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This chapter examines union avoidance strategies in Canada's growing casino gaming sector through a case study of six successive failed unionization drives at Niagara's casinos between 1996 and 2016. --Introduction

The idea of universal basic income (UBI) has taken on new life as people experience greater inequality and greater exploitation than ever before—combined with the recurrence of the historically-cyclical fear of mass unemployment driven by rapid advancements in automation technologies. But the idea of providing every person with a certain amount of money, regardless of their socioeconomic status or (in)ability to or (dis)interest in working, is far from universally-accepted by socialists. This essay offers replies to three common socialist criticisms of various basic income proposals, in an effort to defend the radical potential of UBI; a potential that is consonant with the fundamental goal of the socialist project—achieving a democratic, non-exploitative world beyond capitalism.

Canadian universities are relying heavily on precariously-employed faculty on campus. Once among the most secure professions in the country, by 2016-17 contract jobs in the sector accounted for the majority (53.6 percent) of all university faculty appointments, according to data obtained through Freedom of Information requests to all 78 publicly-funded Canadian universities. The findings show that reliance on contract faculty is a foundational part of the system, and has been for at least a decade. This report is the first-ever snapshot of the prevalence of university contract jobs, where they’re located, and what departments are more likely to offer contract work instead of permanent, secure academic appointments.

While post-secondary institutions are places of learning, they also employ thousands of people across a broad spectrum of job classifications. This report explores the extent to which workers in Canada’s post-secondary institutions are experiencing precarity. More precisely, it asks whether employment on university and college campuses in Ontario is becoming more precarious, for whom and for what reasons. This report combines quantitative analysis of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data with qualitative accounts of the lived experience of precarity from post-secondary employees. Overall, the LFS data analysis suggests that 53% of post-secondary education workers in Ontario are, to some extent, precariously employed. Specifically, the report identifies a rise in work categories that are more precarious (e.g., research assistants and teaching assistants) alongside a decline in others that have traditionally been less precarious (e.g., librarians).

Organizations continue to be challenged and enriched by the diversity of their workforces. Scholars are increasingly focusing on inclusion to enhance work environments by offering support for a diverse workforce. This article reviews and synthesizes the inclusion literature and provides a model of inclusion that integrates existing literature to offer greater clarity, as well as suggestions for moving the literature forward. We review the inclusion literature consisting of the various foci (work group, organization, leader, organizational practices, and climate) and associated definitions and how it has developed. We then describe themes in the inclusion literature and propose a model of inclusion. Finally, we end by discussing theoretical and practical implications.

The article reviews the book, "Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change," edited by Ian Thomas MacDonald.

This article reviews the book, "Empty Promises: Why Workplace Pension Law Doesn't Deliver Pensions" by Elizabeth Shilton.

When members of the Office and Professional Workers Organizing Committee (opwoc), employed by the Banque Canadienne Nationale (bcn), set up picket lines at branches in Montreal on 30 April 1942, they began the first strike in the Canadian banking industry. This article analyzes the four-week strike, and the organizing drive that preceded it, as a way of exploring how changes in the relationship between labour, capital, and the state during the Second World War helped or hindered unionization in unorganized industries - areas with limited or non-existent levels of union representation and often predominantly female and racialized workforces. By examining this failed white-collar strike in relation to the substantial increase in labour organizing that occurred in the 1940s and the concomitant changes to the labour relations system, we can consider the effect that these changes had for different types of workers. A closer look at the first Canadian bank strike shows that the changes made to the labour relations system in this period made little difference for the men and women who joined opwoc: the state continued to hamper their organizing effgorts, and the banks continued to oppose and work to thwart unionization. Half-hearted support from labour leaders compounded the problem. Ultimately, the bank's anti-union behaviour, the regional war labour board's drawn-out and disappointing decision on bcn employees' application for increased compensation, and labour leaders' willingness to accept the board's decision undermined the strike and hindered bank workers' efforts to unionize in the early 1940s.

This article reviews the book, "Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement" by Geoffrey Bell.

In the first few years of the 1940s, poet P.K. Page was employed as a filing clerk for Allied War Supplies, a Montreal-based war firm tasked with producing and distributing materials needed for Canada's war effort. During this time, Page joined the editorial committee of Preview, a socialist poetry magazine to which she contributed a number of poems about office work, workers, and managerial culture. This essay reads that remarkable set of poems through a double lens: it first explores their documentary and diagnostic value as an insider's view of the office during what Graham S. Lowe calls the "administrative revolution"; it then shows how the socialist "work" of these poems is constrained by an aesthetic philosophy that defines the poet and poetry in opposition to labourers and labour-a stance that introduces a number of contradictions that account for the poems' strangely ambivalent and patronizing tone.

The article reviews the book, "Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City," by Steve Early.

The article reviews the book, "The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism," edited by Kevin Skerrett, Johanna Weststar, Simon Archer, and Chris Roberts.

The article reviews the book, "Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century," by Verity Burgmann.

