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L’histoire est bien connue. En 1833, peu avant que ne débute la saison de la construction, les compagnons charpentiers-menuisiers de Montréal annoncent qu’ils ne travailleront plus au-delà de dix heures par jour, faute de quoi ils recourront à la grève. À la suite d’une victoire partielle auprès des employeurs, le mouvement reprend de plus belle en 1834 et s’étend même aux maçons, aux cordonniers, aux tailleurs et aux boulangers de Montréal. Une alliance de plusieurs maîtres fera toutefois échouer ce mouvement pour la journée de dix heures, dès le mois de mai 1834. Contrairement à ce que prétendait jadis Catherine Vance dans un article de la revue The Marxist Quarterly, rédigé en 1962, nous croyons que l’enjeu de la grève des charpentiers-menuisiers dépassait la seule réclamation de la journée de dix heures. Une enquête approfondie dans les sources nous révèle que nous avons affaire en fait à une lutte de pouvoir entre une nouvelle oligarchie d’entrepreneurs-architectes et une coalition de compagnons et de petits entrepreneurs artisans qui souhaitaient faire reconnaître leur légitimité, dans un contexte où les traditions et les coutumes mutualistes reliées à la pratique du métier de charpentier-menuisier étaient menacées pour la première fois par l’action souterraine de l’économie marchande. Il ressortira de ce conflit deux visions du monde : une conception républicaine du bien commun et de la justice sociale, et une conception libérale du droit de propriété et de l’autorité.

Constitutional labour rights in Canada now protect workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively and to strike. These associational freedoms are especially important for public sector workers, the most frequent targets of legislation limiting their freedoms. However, the Supreme Court of Canada judgments recognizing these rights and freedoms have also introduced important ambiguities about their foundation, scope and level of protection. This brief comment locates these ambiguities in the context of Canada’s political economy and industrial relations regime, which are beset by contradiction and conflict. It then explores the origins and development of the jurisprudential ambiguities in constitutional labour rights through a survey of recent Supreme Court of Canada’s labour rights judgments, including most recently British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and British Columbia (2016).

This article reviews the book, "Unions in Court: Organized Labour and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms" by Larry Savage and Charles W. Smith.

In this dissertation, I explore several social economic topics, including health, labour, and the environment. Although the chapters of this dissertation explore diverse subjects, the overall theme is to analyze important social issues and their policy implications. I made use of a variety of rich datasets, as well as employing various econometric analyses, often supported by a theoretical model, to examine the research topics identified in each chapter. In Chapter 1, I explore a 1997 policy change, which altered eligibility requirements for Disability Insurance (DI). While DI in Canada provides income support to millions, it has also been criticized for creating a disincentive for labour force participation. The 1997 change affected some Canadians, but not others, creating a natural experiment setting in which to explore this policy. I found that, following the tightening of eligibility requirements, relative labour force participation for women did increase, but their level of employment did not. There was little effect for men. This distinction between labour force participation and employment is a crucial one in this context: it indicates that what may appear to be individuals returning to work after not being eligible for DI may instead be individuals returning to the labour force, but unable to find suitable employment. In Chapter 2, I examine whether searching for health information on the internet acts as a complement or substitute for the demand for information from physicians (proxied by physician visits). I found that the effect on physician-based information hinged on an individuals prior trust in the formal medical sector: those with high prior trust tended to use health information searching on the internet as a complement for physician visits, whereas, those with low prior trust substituted away from physician visits in favour of information found online. The results were very similar when a telehealth program was examined instead of internet-based information. Further, those who were online health information searchers also tended to be more likely to use a telehealth program. This is a reassuring result, as it may mean that those who substituted out of the formal medical sector, in favour of health online information, may also be using the more quality-controlled telehealth programs. In Chapter 3, I explore how attitudes towards the environment affect behaviours in five key areas of environmental-related household consumption: waste generation and recycling, energy use, organic food consumption, personal transport, and water use. Prior studies have not examined these areas together, often due to data restrictions, and not in the context of environmental attitudes. Using a modelling procedure that allows for the errors in these five areas to be correlated, I found that attitudes were often a more significant predictor of ones behaviour than the financially driven policy implemented in the area.

The articles reviews the book, "Multinational Enterprises and Host Country Development," edited by Holger Görg.

