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The article provides information on the municipal elections which were held in Ontario in November 2006. The elections represented a strategic shift in the political priorities of organized labour. The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) held a series of strategy sessions, candidate schools, public speaking and media courses, and political organizer training sessions. The campaign was rolled out in four phases including visioning, training and endorsement, and accountability.

The article reviews the book, "Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement," by Clayton Sinyai.

The article reviews the book, "Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice," by Christo Aivalis.

The article reviews the book, "Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour," edited by Gerald Hunt and David Rayside.

This article surveys positions on constitutional reform of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) from a historical perspective. In addition to analyzing how Canada’s largest labour organization has approached issues of national unity, federalism, and constitutional reform, the article underscores how Canadian constitutional struggles were reflected within the labour movement by focusing on how constitutional politics affected the relationship between the CLC and its Québec affiliate, the (Québec Federation of Labour) FTQ. Specifically, the article traces the gradual eclipse of the CLC’s preference for centralization and the emergence of sovereignty-association as a political position which the CLC has both externalized politically and internalized organizationally.

This case study of a union campaign to organize personal trainers and fitness instructors at GoodLife Fitness, the world's fourth-largest fitness chain, is used to highlight the challenges and possibilities of organizing precarious workers in the multi-billion-dollar fitness industry. Drawing on the broader literature on union organizing and strategic corporate campaigns, primary documents related to the organizing drive, media coverage of the campaign, and in-depth interviews with union officials and fitness workers, the case study reveals how the workers were successfully, yet unconventionally, able to leverage institutional, symbolic, and associational power to build union muscle in an industry that is virtually union-free.

Review essay of "A Grander Vision: My Life in the Labour Movement" (2019) by Sid Ryan, and "A New Kind of Union: Unifor and the Birth of the Modern Canadian Union" (2019) by Fred Wilson.

This article begins with a broad overview of the scholarly literature on labour politics in Canada before focusing more specifically on the relationship between organized labour and the NDP. The article is organized thematically, focusing on three key features of the party-union relationship: (1) institutional ties between labour and the NDP; (2) the ideological impact of labour on the politics of the NDP: and (3) labour's (in)ability to deliver votes to the party. Each dimension of the party-union relationship reveals factors that contributed to a loosening of ties over time and sets the stage for a final concluding section exploring the implications of a weakened NDP-union link for the future of labour and working-class politics in Canada. --From author's introduction

This article addresses two key questions. First, how have faculty associations and university administrations in Canada responded to the intertwined challenges of austerity and pandemic bargaining? And second, how can faculty associations apply strategic and tactical lessons from this period to future rounds of collective bargaining? The content of this article is informed by the secondary literature on university labour relations and faculty associations in Canada and is grounded in the author’s practical experience as Chief Negotiator for the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA) in the last two rounds of bargaining. The article uses the 2020 round of pandemic bargaining at Brock University as a case study to explore the obstacles and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 crisis within the broader context of the neoliberalization of higher education. The case study also serves as a jumping off point to compare and contrast the range of faculty association responses to pandemic bargaining and theorize more generally about how the pandemic intersects with strategic debates concerning models of faculty unionism. --From introduction

In the wake of a series of prolabor Supreme Court decisions in Canada, the mantra of “workers' rights as human rights” has gained unprecedented attention in the Canadian labor movement. This article briefly reviews the Canadian labor movement's recent history with the Supreme Court before arguing that elite-driven judicial strategies, advocated by several academics and Canadian unions, threaten, over time, to depoliticize traditional class-based approaches to advancing workers' rights. The argument is premised on the notion that liberal human rights discourse does little to address the inequalities in wealth and power that polarize Canadian society along class lines.

The longstanding political alliance between the Canadian labor movement and the New Democratic Party (NDP) has experienced new stresses in recent years. Whereas the NDP was widely considered the political arm of the labor movement during the Keynesian post-war period, under neoliberalism, the relationship between most unions and the NDP has become more tactical and less cohesive. This article surveys contemporary party-union relationships in Canada, at both the federal and provincial levels, with a view to demonstrating that weakening party-union relations are rooted in larger macro-economic and political transformations and are shaped by factors related to region and language.

