Your search

Most OECD countries have introduced policies shifting health care into community settings. These policies rely on informal caregivers to provide care to disabled or ill family and friends. At the same time, there are policies in place promoting labour market retention. To better understand how caregiving and labour policies may interact to affect the available pool of caregivers and labour force participants, we need more evidence about how informal caregiving is related to labour market outcomes. We explore this issue through three empirical studies, with a focus on caregivers who provide significant amounts of weekly care (i.e. intensive caregivers).The first study uses the Canadian cross-sectional General Social Survey to determine whether providing informal care is associated with various labour market states. We find that intense caregiving is associated with being fully retired for men and women. High intensity caregivers are also more likely to be retired before age 65. In the second study, we use the American National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women and control for time-invariant heterogeneity and time-varying sources of bias amongst retirement-aged women. We find that women who provide at least 20 hours of informal care per week are 3 percentage points more likely to retire relative to other women, which supports the idea that intensive caregiving may cause women to retire. Finally, given changes in the policy, demographic, and cultural contexts, we use the American National Longitudinal Surveys of Young and Mature Women to explore whether labour market penalties have changed over time. Following two cohorts of pre-retirement aged women, we find that intensive informal caregiving is negatively associated with labour force participation for both pre-Baby Boomers and Baby Boomers. The caregiving effects are not significantly different across cohorts, implying that, despite the introduction of offsetting policies, labour market penalties for caregivers have persisted.

This thesis interrogates social exclusion among migrant workers under the NOC C & D (“low skill”) occupational stream of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, a relatively new, fast-growing, and highly diverse stream which brings migrant workers into industry sectors and social settings where they were never seen before. The author develops a framework for understanding law’s role in producing social exclusion, and applies it to ethnographic data collected through interviews with migrant justice advocates and migrant workers in Brandon, Manitoba. This thesis ultimately establishes that migrant workers need not face spatial separation, discrimination from the community, or a historically gendered and racialized labour context in order to experience social exclusion; the author argues that social exclusion is legally constructed and that the legal framework of this program itself presents barriers to migrants’ full participation in the life of the communities in which they live and work.

Despite the international emphasis on care in private homes, the demand for long-term residential care is rising given the growing number of older persons and those living with severe disabilities. Rising acuity levels of residents have resulted in calls for more training for care providers and concerns have been raised about the supply of workers, drawing attention to the working conditions, pay, benefits and status attached to work in long-term residential care. This industry is a link in the international care chain, with wealthy countries seeking workers from poorer countries. Yet, cross-national data sources provide limited information on the long-term residential care labour force, reflecting the value attached to the sector and the level of concern about the well-being of the labour force. Data that are available indicate that care is prioritized, divided and measured in different ways in different contexts and that there are varying degrees of precariousness experienced by workers. The evidence from the data also suggests that the public not-for-profit sector and unionization are critical shelters for the mostly women providers. Using a feminist political economy approach, this thesis outlines data available from statistical sources in Europe and North America with a case examination of four countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden. It critically maps the comparative data on the supply of labour in this industry of health and social care, as well as on their locations and relations. It illustrates the extent to which the framing of care in conventional terms, influenced by both neoliberal and medical notions of care, limits the statistical infrastructure in terms of its capacity to adequately measure workforces involved in long-term residential care and to provide a basis for addressing the continuing supply of labour in this sector.

Informed by the disciplines of disability studies and interpretive sociology, and using the social model of disability and the collective identity model, this dissertation pursues an investigation of underemployment. Underemployment, conceptualized as the underutilized skills and knowledge of the employed and unemployed, occurs at higher levels amongst disabled persons than among non-disabled people (Canada, 2009). Semi-structured interviews with 14 underemployed disabled people conducted, to investigate the experiences of disabled persons who worked in the fields of education, computer, healthcare, fitness, environment, travel, social work, government and non-government agencies. In addition, Canadian social policies were analyzed to address the research questions: 1) How do disabled workers understand and address experiences of underemployment? 2) How do organizations and social policies account for underemployment amongst disabled persons? 3) How can practices which acknowledge and enhance collective identity be used to address underemployment and advance the disability movement? 4) How can underemployment amongst disabled persons be addressed at the organizational level? The texts of these narratives and Canadian social policies were analyzed using a critical interpretative textual analysis approach. The analysis demonstrates the depths of the negative consequences of high levels of underemployment resulting from structural, environmental and attitudinal barriers. Such consequences include lack of opportunities for recognition, compensation, promotion, accommodations, and career fulfillment, as well as poor mental, physical, emotional and social health. This research study is unique as it reveals the struggles that disabled persons experienced in work contexts, their narratives of resistance, and their recommendations for socio-political change to build more inclusive work environments

