Your search

At the "Challenging Labour" / «Le défi du travail» conference held at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, in October 2022, two plenary sessions invited scholars to engage in a dialogue on important historical and theoretical issues in the field of labour and working-class history/studies. One of these, on the entanglement of capitalism and colonialism, featured a paper delivered by Bryan D. Palmer and a response from hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies). These presentations are revised for publication here along with a rejoinder from Palmer in what is Labour/Le Travail's first "Forum" section. The aim of this section is to foster conversation, with scholars meaningfully engaging with each other's work across disciplinary, methodological, theoretical, or other kinds of differences in approach and understanding. The merit of this kind of dialogue is well demonstrated here by Palmer and hayetsk, and the editors would invite more such conversations for publication in this section in future issues. --Editors' introduction

En raison de leur statut prééminent, les droits fondamentaux se sont introduits dans le droit du travail. Les regards se sont vite tournés vers la confrontation normative qui résulte de l'assemblage de ces deux domaines du droit aux logiques distinctes. Les droits de la personne ont alors été appréhendés davantage dans un rapport de confrontation plutôt que de complémentarité avec le corpus du droit du travail. Cette étude historico-juridique cherche à démontrer que le construit du droit du travail recoupe pourtant les trois traits structurants des droits de la personne, soit la fondamentalité, l'universalité et l'inaliénabilité. Cette complémentarité devrait être prise en compte dans l'interprétation des droits fondamentaux au sein de la relation d'emploi, ce qui devrait accentuer le degré de protection de la personne au travail.

Advertising tools used by sex workers for solicitation and client screening have been identified as supporting occupational health and safety (OHS); however, sex work legislation continues to criminalize advertising by third parties. We explored how the criminalization of third-party advertising and online censorship shapes indoor sex workers’ access to OHS measures such as client screening, and negotiation of prices and services, in addition to income security.

Precarious employment (PE) is non-standard employment with uncertain and unstable contract duration, low wages, and limited labour protections and rights. Research has associated PE with workers’ poor mental health and well-being; however, this association has been studied primarily using quantitative methods. This qualitative study seeks to examine the mechanisms between PE and mental health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it aims to address: (Benach J, Muntaner C. Precarious employment and health: developing a research agenda. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2007;61(4):276.) How do PE and working conditions impact the mental well-being of workers and members of their close families or households?; and (Kreshpaj B, Orellana C, Burström B, Davis L, Hemmingsson T, Johansson G, et al. What is precarious employment? A systematic review of definitions and operationalizations from quantitative and qualitative studies. Scand J Work Environ Health. 2020;46(3):235–47.) How has the COVID-19 pandemic shaped these relationships? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 40 individuals aged 25–55 engaged in PE during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic or whose employment was terminated due to the pandemic. Results showed that PE amplified mental health symptoms and illnesses for workers and their families. These experiences were described as chronic, where impacts were exerted on precariously employed workers through systemic discrimination and racism, colonialism, workplace hierarchies, and gendered ideologies. PE negatively impacted mental health through emotional stress about employment and income instability, insecurity, and loss; added pressure for households where both partners are engaged in PE; impacted ability to maintain or improve overall health and well-being; and barriers to social connectedness. Overall, this study characterizes multiple dimensions of PE and the consequences they have on the mental health of workers and their families.

We discuss the everyday work of sporting goods salespeople in France, stressing the importance of informal and relational skills in the service relationship, which draws on the seller and buyer’s shared interest in sports. Salespeople do far more than just perform predefined tasks. Their effectiveness depends largely on being able to develop personal relationships with customers. We collected quantitative and qualitative data through four methods: 1) a questionnaire sent in 2019 to all sports and recreational retail managers in the Grand Est region of France (n=61); 2) an analysis of job listings posted in the press, online and in stores in 2019 and 2020 (n=152), which we used to draw up a list of skills and qualifications for the advertised positions; 3) semi-structured interviews with salespeople and store managers (n=20) on their everyday work, their relationships to sporting goods and their perceptions of customer relationships; and 4) ethnographic observation of everyday sales work in ten stores (January-February 2020). In service work, a sense of selflessness is valued, as reflected in the practice of adaptive selling. Salespeople develop a sense of the customers’ lifestyle and approach to sports and create verbal, cognitive and emotional closeness. The personal relationships that develop through such adjustments ultimately facilitate sales transactions, whose meaning is socially constructed by both parties.

