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Examines the shifting currents of court decisions on labour rights in the Charter era. Concludes that labour's resort to the courts is primarily defensive and that victories, when they occur, are limited.

Obituary for Wayne Roberts (1944-2021), a Labour/Le Travail contributor who wrote on labour, food policy, the environment, and urban issues.

The article reviews the book, "Une histoire politique du tiers-monde," by Vijay Prashad.

Defines the value-action gap (i.e., the disjuncture between word and deed) and explores the labour movement's mixed response to the environmental challenge in terms of this model. The conclusion urges labour to help foster a broad-based movment that would integrate environmental sustainability with economic equality and social justice. It also cautions against the embrace of green capitalism. A revised version of the essay in the first edition (2012).

The year 1983 began like any other year in Canada's leftmost--er, West Coast province. Then Bill's bills unleashed four months of public unrest. The newly elected Social Credit government announced an avalanche of far-right legislation that shocked the country. By dropping viciously anti-union legislation that slashed protection for hard-won human rights, Premier Bill Bennett attacked nearly everyone in his contingency. A resistance movement called Solidarity sprung up across the province. Massive street protests, occupations and plans for an all-out general strike had all eyes on B.C. Like other uprisings - from France in 1968 to the anti-racism protests of 2020 - Solidarity arrived unexpectedly and rocked social foundations. Revolution, in one province? Filled with revealing interviews and lively, insightful prose, David Spaner's Solidarity goes behind the scenes of one of the greatest social uprisings in North American history. Spaner delves into the Solidarity months of 1983 through his own experience and that of the activists, both iconic and unsung, that organized B.C.'s masses. Solidarity's intimate storytelling mixes popular culture and rebel politics, finding political answers in the personal lives of those touched by the movement. In recreating this one singularly dramatic event, Spaner's Solidarity becomes the ongoing history of 20th century B.C. - exploring its great divides and unions, cultures and subcultures, and conflicts that continue into the 21st century. -- Publisher's description

There is abundant evidence that when workers can provide input, express opinions, and influence change in their work places. Providing workers with regular, safe channels of “voice” at work increases their personal motivation and job satisfaction. It benefits their employer, too, through reduced turnover, enhanced productivity, and better information flows. And it contributes to improved economic and social outcomes—everything from stronger productivity growth, to less inequality, to improved health.... Summary and main findings

Examines the legislative record of the governing conservative Saskatchewan Party on protecting the rights of migrants and immigrants in the context of business and labour market demands. Concludes that the province's legal regime stands well in comparison to other jurisdictions, although the government has at times also catered to anti-immigration populism, such as the Yellow Vest Canada movement.

Examines the anti-union legislative record of the Saskatchewan Party, which saw one of its core bills, prohibiting the right to strike in a broad range of public sector services, struck down by the Supreme Court. The court did, however, uphold a companion bill that undermined workers' ability to organize. Provides background on provincial labour regimes since the landmark Trade Union Act of 1944 that was passed by the CCF government of Tommy Douglas. Concludes that the Saskatchewan Party has done more than any previous conservative government to curtail the right of workers to organize and take job action.

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia's first female MLA and the British Empire and Commonwealth's first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith demanded a fair deal for "deserving" British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism's privileging of white women. His 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, mothers' and old age pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Her death in 1933 ended an experiment in extending democracy that was both brave and deeply flawed. A Liberal-Labour Lady sheds light on a Canadian suffragist undeservedly neglected by scholars and forgotten by posterity. It also illuminates a half a century of political history, first-wave feminism, immigration, and labour history set in a broad context of shifting ideas, ideologies, and strategies. Although simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada's compromised struggle for greater justice, who helped set the contours of a modern Canada. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History," by Carolyn Strange.

The right to strike has been constitutionally protected in Canada since 2015. In other jurisdictions where the right to strike is explicitly recognized in the constitution, protection against strikebreaking is recognized as part of that right. Only two Canadian provinces restrict the use of replacement workers during a strike or a lockout. Quebec’s Labour Code has provisions that prohibit the use of replacement workers at the employer’s establishment. Quebec arbitrators, courts, and boards have interpreted this ill-defined concept as a strictly physical location of production, while ignoring technological advances that make remote work possible. This paper examines how the restrictive interpretation of establishment allows a form of strikebreaking that the Spanish Constitutional Court has described as “technological strikebreaking” (esquirolaje technologico), while also allowing the use of technology already at the employer’s disposal to circumvent restrictions on replacement workers even when such technology is not routinely used. The impact of technology on strikebreaking is examined through two case studies: the successive lockouts at the Journal de Québec and the Journal de Montréal. In both cases, external contributors provided the newspapers with content electronically, thus allowing uninterrupted publication. Using Katz, Kochan and Colvil’s three-tier model of collective bargaining, this paper looks at how technological strikebreaking disrupts not only the balance of bargaining power but also bargaining strategy, and how, in the case of the Journal de Montréal, it led to devastating bargaining outcomes. Though the lockouts led to a call for legislative reform in 2011, legislative change is not necessary to align existing provisions with the goal of shortening labour disputes.