Un employeur peut-il imposer à ses employés des périodes de garde obligatoires pendant lesquelles ils doivent être joignables en tout temps afin de pouvoir se rendre au travail rapidement et être en état d’accomplir leur prestation de travail ? Dans un arrêt rendu en 2017, la Cour suprême du Canada estime qu’une telle politique ne constitue pas un exercice raisonnable des droits de direction de l’employeur, mais qu’elle ne porte pas atteinte au droit à la liberté des employés protégé par la Charte canadienne. La démarche utilisée par la Cour pour apprécier ce qu’est l’exercice raisonnable d’un droit de direction représente la principale retombée de cet arrêt. Toutefois, l’analyse de l’obligation de disponibilité sous l’angle de l’atteinte aux droits fondamentaux des employés reste à faire.

The arduous struggle to form Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) at Trail, British Columbia, began in 1938. By 1944 it had been certified as the legal bargaining agent for the 5,000 workers at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (cm&s). But being certified did not spell the end of its problems. Even as World War II was winding down, local and continental anti-Communists attacked the Communist leaders who had founded the local. Among the most determined of the attackers was the United Steelworkers of America (uswa). As the Cold War began, Local 480 was girding for a two-year battle to protect itself from the raiding uswa. Sanctioned by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) to subsume Mine-Mill across North America, the Steelworkers employed an aggressive anti-Communist strategy. In early 1950, when this account begins, Local 480 was in a fight for its life.

Historians of postwar Canada have relegated neighbourhood activism to specific periods of city-wide mobilization. In Montréal, for example, authors who participated in or studied urban social movements describe a rapid decline in activism following the first sovereignty referendum in 1980. This periodization of activism has privileged the experiences of a mostly middle-class left who circulated in activist networks spanning the city and has largely ignored the experiences of working-class people who could not afford to stop organizing in their neighbourhoods. During the 1980s, residents in the Montréal neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles launched projet St-Charles, a plan to build 500 units of co-operative housing to buttress the deindustrializing area against gentrification. Co-ops were a form of low-income housing that some felt could also serve as the organizational basis for a broader movement of poor and working-class people. Plans did not progress exactly as intended; internal race, gender, class, generational, and linguistic tensions within the neighbourhood complicated attempts by local organizers to build a representational movement, as did the social-spending cutbacks that characterized the neoliberal 1980s. Rather than abandon their principles, projet organizers continued to develop co-op housing, thereby sheltering a social fabric and radical critique in Pointe-Saint-Charles from the violent restructuring of the neoliberal city.

On Canada Day 2017, author Helene Vosters hosted a Stitch-by-Stitch Unsettling Canada 150 sewing circle and picnic. Despite intermittent thundershowers, with umbrellas and soggy red thread in hand, a group of twenty to thirty intrepid stitchers embroidered text from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) 94 Calls to Action onto Canadian flags. By the time Canada 150 reached its Canada Day zenith, Vosters asserts, it had already become increasingly apparent that the story of a beneficent Canadian nation committed to equity and multicultural inclusivity that the celebrations sought to engender had been significantly eclipsed in mainstream and social media by critiques of the sesquicentennial’s ahistorical premise and its disregard for the ongoing violent effects of settler-colonialism. Against this backdrop, Vosters weaves reflections of the sewing circle as a labour of reinscription with an inquiry into the value (and pitfalls) of embracing what Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson and settler scholar Keavy Martin call everyday “aesthetic actions.”

The article reviews the book, "Refus global. Histoire d'une réception partielle," by Sophie Dubois.

In both academic and practitioner communities, there is an increased concern related to the time-consuming nature of the traditional labour arbitration system in Canada. The arbitration process was initially instituted to combat the delays and costs experienced in the courts. This study addresses the gap in the scientific literature by considering these ongoing concerns. Many Canadian jurisdictions offer the parties an opportunity to expedite the arbitration process pursuant to applicable legislation. However, despite the opportunity to accelerate the process, there appears to be a reluctance to use the expedited arbitration system. We performed content analysis on over 550 Canadian expedited and traditional labour arbitration cases. The case sample was limited to termination cases. We studied and compared delay at multiple times during the arbitration process, including the delay to the hearing, delay to the arbitration award, and total delay. Furthermore, we studied the case outcome; specifically, whether the grievance was granted or denied and adopted an ordered analysis to investigate differences in case outcomes. Our results support the perception that there is a difference in the expediency of expedited arbitration cases in comparison with traditional arbitration cases. The results also show that the outcomes of dismissal cases, decided in the expedited system, do not significantly differ from the traditional arbitration system. The findings suggest that there are statutorily available opportunities for the parties to accelerate the arbitration process without compromising the results.

The article reviews the book, "The Struggle for Development," by Benjamin Selwyn.

This article reviews the book, "Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland" by Steven Parfitt.

The article reviews the book, "A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and their Homeland Connections," edited by Nancy L. Green and Roger Waldinger.