L’exercice de la responsabilité individuelle du salarié représente un défi pour toute organisation de travail qui a besoin de comportements prévisibles et d’individus capables de répondre de leurs actes pour assurer une bonne efficience de ses activités. Dans le cadre de la théorie des rôles, le comportement prévisible d’un salarié résulte d’un processus d’influences mutuelles avec son manager. Cet article explore les marges de manoeuvre dont dispose le manager qui favorisent l’exercice de la responsabilité par le collaborateur, un sujet qui fait l’objet de peu de travaux empiriques. Notre recherche prend appui sur le modèle triangulaire de responsabilité de Schlenker et al. (1994), pour le proposer comme un modèle opérationnel dans le cadre des pratiques managériales. Une étude de cas multiple est présentée, constituée de 14 situations décrites par des managers et dans lesquelles des salariés exercent leurs responsabilités. Le canevas d’analyse intra-cas permet d’effectuer une analyse des éléments constitutifs d’une situation de responsabilité, pour assurer une lecture rétrospective de situations dans lesquelles la responsabilité a été effectivement exercée (situations « abouties »). Les processus, ascendant de généralisation et descendant de spécification, révèlent des stratégies d’action et des modes opératoires qui viennent installer ou conforter les prérequis d’une situation de responsabilité aboutie. Nous proposons une visée instrumentale et un enrichissement conceptuel du modèle triangulaire de responsabilité. Si nos résultats montrent que les managers jouent un rôle actif pour soutenir le processus de responsabilisation au travail, ils n’ont pas cherché à appréhender le rôle actif du salarié, ouvrant la voie à des travaux à poursuivre.

This article explores the effects of generative AI software like ChatGPT on academic labour. Beginning with an account of the commodification of knowledge work and higher education under neoliberalism, it argues that the class position of both academics and students has become muddied. In order to properly understand how ChatGPT can and will affect the academy, including academic libraries, we need to get clearer on the class position of knowledge workers (including students) and the role technology plays in the capitalist mode of production. Only then can we engage in labour activism and forge links of solidarity in full awareness of the class composition and technological structures of knowledge work.

Discusses the efforts of the Sudbury local of the Mine-Mill union in the post-World War II era to develop a distinct political-cultural community including through a multi-purpose union hall, dance school, and theatre company. Concludes that Mine-Mill's social and cultural programming was eclipsed by Cold War anti-Communism and the bitter battle with the United Steelworkers of America to represent the workers.

The article reviews the book, "Désobéir : le choix de Chantale Daigle," by Daniel Thibault et Isabelle Pelletier.

Objectif : Cette revue systématique vise à définir de manière exhaustive les pratiques GRH à haut engagement et à analyser leur corrélation avec les indicateurs clés de l’échange social. Elle propose une définition unifiée, établit les pratiques spécifiques et leurs instruments de mesure, et explore leurs effets sur les résultats individuels et organisationnels...

Across most jurisdictions in Canada, academic librarians are members of academic staff associations. Librarians participate in union activities including committee work and participation on union executives. Librarians also frequently contribute to collective bargaining through mobilizing colleagues, identifying bargaining priorities, and crafting collective agreement language. Their direct participation in bargaining as members of collective bargaining teams, however, is relatively rare. For those librarians who have participated in bargaining, how do their motivations and experiences differ from those of the faculty members that typically make up the bulk of these teams? This paper draws on interviews with ten academic librarians who have served on negotiating teams. It explores their experiences at the negotiating table, including identifying barriers and opportunities.

The concurrent growth of steam travel and state-sponsored navigational aids—marine charts, sailing guides, lighthouses—played a complicated dual role on British Columbia’s West Coast. Such technologies allowed settlers to literally bypass the Indigenous intermediaries necessary for coastal travel in previous eras. This distancing effect shaped settler perceptions of the coast and undermined the measure of autonomy that intricate coastal environments sometimes afforded Indigenous communities. Yet lighthouse logs and government records reveal that Indigenous intermediaries remained essential for the successful functioning of navigational infrastructure into the twentieth century. This article considers the Cape Beale Lighthouse to show how the state strategically engaged Indigenous knowledge and labour to construct a navigable coast. Huu-ay-aht canoes and seafaring skills were martialed to build and provision the lighthouse. Lightkeepers learned the Chinook jargon and relied on Indigenous intermediaries to communicate with government officials in Victoria. At the same time, tensions over compensation, missing livestock, and rotting whale carcasses occasionally threatened to result in physical confrontation and intervention from Indian Agents. By examining such instances of intercultural contact, conflict, and negotiation, this article argues the construction of a navigable coast was a far more protracted process than previous studies have suggested. Ultimately, however, the article positions Cape Beale and other lighthouses as among the colonial arsenal that rendered coastal environments safer and more accessible to settlers, capital, and the state itself.

