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The growth of industrial tourism and heritage has both fascinated and frustrated scholars of deindustrialization. Frequently, workers and class conflict are obscured in or expunged from the official narratives of industrial heritage. This article makes an original contribution to research on deindustrialization and industrial heritage through fieldwork in Sudbury, Ontario – a region that has seen a decades-long process of industrial restructuring. The article draws on 26 qualitative interviews with current and retired nickel miners and analyzes workers’ reflections on local mining history. It examines how workers understand the foreign takeover of the mines, job loss, and the transformation of Sudbury’s regional economy away from blue-collar industrial employment. The article then explores the growth of regional tourism based around the mining sector, looking particularly at Dynamic Earth, an attraction that teaches visitors about the history of nickel mining through guided tours of a closed mine. On the one hand, workers critique what they see as an obfuscation of class conflict in industrial heritage, while on the other hand, they experience these sites as confirmation of the historic contributions nickel miners have made to Sudbury and the surrounding region.

This article examines the history of, and legal precedent set by, Four B Manufacturing v. United Garment Workers of America, a 1980 Supreme Court of Canada case involving an Indigenous-owned manufacturing firm that resisted the efforts of its Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers to form a union on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a reserve in southeastern Ontario. The employer, Four B, contested the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and argued, unsuccessfully, that as an "Indian enterprise," its own operations were a matter of federal jurisdiction. We return to the case of Four B for three interrelated reasons. First, we argue that Four B remains relevant because of the ways that the political economy of settler-colonial Canada continues to structure Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment as ongoing sites of tension. Second, as the inaugural case dealing with the "core of Indianness" – a contested legal concept used by the courts to determine federal jurisdiction over Indigenous labour – this case both set the legal precedent and shaped the subsequent political terrain of Indigenous labour relations. Third, the issues addressed in Four B contextualize recent jurisdictional struggles over Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment in what we term the "Indigenous public sector" – namely, health care, social services, and First Nations government administration. The article reviews the case history of Four B, setting this against the backdrop of deindustrialization in southeastern Ontario during the period, before tracing how the case influenced the juridical and political landscape of Indigenous labour relations. We close by considering the potential tensions between Indigenous self-determination and the exercise of collective bargaining rights by Indigenous workers.

The article reviews the book, "Querelle de Roberval," by Kevin Lambert.

On 15 August 1983, 9,500 workers from the Montréal locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union went on strike for the first time in 43 years. The strike became known as “la grève de la fierté” and made clear that the women working in the city’s garment factories were taking a stand against the layoffs and closures prompted by industrial restructuring and deindustrialization. However, the strike’s success was limited, revealing the extent to which the structural inequities in the garment industry had calcified along gendered, classed, and ethnic lines. The union executive had grown increasingly distant from its rank-and-file, and it was immigrant women workers who were left to organize against the flurry of closures and the corresponding decline in their working conditions. The campaign leading up to the 1983 strike, organized by the Comité d’action des travailleurs du vêtement, articulated a series of demands for the improvement of workplace health and safety conditions, better benefits, and more representative union leadership. With original archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that the 1983 “grève de la fierté” illustrates how the historically entrenched gendered structure of labour relations shaped the pathways of deindustrialization in Montréal’s garment industry.

The article reviews the book, "The Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919–30," edited by Barbara C. Allen.

The article reviews the book, "The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives," by Adolph L. Reed, Jr., with a foreword by Barbara J. Fields.

Although mine closures are an inherent feature of extractive industry, they tend to receive less attention in the literature on deindustrialization than the closures of manufacturing and other heavy industries. Until recently, the settler-colonial context of hinterland mineral development and its impact on northern Indigenous lands and communities in Canada have also remained largely unexplored within this literature. Mineral development is historically associated with the introduction of a colonial-capitalist industrial modernity across Canada’s northern regions. Yet the boom-and-bust nature and ultimate ephemerality of mineral development has meant that resource-extractive regions have also been subject to intensive “cyclonic” periods of closure and deindustrialization. This article examines the experience of deindustrialization on the part of the Inuit community of Arctic Bay, who were largely “left behind” by the closure of Nanisivik, Canada’s first High Arctic mine. Through documentary sources and oral history interviews we illustrate how, for Arctic Bay Inuit who were engaged in the cyclonic economies of Nanisivik’s development and closure, there were myriad dimensions of social loss, displacement, and resentment associated with the failure of this industrial enterprise to deliver promised benefits to Inuit, beyond more commonly understood socioeconomic impacts such as job loss.

The article reviews the book, "1972. Répression et dépossession politique," by Olivier Ducharme.

This article is about recent changes in the union strategy of Spanish platform workers. Using a socio-spatial approach to labour processes and disputes, we first describe the context of union organizing: how the business model of delivery platforms has evolved and how it is regulated in Spain. We then analyze the first initiatives to organize couriers in Spain. These initiatives can be classified under the heading of community unionism and have focused on specific spaces of union activism (state regulation and community support). Next, we explore how their newly won employee status has caused couriers to adopt more conventional forms of union organizing and focus on other spaces. Finally, we discuss the main challenges of reconciling union models with the working world of delivery platforms.

Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts toward state-led economic development. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale industrial planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. State corporate entities, such as Industrial Estates Limited, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province’s efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This article examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia’s “new industries” that emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this Stellarton-based firm reveals how structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within sectors that were completely distinct from the province’s cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This case includes a reflection on the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia and represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies.

Introduces the theme of deindustrialization in Canada including history, gender, regions, technology, and resistance Summarizes the various contributions to this special issue of the journal.

The article reviews the book, "The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program," by Pallavi Banerjee.

