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Collective Bargaining on Working Time: Recent European Experiences, edited by Maarten Keune, and Bela Galgoczi, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Unexpected Power: Conflict and Change Among Transnational Activists," by Shareen Hertel.

Minimum labor standards are legally established standards that apply to most employers and employees and include minimum wages, maximum hours of work, overtime, and paid time off. The regulation of minimum standards in Ontario was consolidated within the Ontario Employment Standards Act in 1968. While the provincial minimum standards of the late 19th and early 20th century have been well documented, the regulation of minimum standards during the postwar period has received little scholarly attention. This article explores the development of minimum standards legislation in Ontario from the immediate postwar years to the enactment of the Employment Standards Act. Social forces both internal and external to the state pressured for the enactment of comprehensive legislation to provide some statutory protection for the most vulnerable workers in the province. However, the ways in which the state negotiated the tensions associated with providing social protection for nonunionized workers, while at the same time minimizing interference in the market, severely compromised the capacity for the legislation to provide protection for the "pockets of exploitation" they were intended for. Further, this approach to minimum standards supported and reproduced patterns of gendered and racialized segmentation within a labor market that was built around the norm of the standard employment relationship and thereby ensured standards of a secondary status for workers with the least bargaining power.

Explores the implications of the 2001 revisions to the Employment Standards Act in Ontario, which increased the weekly maximum number of work hours to 60 while loosening the requirements for overtime pay. Based on a case study involving interviews with several workers from the Ontario Toyota plant, the author argues that the changes involve a re-regulation of the labour market that enhances employer-centred flexibility via the construction of a new form of time discipline.

The article reviews and comments on "The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border" by David Bacon, "Juggernaut Politics: Understanding Predatory Globalization" by Jacques B . Gelinas, "Labour and Globalisation: Results and Prospects" edited by Ronaldo Munck, and "System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism" by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer.

The article reviews the book, "Challenging The Market: The Stuggle To Regulate Work And Income," edited by Jim Stanford and Leah F. Vosko.

The organization of working time is a central concern in today's labour market, as it is connected to experiences of work-life conflict, employment insecurity, and broader patterns of gender inequality. This article examines union responses to working time changes using a case study of four large unions, as well as a larger survey of working time provisions in major collective agreements. The article contends that working time re-regulation strategies include not only efforts to reduce hours of work, but also a range of strategies to promote employee-oriented time flexibility. These working time strategies provide some means to address growing forms of work-life conflict and working time inequalities; however, these strategies are constrained by a number of factors, including employer resistance and the need for broader-based representational and collective bargaining structures.

This article explores the dynamics of labour organizing among migrant and immigrant workers in Canada, focusing on two case studies: first, recent efforts to organize migrant farmworkers in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program; and, second, the work of the Immigrant Workers’ Centre in Montreal. The Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program, which employs workers from Mexico and Caribbean countries, is often viewed by policymakers and employers as an example of ‘best practices’ in migration policy. Yet workers in the program experience seasonal employment characterized by long hours and low wages, and are exempt from many basic labour standards. The Immigrant Workers’ Centre formed in 2000 to provide a safe place for migrant and racialized immigrant workers to come together around problems in their workplaces. Through these case studies, we examine labour organization efforts including advocacy and grassroots organizing through the Immigrant Workers’ Centre and legal challenges attempting to secure recognition of freedom of association rights for farmworkers. The article explores the ‘limits and possibilities’ of these strategies, and concludes by assessing the implications for labour organizing among the growing numbers of migrant and immigrant workers employed in a wide range of low-wage, low-security occupations due to the recent expansion of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

The Christian Labour Association of Canada (clac) has historically had a relatively small presence in Canada's labour movement. Increasing interest in clac over the last decade is due to its expanded membership, largely in western Canada and Ontario: the union claims to represent 60,000 workers. Further, the tactics used to achieve this growth have been controversial within organized labour. In fact, clac was expelled from central labour bodies for its employer accommodationist strategies. This article expands the understanding of clac beyond a characterization of classic "company" unionism. In this article we find that clac integrates elements of populism into a specific geographic strategy for expansion in ways that complicate analysis. We focus on labour board records of disputes between clac and other unions, a recent case where the union backed employer-friendly legislation in Ontario, and the union's rhetorical devices and propaganda.

With a focus on police unions in the United States and Canada, this article argues that the construction of ‘blue solidarity’, including through recent Blue Lives Matter campaigns, serves to repress racial justice movements that challenge police authority, acts as a counter to broader working class resistance to austerity and contributes to rising right-wing populism. Specifically, the article develops a case study analysis of Blue Lives Matter campaigns in North America to argue that police unions construct forms of ‘blue solidarity’ that produce divisions with other labour and social movements and contribute to a privileged status of their own members vis-a-vis the working class more generally. As part of this process, police unions support tactics that reproduce racialised ‘othering’ and that stigmatise and discriminate against racialised workers and communities. The article concludes by arguing that organised labour should maintain a critical distance from police unions.

