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In this submission to the BC Fair Wages Commission, the CCPA-BC highlights the urgency for British Columbia to adopt a $15 minimum wage by March 2019. BC’s current minimum wage is a poverty-level wage. Low-wage workers need a significant boost to their income and they have been waiting a long time. Over 400,000 British Columbians—22 per cent of all paid employees in the province—work for less than $15 per hour and they would significantly benefit from a $15 minimum wage. --Publisher's description

Since the mid‐1990s, governments have adopted gender mainstreaming (GM) as a strategy for achieving gender equality and improving women's social, economic and political conditions. Yet, studies indicate that GM continues to be unevenly implemented, both within and across countries. To explain this outcome, this paper focuses on the local implementers of GM — the gender focal points — and how they understand GM and interpret it in their everyday work. Drawing upon interviews with gender focal points in the Canadian public service, we explore how bureaucratic role perceptions shape how these local actors understand GM and how they navigate the complex terrain between bureaucratic neutrality and the equality agenda of gender mainstreaming. Our exploratory study shows no common understanding among our interviewees, revealing how the meaning of gender mainstreaming varies depending on whether the public servant views himself or herself as policy analyst, policy advisor or policy advocate. Based on these insights, we conclude with suggestions for future research on gender mainstreaming.

In the decades after World War II, immigrants generally managed to fit into the Canadian labour market without too many obstacles. Even when they were poorly educated, they found adequate jobs in the secondary sector, particularly in manufacturing. Moreover, if they were initially paid less than the natives, they tended to catch up after about fifteen years. In the early 1970s, however, when the thirty-year postwar boom gave way to a period of restructuring the productive system, the ensuing strong expansion of the tertiary sector resulted in fewer suitable employment opportunities for immigrants. The Canadian and Quebec governments responded by putting in place a policy that sought to select their immigrants on the basis of human capital characteristics. This policy continues to this day, especially because the world of work is currently engaged in a new phase of transformation linked to the development of the knowledge economy.

We examine whether a sex-based salary gap identified at the University of Manitoba in 1993 and 2003 persists in 2013. We apply decomposition techniques to analyze the factors contributing to the salary gap in each year and to its changes across the two decades. We find that a smaller but substantial 12 percent gap persists in 2013. In contrast to previous years, the 2013 gap is completely explained by sex differences in faculty, experience, and, more important, type of appointment and rank. The distribution of values of these control variables changed considerably between the earlier years and 2013 in ways that influenced the gap.

In June the Ontario government announced its intention to raise the province’s minimum wage by the most in 50 years: 23% this January 1 and another 7% a year later. This move would raise the ratio of minimum wage to average hourly earnings in Ontario from the current 44% to 53% on January 1 and 55% a year later. There is only one precedent among the four largest provinces in Canada for an increase of the minimum wage to such ratios, the experience of Quebec in 1975. Two years after its introduction, this increase was found to be counterproductive. The segments of the labour force most likely to be affected by a surge in the minimum wage are youth (people aged 15-24) and recent immigrants (those landed less than five years ago).

Work stress is costly and decreases productivity. Quebecers are much more likely to report high work stress than other Canadians. Using data from the Canadian Community Health Survey spanning 2003–2012, we study the determinants of reported work stress. Chronic disease, mental health, and lifestyle choices all contribute to work stress. Despite including a large variety of influences, living in Quebec is persistently associated with higher work stress. We discuss contextual and cultural factors. No one explanation stands out, but Quebecers are absent from work more often than others, suggesting that the costs of this phenomenon are real.

In this paper, Fay Faraday explores how to provide workers in the on-demand service economy protection under the Employment Standards and Labour Relations Acts. Ontario’s Bill 148 – the Fair Workplace Better Jobs Act, 2017 – should provide protections to workers in precarious employment in the 21st century labour market. Workers in the on-demand service sector are at the forefront of both precarity and technological change. This paper provides guidance on how Bill 148 could be amended to extend protections to these workers.

The Ontario government has committed to raise its minimum wage to $14 on January 1, 2018 then to $15 on January 1, 2019. This paper examines who in the province will get a "raise" from the $15 minimum wage, and finds it will largely benefit the province’s most marginalized—a broad and diverse swath of workers including contract, seasonal, and casual workers, part-time workers, women, and immigrants. The report also finds that the vast majority of workers who will benefit from a higher minimum wage are over the age of 20, and that they work for big companies (those with 500 or more employees), not small businesses. The study comes as the Ontario government consults the public about its decision to raise the minimum wage to $15 by January 2019. Although the data source for these findings, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) public use microdata file (PUMF), did not specify Indigenous identify, additional research has shown the benefits of a $15 minimum wage to Indigenous Ontarians would be significant, particularly for First Nations women and families. --Website description

Families who work for low wages face impossilbe choices--buy food or heat the house, feed the children or pay the rent. The result can be spiralling debt, constant anxiety and long-term health problems. This reports breaks out the differences in actual costs for single parent and two-parent families in three locations in the province of Manitoba: Winnipeg, Brandon, Thompson. And with these real costs proposes a living wage for these families.

This article aims to explain whether and to what extent formal and informal labor education and training initiatives help increase union participation among young members. Between 2009 and 2014, twenty-two interviews were conducted with ten national union leaders and twelve young leaders in two trade union organizations operating in the public and private sectors in Quebec. To complement these data, fifty-three focus group discussions were held, involving more than four hundred thirty young members (under the age of thirty). Our results reveal the presence of three areas of tension associated with the internal functioning of these unions. They also point out some factors that may boost the participation of young workers, internally.

Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy and othering to connect the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism and show how material dominance is maintained through colonial logics and racially ordered narratives. Through in-depth interviews, I investigate how white settler farmers perceive and construct two distinctly ‘othered’ groups: Indigenous peoples and migrant farmers and farm workers. Further, I show the disparate role of land and labour in constructing each group, and specifically, the cultural and material benefits of these constructions for land-based settler populations. At the same time, settler colonial structures and logics remain reciprocally coupled to political conditions. For instance, contemporary neoliberalism in Canadian agriculture modifies settler colonial structures to be sure. I argue, however, that political economic analyses of land and food production in Canada (such as corporate concentration, land grabbing and farm consolidation) ought to better integrate the systemic forces of settler colonialism that have conditioned land access in the first place. Of course, determining who is able to access land—and thus, who is able to grow food—continues to be a territorial struggle. Thus, in order to shift these conditions we ought to examine how those with access and control have acquired and maintained it.

There is renewed discussion of a basic or guaranteed income at both the federal and the provincial levels in Canada, but counterarguments about the cost, work disincentives, and electoral appeal of such schemes remain challenging. In this article, we argue that a grand plan for a basic or guaranteed income is unnecessary because self-financing redesign of existing tax credits to be refundable can better target benefits to low-income families while improving tax equity. Using 2015 tax and transfer parameters and estimates of income and population, we assess the federal transfer system as a source of universal income security, identify the revenues that can be raised through the elimination of selected federal tax credits, present four options that could be financed within that budget constraint, assess their performance, and select our preferred universal basic guaranteed income (UGBI) option. We then provide a more detailed assessment of the impact of our preferred UGBI design and discuss the extension of that design to provincial tax and transfer systems. We estimate that the combined federal and provincial UGBI that we propose would effectively target benefits to low-income households and virtually eliminate poverty for all but single non-elderly individuals at a modest efficiency cost in terms of work disincentives.

The wage needed to cover the costs of raising a family in Metro Vancouver is virtually unchanged in the past year, however, child care and housing costs are major challenges for many families, a report released today finds.

Homer Stevens spent his life fighting for the working people. Fearless, passionate, honest, a straight-talking champion of social justice, a civil libertarian, a tough labour leader, an environmentalist before the term was coined, he believed political engagement was the best way to defend and advance democracy. --Introduction

hey are young and highly educated, but many “sharing economy” workers in the GTA are selling their services under precarious working conditions. Read the first comprehensive look at workers who sell “sharing economy” type services and the consumers who buy them in this new report.

The recent economic downturn magnified a routine occurrence in the Canadian labour market: job loss resulting from an employer downsizing, moving, or going out of business. Nevertheless, even in times of economic expansion, rates of involuntary job loss persist across a wide range of demographic and labour market groups. Moving is one way individuals may respond to job loss, relocating either to cheaper housing or in search of work. Drawing on data from the 1996–2010 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, this article examines the relationship between job loss and geographic mobility in Canada and provides evidence on the types of neighbourhoods to which individuals move. The findings establish job loss both as a key life course transition motivating residential mobility and long-distance migration in Canada and as a trigger event that initiates entry into high-deprivation areas.

À l'occasion du lancement du Fonds Syndicat du transport de Montréal (Employés-es des services d'entretien - CSN), nous avons cru opportun de présenter une composante de l'histoire de l'action syndicale de ces milliers de travailleurs et travailleuses qui ont concouru durant plus de cent ans au fonctionnement du service de transport en commun à Montréal.

We use two administrative data sets to examine the correlates of (a) taking the high school courses needed for university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs and (b) applying to and registering in such programs. Staying on the STEM path during high school depends most importantly on math and science grades at each level. Factors such as gender, immigration status, and average neighbourhood income play relatively smaller roles. These two sets of factors play similar roles in the transition to university STEM programs. These results raise challenging questions of what lies behind the differences in critical factors among high school students.

The Knights of Labor became one of the great global working-class movements of the nineteenth century between 1880 and 1900, extending from New Zealand to Belgium, Scotland to South Africa. That story, however, has been told only in fragments, on local, regional, and national levels. No truly global history of the Knights of Labor yet exists. This article brings together what historians have so far uncovered of their activities outside Canada and the United States, provides an outline of what their global history might look like, and shows how that history enriches our understanding of national labor histories across the world and of the Knights themselves in their American home. Finally, this article addresses the wide range of historical topics that would benefit from such a global history, including labor and imperial history and the construction of gender and color lines on an international scale during the nineteenth century.

The recent announcements of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot and Finland's cash grants to jobless persons reflect the growing interest in some form of guaranteed annual income (GAI). This idea has circulated for decades and has now been revived, no doubt prompted by concerns of increased inequality and employment disruptions. The Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (Mincome), conducted some 40 years ago, was an ambitious social experiment designed to assess a range of behavioural responses to a negative income tax, a specific form of GAI. This article reviews that experiment, clarifying what exactly Mincome did and did not learn about how individuals and households reacted to the income guarantees. This article reviews the potential for Mincome to answer questions about modern-day income experiments and describes how researchers may access these valuable data.