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The article reviews the book, "Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America," by Emily E. LB. Twarog.

Although the health of the trade union movement may rest on its ability to include women in membership and leadership, little attention has been paid to women-only labour education. This original collection contains vibrant example of labour education events and the women involved who develop, implement, research, evaluate and facilitate at them. All the contributors speak from first-hand experience with women-only programs in unions across Canada, the United States and the world. They identify the methods used in pursuit of learner empowerment and transformation, and frankly discuss the outcomes. These real-life examples offer practical guidance and inspiration for all who create and support activist learning within unions and other social-justice organizations. -- Publisher's description

This dissertation examines the history of working-class environmentalism. It investigates the relationship between work and the environment and between workers and environmentalists. It presents five case studies that focus on the relationship between workers and the environment in British Columbia from the 1930s to the present, with particular emphasis on the forestry industry. Each case study examines how the interests of workers both intersect and conflict with the interests of environmentalists and how this intersection of interests presented itself throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Additionally, this dissertation examines how the working class has historically been constructed as the adversary of nature or wilderness and aims to explore how the working class, resource workers in particular, have come to symbolize that adversarial relationship. As well, it hopes to answer more epistemological questions about why working class environmentalism has not entered our lexicon and how lacking a sense of the working-class environmentalist serves to shape a discourse in which the history of worker environmentalism has been largely passed over. This study also explores how the collective memory of environmentalism has been constructed to exclude notions of class, and thus how environmentalism and the working class have been constructed as mutually exclusive categories. While this dissertation explores the exclusion of working class environmentalism it also attempts to write the worker-environmentalist back into history and show how teaching working class and labour history can help remedy this exclusion.

his thesis examines a selection of print materials from the radical and Communist-affiliated Left in the 1930s, a group and time period that are often passed over in assessments of Canadian literature. While similar texts have been studied in the context of legal evidence or political propaganda, they have rarely been considered as print objects in themselves, operating within a network of production, circulation, and response alongside other literary and non-literary media. In looking at the 1930s, a moment when the project of Canada was acutely challenged by the political and economic forces of the Great Depression, I see an equal challenge to scholars and critics by writers and readers struggling to organize from below. By considering examples of Canadian proletarian print from different points along the communication cycle, this project seeks to connect the imaginary aspirations and rhetorical strategies of these texts to the material contexts of their producers and readers. Chapter One addresses the existing gap in Canadian literary history, which maintains a liberal orientation throughout its associated institutions, approaches and subjects; this orientation has been upheld through political and legal structures hostile to proletarian movements. This chapter discusses Ronald Liversedge’s Recollections of the On-to-Ottawa Trek as a text that highlights and crosses such institutional boundaries. Chapter Two takes up the methods of book history, using the example of the “Worker’s Pamphlet Series” to discuss expanding this approach to include material such as pamphlets, periodicals, and manifestos as part of an explicit class analysis. Chapter Three analyzes the self-reflexive circulation of proletarian print in the restrictive legal environment created by Section 98 of the Criminal Code through materials produced by the Canadian Labour Defense League. Chapter Four examines surveillant readings and misreadings as they intercept proletarian print, using the Edmonton Hunger March and the subsequent pamphlet “The Alberta Hunger-March.” By mapping locations associated with this event and with the print economy in 1932 Edmonton, Chapter Five considers the formation of proletarian publics as highly localized interpretive communities, and how the application of tools such as GIS mapping might further re-center readers’ material lives in the analysis of print culture. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrates how the methods of analysis and historicization offered by book history can and should be applied to bring proletarian print and readers into conversation with the wider patterns of Canadian writing through the twentieth century. This is a necessary confrontation: as the study of Canadian literature begins to acknowledge the construction and contestation of our national myths, it must also avow the lasting political consequences for those who have been excluded.

This article examines the efforts to unionize Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) workers in British Columbia, Canada. Through an examination of three key legal cases, Greenway, Sidhu & Sons and Floralia, this article demonstrates the positive role that unionization and collective bargaining can have in improving working conditions and security for migrant agricultural workers in Canada. Specifically, through these cases, this article explores the strategies deployed by unions in organizing and collective bargaining processes to resist the problematic consequences associated with the SAWP’s circularity and system for recalling workers, and how those strategies enhance workers’ job security, rights and voice as workers. Together, these cases demonstrate the potential of labour law to shift conditions and experiences of work for migrants, and to enable workers to negotiate decent work, access rights and improve working conditions. Though focused on Canada’s SAWP, this article bears important implications for migrant agricultural workers in many other jurisdictions, and internationally.

