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Craig Heron is one of Canada's leading labour historians. Drawing together fifteen of Heron's new and previously published essays on working-class life in Canada, Working Lives covers a wide range of issues, including politics, culture, gender, wage-earning, and union organization. A timely contribution to the evolving field of labour studies in Canada, this cohesive collection of essays analyzes the daily experiences of people working across Canada over more than two hundred years. Honest in its depictions of the historical complexities of daily life, Working Lives raises issues in the writing of Canadian working-class history, especially "working-class realism" and how it is eventually inscribed into Canada's public history. Thoughtfully reflecting on the ways in which workers interact with the past, Heron discusses the important role historians and museums play in remembering the adversity and milestones experienced by Canada's working class. -- Publisher's description. Table of contents: Part 1: On the job. On the job in Canada -- Ontario’s first factory workers -- Work and struggle in the Canadian steel industry, 1900-50. Part 2. Workers’ Cultures. Arguing about idleness -- Labour and liquor -- Into the streets. Part 3: Getting organized. Labourism and the working class -- The Great War, the state, and working-class Canada -- Contours of a workers’ revolt. Part 4: A gendered world. Working girls -- Boys will be boys -- Male wage-earners and the Canadian state. Part 5: Doing history. Workers in the camera’s eye -- The labour historian and public history -- The relevance of class.

The article reviews the book, "The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation and World History, 1500-2000," by John Tutino.1

There's a pervasive sense of betrayal in areas scarred by mine, mill and factory closures. [This book] delves into the long history of deindustrialization in the paper-making town of Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, located on Canada's resource periphery. Much like hundreds of other towns and cities across North America and Europe, Sturgeon Falls has lost their primary source of industry, resulting in the displacement of workers and their families. One Job Town takes us into the making of a culture of industrialism and the significance of industrial work for mill-working families. One Job Town approaches deindustrialization as a long term, economic, political, and cultural process, which did not begin and simply end with the closure of the local mill in 2002. High examines the work-life histories of fifty paper mill workers and managers, as well as city officials, to gain an in-depth understanding of the impact of the formation and dissolution of a culture of industrialism. Oral history and memory are at the heart of One Job Town, challenging us to rethink the relationship between the past and the present in what was formerly known as the industrialized world. --Publisher's description.

Since the 1970s, the closure of mines, mills, and factories has marked a rupture in working-class lives. The Deindustrialized World interrogates the process of industrial ruination, from the first impact of layoffs in metropolitan cities, suburban areas, and single-industry towns to the shock waves that rippled outward, affecting entire regions, countries, and beyond. Seeking to hear the “roar ... on the other side of the silence,” scholars from France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States share their own stories of ruin and ruination and ask others what it means to be working class in a postindustrial world. In Part 1, they explore the ruination of former workplaces and the damaged health and injured bodies of industrial workers. Part 2 brings to light disparities of experiences between rural resource towns and cities, where hipster revitalization often overshadows industrial loss. Part 3 reveals the ongoing impact of deindustrialization on working people and their place in the new global economy. Together, the chapters open a window on the lived experiences of people living at ground zero of deindustrialization, revealing its layered impacts and examining how workers, environmentalists, activists, and the state have responded to its challenges. --Publisher's description

In Perogies and Politics, Rhonda Hinther explores the twentieth-century history of the Ukrainian left in Canada from the standpoint of the women, men, and children who formed and fostered it. For twentieth-century leftist Ukrainians, culture and politics were inextricably linked. The interaction of Ukrainian socio-cultural identity with Marxist-Leninism resulted in one of the most dynamic national working-class movements Canada has ever known. The Ukrainian left's success lay in its ability to meet the needs of and speak in meaningful, respectful, and empowering ways to its supporters' experiences and interests as individuals and as members of a distinct immigrant working-class community. This offered to Ukrainians a radical social, cultural, and political alternative to the fledgling Ukrainian churches and right-wing Ukrainian nationalist movements. Hinther's colourful and in-depth work reveals how left-wing Ukrainians were affected by changing social, economic, and political forces and how they in turn responded to and challenged these forces. -- Publisher's description

Using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey for March of 2006 to 2012, this paper examines how employment in precarious jobs may lead to lower earnings among Canadian newcomers. Results suggest that recent immigrants are struggling financially due to wage disparities created by precarious employment. Both males and females experience an initial earnings disadvantage which is further exacerbated by being employed in involuntary part-time work, temporary work and multiple jobs.

