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This article examines the approaches that historians, beginning in the mid 20th century and into the early 21st century, used to write about the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. It focuses on five major works: "The Winnipeg General Strike" by D.C. Masters; "Confrontation at Winnipeg: by David J. Bercuson; "The Workers' Revolt in Canada, 1917-1925" edited by Craig Heron; and "When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike" by Tom Mitchell and Reinhold Kramer. It identifies where the monographs depart from one another in interpretation; as well as where they remain the same. Given the layers of complexity, the interpretation of the event becomes especially salient in the 21st century as its 100th anniversary steadfastly approaches and the question of how should it be publicly presented in 2019 requires an answer soon (which the paper also addresses).

Employee Rights and Employer Wrongs: How to Identify Employee Abuse and How to Stand Up for Yourself, by Suzanne Kleinberg and Michael Kreimeh, is reviewed.

L’article s’interroge, dans la perspective de l’institutionnalisme économique de Commons, sur la relation unissant les dispositifs de participation financière au climat social, appréhendé par le biais de la perception qu’en ont les dirigeants et les salariés, d’une part, et par des indicateurs de dysfonctionnements sociaux, tels que l’absentéisme et les conflits sociaux, d’autre part. La question des caractéristiques de ces pratiques (modalités de négociation présidant à leur mise en oeuvre, types de dispositifs, mode de calcul) est également posée. L’étude empirique est fondée sur l’exploitation de l’enquête REPONSE qui représente un échantillon de 3 000 établissements français et de 8 000 salariés. Au-delà des différences de perception entre dirigeants et salariés, les résultats, obtenus à l’aide de modèles de régressions logistiques, mettent tout d’abord en évidence que plus que le montant versé, c’est l’existence même d’un dispositif de participation financière qui influence le climat social. Par ailleurs plus les dispositifs apparaissent comme désintéressés de la part de l’entreprise et meilleur est le climat social du point de vue des salariés. Les modalités de conclusion de l’accord de participation financière, notamment l’intervention des syndicats, ont également une influence sur le climat social. Compte tenu des différences de résultats pouvant exister selon que l’on s’intéresse à la perception des dirigeants, à celle des salariés ou aux indicateurs de dysfonctionnements sociaux, l’article met également en lumière l’importance pour les recherches sur le climat social de prendre en compte à la fois les dimensions objectives du climat social et la perception qu’en ont les acteurs.

Labour geography has yet to pay full attention to the experiences of public sector workers and their employer (the state). This article addresses this lacuna and provides some insight into the labour geographies of public sector workers through an empirical analysis of the centralization of governance, employment relations, and collective bargaining in Ontario, Canada’s publicly-funded elementary and secondary schools. This case demonstrates how one particular group of public sector workers – teachers – and their unions located and exercised agency in the arenas of politics and collective bargaining through a rescaling of their activities from the local to the provincial level. The paper also argues that the rescaling of politics and collective bargaining is problematic. Questions remain regarding whether or not Ontario’s teachers were able to increase their aggregate bargaining power through centralization or merely transferred agency and authority from one scale to another. Moreover, the paper engages with the fast-developing geographies of education literature, and is consistent with an outward-looking approach that links education to wider political and economic processes. In so doing, it extends the scope of the geographies of education to the employees of publicly-funded schools and their administrative bodies, and suggests value a theoretically- and empirically-informed dialogue between geographers interested in education and those interested in labour.

This article examines the professional practices of a sample of 21 Canadian ergonomists from across Canada, focusing on the manner in which they report negotiating the intersection of safety and productivity in their work. Results indicate that ergonomic practice is directed primarily to safety concerns. A minority of study participants addressed productivity concerns, either as secondary or primary outcomes of ergonomic applications. In either instance, efforts to highlight the contribution of ergonomics to production did not significantly disrupt the dominant safety oriented perception of the field. Financial considerations were major determinants of whether recommendations were implemented. An irony of the dominant understanding of ergonomics as oriented to safety, with little reference to performance aspects, is that this provides the main basis for its growing presence in workplaces but also limits its applications.