The article considers the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Québec Federation of Labour (FTQ) during the tenure of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Discusses CLC and FTQ approaches to the Meech Lake Accord, as well as organized labour's response to the Charlottetown Accord. Explores how the longstanding party-union relationship deranged the trade union movement's weak constitutional perspective.

The shifting provincial-municipal landscape in Ontario, which has positioned local government as central to the neoliberal project, has created both strategic opportunities and risks for organized labour. This article explores how the provincial state has used downloading and neoliberal municipal restructuring to shift the balance of class forces in local politics and provides analytical context against which to examine organized labour’s attempts to pursue progressive policy outputs in this new environment.

The Quebec labour movement's decision to withdraw its support for Canada's federal system in the 1970s and instead embrace the sovereignist option was unquestionably linked to the intersection of class and nation in Quebec. In this period, unions saw the sovereignist project as part of a larger socialist or social democratic societal project. Because the economic inequalities related to ethnic class, which fuelled the labour movement's support for sovereignty in the 1970s, were no longer as prevalent by the time of Quebec's 1995 referendum, organized labour's continued support for the sovereignist option in the post-referendum period cannot adequately be explained using the traditional lens of class and nation. This paper employs an institutional comparative analysis of Quebec's three largest trade union centrals with a view to demonstrating that organized labour's primary basis for supporting sovereignty has changed considerably over time. While unions have not completely abandoned a class-based approach to the national question, they have tended to downplay class division in favour of an emphasis on Quebec's uniqueness and the importance of preserving the collective francophone identity of the nation. Party–union relations, the changing cultural, political and economic basis of the sovereignist project and the emergence of neoliberalism in Quebec are offered as key explanatory factors for the labour movement's shift in focus.

This article examines the relationship of the Canadian Labour Congress with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms from the initial stages of the Charter's development, in the 1980-81 Special Committee on the Canadian Constitution, to its present status as powerful legal instrument and national symbol.

This article engages in a comparative analysis of the U.S. and Canadian labor movements’ attitudes toward nuclear power, in both historical and contemporary periods, with a view to explaining the divergent policy positions on nuclear power adopted by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the AFL-CIO, respectively. The contrasting views of the AFL-CIO and CLC, it is argued, arise not simply from differing levels of commitment to the principles of social unionism, but from a more complex mesh of ideological, pragmatic, and institutional factors related to union-party relationships and other important differences pertaining to the culture, membership composition, organizational maintenance requirements, and decision-making power bases in both labor organizations.

Given [the] hostile political and ideological climate in which, rightly or wrongly, unions are seen as defenders of sectional rather than the general interest, the question of new and effective political strategies and tactics to combat austerity is all the more urgent for the labor movement. It is within this context that contributors to this special issue of Labor Studies Journal and other labor educators from across North America presented their research at the United Association for Labor Education conference in Toronto in March 2013 as part of six panels focused on labor’s strategic response to austerity. Panelists represented a wide range of different approaches, produced rich and varied research aimed at clarifying some of the obstacles facing unions, and explored the various routes open to the labor movement in its efforts to confront austerity. --From Editors' Introduction

Nuclear energy is one of the predominant false solutions being offered up by contemporary capitalism's power elite in a futile effort to reconcile the goal of environmental sustainability with limitless growth, profit, and accumulation. Incorporating environmental needs into the economy ultimately means not only developing new eco-friendly products and technologies, but changing everything about how people produce and consume and how they travel and live. To this end, the contemporary labor movement needs to increasingly put its own independent and proactive vision of progress and ecological transformation on the table instead of simply allying with employers and perpetuating its dependence upon existing structures of production and consumption. The Canadian Nuclear Workers Council's (CNWC) alliance with the nuclear industry reflects not only the organization's stake in protecting jobs, but also its inability and unwillingness to challenge the deceptive employment versus environment discourse and the dominant mode of economic growth.

This article reviews the arguments for and against adopting an anti-scab law and considers what impact such laws have on unions, businesses and individual workers. This article will then look at the constellation of players in today’s debate: governments, political parties, labour organizations, and the business community. The article will focus on the Canadian Labour Congress’ (CLC) unsuccessful campaign for a federal anti-scab law, in the form of bill C-257, to determine what, if anything, it says about labour politics and what lessons it provides for labour law reformers. (Excerpt from introduction)