Your search

Women and Labour Organizing in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism, edited by Kaye Broadbent and Michele Ford, is reviewed.

The advent of a modern workmen’s compensation system in Ontario in the mid-1910s was a moment of significant gain for injured workers. With the passage of the 1915 Workmen’s Compensation Act (WCA), injured workers would no longer have to rely on an uncertain, even hostile, judge and jury system to receive some form of compensation from their employers. The WCA was, however, a gendered, i.e., discriminatory, statute. As the paper outlines, the 1915 WCA statutorily enshrined the assumptions of the day that women’s paid work was of less value than that of men’s. The situation remained uncontested until the 1970s, when a vibrant and politically influential injured workers’ movement (IWM) emerged and, in small but important ways, began to challenge the gendered and racialized dimensions of the worker’s compensation system. As it happened, the victories secured at this juncture by the IWM that impacted on women – both as injured workers and as wives, mothers, and widows of injured workers – proved to be more symbolic than material. For while a 1982 change in the name from “Workmen’s” to “Workers Compensation Act” was symbolic of a formally gender neutral statute (continued with the passage of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act in 1997), women workers injured over the past two decades report that their claims are being processed by WCB officials who downplay the severity and the legitimacy of their injuries, on the one hand, and who circumscribe rehabilitation and job training programs with gendered notions that their jobs are secondary in importance to that of male members of their households, on the other hand. No longer totally ignored, injured women workers now confront a neo-liberal, increasingly welfarized workers’ compensation system whose formal gender neutrality does not address entrenched labour market inequalities or the regulatory and processual discrepancies between laws and their application.

This paper examines the evolution of Ontario's tree planting industry and the segmentation of its labour force since the end of WorldWar II. To. do so, it draws upon Jamie Peck's causal emphases of labour market segmentation: labour demand, labour supply, and the state. Concomitantly, it seeks to better conceptualize tree planting amongst other forestry and seasonal natural resource occupations, such as loggers and agricultural workers. The paper is organized around four distinct time periods, all of which are marked by significant changes to the structure and political economy of the forest products industry and legislation governing forest tenure and management. It also examines mechanization in the logging and tree planting industries, the shift from public to private service delivery, the role of unions, remuneration systems, the potential for the use of migrant guest workers, and the ensuing effects on the segmentation, marginalization, and stigmatization of tree planters in Ontario since the mid-1940s.

The article reviews the book, "Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920," by Ian McKay.

This article concerns the manner in which the European Union Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Directive has been implemented in the UK in the harsh corporate conditions of restructuring, redundancy and site closure. Drawing on interview and documentary evidence from six case companies (Peugeot-Citroen, General Motors, Prudential, Aviva, Marconi, Rolls-Royce), the article exposes major fault lines in the effectiveness of the UK's ICE Regulations to provide even limited protection for employees who were presented with redundancy as a fait accompli. Contrary to management claims, ICE arrangements have not provided additional levels of representation either to complement unions or to fill the "representation gap" left by declining coverage. The failure to consult raises broader questions on the wider political and legislative environment in the UK.

Mennonite political theology, at least as manifested by church pronouncements on communism and labor unions, has been both more and less progressive than the ideology of the broader North American society. When the United States and Canadian governments were obsessed with tracking down enemy “reds” within, Mennonites passed resolutions that cautioned against the identification of Christianity with anti-communism. However, while the Second World War and the decade immediately following saw the expansion of labor unions as North Americans flocked to join them, Mennonites issued statements warning against the compromise of Christian principles that union membership would entail. --Introduction

An acknowledgement speech by Mark Thompson, Professor Emeritus, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, is presented. Firstly, Thompson would like to thank Laval University and his colleagues and friends in the Department of industrial relations for this great honor, one of the great moments of his life. This honor is even more significant taking into account the major role that the Department plays in the study of industrial relations in Canada. Thompson also would like to address the graduates. They were fortunate to study various subjects in industrial relations with well-known professors. In the future, they will have many occasions to recall what they learned in their studies.

Professor Mark Thompson is recipient of an honorary doctorate in the Social Sciences. Thompson undertook university studies in the US, initially at Notre Dame University and subsequently at Cornell University, where he oriented his studies toward the field of Industrial Relations. Following his studies, military service as an officer, and two years at the International Labour Organization, Thompson chose the university sector and pursued his career at the University of British Columbia (UBC). That career would last more than thirty years and, in the meantime, he also became a Canadian citizen. During the years he spent at UBC, Thompson devoted himself to integrating the various components of his profession in a very convincing way. The first component was research and publication. The second component was direct intervention in the areas of mediation and arbitration. The third component was his work within professional associations, the Canadian Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association in the US.

