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Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home and The Civil Wars in US Labor: Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old?, both by Steve Early, are reviewed.
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The article reviews the book, "Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex," by Nick Dyer-Witheford.
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The article reviews the book, "The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism," edited by Kevin Skerrett, Johanna Weststar, Simon Archer, and Chris Roberts.
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This article reviews and comments on "Precarious Employment: Causes, Consequences and Remedies," edited by Stephanie Procyk, Wayne Lewchuk, and John Shields, "Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies," by Arne L. Kalleberg, "Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America, by Tracy Newmann, and "Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres," by Jamie Woodcock.
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Using data collected from survey responses and interviews conducted in 2014, this study examines the consequences of back-to-work legislation from the perspective of customer service workers at Air Canada represented by Unifor Local 2002. By examining union attitudes, opinions of strikes, wildcat actions and back-to-work legislation deployed in 2011 and 2012, the study concludes that this type of legislation functioned to protect the interests of the employer in an ongoing process of corporate restructuring. Such ad hoc legislative measures, defined by political economists as ‘permanent exceptionalism’, further undermines the industrial pluralist regime that is the foundation of Canadian labour relations.
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Examines the controversy surrounding the passage of Bill C-377 by the Canadian federal parliament in 2012. Introduced as a private member's bill by Conservative MP Russ Hiebert in 2011, the legislation required unions to disclose publicly all of their activities to the Canada Revenue Agency under the Income Tax Act. The paper analyzes the anti-labour origins of the bill, which mirrored the union disclosure provisions of the US Taft-Hartley Act; it also considers the role of LabourWatch, the bill's principal private-sector Canadian advocate, as well as the Nanos Research polls commissioned by LabourWatch that appeared to show wide public support for the bill.
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In the winter of 2012, the Canadian federal Conservative government introduced back-to-work legislation prohibiting work stoppages at Canada’s largest airline, Air Canada. In the following weeks, wildcat strikes by baggage handlers, ground crew, and even pilots rattled the company. These disputes were preceded in 2011 by another instance of back-to-work legislation and threats of legislation against Air Canada’s customer service workers and flight attendants, respectively. In all cases, the union leadership was legally forced to police their membership and order their members to cease job actions when they erupted. This article situates the Conservative government’s coercive measures to deal with labor unrest at Air Canada within a broader anti-union context, highlighting the continued decline of industrial pluralism in Canada and questioning whether the repeated use and threat of federal back-to-work legislation will open up space for civil disobedience as a new norm in Canadian industrial relations.
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Over the past four decades, governments have backed away from the promotion of collective bargaining in Canada resulting in a tendency towards anti-unionism. Examining this new reality, this article investigates two interrelated trends in Canadian anti-unionism over the last two decades in an effort to conceptualize the role of the state in regulating labour relations. First, we investigate legislative attempts to undermine or eliminate the ability of workers to collectively bargain and strike. Second, the article unpacks the political economy of anti-unionism in the private sector by focusing on the role of lobby groups that have shaped labour legislation. These two interrelated threads allow us to expose the relationship between employers and governments, which has threatened the strength of organized labour in the private and public sector and shaped a uniquely Canadian anti-unionism. Finally, we conclude by examining both the strengths and limitations of the unique fight-back strategies used by the labour movement, which has sought to elevate aspects of Canadian labour law to be protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This, we argue, offers restrictive possibilities for advancing collective bargaining rights in the existing labour relations framework.