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The Working Centre in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, is a widely recognized and successful model for community development. Begun from scratch in 1982, it is now a vast network of practical supports for the unemployed, the underemployed, the temporarily employed, and the homeless, populations that collectively constitute up to 30 percent of the labour market both locally and across North America. Transition to Common Work is the essential text about The Working Centre--its beginnings thirty years ago, the lessons learned, and the myriad ways in which its strategies and innovations can be adapted by those who share its goals. The Working Centre focuses on creating access-to-tools projects rather than administrative layers of bureaucracy. This book highlights the core philosophy behind the centre's decentralized but integrated structure, which has contributed to the creation of affordable services. Underlying this approach are common-sense innovations such as thinking about virtues rather than values, developing community tools with a social enterprise approach, and implementing a radically equal salary policy. For social workers, activists, bureaucrats, and engaged citizens in third-sector organizations (NGOs, charities, not-for-profits, co-operatives), this practical and inspiring book provides a method for moving beyond the doldrums of "poverty relief" into the exciting world of community building. --Publisher's website. Contents: Part 1: The Working Centre takes root -- Introduction: beyond us and them -- Building community: the Working Centre's roots -- Liberation from overdevelopment -- Part 2: Community engagement -- The Virtues -- St. John's Kitchen: redistribution through cooperation -- Searching for work at the Help Centre -- The nuts and bolts of an alternative organization -- Part 3: Toward a philosophy of work -- Ethical imagination: the Working Centre's approach to salaries -- Community tools -- Small is beautiful: re-embedding reciprocal relationships in daily work -- Conclusion: transition to common work -- Map of the Working Centre buildings and projects -- Map of the Working Centre locations in downtown Kitchener -- A thirty-year chronology of the Working Centre -- People of the Working Centre.

The article reviews the book, "Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba," by Janis Thiessen.

While historians have been increasingly attentive to the politics and culture of social movements since the long sixties, they have engaged much less with the significance of anarchism within these activist currents. As part of an emerging field of anarchist studies, this article demonstrates that anarchist projects were critical in shaping postwar political radicalism in Vancouver and its relationship to a global pattern of cultural transformation, capitalist restructuring, and social movement activism. Specifically, the article investigates how and why Vancouver’s anarchist community created strong political, personal, and cultural connections with an emerging punk scene during the 1970s and early 1980s. It demonstrates that these relationships emerged from anarchism’s conflicting relationship with the city’s New Left and countercultural communities in the long sixties, as well as from anarchists’ specific engagement with punk as a tool for revolutionary struggle in the wake of the sixties. Overall, the article argues that anarchists cultivated connections with punk in this context because they saw it as awash with the potential to bridge generations of political dissent; to support emerging activist projects; and to help usher in new expressions of radical culture in the city. In so doing, the article offers new insights into the political, social, and cultural legacies of the long sixties, in Vancouver and beyond.

The organization of work through production networks undermines the application of labour law to a growing proportion of workers. Protections put in place by labour law, specifically devised to apply within the hierarchical and bilateral structure of the employer/employee relationship, are ill-fitted to tackle the multilateral structure of network production in which market and hierarchical relationships are entangled. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to some as a possible answer to these challenges. The author develops a normative and functional framework to assess the promise and limits of CSR as a regulatory tool. The framework is grounded in human dignity, as concep- tualized by human rights law and political philosophy. A holistic understanding of human dignity highlights the interdependency of labour law's basic func- tions: providing minimum working conditions, ensuring employer accountability for working hazards, and enabling workers' collective action. The author then applies the human dignity framework to codes of conduct, as described and analyzed in current literature on the subject. She concludes that CSR codes and their implementation often fall short of what is required in the workplace by the human dignity principle.

Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that was failing to assume responsibility for isolated and uneducated men on the frontier, as well as working-class men who responded to their poor working conditions by succumbing to moral diseases that left them incapable of governing themselves, leading their families, or functioning as rational citizens. Fitzpatrick developed a double strategy to head off this crisis: he lobbied the state for structural change, and at the same time promoted a home-like environment for reading, as well as particular works of fiction, as a means of reminding male workers of their duty to self, family, and nation. Despite the association’s apparent interest in the cultivation of the liberal individual, its reliance on the reading room and on the fiction of popular authors such as Ralph Connor as surrogates for the absent family demonstrates the centrality of the apparently private sphere to early 20th-century Canada’s industrializing economy.

The article reviews the book, "Solidarités provinciales. Histoire de la Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Nouveau-Brunswick," by David Frank.