This article reviews the book, "Fiery Joe: The Maverick Who Lit Up the West" by Kathleen Carlisle.

Set against the backdrop of the U.S. experience, Power, Politics, and Principles uses a transnational perspective to understand the passage and long term implications of a pivotal labour law in Canada. By utilizing a wide array of primary materials and secondary sources, Hollander gets to the root of the policy-making process, revealing how the making of P.C. 1003 in 1944, a wartime order, that forced employers to the collective bargaining table and marked a new stage in Canadian industrial relations, involved real people with conflicting personalities and competing agendas. Each chapter of Power, Politics, and Principles begins with a quasi-fictional vignette to help the reader visualize historical context. Hollander pays particular attention to the central role that Mackenzie King played in the creation of P.C. 1003. Although most scholars describe the Prime Minister's approach to policy decisions as calculating and opportunistic, Power, Politics, and Principles argues that Mackenzie King's adherence to key principles, especially his determination to preserve and enhance the cohesiveness of the country, created a more favourable legal environment in the long run for Canadian workers and their unions than a similar collective bargaining regime in the U.S. --Publisher's description

This article reviews the book, "How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe" by Ferruh Yilmaz.

Most Canadian prisoners work, yet very little attention has been paid to them as workers by either labour scholars or unions. However, in 1977 the Canadian Food and Allied Workers union (CFAW) organized both incarcerated and non-incarcerated meat cutters into the country's first and only legally recognized union representing primarily prisoners, CFAW Local 240. The union drive came in response to the Ontario government's push to increase prisoners' participation in the workforce, including the introduction of a number of "outside managed industrial programs", which involved private firms operating within provincial correctional facilities. These privately managed industries rekindled some older debates around the potential for prison labour to undermine the wages of free labour, but in the case of the experimental abattoir program at Guelph, they also resulted in something new: unionized prisoners. The union not only made important gains for the workers, but also made modest gains for prisoners' rights. While CFAW Local 240 would eventually be merged into subsequent unions, it continues to serve as a model for working prisoners and represents a rare moment in Canadian history - one where a union organized prison labour instead of opposing it.

Embracing a spatial and historical lens and the insights of critical legal theory, this dissertation maps the patterns of protest and the law in modern British Columbia―the social relations of adjudication—the changing ways in which conflict between private property rights and customary rights invoked by social movement actors has been contested and adjudicated in public spaces and legal arenas. From labour strikes in the Vancouver Island coal mines a century ago, to more recent protests by First Nations, environmentalists, pro- and anti-abortion activists, and urban “poor peoples’” movements, social movement actors have asserted customary rights to property through the control or appropriation of space. Owners and managers of property have responded by enlisting an array of legal remedies and an army of legal actors—lawyers, judges, police, parliaments, and soldiers—to restore control over space and assert private property rights. For most of the past century, conventional private property claims trumped the customary claims of social movements in the legal arena, provoking crises of legal legitimacy where social movement actors questioned the impartiality of judges and the fairness of adjudicative procedures. Remedies and legal technologies asserted by company lawyers, awarded by judges, and enforced by police and soldiers were often severe―from Criminal Code proscriptions against riotous assembly and deployment of military force, to the equitable remedy of the injunction and lengthy prison sentences following criminal contempt proceedings. But this pattern shows signs of change in recent years, driven by three major trends in British Columbia and Canadian law: (1) the effective assertion of indigenous customary rights; (2) growing recognition of the importance of human rights in democratic societies, particularly in the context of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and (3) changes in the composition of the legal profession and judiciary. This changing legal landscape has created a new and evolving legal space, where property claims are increasingly treated as contingent rather than absolute and where the rights of one party are increasingly balanced by customary rights, interests, and aspirations of others. Consequently, we are seeing a trend toward the dilution of legal remedies traditionally available to the powerful, creating space for the assertion of non-conventional property claims and the emergence of new patterns of power relations.