An organization expects its employees to comply with job standardization to improve its production efficiency, while also expecting them to make suggestions to improve their job performance. Are the two goals compatible? Does job standardization turn employees into active speakers or stifled ones? This study is about how and why job standardization influences employee voice. I use conservation of resources (COR) theory to articulate competing hypotheses and a mediating process for the individual mechanism of employees’ role orientation in their job. In a three-wave panel survey, 232 employees completed questionnaires. The results are consistent with the resource conservation argument of COR theory: job standardization is resource-depleting and tends to narrow the role orientation of employees, who thus focus on resource conservation to fulfill job requirements and are in turn less likely to consume resources and voice suggestions. This study provides a specific, job-related way for managers to keep employee voice from being stifled or ignored. Job standardization should consider the relative importance of employee voice and be classified as discipline-related or job-content-related.

Le développement du travail de plateforme a vu naître, dans différents contextes nationaux, des mobilisations pour défendre les intérêts et faire reconnaître les spécificités de travailleur·es situé·es aux marges des relations industrielles. L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner, suivant une perspective comparative et intersectionnelle, l’accompagnement syndical des mobilisations de chauffeurs VTC et de livreurs de repas en France. À partir d’une enquête qualitative sur des collectifs suivis par la CFDT et la CGT, il met en évidence les défis et les obstacles communs auxquels ces organisations sont aujourd’hui confrontées pour soutenir l’action collective de travailleur·es précaires et racisé·es.

La croissance du travail sur plateforme numérique a perturbé et réorganisé la réglementation sur l’emploi. La littérature a abordé ce sujet sous différents angles, mais souvent de manière fragmentée et sans expliquer clairement pourquoi et comment les conflits sur le plan réglementaire à propos du travail sur plateforme numérique surviennent. En utilisant le cadre de Beckert (2010) pour étudier la manière dont les domaines changent, l’auteur a effectué une revue critique de la littérature sur : 1) les rôles des institutions, des réseaux et des cadres dans la réglementation du travail sur plateforme numérique; 2) le pouvoir de réglementation que ces structures confèrent aux acteurs et aux organisations; et 3) les interrelations possibles entre ces structures. Les résultats démontrent l’existence d’une littérature abondante sur la portée de la réglementation institutionnelle et le pouvoir réglementaire des réseaux, mais beaucoup moins sur le rôle plus large de l’État dans ce domaine et les cadres qui guident les préférences des acteurs en matière de réglementation. Les axes de la recherche à réaliser dans le futur sont abordés.

The expansion of platform work has disrupted and reordered employment regulation. The literature has contributed to this subject from different angles, although often in a fragmented way and without clearly explaining why and how regulatory conflict arises over platform work. Using Beckert's (2010) framework for study of how fields change, the author conducted a critical literature review on: 1) the roles of institutions, networks and frames in regulating platform work; 2) the regulatory power these structures provide to actors and organizations; and 3) the possible interrelationships between these structures. The results show the existence of a substantial literature on the scope of institutional regulation and the regulatory power of networks, but much less on the broader role of the state in this field, and the framing processes that guide the actors’ preferences for regulation. Future lines of research are discussed.

Despite persistent depictions to the contrary, coercion pervades the modern work experience and, in many significant respects, is underwritten by the power of the state. This article outlines some of the ways in which long-standing interventions by Canadian (and British) states continue to affect workplace relations today. To appreciate the scope of this effect, it is necessary to trespass across a number of disciplinary boundaries to include topics such as immigration, deportation, political policing, the legal foundations of employment law, the continuing influence of the British Poor Laws, and the role of prisons and prison labour in helping to regulate work standards. States acted to support proletarianization in a comprehensive way, but their tendency to favour large-scale, "labour-saving" building projects has often undermined the actual effectiveness of their efforts at social control. These patterns still haunt prison policy, as I will show toward the end of the article in discussing the Toronto South Detention Centre.

Nova Scotians understand economic hardships at both the personal and community levels. This is especially true for the residents of Pictou County. With the eclipse of coal, steel, and heavy manufacturing, successive governments looked to tourism to augment an eroding economic base and to commemorate the working lives of Nova Scotians. This article offers an analysis of the initial decision to construct and maintain the Museum of Industry in a region of the province subjected to sequential phases of deindustrialization. The venture, officially opened to regular attendance in 1995, is the largest facility in the province’s impressive system of 28 regional museums. The creation of the museum, however, was fraught with uncertainty and narrowly avoided financial collapse and plans to disperse the collection of artifacts. The project was subsequently left straddling an uneasy divide between celebrating industrial heritage and tempering controversies of economic and environmental development. Despite Nova Scotia’s proud heritage of worker resistance and union activism, visitors may exit the museum with the ambiguous message that while working lives are often harsh and riven with uncertainty, optimism for the future must prevail. The implication is that the appropriate response is selective anodyne forms of nostalgia, even resignation, but not resentment of the human and environmental costs of deindustrialization.

The article reviews the book, "Ineligible: Single Mothers Under Welfare Surveillance," by Krys Maki.

Dans un contexte mondial où l’expansion de l’économie de plateformes numériques dans les secteurs du transport de personnes et de la livraison de repas suscite les mobilisations des travailleurs, le contexte japonais est caractérisé par une double « étrangeté », à savoir une absence apparente des travailleurs de plateformes dans le secteur du transport de personnes alors que les mobilisations y ont été importantes et une faible mobilisation dans le secteur de la livraison de repas où le nombre de livreurs a véritablement explosé. À partir d’une enquête qualitative menée auprès de divers acteurs actifs dans les deux secteurs, l’article montre comment le syndicalisme japonais a réagi face au capitalisme de plateforme.