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In 1938, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) came to organize the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) in Trail, British Columbia. Six years later it was recognized as the legal representative of more than 5,000 workers at a smelter owned by the powerful Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S). Smelter Wars aims to unfold the historic struggle of the working people who built the city of Trail. The book recounts the various difficulties of the rural community, providing glimpses into the political and social life in the smelter city, as well as the turbulent years marked by economic depression, war, and Cold War intolerance. Ron Verzuh draws upon archival and periodical sources, including the mainstream and labour press, to explore the CIO's complicated legacy in Trail as it battled a wide range of antagonists: a powerful employer (CM&S), a company union, local conservative citizens, and Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) leadership. More than a history of a union, Smelter Wars is a cultural study of a community that has been shaped by decades of corporate welfare. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: A Smelter City Is Born -- A Red Union Comes to Town -- Battling Blaylock's Company Union -- Women War Workers and Ladies Auxiliary Politics -- Mine-Mill Courts Trail's Immigrant Enclave -- A Clash of Ideologies in the Kootenays -- Steel's Cold Warriors Raid Trail's Red Union -- Resisting Canadian -- McCarthyism in British Columbia -- Conclusion: The Complicated History of Local 480.

To appease public anxieties and limit exploitation, in recent years Canada has sought to more strictly regulate and reduce temporary migrant work, while expanding opportunities for international mobility. This article explores the division between mobility and migration in this settler colonial context by charting developments in two overarching Canadian immigration program streams dedicated to facilitating international migration for employment on a temporary basis – the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP) – focusing on the latter. Through an analysis of underexplored IMP subprograms directed at ‘national competitiveness,’ it probes the extent to which several fast-growing IMP subprograms entail a departure from temporary migrant work under exploitative conditions. Questioning the validity of the migration/mobility distinction assumed in policy discourse, it argues that far from providing for ideal conditions for ‘mobile’ workers, Inter-Company Transfer, Postgraduation, and Spousal subprograms are characterised by conditions poised to heighten exploitation. Meanwhile, many participants in these subprograms migrate from source countries with a history of subordination through differential inclusion, illustrating how the application of migration control devices is bound-up with residues of formal barriers to entry forged on the basis of nationality and the institutionalised racism that they engendered and threaten to perpetuate.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada imposed certain international travel bans and work-from-home orders, yet migrant farmworkers, declared essential to national food security, were exempt from such measures. In this context, farm worksites proved to be particularly prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. To apprehend this trend, we engaged an expanded and transnational employment strain framework that identified the employment demands and resources understood from a transnational perspective, as well as the immigration, labour, and public health policies and practices contributing to and/or buffering employment demands during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We applied mixed methods to analyze administrative data, immigration, labour, and public health policy, as well as qualitative interviews with thirty migrant farmworkers employed in Ontario and Quebec. We concluded that the deleterious outcomes of the pandemic for this group were rooted in the deplorable pre-pandemic conditions they endured. Consequently, the band-aid solutions adopted by federal and provincial governments to address these conditions before and during the pandemic were limited in their efficacy because they failed to account for the transnational employment strains among precarious status workers labouring on temporary employer-tied work permits. Such findings underscore the need for transformative policies to better support health equity among migrant farmworkers in Canada.

The Labour Rights Index is a comparative tool, an international qualification standard, which allows its users to compare labour legislation around the world. In a way, it helps you navigate the labour markets of 145 countries. The labour market regulation affecting around more than 90% of the 3.5 billion global labour force has been analysed and scored under the Index. The aim is to make all this abstract legal information accessible to workers in order to improve their working lives. Similarly, the work is useful for national and trans-national employers to ensure compliance with local labour legislation. --Website description

The article reviews the book, "The Subjectivities and Politics of Occupational Risk: Mines, Farms and Auto-Factories," by Alan Hall.

For four days in October 1932, during the height of the Great Depression, prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary revolted. They took control of their workshops and brought the convict labour regime to a halt, until the guards and militia violently regained control. This revolt was the culmination of more than a year of organizing and collective actions. Prisoners wrote manifestos, participated in work refusals, elected representatives, and developed a sophisticated critique of the conditions of their incarceration and the penitentiary administration. Using a unique collection of archival documents, this article closely examines the complaints, criticisms, fears, hopes, and frustrations of the incarcerated, whose demands and goals are crucial for understanding how and why the prisoner revolt unfolded as it did. I argue that the prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary, by striking and organizing to assert their dignity, democratically organized their lives and ensured a "fair deal" should be considered part of the Depression-era protests of the unemployed, imprisoned, and marginalized.

Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood - the set of people near and surrounding the family - through an examination of work bees in Southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The "bee" was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour's farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn-raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families' daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice," by Jenny Carson.

This article compares the union careers of the US Teamsters Union leader James R. Hoffa and the head of the Canadian Seafarers International Union (siu), Hal Banks. It focuses on the charges of union corruption that swirled around both men in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The article uses that comparison to consider the predominant understanding of union corruption in the United States, which posits a kind of American exceptionalism in regard to this issue. The similarities and differences between the cases of Hoffa and Banks provide a new consideration of the history of union corruption in Canada. This comparison also offers a new perspective on the divergence between unionization rates in the United States and Canada since 1964.

Le notariat connait depuis les années 2000 un phénomène de modernisation qui se traduit par la digitalisation de nombreuses prestations. Cette contribution vise à montrer comment deux technologies digitales modifient les activités historiques de la profession notariale. L’implémentation de ces technologies cristallise des controverses qui concernent d’une part la légitimité du notariat, et d’autre part l’évolution de l’identité professionnelle du notaire. Cette analyse de la digitalisation de la profession permet d’interroger le repositionnement institutionnel largement animé par la fédération professionnelle, qui vise à doter les notaires d’une place centrale dans l’organigramme juridique belge, en même temps que de rompre avec l’image archaïque de la profession.

The article reviews the book, "Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Employment Standards Protections for People in Precarious Jobs," by Leah F. Vosko et al.