This paper provides a historical, socioeconomic and political analysis of the compensation claims process for former General Electric workers in Peterborough. To provide context to the issue, the literature analyzes the evolution of the compensation process, the history of asbestos and occupational cancer in Canada and more specifically, Ontario, chemical causation considerations and the government and large industry’s participation in these issues. In order to examine the complexity of the compensation process in Peterborough, the key players involved in the process were interviewed and include representatives from CAW/Unifor, Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers (OHCOW), OWA (Office of the Worker Advisor), Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), Occupational and Environmental Health Coalition of Peterborough (O&EHC-P), as well as former workers and their families. The testimonials deliver insight on issues such as the range of asbestos and chemicals used in the plant, the lack of causation data to support workers’ claims, the use and abuse of science in the process, the socioeconomic relevancy of GE in Peterborough, the environmental devastation created by the manufacturing industry in the city and the tensions between the intended and applied responsibilities of the key players. The overall findings were that the workers feel invisible to the major players involved, ignored by the community and overwhelmed by the system. To provide a deeper understanding of these issues, there are three groups of case studies examined: the compensated, the uncompensated and the families. The recommendations include a need for a concerted effort by all key players to ensure the workers’ right to a fair and just compensation process, enhanced education within the community on occupational health and safety, legislation reform, increased causation data, community mobilization efforts and environmental studies examining the water, air and soil in Peterborough and surrounding areas.

This study explores the lived experiences of unemployed women in neo-liberal Canada, through interviews with a diverse sample of participants between the ages of 25 and 40 from the cities of Toronto and Halifax. The results were analyzed using intersectional and grounded theory. The study resulted in four main findings. First, the study builds on intersectional methodology by McCall (2005) and Hancock (2007) to indicate the significance of context-specify and fluidity of identities. The significance of intersectionality theory is that there is not one salient identity; rather the impacts of identities are context dependent. Second, the neo-liberal erosion of the state infrastructure is manifested in a paucity of supports for unemployed workers. The unemployed woman workers do not only have to face a lack of adequate support when they become unemployed but they also do not have adequate support in other aspects of their lives including child care, retraining, health care and labour market supports while employed. Thus, many women do not have access to adequate living conditions without reliance on a male partner. Third, the health of the women was negatively affected, whether precariously employed or unemployed. They have insecurity around not being able to plan their future, and living on limited money and poor health care benefits. Finally, regional economic differences may be disappearing while all EI measures are brought towards the lowest common denominator. Thus, neo-liberal labour market policies put women, and particularly women with intersectional identities, in jeopardy. This study makes four policy recommendations: (1) to create social policies that address intersectional identities to allow women a real choice in facing competing demands of wage work and dependent care; (2) to create policies to curb the impacts of precarious employment; (3) to create EI policies not bound by regions but to the needs of the labour market including the growth of precarity; and (4) in the interim, to introduce extended health benefits to improve the situation of unemployed and precariously employed workers.

The lengthy and raucous 1986 Gainers meatpacking plant strike in Edmonton, Alberta was one of the most important events in recent Alberta labour history. In the midst of the economic crisis of the 1980s and the rise of neo-liberal ideas, the strike marked a backlash by both the labour movement and ordinary citizens against attacks on workers and unions. Characterized by widely covered picket line violence, repressive police and court actions, and government unresponsiveness, the strike generated massive solidarity within and beyond the labour movement. This solidarity originated in a rejection of the neo-liberal new reality of Alberta typified by high unemployment, anti-union laws and practices, and lack of government welfare support, and it generated a provincial change the law campaign, national boycott, and rising class consciousness. The working class mobilization during the Gainers strike was a watershed for the Alberta labour movement.

