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Questions the "value added" strategy for extracting Tar Sands oil advocated by unions and the NDP.

Summarizes the report, "It's More than Poverty: Employment Precarity and Household Well-Being," released by the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario research group in Feburary 2014.

This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health-care access. We find that both groups engage in precarious work, with consequences for their health and safety, including immigrant workers with citizenship. Nevertheless, migrant guest workers are subject to more coercive forms of labor discipline and a narrower range of social protection than immigrants. We argue that while formal citizenship can mitigate some dimensions of precariousness for farmworkers racialized as non-white, achieving a more just, safer food system will require broader policies to improve employer compliance and address legislative shortcomings that only weakly protect agricultural labor.

Describes the weakened state of the labour movement in Quebec, and efforts at renewal.

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.

The article reviews the book, "Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America," by Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui.

The shifting provincial-municipal landscape in Ontario, which has positioned local government as central to the neoliberal project, has created both strategic opportunities and risks for organized labour. This article explores how the provincial state has used downloading and neoliberal municipal restructuring to shift the balance of class forces in local politics and provides analytical context against which to examine organized labour’s attempts to pursue progressive policy outputs in this new environment.

The knowledge synthesis presented in this report is based on an analysis of publicly accessible research on northern Aboriginal youth employment. We investigated the possible sources of the apparent mismatch between employment opportunities in northern Aboriginal communities and the hopes and needs of the people who make up the northern Aboriginal youth labour force. Our report outlines what is known about the sources of the mismatch, and the measures currently being taken to address it. We comment on the quality of the available evidence. Where possible, we have supplied missing information from primary sources. Finally, we offer recommendations for further research. --Executive Summary

Critique of the federal government's decision in December 2012 to curtail migrant farm workers' access to special benefits (parental, maternal, compassionate care) under the Employment Insurance plan, despite the fact that they contribute to it.

English/French abstracts of articles in Spring 2014 volume.

Review of: Y a-t-il un âge pour travailler ? edited by François Hubault.

Examines critically the efforts of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper efforts to reshape the public symbols and representations of Canadian history, citizenship, and identity. Emphasizes the importance of the body of research on social history, as well as the understandings offered collectively by the social sciences and humanities.

This article is a critical review of "Constitutional Labour Rights in Canada: Farm Workers and the Fraser Case," by Fay Faraday, Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker.

In the mid-1980s, the Abella Commission on Equality in Employment and the federal Employment Equity Act made Canada a policy leader in addressing systemic discrimination in the workplace. More than twenty-five years later, Employment Equity in Canada assembles a distinguished group of experts to examine the state of employment equity in Canada today. Examining the evidence of nearly thirty years, the contributors – both scholars and practitioners of employment policy – evaluate the history and influence of the Abella Report, the impact of Canada’s employment equity legislation on equality in the workplace, and the future of substantive equality in an environment where the Canadian government is increasingly hostile to intervention in the workplace. They compare Canada’s legal and policy choices to those of the United States and to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and examine ways in which the concept of employment equity might be expanded to embrace other vulnerable communities. Their observations will be essential reading for those seeking to understand the past, present, and future of Canadian employment and equity policy. --Publisher's description.

This article examines some of Depression-era Canada’s most influential labour newspapers with the intent to show that their writers were deeply inspired by radical Christianity. While connected in many ways to earlier strands of working-class and leftist Christianity as typified by the social gospel, radical Christianity differs in the extent to which the roots of social dysfunction were acknowledged as being linked to the capitalist order, and the solution being in its destruction. In this way, one can find deep intellec­tual connections between the Canadian labour press and the members of the Fellowship of a Christian Social Order (FCSO). Thus, this article not only examines labour intellectuals in a Gramscian light, but seeks to challenge the claim among many historians that links between labour and Christianity col­lapsed before the Depression. Indeed, labour intellectuals sought to confront the prevailing hegemony of a capitalistic Christianity, not only by challeng­ing the links the institutional churches held with the economic elite but also through developing understanding of how capitalism played an intrinsic role in the creation of sin and suffering.

Amendments to the Ontario Human Rights Code that took effect in 2008 introduced a new hybrid direct access model, which allows complaints to be taken directly to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario without prior investigation by the province's Human Rights Commission, and which limits the Commission's role to the protection of the public interest through policy development and public education. The authors are of the view that there was inadequate cost-benefit analysis of the new model before it was implemented, and that the three-year period between the implementation of the new model and the preparation of the Pinto Report on its operation was not long enough to allow for a thorough analysis of how well the model was working. They argue that cost-benefit analysis is still needed to assess whether the model is meeting its policy goals and whether it is cost-effective and efficient. However, they acknowledge that one of the challenges in performing an analysis of a human rights regime lies in the dificulty of quantifying the regime's costs and benefits; it is hard, for example, to place a value on fictors such as access to justice. With an eye to the differences between the new Ontario model and the human rights regimes in other Canadian jurisdictions, the authors highlight a number of potential problems with the hybrid Ontario model that call for future research using a cost-benefit approach: the lack of Commission-initiated public interest cases; the risk that more non-meritorious cases will reach adjudication because of the lack of screening by the Commission; the shifting of the costs and other burdens of litigation to private parties; and the question of the effectiveness of the Legal Support Centre in helping to meet those burdens.

"In the mid-1980s, the Abella Commission on Equality in Employment and the federal Employment Equity Act made Canada a policy leader in addressing systemic discrimination in the workplace. More than twenty-five years later, Employment Equity in Canada assembles a distinguished group of experts to examine the state of employment equity in Canada today

The title of CIRA's 50th anniversary conference -- From Theory and Research to Policy and Practice in Work and Employment -- has a nostalgic ring to it. You will recall, perhaps, that large numbers of people, who used to be known as "workers", were "employed" in something called "industry". Significant numbers of these workers joined organizations called "unions" that established collective "relations" with employers. Implausible as it now seems, governments were once so concerned about "industrial relations" (IR) that they sponsored a great deal of IR research and even conducted their own. The Task Force on Labour Relations, appointed in 1966, enlisted virtually every industrial relations and labour law scholar in the country; compiled shelves-full of ambitious studies; and made scores of recommendations, a surprising number of which ended up being adopted by one or another Canadian jurisdiction. --From author's keynote address