results: Casino workers initially did adopt a decommodified vision of wage entitlements; yet, due to political—the New Democratic Party of Ontario—and institutional—low sectoral union density—forces, casino workers during 2014-2015 interviews embrace a service mind where wages are determined by a market-oriented human capital model. Conclusions: CAW union representatives and the casino membership now view the CAW’s attempt to bring an industrial mindset into the casino as a mistake, naturalizing the link between decommodified wages in automotive manufacturing and the market-oriented wage entitlements of the service sector. This case study marks a critical lost opportunity by the CAW to decommodify wage entitlements in the casino industry and the broader service sector.

The article reviews the book, "Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada," by Barry Eidlin.

Ten-year-old Cassie lives with her working-class family in 1919 Winnipeg. The Great War and Spanish Influenza have taken their toll, and workers in the city are frustrated with low wages and long hours. When they orchestrate a general strike, Cassie--bright, determined and very bored at school--desperately wants to help. She begins volunteering for the strike committee as a papergirl, distributing the strike bulletin at Portage and Main, and from her corner, she sees the strike take shape. Threatened and taunted by upper-class kids, and getting hungrier by the day, Cassie soon realizes that the strike isn't just a lark--it's a risky and brave movement. With her impoverished best friend, Mary, volunteering in the nearby Labour Café, and Cassie's police officer brother in the strike committee's inner circle, Cassie becomes increasingly furious about the conditions that led workers to strike. When an enormous but peaceful demonstration turns into a violent assault on Bloody Saturday, Cassie is changed forever. Lively and engaging, this novel is a celebration of solidarity, justice and one brave papergirl. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics," by Jefferson Cowie.

This dissertation turns to recent feminist history of the 1980s to consider feminism’s relationship to class, economics, and labour. Challenging the idea that feminism is an inclusive project, I look at how feminist ideology produces commonsense forms of racism, classism, and sexual normativity. To demonstrate this argument, I evaluate two important moments in 1980s Canadian feminism: the development of feminist political economy and the debates of the feminist sex wars. In tracing the ways in which these histories unfold to value some feminist subjects more than others, I show how feminist narratives appear cohesive through quotidian practices of exclusion. I claim that the resistance of marginalized subjects is integral to these narratives, particularly when this resistance has been made to appear invisible or absent. I first turn to feminist political economy to show how a white feminist discourse about gendered domestic labour emerged while simultaneously omitting analyses of the experiences of women of colour and migrant domestic labourers. This white feminist discourse is imbued with commonsense racism, and imagines migrant domestic workers as located elsewhere to feminism. Subsequently, I examine how the feminist sex wars pursued a line of inquiry into sexuality that privileged a framework of danger. Feminist theorizing of violence against women as intrinsic to prostitution and pornography had dire consequences for understanding sex work and the diverse women employed in the industry. In promoting a white, middle-class perspective on sexuality, feminists appropriated sex workers’ experiences of violence and sought state support for abolishing commercial sexuality, in turn contributing to the heightened state surveillance of sexual minorities. In looking to and for marginalized women’s experiences within an archive of women’s publishing, this project insists on the integral place of sex workers and migrant domestic workers within Canadian feminist labour histories.

This paper examines precarious work, its historical origins and certain social consequences. I use the 2015 Canadian Election Study to analyze the relationship between work-related insecurity and economic anxiety with voting, non-voting political behaviour and attitudes toward equity-seeking groups. I propose a theory of "harmonizing down", in which workers who were once able to access the benefits and status of the standard employment relationship have generally seen their opportunities for stable and secure work decline. This has resulted in economic anxiety for most workers. Results were mixed, suggesting that broad generalizations around economic anxiety are problematic. Insecurity and anxiety may reduce the likelihood of voting but may increase non-voting participation. Some aspects of insecurity and anxiety were related to negative attitudes toward equity-seeking groups, but the relationship is not clear. Gender and political party identity influence these attitudes.