This research examines the everyday experiences of immigrant women working informally in the City of Toronto (Canada). The study is based on analysis of original in depth interview (n = 27) and focus group data (n = 19). The thesis begins from the belief that the choice of highly educated immigrant women, with and without professional work experiences from their home countries, to do informal work in Canada is part of a fact that they are going through a particularly intensive process of change. With special attention to the potential for critical transformative learning (e.g. Mezirow; Freire) - how this change is produced, experienced, and addressed is the key focus in this study. The study considers three avenues of experience potentially influencing change in the lives of immigrant women post-immigration: i) the ways of knowing, frames of reference, and worldviews of these women as shaped by the complex relationship between their private (e.g. as mothers and wives) and public (e.g. as community members and informal product/service workers) lives; ii) the various economic and cultural relations and shifting locations that mediate how the individual makes choices regarding (formal and/or informal) work activities; and, iii) the social relations shaping the changing experiences and interpretations of interlocking systems of power relations involving gender, race, class and disability.Agentive participation and learning in the context of economic participation are key in understanding women's choices, experiences, and outcomes in the context of their work and life experiences in Canada. This study reveals the multidimensional, often contradictory, processes of change that individuals in marginalized situations post-immigration go through and their awareness of and influence over these change processes. The analysis suggests a multilayered process that supports and sometimes inhibits the creation of a new foundation for various types of transformative learning trajectories; one that keeps the loose threads together and moves people towards and along a path they individually or collectively choose to follow in order to find meaning and realize positive change.

James W. Orr (1936-2009) was one of a number of rank-and-file labour militants in the city of Saint John, New Brunswick who bore witness to, and had some hand in, a number of upheavals in the local labour movement. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in west Saint John, he came of age at the time of the momentous Canadian Seamen’s Union strike of 1949, which had a permanent impact on his outlook. Leaving school at sixteen to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he then joined the navy before going on to become a lifelong union man on the docks. As a member of Local 1764, International Longshoremen’s Association, he helped lead the 1974 strike against the Maritime Employers’ Association. He was one of the organizers of the 1976 Saint John General Strike on 14 October against the federal government’s wage controls. Orr was also a key organizer of the 1979 NO CANDU campaign that closed the port in support of civil rights for workers in Argentina. Within the ILA, he helped open union membership for non-union workers on the docks, an effort that cost him his position as a union officer; however, the influx of new blood rejuvenated the ILA and reoriented it in the direction of social unionism. Local 273 went on to replace the archaic shape-up system with a dispatch system while also struggling against the bureaucracy of the international union and for the autonomy of Canadian locals. The object of this study is to rescue Jimmy, or “the Bear” as he was affectionately called, from what the influential social historian E.J. Hobsbawm describes as “the anonymity of the local militant.” This study relies heavily upon oral history, including two interviews completed before Orr’s death, and his personal papers deposited at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.

This research explores the relationship between a strategic approach to quality management in Canadian organizations and employee measures of happiness. In particular, it investigates how a strategic approach to quality management impacts on employee satisfaction, engagement, and morale. Understanding the relationships between a strategic approach to quality management and employee measures of happiness helps companies, policy-makers, and academia. Companies can use the conclusions to decide on the value of a quality management system as it relates to employees. The findings provide answers to employees, management, and labour unions that need to understand the impact a strategic approach to quality will have on them. Policy-makers can use the findings to set the agenda for closing Canada’s productivity gap. Knowledge of this research can support policy-maker decisions to simplify the process for implementing a strategic approach to quality, realizing the benefits for participating organizations and employees at those organizations. This research helps academia fill two major gaps in the literature: First, the impact that the implementation of a strategic quality approach has on employee happiness (namely satisfaction, engagement, and morale). The second is the focus on Canadian organizations. There are relatively few studies that investigate a strategic approach to quality that focus on Canadian companies. Much of the research related to strategic quality employs data from American, Asian, Australian, and European organizations whereas this research uses data from exclusively Canadian organizations. This is the only academic research (to the knowledge of the researcher) that uses original Canada Awards for Excellence recipient results to draw conclusions. In this research, organizations with a strategic approach to quality (Canada Awards for Excellence recipients) are compared with similar size organizations with no defined approach to quality (non-winners). A 66-question survey was used with 591 respondents representing 58.68% response rate from 12 Canadian organizations. The participating organizations were a mix of small and medium size organizations ranging in size from 5 employees to 400 employees in both the service and manufacturing sectors. The survey respondents included 315 from Canada Award for Excellence winners and 276 from non-winners. Of the 12 organizations studied, five are Canada Award for Excellence winners and seven of them are non-winners. The research provides evidence that organizations taking a strategic approach to quality have a positive impact on the employees of that organization. The research has found significant connections between an organization’s level of strategic quality and the effect on employees in terms of morale, engagement, and satisfaction. The survey alongside focus group analysis shows that there is a clear relationship between strategic quality and employee measures of happiness. The findings indicate that the impact of implementing quality is positive and results in benefits for both the organization as a whole and the individual employee. Significant differences are noted between Canada Award for Excellence winners and non-winners.

