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Saskatchewan's migrant workers rights regime has been characterized as a "positive national standard" for the rest of the country. Introducing the legislation in 2012, then-Minister of the Economy Bill Boyd argued it would "position Saskatchewan as having the most comprehensive protection for newcomers of any province in Canada." In Safe Passage: Migrant Worker Rights in Saskatchewan, Dr. Andrew Stevens reviews the impact of Saskatchewan's Foreign Worker Recruitment and Immigration Services Act (FWRISA) since its implementation. Using cases of employers and recruiters investigated under the FWRISA, this report explores how the government has addressed the exploitation of migrant workers in Saskatchewan. Dr. Stevens argues that the FWRISA deserves recognition as an important piece of legislation that has strengthened migrant worker protections and explicitly recognizes foreign labour’s unique vulnerabilities in the workplace. However, despite the strengths of the legisltion, Dr. Stevens argues that enforcement still remains a problem, with the complaints-based system too often putting the onus on precariously employed workers to self-report violations. Moreover, there is no requirement for employers to demonstrate comprehension of the province’s migrant labour regime in advance of accessing workers from abroad, resulting in employers that are ill-informed or ignorant of their responsibilities. Dr. Stevens concludes that Saskatchewan's existing migrant worker rights regime could be further improved by investing in a more rigorous audit and inspectorate system and through an expansion of community supports for newcomers.

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.

The article reviews the book, "Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex," by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

The article reviews the book, "The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism," edited by Kevin Skerrett, Johanna Weststar, Simon Archer, and Chris Roberts.

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.

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.

Call centres have in the last three decades come to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. From telemarketing to tele-health services, to credit card assistance, and even emergency response systems, call centres function as a nexus mediating technologically enabled labour practices with the commodification of services. Because of the ubiquitous nature of the call centre in post-industrial capitalism, the banality of these interactions often overshadows the nature of work and labour in this now-global sector. Advances in telecommunication technologies and the globalization of management practices designed to oversee and maintain standardized labour processes have made call centre work an international phenomenon. Simultaneously, these developments have dislocated assumptions about the geographic and spatial seat of work in what is defined here as the new international division of knowledge labour. The offshoring and outsourcing of call centre employment, part of the larger information technology and information technology enabled services sectors, has become a growing practice amongst governments and corporations in their attempts at controlling costs. Leading offshore destinations for call centre work, such as Canada and India, emerged as prominent locations for call centre work for these reasons. While incredible advances in technology have permitted the use of distant and “offshore” labour forces, the grander reshaping of an international political economy of communications has allowed for the acceleration of these processes. New and established labour unions have responded to these changes in the global regimes of work by seeking to organize call centre workers. These efforts have been assisted by a range of forces, not least of which is the condition of work itself, but also attempts by global union federations to build a bridge between international unionism and local organizing campaigns in the Global South and Global North. Through an examination of trade union interventions in the call centre industries located in Canada and India, this dissertation contributes to research on post-industrial employment by using political economy as a juncture between development studies, critical communications, and labour studies.

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.

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.

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.