Global warming is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the twenty-first century. Environmental polices on the one hand, and economic and labour market polices on the other, often exist in separate silos creating a dilemma that Work in a Warming World confronts. The world of work - goods, services, and resources - produces most of the greenhouse gases created by human activity. In engaging essays, contributors demonstrate how the world of work and the labour movement need to become involved in the struggle to slow global warming, and the ways in which environmental and economic policies need to be linked dynamically in order to effect positive change. Addressing the dichotomy of competing public policies in a Canadian context, Work in a Warming World presents ways of creating an effective response to global warming and key building blocks toward a national climate strategy. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction / Stephen McBride and Carla Lipsig-Mummé -- International constraints on green strategies : Ontario's WTO defeat and public sector remedies / Scott Sinclair and Stuart Trew -- Unions and climate change in Europe : the contrasting experience of Germany and the UK / John Calvert -- Gendered emissions : counting greenhouse gas emissions by gender and why it matters / Marjorie Griffin Cohen -- Canadian labour's climate dilemma / Geoffrey Bickerton and Carla Lipsig-Mummé -- Renewable energy development as industrial strategy / Mark Winfield -- (Re)building sustainable infrastructure : implications for engineers / Kean Birch and Dalton Wudrich -- Construction and climate change : overcoming roadblocks to achieving green workplace competencies / John Calvert -- Labour and the greening of hospitality : raising standards or union greenwashing? / Steven Tufts and Simon Milne -- Cities, climate change, and the green economy / Stephen McBride, John Shields, and Stephanie Tombari -- Renewable energy, sustainable jobs : the case of the Kingston, Ontario Region / Andrea Megan MacCallum, Lindsay Napier, John Holmes, and Warren Edward Mabee.

The aging workforce poses perplexing policy challenges, even in Canada, which is demographically young among comparable countries. We ask what the evidence shows about whether there are, or will be, labour or skills shortages as the workforce ages. Highlighting the challenges of measuring labour/skills shortages, we explore peer-reviewed research in the 2000–2013 period. No evidence is found of a national labour shortage in the foreseeable future. In fact, the workforce is predicted to grow for the coming two decades with less shrinkage than in the past as a result of retirements. Regional and occupational shortages occur at times, as well as underutilized skills.

This paper engages with the varieties of capitalism literature to investigate the employee representation and consultation approaches of liberal market economy multinational companies (MNCs), specifically Australian, British and US MNCs operating in Australia. While the literature would suggest commonality amongst these MNCs, the paper considers whether the evidence points to similarity or variation amongst liberal market headquartered MNCs. The findings contribute to filling a recognized empirical gap on MNC employment relations practice in Australia and to a better understanding of within category varieties of capitalism similarity and variation. Drawing on survey data from MNCs operating in Australia, the results demonstrated that UK-owned MNCs were the least likely to report collective structures of employee representation. Moreover, it was found that Australian MNCs were the most likely to engage in collective forms of employee representation and made less use of direct consultative mechanisms relative to their British and US counterparts. In spite of the concerted individualization of the employment relations domain over previous decades, Australian MNCs appear to have upheld more long-standing national institutional arrangements with respect to engaging with employees on a collective basis. This varies from British and US MNC approaches which denotes that our results display within category deviation in the variety of capitalism liberal market economy typology. Just as Hall and Soskice described their seminal work on liberal market economy (LME) and coordinated market economy (CME) categories as a “work-in-progress” (2001: 2), we too suggest that Australia’s evolution in the LME category, and more specifically its industrial relations system development, and the consequences for employment relations practices of its domestic MNCs, may be a work-in-progress.

This article reviews the book, "The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest," by Stephen Tuck.

It is commonplace today to suggest that gender is socially constructed, that the roles women and men fulfill in their daily lives have been created and defined for them by society and social institutions. But how have men and women negotiated and navigated the gender roles that have been thrust upon them? With Gendered Pasts, Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell have collected eleven engaging essays that seek to answer this question in a wide-ranging exploration of specific gendered dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian history.The contributors cover all manner of topics related to gender and history across Canada, including: female vagrancy; gambling, drinking, and sex; the role of the miner's wife; the portrayal of gay men; and the sharply defined role of nurses. Unusual in its breadth, Gendered Pasts is essential to the understanding of the various threads and themes in Canadian gender history. Previously published by Oxford University Press, . --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940-1980," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.

