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The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Teamsters Strikes of 1934," by Bryan D. Palmer.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities," edited by D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly; and "Academic Careers and the Gender Gap," by Maureen Baker.

Argues that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's exercise of political power falls outside of parliamentary and constitutional norms, such as the repeated use of omnibus bills, prerogation of Parliament, and closure of debates.

Accelerating flows of remittances are dwarfing global development aid. This study deepens our understanding of remittance impacts on the families of workers who come to Canada annually for several months under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Interviews with SAWP workers, their spouses, adult children and teachers in Mexico deepen our understanding of the impacts of these remittances. They demonstrate that the remittances are often literally a lifeline to transnational family survival, allowing them to pay for basic needs such as shelter, food, and medical care. Yet, at the same time, the remittances do not allow most of these workers and their families to escape deep poverty and significant precarity, including new forms of precarity generated by the SAWP. Instead, SAWP remittances help reduce poverty, at least temporarily, to more moderate levels while precarious poverty expands through global neoliberal underdevelopment.

"[U]ses autoethnography to convey the experience of librarians participating in faculty associations, providing a compelling narrative of the impact on the participants and the communities they represent." -- Editors' introduction.

Argues that there is an underlying narrative incoherence in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper's use of history for partisan ends. Examines the government's reaction to traditional liberal interpretations of Canadian history and national identity.

This article reviews the book, "Detroit's Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism," by Colleen Doody.

This dissertation examines workplace issues and events that shaped men’s health, and the healthcare services in support of them, in northern Ontario’s resource extraction industries. Between 1890 and 1925 there were important transformations in the hardrock mining sector including: technological innovations and refinements of the materials and devices used to extract ores; the healthcare mandated and legislatively prescribed but challenging to deliver to frontier workspaces; and how the complex interactions of the men, their work, their communities, wartime demands and collective bargaining combined to construct new definitions of masculinity. Using quantitative data from the Ontario Bureau of Mines on the numbers of annual accidents and fatalities, a clearer understanding emerges that reveals how workingmen’s bodies were understood over time. Together with newspaper accounts, the reports of coroners’ juries, personal papers, doctors’ memoirs and popular histories, the role of work and workplace conditions clarifies how health was managed or how it suffered as the exploitation of the provinces natural resources began in earnest. The impact of World War One caused a wholesale change in the scale and importance of the mines and the men that worked them. This was seen in their solidarity, strength and successful strike immediately after the war and in fewer accidents and fatalities. The pace of change, however, faded in the post-war era. The gains that were made were kept and men’s health and safety never again saw the alarming losses as those enumerated here.

In contrast with Schein's theory, which presumes a single dominant career anchor, this study proposes an original model based on a career value structure that could explain why some individuals have several dominant career anchors. Career values, which are organized according a circular logic, are grouped into four large clusters of values which are opposed by pairs: bureaucratic self-concept opposed to the protean self-concept and careerist self-concept opposed to social self-concept. Using a new career value inventory, the model was tested on a sample of 240 employees and 155 managers in a health care organization. Construct validity was demonstrated by linking career values with career anchors, proactivity and collectivism. For instance, of the four career self-concepts, only the careerist self-concept is significantly related to the managerial competence.

This article reviews the book, "Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania 1897-1959," by Robert P. Wolensky and William A. Hastie, Sr.

This article reviews the book, "Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good," by Stephen D'Arcy.

Since the 2008 revisions to the Ontario Human Rights Code, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) has been responsible for providing fair, accessible, effective and timely resolution of human rights complaints. The author, formerly vice-chair of the HRTO, reviews the implementation and oper- ation of that system over its first five years, highlighting key challenges and the HRTO's responses to them. The author describes the principal stages of the current HRTO process, including applications and responses, mediation, and the hearing on the merits. He also outlines the ongoing restructuring of Ontario's administrative justice system into clusters, the development of a sum- mary hearings procedure, the use of litigation guardians, and efforts to control misuse of the system by vexatious litigants. In his view, the figures to date show progress in the areas of access to justice and efficient caseload management, but much remains to be done. Budget pressures make it difficult to fund such resource-heavy initiatives as active review of files, early case management, and the refining of the HRTO's processes to make them more accessible to appli- cants. The experience of the HRTO since 2008 can offer significant guidance in the design offuture direct access systems in human rights and other areas of administrative justice.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left," by Martin Duberman; "The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the 'People’s Historian'" by edited by Timothy McCarthy; and"Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinn’s Legacies and the Future of Activism," edited by Stephen Bird, Adam Silver, and Joshua C. Yesnowitz.