This essay examines the United States Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v AFSCME, Council 31, which concluded that agency shop provisions violate the First Amendment rights of public sector workers who are not union members but receive the fruits of the representation. This decision reversed over 40 years of precedent and imposed “right to work” as a new federal constitutional mandate, fulfilling the dream of anti-union forces since the first Gilded Age. The essay begins with a brief history of the open shop movement and the development of the agency shop as a constitutionally permissible form of union security in the private and public sectors. It then describes how an activist Supreme Court majority undermined the constitutionality of the agency shop, which set the stage for the Janus decision. The essay summarizes the majority and dissenting opinions in Janus, and describes how unions, employers, and some state legislatures are responding to the decision’s immediate impact.

Article 23(4) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states ‘Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.’ This article documents the global legislative history of Article 23(4) trade union rights from its original drafting to interpretation by international labour standards. The history includes debates on the fundamental principles of trade union rights, the decision by ECOSOC to ignore a call to establish a permanent UN Commission on Trade Union Rights, the devolution of authority from the United Nations to the International Labour Organization, how ILO international law experts framed trade union rights as a subset of the freedom of association, and the treatment of labour relations policy, including compulsory union membership, that resulted under international human rights norms. The history is discussed as one that confines standards of policy on labour rights in the global political economy and has particular implications for the discourse on labour rights as human rights.

The practice of design has become obscured by global networks of production, circulation, and consumption. Traditional design studies tend to focus on high-profile products, presenting heroic designers as the primary authors of works of design. This approach is inadequate for understanding design in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Contemporary design is better understood as an iterative and distributed process of give-and-take among actors, human and non-human, including people, tools, places, and ideas. It is a process that is influenced by conditions along the commodity chain that fall outside of the designers traditionally recognized sphere. This research demonstrates that commonly held conceptions of designers as sole authors and of design work as a largely intellectual, creative activity distanced from manufacturing, misrepresent the real practices and relations of design labour in the current global economy. Two object ethnographies follow the production, circulation, and consumption of everyday, mass-produced goods: the Vanessa steel-toe boot by Mellow Walk and the Non Stop flatware by Gourmet Settings. These case studies map networks of design labour across continents, countries, cities, and generations. Primary research includes 18 interviews, observations of environments and practices, and the analysis of material evidence. This process reveals actors whose contributions have typically been omitted from design history, and describes practices of design that contest traditional depictions of designers, design work, and evidence thereof. This research contributes a fuller and more accurate understanding of the range of creative labour and labourers involved in the design and development of goods for global markets while challenging the view of these goods as placeless and culture-free. I respond to the call by design historians to extend the scope of designs histories beyond the West, and I build on the work of design and creativity scholars who identify design thinking outside of recognized design roles. My work challenges established hierarchies of design, including who is permitted to design, which countries are perceived as superior sources of design and manufacturing expertise, and the hand-head dichotomy that underwrites how we think about design and that has been entrenched in traditional conceptions of manufacturing and the global division of labour. Understanding how the work of design is distributed and how it has changed in response to globalization gives insight into the politics of production and consumption.

The article reviews the book, "The Prairie Populist: George Hara Williams and the Untold Story of the CCF," by John F. Conway.

Canada’s prison farms are being reopened. But when prisoners will be paid pennies a day, and the fruits of their labour will likely be exported for profit, there’s little to celebrate.

Although Canadian womens history is now nearly forty years old, no volume exists that reflects explicitly upon the fields evolution and assesses its historiographical context. This retrospective is not merely summative; the essays in this collection are analytical engagements with the current state of the field, which draw on its rich past to generate new knowledge and propose innovative avenues for inquiry. The dual purposes of this collection are to contemplate the fields past and to contribute productively to its future. These thirteen original essays are written by scholars at all career stages. The diversity of these authors perspectives illustrates the contributions that Canadian scholarship has had in international dialogues about womens and gender history and that it continues to be a vibrant area of research. The collection includes chapters about the principal sub-fields in Canadian womens and gender history, including specialized chapters on Québecois, Indigenous, Black, and immigrant womens histories, religious history, labour history, war and society, history of sexuality, the history of reproductive labour and reproductive justice, two essays on the history of feminism that, taken together, cover the period from 1850 to the present, and a thematic essay on the colonial period. --Publisher's description

