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The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out 35 years of women’s economic gains in two short months. At the height of the lockdown, women were working 27 per cent fewer hours, in the aggregate, than in February 2020. In total, 2.8 million women lost their job or were working less than half of their regular hours because of the March 2020 economic lockdowns. This report examines what’s happened to women in the workforce since. It finds mixed reviews: many women in higher-paying jobs are now doing better than before the pandemic. However, women in low-paying, pandemic-vulnerable jobs and in the care economy are still having a rough time of things. The COVID-19 crisis illustrated both the shortcomings of existing policies and institutions and what’s possible with strong public leadership. The imperative now is to apply the lessons of COVID-19 in service of a more resilient and inclusive labour market and gender-just future. Institutional reforms and greater awareness of the damaging impacts of gender disparities may yet create opportunities for systemic change. --Website description

In this book, independent experts analyze the performance of Justin Trudeau’s years in power in over 20 important areas of government policy. The record of what has been done–and what hasn’t–will surprise even well-informed readers. The focus is on six policy areas: Indigenous rights, governance and housing; the environment and energy; taxes and spending; healthcare and social benefits; foreign policy, immigration, and trade; and social policy including drug reform, labour rights, and racism. Editors Katherine Scott, Laura Macdonald, and Stuart Trew of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have recruited Canada’s most knowledgeable experts in their areas to contribute to this volume. -- Publisher's description

This article analyzes nail technicians' occupational health experiences using body and hazard mapping – a visual, low-cost, and worker-centred approach. Thirty-seven Toronto-based nail technicians from predominantly Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean communities identified various occupational illnesses, injuries, and symptoms on visual representations of human bodies (body mapping) and linked these to their hazard sources in the nail salon (hazard mapping). The impacts identified include musculoskeletal aches and pains, stress and mental health concerns, various symptoms linked to chemical exposure, and concerns about cancer and reproductive health. Rather than a conventional occupational health approach, this work draws on Vanessa Agard-Jones' expansion of the "body burden" as more than the bioaccumulation of chemical agents. As such, this article asserts that nail technicians' body burden encompasses various types of occupational illnesses and injuries. In addition, nail technicians are exposed to broader "toxic" systemic inequities and structural conditions that allow these workplace exposures to occur and persist. By illustrating the embodied and experiential knowledges of nail technicians and contextualizing this lived experience, the body and hazard maps illuminate vast layers of harm – or multiscalar toxicities – borne by nail technicians. Moreover, as a group-based method, body and hazard mapping allow collective reflection and can spur worker mobilization toward safer and fairer nail salons.

The article reviews the book, "To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci," by Jean-Yves Frétigné.

This paper examines the politics surrounding the construction, implementation, and administration of the Saskatchewan Trade Union Act (stua) between 1944 and 1950. The act is important because it reflects the first attempt by a social democratic government in North America to construct a system of labour law that ostensibly aligned socialist ideas with the rights of workers to form trade union freedoms. This makes the stua unique in Canadian labour and political history because the legislation demonstrated the policy priorities of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) and the Canadian Congress of Labour as both organizations were attempting to solidify their places in postwar Canada. This history reflects the fact that the ccf and the unions, like the left in general throughout the 1940s and 1950s, defined the working class narrowly, focusing attention on white and male breadwinners with women and racialized workers very much on the periphery. The history also demonstrates the inherent contradiction within social democratic reform politics, as the act extended numerous rights to workers to organize and collectively bargain but when those same workers pushed back against government decision-making during the province’s first public-sector strike in 1948, political tensions found many of those same social democrats acting in similar manners to their private-sector counterparts. These tensions within social democratic approaches to labour relations – so evident in the Saskatchewan experience – have become a central contradiction of the movement throughout the postwar period and continue today.

Pays homage to the feminist social and cultural historian, Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023).

The article reviews the book, "Why Canada Needs Postal Banking ," by John Anderson.

The article reviews the book, "Le marxisme et l'oppression des femmes. Vers une théorie unitaire," by Lise Vogel.

In 2026, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement will be up for review—and the possibility of political shakeups means that governments should start preparing now. This report assesses the functioning of CUSMA to date and suggests ways to expand on the rights-based and worker-centred novelties in the agreement that improved upon the original NAFTA. Though national elections will transform governments in all three countries between now and the 2026 review, the worker-centred trade policy of the current U.S. administration will likely live on. For political, geoeconomic and national security reasons, a bipartisan consensus has emerged on the need to renew North America’s manufacturing base and better protect workers from subsidized—financially or through weaker labour and environmental standards—foreign competition. This report examines how Canada could prepare, and goals to strive towards, starting today.

Debates over worker subordination are central to discussions of the efficacy of protective labour and employment law whose central mission in a capitalist political economy, after all, is to reduce but not eliminate subordination. When protective labour and employment law seems to be fulfilling its mission discussions of worker subordination seem to ebb, but the topic becomes more urgent as the efficacy of the law declines. Not surprisingly, as labour law’s efficacy has been declining over the past several decades, we are in the midst of a revival of debates over worker subordination, the premise of this special issue. While many seek to revive the classic mission of labour and employment law, ameliorating the worst excesses of subordination, while leaving in place labour’s structural dependency on capital, the goal of this article is to revisit and elaborate a marxist political economy perspective to demonstrate that workers’ structural subordination to capital is deepening and that this limits the possibility of achieving much of the reformist agenda. While there are no easy ways of overcoming that structural subordination, a progressive reform agenda must centre that subordination and think about how labour laws might contribute to a transformative project. --Introduction