L’article porte sur les pratiques mises en oeuvre pour prévenir les risques psychosociaux (RPS) dans les entreprises. Selon les connaissances scientifiques actuelles, réduire ces risques requiert une approche intégrée qui vise à développer les ressources collectives et individuelles des travailleurs, ainsi qu’à réduire leurs contraintes professionnelles. Toutefois très peu de publications ont porté sur la façon dont les employeurs appréhendent effectivement ces questions. L’objectif de cette étude est de mieux comprendre les pratiques de prévention déclarées par des dirigeants d’entreprises, en relation avec la manière dont ils perçoivent l’exposition de leur personnel aux RPS. Nous avons élaboré un cadre d’analyse exploratoire des relations entre la prévention des RPS, la perception des facteurs de risques par les employeurs et diverses caractéristiques des entreprises. Ce cadre a servi de base à une enquête auprès de 404 établissements. À partir d’analyses factorielles et de régressions multiples, l’étude a fait émerger deux modes de prévention : 1- des mesures de gestion spécifique des RPS axées sur les procédures et la formation et liées principalement au risque d’atteinte à l’intégrité personnelle (harcèlement, agressions, discrimination, confrontation à des événements traumatisants) ; et 2- des mesures d’amélioration générale des conditions de travail (organisation, horaires, équipements et environnement de travail) qui peuvent contribuer à renforcer les ressources, mais que les employeurs ne perçoivent guère comme de la prévention des RPS. Les pratiques sont liées à des variables structurelles, ainsi qu’aux modes de participation et de gestion des risques professionnels dans leur ensemble, davantage qu’à la perception de l’employeur concernant l’exposition aux RPS. Les résultats soulignent deux défis pour les autorités. Le premier consiste à faire adopter par les entreprises une approche plus globale, non centrée sur les phénomènes de harcèlement. Le second réside dans le renforcement de mesures de prévention ayant un impact favorable sur l’activité réelle de travail.

In this essay I explain both why Karl Marx remains an important thinker and why he is in some respects inadequate. I focus on the central issue of 'materialism vs. idealism,' and briefly explore ways in which contemporary intellectuals still haven't assimilated the insights of historical materialism. In the last section of the paper I examine the greatest weakness of Marxism, its theory of proletarian revolution, and propose an alternative conceptualization that both updates the theory for the twenty-first century and is more faithful to historical materialism than Marx's own conception was.

The article reviews the book, "Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992," by Teishan A. Latner.

Comment analyser la montée de ces nouveaux mouvements de travailleurs que représentent les mobilisations des travailleurs informels et précaires, oů les femmes tiennent une place importante, y compris en termes de leadership ? Les approches traditionnelles en sociologie et en relations industrielles évoquent une montée des identités sociales par rapport aux identités professionnelles, comme s'il s'agissait de la montée d'intérets spécifiques. Â partir d'une redéfinition ontologique du travail qu'ouvre l'approche féministe matérialiste, cet article propose une autre lecture des objets de conflictualité amenés par les mobilisations de travailleuses et de travailleurs informels. Il s'appuie, pour ce faire, sur une étude de cas effectuée dans l'économie solidaire brésilienne et sur le concept d'identité collective de Melucci. Il explore la façon dont ces nouveaux mouvements de travailleurs définissent les processus d'exploitations et de dominations a combattre et la façon dont ils mettent en pratique leurs visions du changement social. Ľarticle met ainsi en lumiére la portée émancipatrice des transformations de leur rapport au travail et souligne, a l'opposé, les réductionnismes qui animent les stratégies syndicales, en particulier quand elles prétendent défendre les droits des travailleurs en développant des coopératives compétitives. Cette approche, qui reconnaît le caractére situé des connaissances, permet de mieux saisir la portée des mobilisations dans l'économie solidaire et le pourquoi des tensions entre syndicats et travailleurs précaires et informels lors des luttes menées par ces derniers.

The Living Wage for Families Campaign advocates for employers to sign on to pay a living wage to all direct and contract service staff as well as does policy advocacy on issues that impact working families. Since 2008, we have partnered with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to calculate the living wage in Metro Vancouver. Additionally, we support 20 communities across BC in calculating a local living wage. The living wage is a bare bones calculation that, through a methodology established in consultation with academics, employers, and low-wage workers, determines how much a family needs to earn to meet their expenses in a particular region. Living wages across BC vary from $20.62/hr in the lower mainland to $18.77 in Revelstoke to $15.90 in the Fraser Valley. There is no community in BC that has a living wage that is lower than $15/hr.