Violence in the workplace has attracted widespread scholarly and media attention in the United States and Canada since the 1980s. Governments and corporations on both sides of the border have identified this violence as a serious problem affecting the health and safety of workers. However, there is still much that is unknown about workplace violence. Is the problem of workplace violence more serious than it was today? How has it changed over time? What are the factors that have produced violence at work? How have workers, management, and governments defined violence at work? How have they approached the problem? This dissertation historicizes the phenomenon of workplace violence, investigating on-the-job violence in the North American automotive industry between 1960-1980. It embeds violence at work in its economic, political, and cultural contexts and investigates how violence shaped the North American workplace and identities of class, gender, and race on the job. A comparative, transnational approach is central to this study. If we seek to understand the structural factors causing workplace violence, the national context cannot be ignored. This is especially true when considering the US and Canada, two countries which are extraordinarily integrated economically but often contrasted socially and culturally. My research has uncovered a significant history of violence in the automotive workplaces of Detroit and Windsor, and shows that national and local contexts were crucial in determining the level of violence. Violence was a regular element of shop-floor culture and workplace conflict in both countries, but was different in each. In Detroit, violence at work reached epidemic levels and was a major factor in the crisis that gripped the city's auto plants in the 1960s and 1970s. This was not the case in Windsor. Yet in both cities workplace violence became a major concern outside the factory when work-related murders seized national headlines and challenged citizens to understand these tragedies. The thesis demonstrates that, though the patterns and levels of violence were different in each place, violence was no aberration, no freak occurrence, but an ongoing phenomenon that influenced the labour process and workplace culture in both Detroit and Windsor.

This report was prepared for the Moose Cree First Nation. Employment opportunities figure prominently in the private agreements between First Nations, Inuit and Métis governments and the resource companies who want to develop on their territories. Resource companies and Indigenous leadership alike often see employment opportunities as a key way that local communities can benefit from resource-related development. Many early agreements, however, provided for entry-level positions but not for training that would lead to meaningful work that is well compensated for Indigenous communities. As a result, employment provisions in agreements often strive to provide greater detail about access to training and movement into higher skilled positions. Access to training is particularly critical in the construction sector, since jobs are short term and range from unskilled positions that have no upward mobility to registered tradespersons, foreman and superintendent positions. This report offers a detailed examination of how a negotiated agreement facilitated the training and employment of First Nations workers in the construction phase of the Lower Mattagami River Hydro River Project (LMRP) from 2010 to 2015.

In-depth forecast of the next two, five and ten years of the existing workforce, demographics and diversity, and other challenges in the Canadian mining industry. Concludes that the industry faces significant labour market challenges and pressures in the coming years.

This article reviews the book, "Canada the Good: A Short History of Vice since 1500," by Marcel Martel.

This article reviews the book, "Hurrah Revolutionaries: The Polish Canadian Communist Movement, 1918–1948," by Patryk Polec.

Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada was in force from1919 to 1936. The dissertation traces the way in which Canada incorporated emergency law, created during the First World War under the War Measures Act, into the Criminal Code as Section 98 after the war to combat political radicalism from 1919 to 1936. In contrast to existing scholarship, this work not only explains how a liberal democracy like Canada can legally use emergency legislation outside of a state of emergency through a process of `normalization' but it also examines the effects of such laws on their human targets through case studies of criminal trials and deportation hearings. Targets included political activists, immigrants and women. It makes contributions to Canada's legal, immigration, labour and intelligence history. The study also examines the international influences on Canadian policy makers in creating such laws and the complex international identities of the transnational activists at whom these laws were often directed. The work examines how culture played a crucial role in underpinning the intelligence cycle that led to the prosecution of leading Communist Party of Canada (CPC) members. It also complicates our understanding of the CPC during Moscow's `Third Period.' It was a party that both marginalized and welcomed immigrant workers. The dissertation provides an in-depth examination of the trial of Rex v. Buck et al and the ways in which political ideology was interpreted by the court as a criminal act. It examines cases of deportation that resulted from the trial, such as the case of the `Halifax Ten,' and traces what happened to the deportees after their deportation making use of Finnish, Polish, Croatian, and German primary sources. In addition, this work demonstrates how the communist led organization, the Canadian Labour Defense League (CLDL) initiated Canada's civil rights movement by joining with moderate leftists during the `Third Period,' and before the Communist International's shift to the `United Front' policy, to repeal Section 98. It demonstrates how the normalization of emergency law continued after Section 98's repeal when its core elements were retained and folded into Canada's sedition laws where it remains today.

This article reviews the book, "Putting the State on Trial: The Policing of Protest during the G20 Summit," edited by Margaret E. Beare, Nathalie Des Rosiers, and Abigail C. Deshman.

The article reviews the book, "Le travail de prévention : Les relations professionnelles face aux risques cancérogènes," by Arnaud Mias, et al.