Non-profit work plays a vital role in connecting policy and community, as well as providing essential services in Canada. However, evidence suggests that despite being often engaged in equity seeking work, many non-profit organizations remain sites of inequity and marginalization among service provider staff. In this qualitative study, researchers conducted interviews with representatives from 60 organizations across the province of Alberta, Canada. Using intersectionality and thematic analysis, the study identified three key themes across issues related to the feminization of gender-equity seeking work in the third sector. First, economic exploitation, including low pay across the non-profit sector, and pay discrepancies across positions within non-profit work, impact staff in gendered and racialized ways. Second, uneven labour expectations compound exploitation through failures of performative Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), unpaid labour expectations, and gender bias both within and outside of organizational structure. Third, service provider capacities are being restricted through staff mental health challenges and burnout, staff use of the services they provide clients, and challenges with worker retention. Organizations and funders may address these inequities by demanding transparency in promotion policies to ensure women and gender-diverse people, particularly those who are racialized, have fair access to management and leadership positions, as well as by reforming funding structures to encourage more equitable pay.

The article reviews the book, "L’HUMAIN plus qu’une ressource au coeur de la gestion," edited by François Bernard Malo, James D. Thwaites and Yves Hallée.

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading work published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers. -- Publisher's description

In this report, we, the research team, are going to consider the policies that come together to create an exploitative and precarious labour conditions for migrant care workers, who are predominantly financially challenged racialized women. We have conducted a systematic narrative synthesis analysis of the policies that are relevant to migrant care workers. In our consideration of these myriad policies, we will present a narrative that emerges in the coordinated design of these policies. The narrative that has emerged presented a journey to precariousness through a heightened likelihood of human rights violations that is facilitated by a network of policies and practices. We identify policies and practices that obscure care workers and the conditions of their labour, as well as the discriminatory impact of various policies and practices that support devaluing and delegitimizing the identities and labour of care workers. Finally, we consider the ways in which multiple policies and practices come together to create significant authorities with the capacity to surveil, restrict, and punish workers.... Executive summary

Canadian higher education has been critiqued for its inequitable structures and failure to change despite claiming to be inclusive. This paper considers the experiences of 15 academic developers who engage in varied forms of institutional equity work. By focusing on how their work takes place, why they pursue equity work and their relationships with co-workers, I open a critical discussion of how prepared Canadian teaching and learning centres are to support equity work. By examining equity work and how it is supported, I intend to contribute to ongoing dialogues about the urgency of structural change in Canadian academic development workplaces.

Temporary migrant workers on closed work permits are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. To address this precarity, the Government of Canada introduced the Open Work Permit for Vulnerable Workers (OWP-V) in June 2019. This permit allows migrant workers in abusive situations, or at risk of abuse, to leave their employers and find new work in Canada for up to 12 months. Drawing from secondary literature, policy analysis and qualitative interviews with migrant support workers and experts, this research assesses the implementation of the OWP-V policy in the Maritimes by examining its benefits and critiques. This research demonstrates that although some perceive the policy as a step in the right direction, significant barriers remain that hinder the effectiveness of the OWP-V in removing migrants from abusive conditions. Further findings demonstrate that even with systemic and technological improvements, stakeholders remain dissatisfied with the policy as it fails to protect migrant workers from re-entering cycles of abuse and exploitation, serving only as temporary relief. To improve the implementation of this policy, stakeholders provided several suggestions pertaining to accessibility, language options, processing times, and inspections. Overall, this thesis argues that while these changes could help improve the working conditions of temporary migrant workers in Canada, substantial systemic issues remain.

This article contributes to understanding the relationship between mobilities and labour control. Focusing on the expansion of the Chinese/Asian restaurant industry in the United States during the last two decades and drawing from a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnography, the concept of spatial labour control is employed to explicate the various forms of labour control and the mechanisms that contribute to the autogenous reproduction of the industry's out-of-state work arrangement. Specifically, a spatial lens reveals paternalistic control over workers' food and housing, spatial control over workers' morals and affect, and control over workers' mobilities. Moreover, workers' constant relocation to new work destinations to combat social isolation and feelings of restlessness unintentionally reproduces the circulation of atomized labour for the industry. Such conditions are inconducive to collectively addressing labour discontent.

During COVID-19, politicians and the media in North America spotlighted the contributions of essential workers. As many low-income essential services are performed by migrant workers, this study explores how the pandemic served as a critical moment to raise societal awareness of the disadvantaged circumstances faced by migrant workers and to garner public support for their rights and equality. Engaging with scholarly critiques of media representation of underprivileged migrant groups and migration and labor scholars’ work on migrant workers in Canada, the study examines mainstream media discourse and public discourse on essential workers and migrant workers in Canada during the pandemic. Adopting thematic and critical discourse analysis, the study reveals that nationalist ideology, intersected with capitalist and neoliberal ideologies, prevents the public from forming solidarity with migrant workers, although overt racist and xenophobic discourse diminishes, and advocacy voices begin to gain higher visibility in mainstream media. The study contends that mobilizing broader public support to tackle inequalities remains a crucial issue in the context of transnational labor migration.

Canadian theatre has the potential to incite social change but inequitable working environments within theatre organizations have hindered this prospect. The sector needs new frameworks to improve conditions for arts workers. Inspired by several scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Lee Edelman, I look to the concept of queer utopia to address inequities within the theatre sector, with a focus on the role of theatre organizations. By defining Queer Utopian Theory (QUT), analyzing calls to action in the Canadian theatre sector, and employing three focus groups, I created a Queer Utopian framework for Canadian theatre organizations to answer the research question: What is the utility of the concept of queer utopia in addressing inequities in the Canadian theatre sector? My research found that relationship building, embracing fear, and subverting socio-political norms are aspects of QUT that are of utility to organizational leaders who wish to foster equitable environments.