The 2008 financial crisis continues to have profound implications for workers worldwide, as governments have embarked on “austerity” programs and employers have confronted organized labor with concessionary demands, placing unions on the defensive. At the same time, populist movements have arisen across North America and Europe as increasing numbers of people grow disenchanted with government action and corporate incompetence. We examine the interplay among what we characterize as “uneven austerity,” union strategic capacities, and rising populism. At the intersection of these processes, we see elements of “populist unionism” as the labor movement confronts both austerity and declining union power. The article develops this concept through an examination of organized labor’s engagement with the Occupy movement in Toronto, Ontario, and the growth of the Christian Labour Association of Canada.

Employment standards (ES) are legislated standards that set minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. In Canada, the majority of workers rely on ES for basic regulatory protection; however, a significant ‘enforcement gap’ exists. In the province of Ontario, this enforcement gap has been exacerbated in recent years due to the deregulation of ES through inadequate funding, workplace restructuring, legislative reforms that place greater emphasis on individualized complaints processes and voluntary compliance, and a formal separation of unions from ES enforcement. The implications of these developments are that, increasingly, those in precarious jobs, many of whom lack union representation, are left with insufficient regulatory protection from employer non-compliance, further heightening their insecurity. Taking the province of Ontario as our focus, in this article we critically examine alternative proposals for ES enforcement, placing our attention on those that enhance the involvement of unions in addressing ES violations. Through this analysis, we suggest that augmenting unions’ supportive roles in ES enforcement holds the potential to enhance unions’ regulatory function and offers a possible means to support the ongoing efforts of other workers’ organizations to improve employer compliance with ES.

In Ontario, hours of work and overtime standards are regulated by the Employment Standards Act (ESA). This legislation covers most employers and employees in the province. As part of an ESA reforms process designed to promote workplace flexibility and enhance competitiveness, the Ontario ESA (2000) allowed for the extension of weekly maximum hours from 48 to 60, and the calculation of overtime pay entitlements to be based on an averaging of hours of work over up to a four-week period. Situated in the context of shifts towards greater working time flexibility, this paper examines the dynamics of working time regulation in the Ontario ESA, with a specific focus on the regulation of excess and overtime hours. The paper considers these processes in relation to general trends towards forms of labour market regulation that support employer-oriented flexibility and that download the regulation of employment standards to privatized negotiations between individual employees and their employers, tendencies present in the ESA that were sustained through further reforms introduced in 2018 and 2019. The paper draws its analysis from interviews with both workers in precarious jobs and Employment Standards Officers from the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL), as well as administrative data from the MOL and archival records. In the general context of the rise of precarious employment, the paper argues that ESA hours of work and overtime provisions premised upon creating working time flexibility enhance employer control over time, exacerbate time pressures and uncertainty experienced by workers in precarious jobs, and thereby intensify conditions of precariousness. The article situates the working time provisions of Ontario’s ESA in the context of an ongoing fragmentation of the regulation of working time as legislated standards are eroded in ways that make workers in precarious jobs more vulnerable to employer exploitation.

This article assesses whether a deterrence gap exists in the enforcement of the Ontario Employment Standards Act (ESA), which sets minimum conditions of employment in areas such as minimum wage, overtime pay and leaves. Drawing on a unique administrative data set, the article measures the use of deterrence in Ontario’s ESA enforcement regime against the role of deterrence within two influential models of enforcement: responsive regulation and strategic enforcement. The article finds that the use of deterrence is below its prescribed role in either model of enforcement. We conclude that there is a deterrence gap in Ontario.

In October 2010, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada enacted the Open for Business Act (OBA). A central component of the OBA is its provisions aiming to streamline the enforcement of Ontario’s Employment Standards Act (ESA). The OBA’s changes to the ESA are an attempt to manage a crisis of employment standards (ES) enforcement, arising from decades of ineffective regulation, by entrenching an individualised enforcement model. The Act aims to streamline enforcement by screening people assumed to be lacking definitive proof of violations out of the complaints process. The OBA therefore produces a new category of ‘illegitimate claimants’ and attributes administrative backlogs to these people. Instead of improving the protection of workers, the OBA embeds new racialised and gendered modes of exclusion in the ES enforcement process.

This article critically assesses the compliance model of employment standards enforcement through a study of monetary employment standards violations in Ontario, Canada. The findings suggest that, in contexts where changes to the organisation of work deepen insecurity for employees, models of enforcement that emphasise compliance over deterrence are unlikely to effectively prevent or remedy employment standards violations.

Employment Standards (es) legislation sets minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. es legislation is designed to provide minimum workplace protections, particularly for those with little bargaining power in the labour market. In practice, however, es legislation includes ways in which legislated standards may be avoided, including through exemptions that exclude specified employee groups, fully or partially, from legislative coverage. With a focus on the Ontario Employment Standards Act, this article develops a case study of exemptions to the overtime pay provision of the act and regulations and examines in closer detail three specific areas in which exemptions apply. Through this study of the overtime pay exemption, the system of exemptions is presented as a contradictory approach to the regulation of es that, in effect, reduces es coverage, contributes to the avoidance of key legislated standards, and undermines the goal of providing protection for workers in precarious jobs.