Are students with a permanent disability more likely to drop out of post-secondary education than students without a permanent disability? Once they are out of postsecondary education, do their experiences in the labour market differ? Answers to these questions are necessary to evaluate current policies and to develop new policies. This paper addresses these two questions using a unique data set that combines administrative records from the Canada Student Loans Program with survey responses. Our measure of permanent disability is an objective one that requires a physician’s diagnosis. The survey data supply information on the students’ education and labour market status. Simple descriptive statistics suggest that, compared to students without a permanent disability, students with a permanent disability are equally likely to drop out of postsecondary education, but less likely to be in the labour force and more likely to be unemployed. We use propensity score matching to address potential selection into the group of students who documented their disability. The results using propensity score matching are consistent with the descriptive statistics. Our story is one of an underpublicized success—the rising number of students with disabilities in postsecondary institutions and their equal likelihood of graduation—and a persistent problem—the continued disadvantage that people with disabilities, even those with the same educational attainment as people without disabilities, face in the labour market.

Models of reference dependence have improved the connection between economic theory and documented labour supply behaviour. In particular, the Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007, 2009) [hereafter "KR"] theory of expectation based reference dependent preferences appears to be a disciplined way to unify the conflicting wage elasticity estimates, and recent laboratory and natural experiments suggest this theory may work in practice as well. I take this theory to the field in a pair of laboratory-like experiments designed to test if expectations determine the effort of a group of impoverished individuals involved in piece-rate work in Northeast Brazil. I use Abeler, Falk, Goette, and Huffman's (2011) experimental mechanism, which is a clear test of KR preferences in effort provision, in two experiments: first to test if rational expectations act as a reference point that influences effort, and second to test if adaptive expectations act as a reference point that influences effort. In both experiments, I find that although people do not behave in accordance with KR preferences, they do not behave as though they make their decisions following canonical lines either. I then outline a speculative rationale for the observed behaviour in these experiments—the adaptive heuristic of regret matching—where workers are able to evaluate their ex-post feelings of regret, even if they do not know the source of those feelings, to optimize behaviour going forward.

This chapter examines the concept of precariousness in work in relation to income and labour market polarization. Although there is growing interest in the separate but related notion of precarity in human geography, economic and labour geographers have engaged less with the literature on precarious work and the decline of the standard employment relation. This chapter provides a brief overview of how precarious employment is understood, before turning to focus on two particular dimensions: the role of labour market intermediaries, and the challenges of regulation in an era of flexible work.

Feminist theories of social reproduction are theories of the gendered nature of power and domination. This seems axiomatic, and the recent upsurge of interest in social reproduction in human geography (Casolo and Doshi, 2013; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016; Hopkins, 2015; Jackson and Neely, 2015; Kofman, 2012; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015; Rioux, 2015) in part relates to the continuing urgency of the need to understand the relationship between social difference and the exercise of power in the contemporary space economy. The elision of reproductive relations and the gendered norms that undergird them from accounts of economic and political crisis, despite decades of feminist research and activism, continues almost unabated. This elision reveals as much as it obscures, shining a light on the politics of knowledge production inside and outside of the academy and bolstering the sense among proponents of the upsurge of feminist theory and social reproduction – myself included – that ‘theory as usual’ is not an option. The conjunctural crisis affecting political economic and ecological foundations of contemporary societies does not sit above the epiphenomena of social relations and related social infrastructures, although there is little to acknowledge their fundamental interrelationship in many accounts of crisis. At the same time, however, the landscape of what we might broadly characterize as ‘feminist theory’ is highly variegated, with ongoing tensions among those who identify with post-structuralist, radical and political economic traditions. Nancy Fraser has famously characterized these tensions as struggles over redistribution versus recognition, where the latter is identified with (oft-conflated) post-structuralism and identity politics. JK Gibson-Graham, on the other hand, has associated Marxian political economic approaches (including the concept of social reproduction) with capital-centrism and deep-seated androcentrism. Feminism is itself a house divided. These divisions are perhaps inevitable on a terrain as broad and uneven as feminism. Nor is a unified, monolithic feminism necessarily desirable. The conceptualization of power is itself a key site of differentiation within feminist theory and research. Fraser, a feminist theorist and political philosopher of the Critical Theory school, has received relatively little attention in human geography – far less than one of her main sparring partners and interlocutors, Judith Butler. But, as I argue in this chapter, her body of work is a rich, if not unproblematic, resource not only for feminist geographers but for all of us who are, or should be, interested in how power, inequality and justice are interrelated with reproduction of and through difference.

The articles reviews the book, "Labour Arbitration in Canada," by Morton Mitchnick and Brian Etherington.

The article reviews the book, "Conflits et résistances au travail," by Yvan Sainsaulieu.

Through a combination of historical and contemporary analysis this book shows how settler colonialism, as a mode of racial capitalism, has made and remade Winnipeg and the Canadian Prairie West over the past one hundred and fifty years. It traces the emergence of a 'dominant bloc, ' or alliance, in Winnipeg that has imagined and installed successive regional development visions to guarantee its own wealth and power. The book gives particular attention to the ways that an ascendant post-industrial urban redevelopment vision for Winnipeg's city-centre has renewed longstanding colonial 'legacies' of dispossession and racism over the past forty years. In doing so, it moves beyond the common tendency to break apart histories of settler-colonial conquest from studies of urban history or contemporary urban processes. --Publisher's description