Au cours des dernières décennies, de nombreux changements économiques, politiques et culturels ont bouleversé la nature du travail, la manière de l’organiser ainsi que la relation d’emploi. Ces transformations nécessitent de revoir, de critiquer et d’actualiser les principaux concepts à partir desquels la sociologie analyse le monde du travail. Dans cet ouvrage, les concepts revisités sont les suivants : salariat, précarité, informalité, conflit, contrôle et organisation du travail, qualification et compétence, rapport au travail, parcours professionnel, insertion professionnelle, temporalités. Chacun des concepts retenus est analysé selon une perspective critique, qui consiste à remettre en question les assises théoriques et empiriques de ceux-ci, et une perspective analytique, qui vise à arrimer ces concepts fondamentaux aux nouvelles réalités du monde du travail. --Publisher's description

In 2012, journalist Hugo Meunier went undercover as a Walmart employee for three months in St. Leonard, Quebec, just north of Montreal. In great detail, Meunier charts the daily life of an impoverished Walmart worker, referring to his shifts at the box store giant as “somewhere between the army and Walt Disney.” Each shift began with a daily chant before bowing to customer demands and the constant pressure to sell. Meanwhile Meunier and his fellow workers could not afford to shop anywhere else but Walmart, further indenturing them to the multi-billion-dollar corporation. Beyond his time on the shop floor, Meunier documents the extraordinary efforts that Walmart exerts to block unionization campaigns, including their 2005 decision to close their outlet in Jonquiere, QC, where the United Food and Commercial Workers union had successfully gained certification rights. A decade later he charts the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that exposed the dubious legal ground on which Walmart stood in invoking closure and throwing workers out on the street. In Walmart: Diary of an Associate, Meunier reveals the truths behind Walmart’s low prices. It will make you think twice before shopping there. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom," by Daniel J. Clark.

This paper explores the spatial politics of racism and inter-worker competition through a case study of Indigenous employment during the construction of the Voisey’s Bay mine in northern Labrador. Over the course of construction, the building and construction trades unions (BCTUs) sought to restrict the hiring of local Inuit and Innu workers by challenging the legitimacy of place-based entitlements to work. Inuit and Innu workers had preferential access to employment as a result of unresolved land claims and the ensuing Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBA) between the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company and both the Innu Nation and the Labrador Inuit Association. IBA provisions that local Inuit and Innu be hired preferentially ran counter to the unions’ organizational structures and cultures, which privileged worker mobility and skill. The BCTUs used the geographic incompatibility between the scale of Indigenous claims and that of construction worker organization to justify a competitive approach to unionism and to veil racist portrayals of Innu and Inuit workers. By drawing out the relation between skill, racism and beliefs about entitlements to work, this paper explores how workers selectively use place-based and mobile identities to participate in inter-worker competition, reifying colonial patterns of labour mobility and labour market segmentation.

The article reviews the book, "One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada," by Joan Sangster.

The article reviews the book, "Marxism and Criminology: A History of Criminal Selectivity," by Valeria Vegh Weis.

Introduction and text of a speech that was to be given in 1970 at the University of Winnipeg by socialist politician and publicist William "Bill" Pritchard (1888-1981), who was a leading defendant at the sedition trial held in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

This study examines workplace corruption from the perspective of individual psychological processes. Existing literature has shown how corrupt behaviours can emerge from various kinds of motivations, including manipulation, retaliation, and conformity. This research suggests yet another path, where corruption stems from a motivation to preserve resources that individuals perceive to be threatened by their professional environment. As such, the study is grounded in conservation of resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001). We put forward an original model that introduces the notion of resource signals. An enrichment of original COR theory, resource signals correspond to individuals’ perceptions that the work environment is supportive, or, otherwise, of their need for resource development and preservation. Specifically, the study tests a moderated mediation model where a sense of mastery, a personal resource, moderates the impact of resource signals, including distributive justice, procedural justice, and interpersonal trust, on occupational corruption. Results are drawn from a sample of French public sector employees (n = 575). They validate the hypothesized mediating role of trust between both facets of organizational justice and measures of corruption, including bribery and property deviance. An indirect negative effect, however, is strongest between procedural justice and workplace corruption. As hypothesized, a sense of mastery significantly moderates the link between trust and both corruption types. This research contributes to both theory and practice. By integrating resource signals within a COR framework, it shows that corrupt behaviours are to be gauged against interacting motivations for preserving psychological resources. Consequently, this study also suggests that organizations should go beyond ethics and procedures, and to consider workplace corruption as a potential symptom of organizational signals perceived as threats to individuals’ valued resources.