Le développement des emplois « atypiques » au Québec donne lieu à la mise en évidence de nouveaux enjeux sociaux et politiques dans un contexte de flexibilité de la main-d’oeuvre. La segmentation du marché du travail qui en découle se caractérise par une précarisation du salariat, définie comme un processus structurel de détérioration des conditions de travail et d’emploi. La sociologie s’intéresse particulièrement aux conséquences de ces mutations sur les conditions de vie à travers l’analyse des perceptions subjectives des acteurs concernés. Ainsi, le rapport au travail incluant les conditions matérielles, l’accomplissement des tâches et la socialisation comporte une dichotomie articulée autour de la satisfaction du salarié, source de valorisation ou de la non-satisfaction, entraînant un mal-être. Les transformations récentes du monde du travail construisent des parcours professionnels morcelés et incertains et nécessitent une réévaluation de leurs impacts sur ce rapport, encore peu documentée. Que signifie occuper un emploi atypique pour ces travailleurs ? La valeur associée au travail est-elle remise en cause ? Les indices contenus dans leurs parcours professionnels constituent-ils une réalité nouvelle ? Basé sur les résultats d’une recherche qualitative menée en 2009 auprès de résidents d’un quartier défavorisé du centre-ville de Montréal, ayant occupé des emplois « atypiques », cet article permet d’entrer au coeur des dynamiques relationnelles des milieux de travail québécois, de comprendre en quoi elles participent à la construction de parcours professionnels spécifiques et d’identifier leurs conséquences sur le rapport au travail et à l’emploi de ces travailleurs. Les différentes expériences étudiées apportent un éclairage sur le phénomène de la précarisation du travail et suggèrent des perspectives tant scientifiques que politiques.

The article reviews the book, "Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice," edited by Christine Ramsay.

Canadian employers have a common law obligation to give reasonable notice when terminating an employment relationship without cause. In deter- mining the appropriate length of the notice period, trial judges hearing wrongful dismissal claims must consider a range of factors, including what are known as the Bardal factors. In this paper, the author presents and analyzes the results of his empirical study of appeal court decisions reviewing trial court awards of reasonable notice across Canada from 2000 to 2011, and examines the impact of the Bardal factors (as well as several others) on outcomes at the appellate level. The study finds that appeal courts have not treated all of the Bardal factors equally, but appear to have given the most weight to the employee's age and length of tenure. Other factors found to have significant predictive value on the length of reasonable notice awards were the employee's gender and whether a successful claim for Wallace damages was made. The data also indicate that employee appeals have succeeded relatively more often than employer appeals, and that the length of notice ordered by appellate courts seems to have plateaued over time. In light of his conclusion that only a narrow range of considerations significantly affect notice awards, the author argues that the current system of judicial assessment of reasonable notice could well be replaced by a less expen- sive and time-consuming statutory scheme that would incorporate a formula for applying the relevant factors and would be administered by employment standards tribunals rather than by the courts.

The article reviews the book, "Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958," by Barrington Walker.

The article reviews the book, "Les temporalités dans les sciences sociales," edited by Claude Dubar and Jens Thoemmes.

Cet article, qui se veut à la croisée des chemins entre une démarche prosopographique et une approche d’histoire sociale, entend examiner des logiques jusqu’à maintenant inexplorées au sein du monde ouvrier bas-canadien des années 1830. C’est ainsi qu’à partir d’un portrait d’ensemble de quelque quatre-vingts militants ouvriers de la première heure, nous tenterons de poser certains éléments nouveaux de réflexion sur cette période tourmentée de notre histoire. Quelle lecture pouvons-nous faire des divers fragments de vie d’ouvriers québécois engagés dans des actions syndicales et revendicatives durant les années 1830? En quoi leur expérience est-elle révélatrice d’un milieu social à cheval entre la tradition et la modernité? D’ores et déjà, nous pouvons dire que ces premiers militants sont issus généralement de métiers (typographes, cordonniers, tailleurs d’habits, charpentiers-menuisiers, etc.), dont le cadre normatif d’ascension professionnelle était particulièrement menacé par l’avènement du marché capitaliste du travail et par les premières tentatives de rationalisation du travail en manufacture. Outre le fait d’avoir rendu possible la personnification des gestes et de la parole ouvrière, cette recherche a révélé la diversité et la polyvalence des engagements ouvriers (syndicats, coopératives, sociétés de secours mutuel, associations civiques antimonopole, etc.) durant la période, de même que le rôle primordial joué par les bourses ouvrières du travail, en vue de contrôler l’offre en main-d’oeuvre dans les villes, et l’importance de l’idéologie du républicanisme ouvrier auprès des classes populaires. Grâce à ce riche matériel biographique, nous avons été également en mesure de découvrir l’étonnante ambivalence du monde ouvrier face au mouvement patriote et réformiste des années 1830.

