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In 2002, approximately two-thirds of school teachers in the Canadian province of Alberta went on strike. Drawing on media, government and union documents, this case study reveals some contours of the political economy of labor relations in education that are normally hidden from view. Among these features are that the state can react to worker resistance by legally pressuring trade unions and justifying this action as in the public interest. This justification seeks to divide the working class and pit segments of it against each other. The state may also seek to limit discussion and settlements to monetary matters to avoid constraining its ability to manage the workplace or the educational system. This analysis provides a basis for developing a broader theory of the political economy of labor relations in education. It also provides trade unionists in education with information useful in formulating a strike strategy.

The article reviews the book, "Still Dying for a Living: Corporate Criminal Liability After the Westray Mine Disaster," by Steven Bittle.

The article reviews the book, "Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880-1940," by Donald Rogers.

The article reviews the book, "Solidarity First: Canadian Workers and Social Cohesion," edited by Robert O'Brien.

This study uses a Delphi analysis to identify significant barriers to the development of sustained and meaningful pressure on the Alberta government to increase the enforcement of its laws regulating the employment of teenagers. In addition to general employment laws (e.g., wage payment, occupational health and safety) that appear to go broadly unenforced, Alberta also appears not to enforce laws specifying the hours during which teens may work, the occupations in which they may work and the job tasks they may perform. The result is wage theft, workplace injury and illegal forms of employment among teens. The seven Delphi panelists—a mixture of academics, trade unionists and staff members in not-for-profit agencies with an interest in employment matters—identify a tight business-government relationship as an important limit on the political opportunities available to insurgents seeking change. Insurgents must also grapple with a framing that minimizes concerns around teen employment, i.e. by framing illegal or injurious work as an educational rite of passage and complaints as whining. Together, these barriers significantly limit the opportunities to pressure the state to enhance enforcement. Panelists also noted that there is no mobilizing structure in place that teenage workers and their allies can access. Alberta’s labour movement has had limited success organizing the service sector (where most teens are employed). Some panelists suggested leveraging the widespread sexual harassment of female teen workers as a way to access existing networks and resources in feminist and labour organizations. Other panelists argued that focusing on sexual harassment would emphasize individual employers’ misbehaviour and obscure the class-based nature of inadequate enforcement. Most panelists suggested that highlighting the socially inappropriate nature of the death or serious injury of teen workers would be the best way to destabilize the existing barriers to better enforcement of employment laws. The opportunity to do so is (fortunately) rare and may be difficult to leverage. Indeed, research on high profile occupational fatalities in Canada (e.g., the Westray Mine disaster) suggests that such fatalities do not have a significant effect on state enforcement efforts. In the meantime, advocates such as organized labour and community groups may also work to alter conventional views of teen employment by supporting educational or artistic endeavours that problematize teen employment. This could include identifying the risks and consequences of the non-enforcement of laws regulating the employment of teens (such as injury and wage theft) as well as highlighting the reasons why teen workers warrant the enforcement of their workplace rights by the state.

Alberta remains the only Canadian province to exclude agricultural workers from the ambit of its occupational health and safety laws. Consequently, farm workers have no right to know about workplace safety hazards and no right to refuse unsafe work, thereby increasing their risk of a workplace injury. This study uses qualitative content analysis to identify three narratives used by government members of the legislative assembly between 2000 and 2010 to justify the continued exclusion of agricultural workers from basic health and safety rights. These narratives are: (1) education is better than regulation, (2) farms cannot be regulated, and (3) farmers don’t want and can’t afford regulation. Analysis of these narratives reveals them to be largely invalid, raising the question of why government members rely upon these narratives. The electoral rewards associated with maintaining this exclusion may comprise part of the explanation.

Utilizing a convenience sample of nearly 2000 respondents drawn from administrative data, this study finds 43.7 percent of adolescents (aged 12-14) and 61.5 percent of young persons (aged 15-17) in the Canadian province of Alberta reported employment in 2011/12. Of those employed, 49.7 percent of adolescents and 59.0 percent of young persons reported at least one work-related injury in the previous year. This study also identifies widespread non-reporting of workplace injuries and seemingly ineffective hazard identification and safety training. These results add to the growing evidence that the regulation of teenage employment in Alberta fails to adequately protect these workers from injury.

This study examines the validity of injury statistics used to monitor workplace safety in the Canadian province of Alberta. These indicators were found to significantly under–report the rate of injury and to be vulnerable to gaming by both employers and the workers´compensation board. These threats to the validity of the measures should limit the inferences drawn from the measures. Injury–based statistics were also found to be inadequate proxies for the broader construct of workplace safety. The political feasibility of alternative measures is also discussed.

The Canadian province of Alberta does not effectively enforce its child labour laws. This non-enforcement interacts with the working-alone regulations in Alberta´s Occupational Health and Safety Act to deny workers under age 15 meaningful solo work protection. As a result, children and adolescents are exposed to the hazards adults face while working alone as well as hazards unique to children and adolescents working alone. This suggests that failing to enforce child labour laws has both obvious and subtle effects. The subtle effects are difficult to identify and remediate, in part because of the initial regulatory failure is politically difficult to acknowledge.