[E]xamines the role and influence of Canadian manufacturers and executives working for the Canadian government, known as the dollar-a-year men, in mobilizing the Canadian economy for war production. Based chiefly on primary source research this thesis examines contracting methods, the bureaucratic structure of the Department of Munitions and Supply, and the degree to which the Department reacted to events. This thesis demonstrates that the dollar-a-year men's strategy for industrial mobilization was initially focused on maximizing production at almost any cost, and only started focusing on cost efficiency in late 1942 and early 1943. It is also demonstrated that the current historiography is lacking and that C.D. Howe played a far different role than the historiography describes.

Taking a telescopic view of the multifaceted struggles of the workless prior to Black Tuesday challenges the myopic picture of the Great Depression as the sudden, unexpected eruption of unemployment protest. Out of all proportion to their size and political strength, radical unemployment agitators between 1875-1928 proved to be vital protagonists in forcing relief measures, thrusting socialist values into public discourse and inspiring working-class resistance during economic crises and at times when the labour movement was at its weakest. This dissertation examines hundreds of unemployment protests in urban centres across Canada during the 1872-1896 long depression, and the economic slumps of 1907-1909, 1912-1915 and 1921-1926. These protests and the organizations of the workless challenged three distinct but overlapping stages in the evolution of the liberal-capitalist state: producer, progressive, and authoritarian. Although always vulnerable and contingent, the mobilized workless responded with innovation to the evolution of liberal capitalism and, by gravitating towards the developing socialist alternative, gained greater coherence and uniformity as they moved from the local and spontaneous “les Misérables” (1875-1896) to an ad hoc “Organized Mob” (1907-1915) to a militant and sporadically nationally-organized “Unemployed Army” (1919-1935). This study contends that the persistence of a moral economy, the strategies of disruption, and working-class anguish and indignation were key resources for the radical and socialist organizers of the unemployed. Sensitive to the ways in which a culture of whiteness and masculinity often precluded greater solidarity amongst the workless, this dissertation also traces the ways unemployed diaspora socialists, socialist feminists and their allies encouraged a more diverse and inclusive movement. Far from reactionary or apathetic, the mobilized unemployed were every bit as important to the vitality of the left as unions or political parties – their struggles were crucial elements in the development of Canada’s earliest socialist experiments. Similarly, Canadian social policy history is unintelligible without an acknowledgment of the fundamental role that unemployment movements played in wresting concessions from the liberal order and as disruptive agents in the shaping of the welfare state.

This dissertation examines workplace issues and events that shaped men’s health, and the healthcare services in support of them, in northern Ontario’s resource extraction industries. Between 1890 and 1925 there were important transformations in the hardrock mining sector including: technological innovations and refinements of the materials and devices used to extract ores; the healthcare mandated and legislatively prescribed but challenging to deliver to frontier workspaces; and how the complex interactions of the men, their work, their communities, wartime demands and collective bargaining combined to construct new definitions of masculinity. Using quantitative data from the Ontario Bureau of Mines on the numbers of annual accidents and fatalities, a clearer understanding emerges that reveals how workingmen’s bodies were understood over time. Together with newspaper accounts, the reports of coroners’ juries, personal papers, doctors’ memoirs and popular histories, the role of work and workplace conditions clarifies how health was managed or how it suffered as the exploitation of the provinces natural resources began in earnest. The impact of World War One caused a wholesale change in the scale and importance of the mines and the men that worked them. This was seen in their solidarity, strength and successful strike immediately after the war and in fewer accidents and fatalities. The pace of change, however, faded in the post-war era. The gains that were made were kept and men’s health and safety never again saw the alarming losses as those enumerated here.