Despite changes to Canadian immigration policy to address declining labour market outcomes, many highly educated immigrants still face challenges when searching for career-related employment. Semi-structured interviews with 38 newcomer professionals in Edmonton, Alberta and Winnipeg, Manitoba illustrate significant obstacles including a lack of credential recognition, racial discrimination and a requirement for Canadian experience. Drawing from intersectional feminism and critical race theory, this study assesses the perspectives of newcomers during their employment search and explores the common desire for return-migration. Findings illustrate how the pre-arrival expectations of immigrants are incongruent with the realities of persistent labour market barriers. Newcomers consider if they should stay in Canada due to the lack of meaningful economic opportunities.

The article reviews the book, "Cabin Crew Conflict: The British Airways Dispute, 2009–11," by Phil Taylor and Sian Moore.

The article examines the evolution of Canadian corvée labour in the late 17th- and early 18th-century French Empire. In New France, tenants, referred to as habitants, rented land from seigneurs in exchange for several taxes. The labour tax, or corvée, required habitants to work on their seigneur’s estate for one to two days a year. Additionally, habitants were responsible for providing corvée for building any public infrastructure that the community required. From the Nine Years’ War (starting in 1688) to the construction of the Chemin du Roy (1732), colonial officials experimented with mass corvée labour mobilization in Canada. A number of factors allowed habitants to challenge authority when they felt the colonial élite had violated their right to subsistence. When drafted annually into forced labour for the construction of Québec and Montréal’s fortifications, groups of habitants refused to show up for work, called upon their superiors to protect them from service, or collectively discussed mutiny if conditions did not improve. During the first three decades of the 18th century, corvée was a negotiated process, with habitants constantly putting forth their own definitions of acceptable labour mobilization.

The article reviews the book, "Promenade sur Marx. Du côté des héroïnes," by Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation," edited by Evelyn Peters and Chris Anderson, "Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax," by Ted Rutland, "Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg," by Owen Toews, and "Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death," by James Tyner.

Obituary for Ed Finn (1926-2000), journalist, editor, trade unionist, and first leader of the Newfoundland and Labrador NDP.

AbstractThis dissertation explores the points of tension between dominant histories of neighbourhood activism in Toronto and Montreal between 1963-1989 and the lived experiences of locally embedded activists who organized for access to safe jobs, homes, and the right to exist in their neighbourhoods. It demonstrates how material conditions, determined by the overlapping processes of deindustrialization, post-industrial development, and the movement of capital from Montreal to Toronto, shaped how neighbourhood activists organized, who they organized with, what they organized for, and how they recorded what they were doing. Dominant narratives of neighbourhood activism during this period over-emphasize the perspectives white, middle-class, and cis-gendered male activists who benefitted from the world the sixties made. Their upward mobility, made possible through the expansion of public spending and their involvement in gentrification, gave them the time and resources to document what they were doing, elevating their perspectives in the historical record. At the same time, embedded poor and working-class, racialized, disabled, and trans activists who continued to experience the ongoing structural violence of the capitalist city also continued to collectively resist that violence. Unfortunately, their ongoing precarity denied them of the resources necessary to produce historical records to the same degree as their upwardly mobile contemporaries. By historicizing how uneven material conditions shaped what activists were doing and how they recorded what they were doing, this thesis demonstrates how power shaped the production of neighbourhood activism history. It also presents opportunities to contest this power in the historical record.

Since the mid-1950s, the Canadian government has increasingly relied on precarious and/or temporary migrant workers to meet a growing demand for care work. Restrictive immigration policies and programs that promise a pathway to permanent residency but place limitations on workers’ rights and freedoms have led to the creation of a highly vulnerable workforce that is subject to working in low-wage and undervalued sectors with few protections. This report argues that, in addition to immediate reforms to current caregiver pilot programs to help protect vulnerable migrant care workers, Canada should work toward granting permanent resident status to all migrants upon arrival. Granting migrants permanent resident status and equal access to available supports and services is key to ensuring basic human rights for all. The report ends with recommendations to achieve this goal.

Questions the commitment of organized labour to equity, inclusion and diversity, which in practice has been treated as a side show to the bread-and-butter issues. Argues that organized labour must make major internal structural changes to confront the problems of EDI that exist both internally and externally.