This study further develops our understanding of the employment experiences of children (ages 9-11) and adolescents (ages 12-14) in the Canadian province of Alberta, with particular attention to illegal employment and the effectiveness of complaint-based regulation. Survey data demonstrates there is a significant degree of illegal employment among children and adolescents. Interview data suggests that complaint-driven regulation of child labour is ineffective because parents, children and adolescents cannot identify violations and do not take action to trigger state enforcement.

The opportunity structure facing waged agricultural workers seeking basic statutory employment rights in the Canadian province of Alberta is hostile, reflecting the intertwined political and economic interests of farmers, the provincial government, and agribusiness. This article outlines the contours of the political opportunities and constraints facing labour groups and agricultural workers seeking legislative change. Analysis suggests there is little opportunity at present to alter this legislative exclusion.

As part of a broader assessment of how well the Government of Alberta's labour programming contributes to fair and, to a lesser degree, safe workplaces, this study examines how effectively the government enforces the Employment Standards Code provisions regulating child and adolescent employment. Enforcement strategies appear to emphasize softer forms of regulation and thereby create little disincentive for violations. Preliminary research into the employment levels of children (age 9-11) suggests over 11,000 children are employed, some perhaps illegally, and that further inquiry into their employment experiences is warranted.

Considering a series of oil-driven economic booms, the use of inter-provincial and international migrant labour has become an important part of labour market policy in the Canadian province of Alberta. The increased use of temporary foreign workers is controversial. Narrative analysis of legislators’ statements in the legislature and the press between 2000 and 2011 reveals the government using three narratives to justify policies encouraging greater use of foreign migrant workers: (1) labour shortages require migrant workers, (2) migrants do not threaten Canadian jobs and (3) migrants are not being exploited. Close scrutiny of each narrative demonstrates them to be largely invalid. This suggests a significant disconnect between the real and espoused reasons for the significant changes to labour market policy, changes that advantage employers and disadvantage both Canadian and foreign workers. The findings are relevant to understand the political dynamics of economically related migration.

In 2007, the Alberta government and the Alberta construction industry developed a ten-year strategy to increase the participation of women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants in construction occupations. At the same time, construction employers began turning to temporary foreign workers (tfws) as an alternative labour supply, and the number of tfws working in Alberta construction jumped dramatically. This article examines the labour market effects of the influx of tfws on employment rates of other marginalized groups in construction occupations. Alberta is a valuable case study because it employed greater numbers of tfws in construction between 2003 and 2013 than any other province. Drawing upon labour market segmentation theory, this study finds that the proportion of traditionally underrepresented workers in construction occupations was essentially unchanged over the study period. These groups of workers experienced higher-than-average employment volitility and remain a secondary source of labour supply. This study also finds that tfws have become a new, hyperflexible source of secondary labour. The article discusses possible explanations for the findings and evaluates the effectiveness of the government's ten-year strategy.

Background: How the media frames and presents a subject influences how society sees and responds to that issue. Analysis: This study uses frame analysis to examine how Canadian English language newspapers portrayed workplace injuries between 2009 and 2014. Three frames emerge: Under Investigation, Human Tragedy, and Before the Courts. There is also a meta-frame casting injuries and fatalities as isolated events happening to “others” with no cause, thus the public ought not be concerned about workplace safety. Conclusion and implications: The article concludes that media frames obscure issues of cause and fault, thereby denying workers a full understanding of why injuries happen in the workplace. These frames serve the interests of employers by obfuscating the employer’s role in creating workplace injury and death.

This case study explores a union organizing drive that revolved in large part around a group of temporary foreign workers. The impact of this group of workers on the union’s organizing strategy and the implications of the workers’ limited residence and labour rights are examined. This article also considers the factors that appeared to make the Justice for Janitors organizing model effective in this case as well as the potential risks associated with this approach.

This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government MLAs also asserted that international migrant workers (3) had questionable occupational, linguistic or cultural skills and (4) caused negative social and economic impacts in Canada. Taken individually, these narratives appear contradictory, casting migrant work as good but migrant workers as bad. Viewed together, these narratives comprise an effort to dehumanize temporary and permanent international migrant workers. This (sometimes racialized) “othering” of migrant workers justifies migrant workers’ partial citizenship and suppresses criticism of their poor treatment.

This article argues that while work-places are safer today than they were 50 years ago, the degree to which this change is due to Canada's occupational health and safety (ohs) system is unclear. Examining the literature and reflecting upon the authors' own experiences with work-place safety, the article suggests that fundamental flaws embedded in the principles of the system undermine its effectiveness at keeping workers safe. Specifically, the premise of joint responsibility – which is given life in the internal responsibility system (irs) – appears to ignore the conflicting interests and unequal power relations that exist in Canadian work-places. The circumstances that contributed to the historical effectiveness of the irs no longer exist, undermining the ability of workers to realize safe and healthy work-places.

Governments in Canada are increasingly using multiple tools to advance their political agenda at the expense of free collective bargaining in the public sector. Legislative intervention has long been a strategy to curtail bargaining rights (Evans et al., 2023). Recently, governments have turned to non-legislative means to influence bargaining outcomes. This article is about the use of a coordination office, a decidedly non-legislative tactic, and how, over two rounds of negotiations, it transformed public-sector bargaining in Alberta. Bargaining has been further transformed by enactment of a legal requirement to keep the government’s mandates secret, the outcome being increased frustration among union representatives and potential damage to long-term relationships. Together, these measures have provided the government with a powerful means of influence, which, if successful, could spread to other jurisdictions.