[Reviews] the history and trends of income inequality in Canada, examining how a growing gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to drive today's political and economic processes, including volatile stock markets, troubled housing markets, and a newly escalated attack on labour that paints unions as yesterday's answer to yesterday's problems. --Introduction

The Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database (CPD) brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in thirty-three countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, twenty-seven European Union (EU) member countries and three non-European Union member countries. ...The introduction provides basic information on the CPD’s conceptual approach to precarious employment in a comparative perspective, an explanation of CPD methodology, and an outline of the design principles behind the creation of harmonized variables used in the statistical tables. These principles are further developed and demonstrated in three interactive modules: forms of precarious employment, temporal and spatial dynamics, and health and social care. --Website description

There is both a lack of theoretical development as well as detailed empirical evidence on the organizational contexts that foster union renewal. Scholars have argued that the integration of social identities into unions and sustained 'lay' participation are key to renewal. This article seeks to identify organizational structures and processes that contribute to incorporating immigrant identities and fostering democratic participation in unions. Empirical analysis is based on ethnographic observations conducted in four local branches within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of the USA that underwent the Justice for Janitors campaign. The approach taken treats union renewal as a complex and non-linear process unfolding over time -- in each city, the campaign entered the complex social structures of local unions, disrupting old processes and structures, and creating new ones. Despite the fact that all four local unions experienced external revitalization owing to the campaign, internal renewal was most successful in Los Angeles, least in Washington DC, and somewhat successful in Boston and Houston. The findings demonstrate the difficulty of achieving transformative change in unions, yet point to key organizational elements that may help achieve it.

Dreams of steady employment in the mining sector led thousands of Ukrainian immigrants to northern Ontario in the early 1900s. As a child, historian Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her baba’s stories about Sudbury’s small but polarized community and what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression. According to Baba grew out of those stories, out of a granddaughter’s desire to capture the experiences of her grandparents’ generation on paper. Eighty-two interviews conducted by Stacey and her grandmother, Olga, laid the groundwork for this insightful and deeply personal social history of one of Canada’s most colourful ethnic communities. The interview process also brought to light the challenges of doing collaborative oral history with community members, particularly as Stacey lost authority to her baba, wrestled it back, and eventually came to share it, and as interviewees met questions with nostalgic reminiscences, subversive humour, or impenetrable silence. By providing a realistic glimpse into the hard work that goes into making communities partners in oral history research, this book provides a new paradigm for studying the politics of memory, one that recognizes that people are not passive recipients of their histories but rather counter and create narratives about the past by invoking alternative ways of remembering. --Publisher's description

This thesis explores the precarious nature of backstage work within the live music industry. Live music is replacing recorded music as the economic core of the music industry. Live music is a unique sector, in that it is valued for its ephemerality. Given the ephemerality of concerts, new frameworks are required to understand technical and logistical production of live music. Labour arrangements in live music reflect sweeping trends in the labour market. Backstage workers are employed in flexible, contract and contingent arrangements leading to precarious livelihoods. This thesis argues that labour precaritization in the live music industry is part of an accumulation strategy by suggesting that employers exploit the affective, emotive and cathartic nature of live music to reduce wages and extract surplus from workers. Essentially, workers are willing to accept a psychic wage in lieu a living wage. This arrangement can be called `lifestyle labour' in that workers are willing to accept lifestyle components as part of their wage.

This article examines Pierre Elliott Trudeau's relationship with labour and social democratic organizations, 1949-1959. Using historiographic works, reflections from contemporary historical figures, and Trudeau's archival fonds, this essay demonstrates that his connections to labour and the left were motivated by his desire to enrich liberal democracy in both Quebec and Canada. Supporting labour unions and the provincial/federal Cooperative Commonwealth Federation during the early 1950s was imperative, as labour was a force for change and democratic renewal, and the CCF was the party with the strongest commitment to popular democracy, especially when contrasted with a Liberal Party and Union Nationale, which were dominated by regressive and financial interests. Using various theoretical approaches, including Ian McKay's Liberal Order Framework and Antonio Gramsci's concept of "trasformismo," I seek to show how Trudeau's leftist forays were informed by the desire to transform liberalism and capitalism in such a way that maintained their essences while inoculating them from their core flaws. This process of liberal transformation and hegemony is further emphasized in the later stages of the 1950s, as Trudeau began to reject social democratic and labour parties, arguing that they put their goals aside and join forces with liberals to fight for democracy first.

Considers the current regulatory environment for temporary employment workers in Quebec. Concludes that the legislative failure to regulate has resulted in abusive practices that undermine labour law.