Search

[Explores] the ongoing push and pull over the meaning of the Charter's freedom of assocation guarantee for the labour movement. --Introduction

Presents a historical overview of unions' lead role in advancing human rights in Canada, not only in the workplace through bargaining and litigation, but also by using their organizational strength to promote legal reform through education, lobbying, and social action to secure protections for all Canadians. --Introduction

This article reviews the book, "Weavers of Dreams, Unite! Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America," by Sean P. Holmes.

Argues that academic historians should accept some of the responsibility for the cuts to heritage institutions under the Harper government. Urges historians to make changes to their teaching and publishing, including the reward system for publication, as well as to the curriculum design for history in the public school system.

Équité en emploi - Équité salariale, by Marie-Josée Legault, is reviewed.

The goal of this research was to challenge notions of “contributing” in active citizen discourse. This was done by exploring how individuals experiencing homelessness give back to their communities while surviving through social exclusion and life on the streets. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals who experienced homelessness between the ages of 40-64. This research found that respondents gave back to others through various forms of labour in ways that were mutually beneficial. Contributing to the well being of others helped respondents to cope with homelessness by gaining opportunities, resources, information, networks and developing a sense of well being, confidence or support. The findings suggest a need to re-conceptualize “contributing” in ways that recognize alternative forms of citizenship activities and participation. By doing so, all people, including people without homes, can be recognized as contributing citizens in their communities.

[This book] traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins of human rights legislation, demonstrating how governments inhibit the application of their own laws, and how it falls to social movements to create, promote, and enforce these laws. Focusing on British Columbia – the first jurisdiction to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex – Clément documents a variety of absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. The province was at the forefront of the women’s movement, which produced the country’s first rape crisis centres, first feminist newspaper, and first battered women’s shelters. And yet nowhere else in the country was human rights law more contested. For an entire generation, the province’s two dominant political parties fought to impose their respective vision of the human rights state. This history of human rights law, based on previously undisclosed records of British Columbia’s human rights commission, begins with the province’s first equal pay legislation in 1953 and ends with the collapse of the country’s most progressive human rights legal regime in 1984. This book is not only a testament to the revolutionary impact of human rights on Canadian law but also a reminder that it takes more than laws to effect transformative social change. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- "No Jews or dogs allowed": anti-discrimination law -- Gender and Canada's human rights state -- Women and anti-discrimination law in British Columbia, 1953-69 -- Jack Sherlock and the failed Human Rights Act, 1969-73 -- Kathleen Ruff and the Human Rights Code, 1973-79 -- Struggling to innovate, 1979-83 -- Making new law under the Human Rights Code -- The politics of (undermining) human rights : the Human Rights Act, 1983-84 -- Conclusion.

This article reviews the book, "The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor," by Chris Rhomberg.

During the Spring of 2012, Québec experienced one of the most important social movements of its contemporary history. The Maple Spring started as a student protest against tuition fee hikes but ended up as a much broader social upheaval against austerity and the authoritarianism of the provincial government. This article investigates the role and position of the labor movement during the Maple Spring. It argues that the events of the Maple Spring demonstrate how the Québec labor movement was put under pressure by the politics of austerity and revealed its internal contradictions. More broadly, this article makes the case for a dialectical approach to understanding the labor movement that takes into consideration its internal diversity and tensions.

We assessed the degree of alignment of organizational strategies with telework using Statistics Canada's 2005 Workplace and Employee Survey data. We consider telework to be 'employee-oriented' when an employee works at home to address his and her family-related or personal wants or needs, and 'employer-oriented' otherwise. We found that employers focusing on innovation were significantly more likely to use both types of telework, with greater emphasis on employee-oriented telework, whereas employers favouring an involvement strategy were somewhat less likely to use either type of telework. We did not find a statistical relationship between a cost containment strategy and telework. Overall, the results suggested that employers are not universally aligning the implementation of the two types of telework with their organizational strategies.

The article reviews the book, "Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict In Quebec: 1840-1914," by Darcy Ingram.

Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term?recognition? shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics--one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a place-based modification of Karl Marx's theory of primitive accumulation throws light on Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon's critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization. --Publisher's description.

Using 7 years of data representing the Canadian private sector, we estimate the effects of the major components of compensation on a rarely studied form of employee performance: innovation. Although there are some limitations inherent in the data, our results indicate the complex motivation required for consistent innovation success. Surprisingly, we find that fixed pay (salary) and individual performance pay have no effect on innovation, while variable group pay and indirect pay (employee benefits) have a positive effect. In other words, our results suggest that you can pay employees to innovate, provided that you select the right compensation incentives.

Review of: Un salariat au-delà du salariat ? by Marie-Christine Bureau and Antonella Corsani .

This thesis adopts a socialist feminist perspective to explore women’s experiences with occupational gender segregation in unionized grocery stores across Southwestern Ontario. The thesis draws conclusions about the devaluation of women’s labour and how this devaluation impacts their economic and social status. Socialization theory and human capital theory, as well as explanations based on biology, are critiqued in this thesis, as these explanations do not fully account for occupational gender segregation. The results of this study suggest that occupational gender segregation is deeply entrenched in unionized grocery stores and the trend towards increasing profit by replacing full-time labourers with part-time labourers is further exacerbating the marginalization of women in paid labour. It is concluded that women’s labour has been steadily devalued and that class and patriarchy severally limit women’s overall upward mobility by concentrating women in highly gendered part-time low skilled jobs in grocery stores.

Discusses occupation, work and employment in the context of mental health disability.

"[E]xamines the strike by academic librarians and archivists at the Universtiy of Western Ontario, a pivotal event in academic librarian labour history...[including] issues of salary, academic status, and autonomy that led to the strike in 2011." -- Editors' introduction.

This article provides new evidence on the economic assimilation of immigrants from the British Isles in Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using data from the 1901 and 1911 censuses and a pseudo-cohort methodology, we estimate both entry and assimilation effects. We find a non-negligible decline in entry earnings among successive cohorts of British and Irish immigrants, previously overlooked in the literature. Our estimates also reveal that the economic performance for Irish and older British arrival cohorts was better than previously reported. Overall, slow economic assimilation and sparse occupational mobility of immigrants have been a long-standing issue in the Canadian labour market.

"[E]xamines the lack of advocacy on the part of professional associations and the proactive role of the Canadian Association of University Teachers in advancing the working conditions of Canadian academic librarians." -- Editors' introduction.

Provides a historical and current perspective regarding the unionization of academic librarians, an exploration ofsome of the major labour issues affecting academic librarians in a certified and non-certified union context,as well as case studies relating to the unionization of academic librarians at selected institutions in Canada. --Publisher's description