The article reviews the book, "The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets," by Tito Boeri and Jan van Ours.

L’étude vise à combler le manque de connaissance sur la préparation à la négociation collective et, plus particulièrement, celle des employeurs. Malgré qu’elle soit considérée comme une phase de première importance du processus de la négociation collective, les études de terrain sur le sujet sont quasi inexistantes. Le modèle de la préparation patronale à la négociation collective utilisé a été testé à partir d’un échantillon de 232 répondants provenant des organisations syndiquées du Québec, à l’exception des fonctions publiques provinciale et fédérale. Les résultats de l’analyse montrent que, globalement, la préparation des employeurs est jugée comme étant une activité importante, surtout la préparation politique, suivie des préparations synoptique et technique. Pour la première fois à notre connaissance, une étude présente ce que font concrètement les organisations en guise de préparation, tout en permettant une analyse théorique de la dynamique de cette phase du processus de la négociation collective.

Can soft regulatory approaches and corporate social responsibility ever be substitute methods for pursuing meaningfully across the globe violations of labour standards? Our analysis shows the limits of country, government, and hard-law based international labour regulation, but also the ambiguities and challenges of soft labour regulation. We introduce an updated model of international labour regulation and create a conceptual framework for analyzing labour regulation. We provide some insights into how regulation has developed over the last decades and discuss some of the challenges it faces. Our assessment of the various regulatory regimes is based on the simple premise of whether they can provide a venue for workers' rights violations to be redressed. We aim to provide a broad overview and an attempt at generalizing the findings and "lessons learnt" so far from an international and comparative industrial relations perspective.

This paper proposes a conceptual model for understanding emerging changes in a North American labour union. UNITE-HERE, largely representing textile and hospitality workers, has been at the forefront of debates on union revitalization in the US and Canada. UNITE-HERE is often characterized as a successful example of North American union renewal, but I argue that this often oversimplifies many complex and contradictory labour strategies. Much of the labour union renewal literature remains prescriptive and is only beginning to escape false binaries such as business versus social unionism, the servicing versus organizing model, or ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ administration. In this paper, I attempt to conceptualize the strategies adopted by the union as they exist in relation to the changing political economic landscape. I characterize the current labour practices as ‘Schumpeterian unionism’, a model which captures the shifting, contradictory, and multi-scalar relationships labour has with the broader community, capital and the state. The model is illustrated with a case study of UNITE-HERE Local 75’s response to the 2003 SARS outbreak through their establishment of a Hospitality Workers Resource Centre to service unemployed workers.

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.

The article reviews the book, "Transforming or Reforming Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Community Economic Development," by John Loxley.

The article reviews the book, "Un débat en analyse du travail : deux méthodes en synergie dans l’étude d’une situation d’enseignement," by Daniel Faïta et Bruno Maggi.

The article reviews the book, "Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871," by Catharine Anne Wilson.

This paper explores the history of Ontario’s labour laws as they relate to agricultural workers, examines the way these laws have been interpreted by the judiciary, provides an overview of the most recent case affirming the right of agricultural workers to bargain, and analyzes the likely effects of the Court of Appeal’s recent decision. In so doing, it provides commentary on the relationship between the labour movement, human rights and the legal system more generally, and provides specific commentary on this situation as applies to agricultural workers in Ontario.

Labour rights are increasingly being constructed as human rights. While this construction is gaining popularity, there is still considerable opposition to it. Recently, the debate has made its way to the pages of Just Labour. Building upon a pragmatic approach utilized by feminist legal scholars, the present article seeks to continue this important dialogue and offers an alternative that combines elements of both rights-based pluralism and critical legal scholarship. It contends that the labour movement ought to employ a multi-faceted strategy to protect and promote the rights of working people. Such a strategy recognizes the limitations of rights-discourse, but also recognizes its potential benefits. The paper argues that the labour movement cannot rely solely on rights-discourse to protect its interests but that it should also not be dismissed out of hand. Thus, the construction of labour rights as human rights can be only part of the labour movement's broader fight back strategy.

The article reviews the book, "Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States," by David Rayside.