Today, retaining skilled and talented employees is one of the main concerns of organizations. To this end, various policies have been considered in recent years, including policies to reconcile work with personal life. We sought to investigate the effect of work-life reconciliation on employee retention while considering the mediating role of employees’ perceived stress. In 2023, we surveyed a sample of Quebec employees who are caring for young children or other family members. In general, work-life reconciliation policies significantly increase employee retention. We also studied how employees’ perceived stress, due to work-life conflict and insufficient annual income, mediate the effect of work-life reconciliation on employee retention. Although caring for children under 18 or other family members increases employees’ perceived stress, it does not directly affect employee retention. In sum, we found that employee retention can be increased through policies that promote work-life reconciliation and thereby reduce perceived stress. Our findings have important implications and may help managers and employees implement policies to reconcile work with personal life, decrease stress, and thus increase employee retention.

This article analyzes nail technicians' occupational health experiences using body and hazard mapping – a visual, low-cost, and worker-centred approach. Thirty-seven Toronto-based nail technicians from predominantly Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean communities identified various occupational illnesses, injuries, and symptoms on visual representations of human bodies (body mapping) and linked these to their hazard sources in the nail salon (hazard mapping). The impacts identified include musculoskeletal aches and pains, stress and mental health concerns, various symptoms linked to chemical exposure, and concerns about cancer and reproductive health. Rather than a conventional occupational health approach, this work draws on Vanessa Agard-Jones' expansion of the "body burden" as more than the bioaccumulation of chemical agents. As such, this article asserts that nail technicians' body burden encompasses various types of occupational illnesses and injuries. In addition, nail technicians are exposed to broader "toxic" systemic inequities and structural conditions that allow these workplace exposures to occur and persist. By illustrating the embodied and experiential knowledges of nail technicians and contextualizing this lived experience, the body and hazard maps illuminate vast layers of harm – or multiscalar toxicities – borne by nail technicians. Moreover, as a group-based method, body and hazard mapping allow collective reflection and can spur worker mobilization toward safer and fairer nail salons.

The article reviews the book, "To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci," by Jean-Yves Frétigné.

This paper examines the politics surrounding the construction, implementation, and administration of the Saskatchewan Trade Union Act (stua) between 1944 and 1950. The act is important because it reflects the first attempt by a social democratic government in North America to construct a system of labour law that ostensibly aligned socialist ideas with the rights of workers to form trade union freedoms. This makes the stua unique in Canadian labour and political history because the legislation demonstrated the policy priorities of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) and the Canadian Congress of Labour as both organizations were attempting to solidify their places in postwar Canada. This history reflects the fact that the ccf and the unions, like the left in general throughout the 1940s and 1950s, defined the working class narrowly, focusing attention on white and male breadwinners with women and racialized workers very much on the periphery. The history also demonstrates the inherent contradiction within social democratic reform politics, as the act extended numerous rights to workers to organize and collectively bargain but when those same workers pushed back against government decision-making during the province’s first public-sector strike in 1948, political tensions found many of those same social democrats acting in similar manners to their private-sector counterparts. These tensions within social democratic approaches to labour relations – so evident in the Saskatchewan experience – have become a central contradiction of the movement throughout the postwar period and continue today.

Discusses the early 20th century films on work that were produced under the auspices of the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments. Provides detail on a select number of films, which are a significant source for labour history. Concludes by noting that the films may be viewed on the website, "The Moving Past."

Pays homage to the feminist social and cultural historian, Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023).

This article analyses the intersections of labour, social reproduction, and refugee politics through an ethnographic case study of Hungarian Romani families living in Canada. Building off of recent anthropological debates on surplus populations, the article frames the life activities of asylum-seekers as a form of labour, paying particular attention to gender and the dynamics of ‘women’s work.’ The main question explored is: what sort of life-sustaining strategies do refugees engage in when they are excluded from both wage labour and citizenship regimes? The key argument put forward is that Hungarian Romani asylum-seeking to Canada should be understood as a social reproduction strategy and a type of gendered work that has emerged in the contemporary conditions of global neoliberal capitalism. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the asylum-seeking activities of Romani families are embedded in gendered divisions of work in which gaining access to refugee status and state social support in Canada is regarded as an extension of domestic labour and familial care work, typically done by the maternal figures of the family. Moreover, the ‘women’s work’ of securing refugee support is recognized by Romani families as a legitimate form of paid work, a kind of ‘bread winning’. Reflecting on these fieldwork findings, I propose an expanded approach to social reproduction theory that is attentive to the unwaged, informal, and life-making work of refugees and surplus populations, ultimately arguing for a breakdown of the dichotomy between the ‘economic migrant’ and the ‘political refugee’ in light of the social totality of capitalism.

The article reviews the book, "Why Canada Needs Postal Banking ," by John Anderson.