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This article reviews the book, "Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement" by Geoffrey Bell.

The article reviews the book, "Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City," by Steve Early.

The article reviews the book, "The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism," edited by Kevin Skerrett, Johanna Weststar, Simon Archer, and Chris Roberts.

The article reviews the book, "Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century," by Verity Burgmann.

Are students with a permanent disability more likely to drop out of post-secondary education than students without a permanent disability? Once they are out of postsecondary education, do their experiences in the labour market differ? Answers to these questions are necessary to evaluate current policies and to develop new policies. This paper addresses these two questions using a unique data set that combines administrative records from the Canada Student Loans Program with survey responses. Our measure of permanent disability is an objective one that requires a physician’s diagnosis. The survey data supply information on the students’ education and labour market status. Simple descriptive statistics suggest that, compared to students without a permanent disability, students with a permanent disability are equally likely to drop out of postsecondary education, but less likely to be in the labour force and more likely to be unemployed. We use propensity score matching to address potential selection into the group of students who documented their disability. The results using propensity score matching are consistent with the descriptive statistics. Our story is one of an underpublicized success—the rising number of students with disabilities in postsecondary institutions and their equal likelihood of graduation—and a persistent problem—the continued disadvantage that people with disabilities, even those with the same educational attainment as people without disabilities, face in the labour market.

Models of reference dependence have improved the connection between economic theory and documented labour supply behaviour. In particular, the Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007, 2009) [hereafter "KR"] theory of expectation based reference dependent preferences appears to be a disciplined way to unify the conflicting wage elasticity estimates, and recent laboratory and natural experiments suggest this theory may work in practice as well. I take this theory to the field in a pair of laboratory-like experiments designed to test if expectations determine the effort of a group of impoverished individuals involved in piece-rate work in Northeast Brazil. I use Abeler, Falk, Goette, and Huffman's (2011) experimental mechanism, which is a clear test of KR preferences in effort provision, in two experiments: first to test if rational expectations act as a reference point that influences effort, and second to test if adaptive expectations act as a reference point that influences effort. In both experiments, I find that although people do not behave in accordance with KR preferences, they do not behave as though they make their decisions following canonical lines either. I then outline a speculative rationale for the observed behaviour in these experiments—the adaptive heuristic of regret matching—where workers are able to evaluate their ex-post feelings of regret, even if they do not know the source of those feelings, to optimize behaviour going forward.

The articles reviews the book, "Labour Arbitration in Canada," by Morton Mitchnick and Brian Etherington.

The article reviews the book, "Conflits et résistances au travail," by Yvan Sainsaulieu.

The article reviews the book, "Managing Performance through Training and Development," 7th ed., by Alan M. Saks and Robert R. Haccoun.

L’histoire est bien connue. En 1833, peu avant que ne débute la saison de la construction, les compagnons charpentiers-menuisiers de Montréal annoncent qu’ils ne travailleront plus au-delà de dix heures par jour, faute de quoi ils recourront à la grève. À la suite d’une victoire partielle auprès des employeurs, le mouvement reprend de plus belle en 1834 et s’étend même aux maçons, aux cordonniers, aux tailleurs et aux boulangers de Montréal. Une alliance de plusieurs maîtres fera toutefois échouer ce mouvement pour la journée de dix heures, dès le mois de mai 1834. Contrairement à ce que prétendait jadis Catherine Vance dans un article de la revue The Marxist Quarterly, rédigé en 1962, nous croyons que l’enjeu de la grève des charpentiers-menuisiers dépassait la seule réclamation de la journée de dix heures. Une enquête approfondie dans les sources nous révèle que nous avons affaire en fait à une lutte de pouvoir entre une nouvelle oligarchie d’entrepreneurs-architectes et une coalition de compagnons et de petits entrepreneurs artisans qui souhaitaient faire reconnaître leur légitimité, dans un contexte où les traditions et les coutumes mutualistes reliées à la pratique du métier de charpentier-menuisier étaient menacées pour la première fois par l’action souterraine de l’économie marchande. Il ressortira de ce conflit deux visions du monde : une conception républicaine du bien commun et de la justice sociale, et une conception libérale du droit de propriété et de l’autorité.

Constitutional labour rights in Canada now protect workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively and to strike. These associational freedoms are especially important for public sector workers, the most frequent targets of legislation limiting their freedoms. However, the Supreme Court of Canada judgments recognizing these rights and freedoms have also introduced important ambiguities about their foundation, scope and level of protection. This brief comment locates these ambiguities in the context of Canada’s political economy and industrial relations regime, which are beset by contradiction and conflict. It then explores the origins and development of the jurisprudential ambiguities in constitutional labour rights through a survey of recent Supreme Court of Canada’s labour rights judgments, including most recently British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and British Columbia (2016).

This article reviews the book, "Unions in Court: Organized Labour and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms" by Larry Savage and Charles W. Smith.

