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The article reviews the book, "What's Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century," edited by Michael Zweig.

The book, " Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario," by Yonatan Reshef and Sandra Rastin, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global," by Paul Mason.

Iin British Columbia in the spring of 2004, over 40,000 hospital and long-term care facility workers, mostly members of the Hospital Employees Union [HEU], struck to defend their jobs and services against attacks from an aggressive neoliberal government and employers. This strike was distinguished by the social composition of the workforce, the fact that HEU had one of the more left-wing leaderships in the Canadian labour movement, and the determination of the strikers to persevere even in the face of back-to-work legislation. HEU'S resistance evoked an unusual degree of support that took the form of active solidarity rather than just passive sympathy. The BC labour leadership was pushed towards a confrontation of the kind that the existing regime of industrial legality was designed to prevent. This article identifies the systemic causes of the BC health care strike in public sector restructuring and the building of a lean state, explores its background, traces its trajectory, and explains and assesses its outcome. This strike highlights the significance of the character of the contemporary labour officialdom as a social layer whose conditions of existence lead it to usually oppose forms of collective action outside the bounds of industrial legality.

The article reviews the book, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire," by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

The article reviews the book, "Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870," by Beverly J. Silver.

The article reviews the book, "Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope," by Susan Weissman.

Challenges from employers and governments and the limited success of public sector union responses suggest the need for renewal in Canadian public sector unions. This article engages with discussions of union renewal by way of theoretically conceptualizing the modes of union praxis relevant to Canadian unions. It then examines the nature of neoliberal public sector reform and assesses the experiences of Canadian public sector unions under neoliberalism. In this difficult context, unions that are able to make progress in the interconnected development of greater democracy and power will be more capable of channelling workers’ concerns into union activity. This, along with international and Canadian evidence, highlights the significance of the praxis of social movement unionism to union renewal in the public sector.

In order to conduct better class analysis, we need class theory that rises to the challenge of understanding class as a structured social process and relationship taking place in historical time and specific cultural contexts. The study of working classes as historical formations requires the replacement of underdeveloped concepts with theory adequate to the task. This theory should incorporate the knowledge that class never exists outside of other social relations such as gender and race, but is always mediated by those relations, and vice versa. Marx, Gramsci, Thompson and autonomist Marxism, enriched with the appreciation of the multidimensional nature of social being produced by feminism and other perspectives arising from struggles against oppression, provide important resources for the development of such a theory.

This interdisciplinary dissertation aims to develop social and political theory capable of understanding social class as a structured process and relationship mediated by gender, race and other social relations and taking place in time and specific socio-material contexts, in order to analyse working classes as historical formations. It also aims to use this perspective and the existing body of historical scholarship to conduct a theoretically-rigorous study of the remaking of the Canadian working class in the 1940s. Arguing that recent theoretical work on class formation is inadequate, the dissertation critically appropriates ideas drawn from classical and contemporary scholarship to outline a theory of working classes as historical formations. An account of how dominant classes exercise power in capitalist societies is a necessary complement to this theory; the overview developed theorizes the existence of capitalist rule in differentiated forms and as inherently, but not primarily, ideological. From this perspective, the dissertation analyses the remaking of the Canadian working class in the paid workplace, community and household spheres in the 1940s. It argues that between 1941 and 1947 a broad but uneven process of class recomposition took place, focussing on such issues as the character of struggles in this period, their participants, their organizations and ideologies in order to illuminate the dynamics of change in working-class formations. In the course of struggle, both the working-class formation and capitalist rule were altered in important ways. The new formation that stabilized in the late 1940s featured improved living standards and greater unity against capital at the most elementary level. It was also shaped in important respects by a particular configuration of racist, sexist and heterosexist social relations. Unions changed from within and without, becoming generally committed to a responsible and bureaucratic practice. The CCF became the undisputed party of the English-Canadian workers' movement, weakening and marginalizing political radicalism. Although it is misleading to interpret this as working-class incorporation, working-class capacities to change society had been constrained and undermined in new ways, in part as a result of the very reforms workers wrested from employers and state power.

A renewal of the study of public sector unionism in Canada is long overdue. This article explains why public sector unions deserve more attention from researchers than they have received of late and proposes that studies of public sector unions would benefit from adopting a new theoretical framework that conceptualizes contemporary unions as not only labour relations institutions but also as particular kinds of working-class movement organizations within a historically-specific class formation. It also identifies two obstacles to the production of accounts of contemporary public sector unions from this perspective.

From October 7-23, 2005, the strike by the 38,000-strong British Columbia Teachers' Federation (bCTF) was the "main event" in BC labour relations. Teachers demonstrated enormous solidarity and determination to achieve a fair negotiated settlement that they could put to a vote. The focus of this paper is not the BCTF strike itself but the remarkable sympathy strike action organized in support of BCTF, primarily by the BC division of CUPE. Such worker action is highly unusual. Since the 1940s sympathy strike action has been illegal and extremely rare. This paper sets CUPE-BC's strikes in support of BCTF in the context of the legal framework established over half a century ago and the decline of sympathy strikes that followed. It then summarizes the events of October 2005 and examines the effects and significance of the strikes and what made them possible. It concludes with a reflection on the implications of these events for the labour movement. The analysis here is shaped by the perspective that public sector unions are best able to resist hostile governments when they adopt a militant and highly democratic approach that aims to build a broad social movement, sometimes referred to as social movement unionism.