In this chapter, we bring together narratives elicited by Tracy [Gregory], whose graduate work as a peer researcher with strip club dancers in Northern Ontario contributes the bulk of the data, and the contributions of Jennifer [Johnson] - a former committee member for Tracy's graduate research and later a supporter of Tracy's continued work in establishing the Sex Workers Advisory Network of Sudbury (SWANS). Together, we apply the insights of feminist geography and sex-work-informed thinking to the issues of spatial awareness and relations of power described by the participants in the study. --From Authors' Introduction

The article reviews the book, "The Economics of Trade Unions: A Study of a Research Field and its Findings," by Hristos Doucouliagos, Richard B. Freeman and Patrice Laroche.

The article reviews the book, "The Communist International, Anti-Imperialism and Racial Equality in British Dominions," by Oleksa Drachewych.

In this article I explore the making of a gendered working-class identity among a sample of male nickel miners in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Through 26 oral history interviews conducted between January 2015 and July 2018 with current and retired miners (ages 26 to 74), I analyze how the industrial relations framework and social relations of the postwar period shaped – and continue to shape – a masculinized working-class identity. I then examine the ways in which economic restructuring and the partial deindustrialization of Sudbury’s mines have affected workers’ ideas about gender and class. I argue that, amid growing precarious employment in both the mining industry and the regional economy more broadly, the male workers in this study continue to gender their class identities, which limits attempts to build working-class solidarity in a labor market now largely characterized by feminized service sector employment.

This dissertation is a study of working-class identity and subjectivity among a sample of male nickel miners in Sudbury, Ontario. Recent foreign takeovers of mining firms and a protracted strike at Vale-Inco in 2009-2010 motivate this dissertation's new look at class relations and subjectivity in one of Canadas most historically significant regions of working-class organization. This study understands these recent events as part of a set of decades long economic processes that have transformed workers lives in and outside work. It explores how the form that trade unionism took in the post-WWII period has shaped class relations and class identity among male nickel miners in Sudbury. The dissertation asks: how have class subjectivity and socioeconomic change interacted over this history? After first analyzing the political economy of mining in the Sudbury Basin, the dissertation traces the formation of historically situated class subjectivities. In it, I examine how the postwar compromise between capital and labour influenced unionization and class identity among male workers at the mines. I then inquire into how industrial restructuring and job loss, the rise of new managerial strategies and neoliberal governance, and the growth of precarious, contract labour have transformed both the material contexts of workers lives and their practices of reproducing their identities as members of a working class. To form the central arguments of the dissertation, I draw on 26 oral history interviews with current and retired workers, and organize their narratives into three thematic areas of class identity: first, issues of work and the labour process; second, themes of place, space, and belonging in the formation of class identities; and third, how historical memory and generational conflict influence class. Within and across these thematic areas I show how material conditions and workers own practices of identity formation interact, adjust, and at times, contradict. I argue that the postwar class compromise between labour and capital contributed to a resilient form of working-class subjectivity among workers that is reproduced by local processes of social remembering and class reproduction. Yet, industrial restructuring, the growth of precarious employment, and the internationalization of ownership and management at the mines challenge the efficacy of this historical subjectivity. By studying unionized workers who are confronting profound industrial change, this dissertation raises questions about how the making of male working-class identity limited broader processes of class formation, as well as how we understand class and class formation in the global economy at a time when labour movements face growing structural challenges.

The article reviews the book, "On the Road to Global Labour History: A Festschrift for Marcel van der Linden," edited by Karl Heinz Roth.

The mining industry continues to be at the forefront of colonial dispossession around the world. It controls information about its intrinsic costs and benefits, propagates myths about its contribution to the economy, shapes government policy and regulation, and deals ruthlessly with its opponents. Brimming with case studies, anecdotes, resources, and illustrations, Unearthing Justice exposes the mining process and its externalized impacts on the environment, Indigenous Peoples, communities, workers, and governments. But, most importantly, the book shows how people are fighting back. Whether it is to stop a mine before it starts, to get an abandoned mine cleaned up, to change laws and policy, or to mount a campaign to influence investors, Unearthing Justice is an essential handbook for anyone trying to protect the places and people they love. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson," by Veronica Strong-Boag.

The article reviews the book, "Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria 1890–1918," by Jakub S. Beneš.