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Drawing on nurses’ strikes in many countries, this paper explores nurse militancy with reference to professionalism and the commitment to service; patriarchal practices and gendered subordination; and proletarianization and the confrontation with healthcare restructuring. These deeply entangled trajectories have had a significant impact on the work, consciousness and militancy of nurses and have shaped occupation-specific forms of resistance. They have produced a pattern of overlapping solidarities – occupational solidarity, gendered alliances and coalitions around healthcare restructuring – which have supported, indeed promoted, militancy among nurses, despite the multiple forces arrayed against them. The professional commitments of nurses to the provision of care have confronted healthcare restructuring, nursing shortages, intensification of work, precarious employment and gendered hierarchies with a militant discourse around the public interest, and a reconstitution and reclamation of ‘caring’, what I call the politicisation of caring. In fact, nurses’ dedication to caring work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may encourage rather than dissuade them from going on strike. This paper uses a trans-disciplinary methodology, qualitative material in the form of strike narratives constructed from newspaper archives, and references to the popular and scholarly literature on nursing militancy.
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The article examines two internal union strategies for improving equality bargaining. The first, representational democracy (RD), highlights the demographic profile of women’s participation in collective bargaining (CB). The discussion presents the existing, albeit imperfect, data on women’s participation. It supports the continuing importance of the gender profiles of negotiators, but also considers the limits of RD via an exploration of essentialism, critical mass and gender composition. It concludes that RD is a limited proxy for voice, and, given the individualism inherent in its claims, an imperfect vehicle for collective agency. The paper then develops the concept of representational justice (RJ), which speaks to collective mechanisms which ensure that women’s interests are represented; in effect, a move from individual equality champions to vehicles for championing equality. As one means to such an end, the article argues for building formal and constitutionalized links between CB and union equality structures. Highlighting internal union strategies to support equality bargaining complements the widespread focus on the substantive issues on the bargaining agenda and takes the discussion of equality bargaining in new directions. Certainly, this approach underscores the importance of unions linking struggles around diversity, equality and representation inside unions to the CB process and agenda.
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Drawing on nurses strikes in many countries [including Canada], this article situates nurse militancy within the context of health care restructuring and neo-liberalism, the gendered construction of nursing work, the feminization of union density and of strikes, and gendered militancy. It explores the emergence of a militant discourse among nurses focussed on the public interest, what I call the politicisation of caring, which has supported a new approach to the ethics of striking. --Author's introduction
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The project Leadership, Feminism and Equality in Unions in Canada (2012) explored the current practices, climate around, and attitudes to women, feminism, leadership, and equality through the insights, voices, and experiences of forty-four women union lead- ers, activists, and staff. This article outlines what we did: what prompted the project and its goals, methodology, activities, output, and results for participants. It also includes a summary of some findings that underscore the significance of the project.This project points to the permeability between and among breaking the silence, movement building, and union education. It asks what kind of union education is rel- evant and available for seasoned activists, leaders, and educators. It found that an ongoing process of what might be called politicized education is critical. Certainly this group of union women benefited from re-politicizing their individual experiences, per- haps what could be called “re-organizing.”
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Detailed examination from a labour militancy perspective of work stoppages in Canada from 1960 to 2004. Statistical data is enhanced with qualitative measures (newspaper accounts) of two strikes: the 8-month Miki Skools strike in the 1980s, and the 3-month Puretex strike of women garment workers in the 1970s.
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Examines the "politicization of caring" and the contest for the public trust between nurses and the state since 1960. Concludes that nurse militancy demonstrates how the battle against austerity can be fought.
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[This book] is a collection of original papers that presents a vision of an invigorated and vibrant labour movement, one that would actively seek the full participation of women and other traditionally excluded groups, and that would willingly incorporate a feminist agenda. This vision challenges union complicity in the gendered segmentation of the labour market; union support for traditionalist ideologies about women's work, breadwinners, and male-headed families; union resistance to broader-based bargaining; and the marginalization of women inside unions. All of the authors share a commitment to workplace militancy and a more democratic union movement, to women's resistance to the devaluation of their work, to their agency in the change-making process. The interconnected web of militancy, democracy, and feminism provides the grounds on which unions can address the challenges of equity and economic restructuring, and on which the re-visioning of the labour movement can take place. The first of the four sections includes case studies of union militancy that highlight the experiences of individual women in three areas of female-dominated work: nursing, banking, and retailing. The second and third sections focus on the two key arenas of struggle where unions and feminism meet: inside unions, where women activists and staff confront the sexism of unions, and in the labour market, where women challenge their employers and their own unions. The fourth section deconstructs the conceptual tools of the discipline of industrial relations and examines its contribution to the continued invisibility of gender. --Publisher's description
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