In this dissertation, I explore several social economic topics, including health, labour, and the environment. Although the chapters of this dissertation explore diverse subjects, the overall theme is to analyze important social issues and their policy implications. I made use of a variety of rich datasets, as well as employing various econometric analyses, often supported by a theoretical model, to examine the research topics identified in each chapter. In Chapter 1, I explore a 1997 policy change, which altered eligibility requirements for Disability Insurance (DI). While DI in Canada provides income support to millions, it has also been criticized for creating a disincentive for labour force participation. The 1997 change affected some Canadians, but not others, creating a natural experiment setting in which to explore this policy. I found that, following the tightening of eligibility requirements, relative labour force participation for women did increase, but their level of employment did not. There was little effect for men. This distinction between labour force participation and employment is a crucial one in this context: it indicates that what may appear to be individuals returning to work after not being eligible for DI may instead be individuals returning to the labour force, but unable to find suitable employment. In Chapter 2, I examine whether searching for health information on the internet acts as a complement or substitute for the demand for information from physicians (proxied by physician visits). I found that the effect on physician-based information hinged on an individuals prior trust in the formal medical sector: those with high prior trust tended to use health information searching on the internet as a complement for physician visits, whereas, those with low prior trust substituted away from physician visits in favour of information found online. The results were very similar when a telehealth program was examined instead of internet-based information. Further, those who were online health information searchers also tended to be more likely to use a telehealth program. This is a reassuring result, as it may mean that those who substituted out of the formal medical sector, in favour of health online information, may also be using the more quality-controlled telehealth programs. In Chapter 3, I explore how attitudes towards the environment affect behaviours in five key areas of environmental-related household consumption: waste generation and recycling, energy use, organic food consumption, personal transport, and water use. Prior studies have not examined these areas together, often due to data restrictions, and not in the context of environmental attitudes. Using a modelling procedure that allows for the errors in these five areas to be correlated, I found that attitudes were often a more significant predictor of ones behaviour than the financially driven policy implemented in the area.

The articles reviews the book, "Multinational Enterprises and Host Country Development," edited by Holger Görg.

Un employeur peut-il imposer à ses employés des périodes de garde obligatoires pendant lesquelles ils doivent être joignables en tout temps afin de pouvoir se rendre au travail rapidement et être en état d’accomplir leur prestation de travail ? Dans un arrêt rendu en 2017, la Cour suprême du Canada estime qu’une telle politique ne constitue pas un exercice raisonnable des droits de direction de l’employeur, mais qu’elle ne porte pas atteinte au droit à la liberté des employés protégé par la Charte canadienne. La démarche utilisée par la Cour pour apprécier ce qu’est l’exercice raisonnable d’un droit de direction représente la principale retombée de cet arrêt. Toutefois, l’analyse de l’obligation de disponibilité sous l’angle de l’atteinte aux droits fondamentaux des employés reste à faire.

The arduous struggle to form Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) at Trail, British Columbia, began in 1938. By 1944 it had been certified as the legal bargaining agent for the 5,000 workers at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (cm&s). But being certified did not spell the end of its problems. Even as World War II was winding down, local and continental anti-Communists attacked the Communist leaders who had founded the local. Among the most determined of the attackers was the United Steelworkers of America (uswa). As the Cold War began, Local 480 was girding for a two-year battle to protect itself from the raiding uswa. Sanctioned by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) to subsume Mine-Mill across North America, the Steelworkers employed an aggressive anti-Communist strategy. In early 1950, when this account begins, Local 480 was in a fight for its life.

Historians of postwar Canada have relegated neighbourhood activism to specific periods of city-wide mobilization. In Montréal, for example, authors who participated in or studied urban social movements describe a rapid decline in activism following the first sovereignty referendum in 1980. This periodization of activism has privileged the experiences of a mostly middle-class left who circulated in activist networks spanning the city and has largely ignored the experiences of working-class people who could not afford to stop organizing in their neighbourhoods. During the 1980s, residents in the Montréal neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles launched projet St-Charles, a plan to build 500 units of co-operative housing to buttress the deindustrializing area against gentrification. Co-ops were a form of low-income housing that some felt could also serve as the organizational basis for a broader movement of poor and working-class people. Plans did not progress exactly as intended; internal race, gender, class, generational, and linguistic tensions within the neighbourhood complicated attempts by local organizers to build a representational movement, as did the social-spending cutbacks that characterized the neoliberal 1980s. Rather than abandon their principles, projet organizers continued to develop co-op housing, thereby sheltering a social fabric and radical critique in Pointe-Saint-Charles from the violent restructuring of the neoliberal city.

On Canada Day 2017, author Helene Vosters hosted a Stitch-by-Stitch Unsettling Canada 150 sewing circle and picnic. Despite intermittent thundershowers, with umbrellas and soggy red thread in hand, a group of twenty to thirty intrepid stitchers embroidered text from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) 94 Calls to Action onto Canadian flags. By the time Canada 150 reached its Canada Day zenith, Vosters asserts, it had already become increasingly apparent that the story of a beneficent Canadian nation committed to equity and multicultural inclusivity that the celebrations sought to engender had been significantly eclipsed in mainstream and social media by critiques of the sesquicentennial’s ahistorical premise and its disregard for the ongoing violent effects of settler-colonialism. Against this backdrop, Vosters weaves reflections of the sewing circle as a labour of reinscription with an inquiry into the value (and pitfalls) of embracing what Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson and settler scholar Keavy Martin call everyday “aesthetic actions.”

The article reviews the book, "Refus global. Histoire d'une réception partielle," by Sophie Dubois.