The article reviews the book, "Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family," by Jane Little Botkin.

This article reviews the book, "Neoliberal Capitalism and Precarious Work: Ethnographies of Accommodation and Resistance" by Rob Lambert and Andrew Herod.

This article reviews the book, "Le stress au travail, un enjeu de santé," by Patrick Légeron.

This article reviews the book, "The Emerging Industrial Relations of China," edited by William Brown and Chang Kai.

The industrial relations (IR) field in Canada and the United States (US) emerged in the late 1910s-early 1920s and is thus on the cusp of its 100th anniversary. The impetus for the creation of the IR field was growing public alarm in both countries over the escalating level of conflict, violence, and class polarization in employer-employee relations. The two countries established federal-level government investigative committees, the Royal Commission on Industrial Relations (1919) in Canada and the Commission on Industrial Relations (1911-1915) in the US, to travel cross-country, gather evidence, and report their findings and overall evaluation. To commemorate the IR field’s centenary, this paper conducts the same type of cross-national ER evaluation, but with modern methods. First, this exercise requires a formal evaluation instrument, like a physical exam worksheet. Adopted is a modified version of a balanced scorecard. Second, the scorecard’s framework and questions should be theoretically informed. The framework used is a modified version of the diagrammatic model of an IR system presented by Mackenzie King in Industry and Humanity (1918). The third step is to fill in the scorecard with data from individual workplaces, which are obtained for the US from a new nationally-representative survey of 2000+ workplaces, the State of Workplace Employment Relations Survey (SWERS). The fourth step is to aggregate all the diagnostic measures to obtain a summary numerical estimate for each of the companies of its state of ER performance and health. Based on a 1-7 (7 = highest) scale, then converted to F to A grades, we find that the average ER grade given by managers is B+ and by employees C+. The company scores are graphed in a frequency distribution that visually represents, for the first time in the literature, the lowest-to-highest pattern of employment relations performance and health across the US.

This article reviews the book, "History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History" by James R. Barrett.

Organizational learning can be a key shared value that perpetuates the family's and the family firm's culture across generations. Imprinting theory helps to explain the impact that lessons learned and transmitted can have on the development of human resources in the family firm. However, the results of imprinting may not necessarily be positive, particularly when imprinting manifests itself in negative processes and expectations. Whereas imprinting and organizational learning are often associated with a “positive halo effect,” they have the potential to result in negative behaviors and deleterious firm-level outcomes. Employing imprinting theory as a framework, we highlight the potential dark side of imprinting within the family firm context and how it can damage human resource efforts and threaten company performance and firm survival. Finally, we suggest how bad habits may be broken and replaced with more effective routines so as to ensure the family firm's continuity and success.

From Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative nonfiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Using a variety of forms including letters, essays and poems, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home. Peering through windows and doors into intimate, remembered spaces now occupied by strangers, Knight writes to them in order to deconstruct her own past. From the rubble of memory she then builds a real place in order to bring herself back home. -- Publisher's description

This research note examines the authors’ graphic history Showdown! Making Modern Unions to build on recent scholarship about the pedagogical use of comics by considering the tools and possibilities this medium opens up to professional historians regarding the treatment of primary sources. We suggest that graphic histories enable strategies for using primary sources that actually enhance and popularize the ways historians can effectively use evidence, particularly in terms of building the critical consciousness of an expanded base of readers. Employing the comics theory concept of closure, we show graphic history to be uniquely situated to allow historians and readers to become actively engaged with and derive meaning from primary sources in a way not possible in other forms of historical writing. Examples from Showdown! are used to show the depth and breadth of these methodological possibilities.