A Life in Balance? Reopening the Family-Work Debate, edited by Catherine Krull and Justyna Sempruch, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865-1950," by Tony Rondinone.

Based on an online survey and in-depth interviews conducted from 2009 to 2010, this study looks at the reality of a particular group of foreign-born and foreign-trained professionals in Ontario. These are the professionals who did not get to practise their respective professions after immigration but acquired a new profession in the form of settlement work. The study identifies their pre-immigration education and work history, the reasons they left their countries of origin (or of permanent residence) for Canada, the expectations they had, the choices they made about pursuing professional practice, the efforts they put towards that or some alternative goal, and their eventual professional reconstitution as settlement workers. Following the Canadian trajectory of these dual professionals has three contributions to research into immigrant access to professions. First, their individual experiences reveal the social processes of inclusion in, and exclusion from, professional practice. Second, unlike those immigrants who are de-professionalized in the post-immigration period, our target population reinvent themselves as practitioners of a new profession and thus provide a more nuanced immigrant experience. Third, their common practice as settlement workers gives us insight into the dynamics of an emerging profession that is settlement work.

When celebrated Wobbly troubadour Joe Hill purportedly visited the Rossland Miners’ Hall in the early 1900s to lend his support to the first Canadian local of the rugged Western Federation of Miners (WFM), he no doubt shared some of his inspired verses with the mine workers who are said to have protected him. Claims of his visit are unsubstantiated, but if he did get to Rossland, British Columbia, he likely would have sung them some of his most popular tunes about struggle, resistance, and the dream of a workers’ paradise, and in so doing he would have been performing the same service that poets and songwriters had rendered working people since the earliest days of the trade union movement. This paper explores examples of that historical literary tradition through a study of smelter worker poetry found in the pages of The Commentator, a trade union newspaper published in Trail by Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) in the late 1930s and early 1940s as labour activists were striving to rekindle the union spirit at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S Company), then the world’s largest lead and zinc smelter and a key munitions manufacturer during the First and Second World Wars.

The article reviews the book, "Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century," by Alyosha Goldstein.

This paper explores how coping styles relate to physicians' feelings of emotional exhaustion, a key dimension of burnout. We also explore whether four coping styles are more or less effective depending on certain dispositional and/or situational factors. We analyze survey data from 1,110 physicians in Western Canada. Denial is significantly related to physicians' emotional exhaustion, but it increases rather than decreases it. Physicians use denial when they experience work overload and difficult patient interactions. Furthermore, it is used by those with high negative affectivity. A highly positive outlook, however, appears to neutralize the harmful relationship between denial and emotional exhaustion. The harmful experiences related to stressful patient interactions are weakened for doctors who disengage or take a time out from the situation. We conclude that certain coping strategies are more effective depending on personality type and the type of stress encountered.

The article reviews the book, "The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon," by William M. Adler.

The article reviews the book, "Regulating the British Economy, 1660-1850," edited by Perry Gauci.

This article examines the decline in unionization that has occurred in the United States over the past half century, focusing on the role that employer opposition to unions has played, together with relatively weak labor law. It compares the U.S. experience and labor law regime to those of Canada. It finds that, compared to their Canadian counterparts, U.S. workers have much more difficulty in exercising their right to freely join and form unions and participate in collective bargaining, in large part due to ill-restrained employer opposition.