This thesis explores the precarious nature of backstage work within the live music industry. Live music is replacing recorded music as the economic core of the music industry. Live music is a unique sector, in that it is valued for its ephemerality. Given the ephemerality of concerts, new frameworks are required to understand technical and logistical production of live music. Labour arrangements in live music reflect sweeping trends in the labour market. Backstage workers are employed in flexible, contract and contingent arrangements leading to precarious livelihoods. This thesis argues that labour precaritization in the live music industry is part of an accumulation strategy by suggesting that employers exploit the affective, emotive and cathartic nature of live music to reduce wages and extract surplus from workers. Essentially, workers are willing to accept a psychic wage in lieu a living wage. This arrangement can be called `lifestyle labour' in that workers are willing to accept lifestyle components as part of their wage.

Il est bien connu que les immigrants rencontrent plusieurs difficultés d’intégration dans le marché du travail canadien. Notamment, ils gagnent des salaires inférieurs aux natifs et ils sont plus susceptibles que ces derniers d’occuper des emplois précaires ou pour lesquels ils sont surqualifiés. Dans cette recherche, nous avons traité de ces trois problèmes sous l’angle de la qualité d’emploi. À partir des données des recensements de la population de 1991 à 2006, nous avons comparé l’évolution de la qualité d’emploi des immigrants et des natifs au Canada, mais aussi au Québec, en Ontario et en Colombie-Britannique. Ces comparaisons ont mis en évidence la hausse du retard de qualité d’emploi des immigrants par rapport aux natifs dans tous les lieux analysés, mais plus particulièrement au Québec. Le désavantage des immigrants persiste même lorsqu’on tient compte du capital humain, des caractéristiques démographiques et du taux de chômage à l’entrée dans le marché du travail. La scolarité, l’expérience professionnelle globale et les connaissances linguistiques améliorent la qualité d’emploi des immigrants et des natifs. Toutefois, lorsqu’on fait la distinction entre l’expérience de travail canadienne et l’expérience de travail étrangère, on s’aperçoit que ce dernier type d’expérience réduit la qualité d’emploi des immigrants. Dans ces circonstances, nous trouvons incohérent que le Canada et le Québec continuent à insister sur ce critère dans leur grille de sélection des travailleurs qualifiés. Pour valoriser les candidats les plus jeunes ayant peu d’expérience de travail dans leur pays d’origine, nous suggérons d’accroître l’importance accordée à l’âge dans ces grilles au détriment de l’expérience. Les jeunes, les étudiants étrangers et les travailleurs temporaires qui possèdent déjà une expérience de travail au Canada nous apparaissent comme des candidats à l’immigration par excellence. Par contre, les résultats obtenus à l’aide de la méthode de décomposition de Blinder-Oaxaca ont montré que l’écart de qualité d’emploi entre les immigrants et les natifs découle d’un traitement défavorable envers les immigrants dans le marché du travail. Cela signifie que les immigrants sont pénalisés au chapitre de la qualité d’emploi à la base, et ce, peu importe leurs caractéristiques. Dans ce contexte, la portée de tout ajustement aux grilles de sélection risque d’être limitée. Nous proposons donc d’agir également en aval du problème à l’aide des politiques d’aide à l’intégration des immigrants. Pour ce faire, une meilleure concertation entre les acteurs du marché du travail est nécessaire. Les ordres professionnels, le gouvernement, les employeurs et les immigrants eux-mêmes doivent s’engager afin d’établir des parcours accélérés pour la reconnaissance des compétences des nouveaux arrivants. Nos résultats indiquent aussi que le traitement défavorable à l’égard des immigrants dans le marché du travail est plus prononcé au Québec qu’en Ontario et en Colombie-Britannique. Il se peut que la société québécoise soit plus réfractaire à l’immigration vu son caractère francophone et minoritaire dans le reste de l’Amérique du Nord. Pourtant, le désir de protéger la langue française motive le Québec à s’impliquer activement en matière d’immigration depuis longtemps et la grille de sélection québécoise insiste déjà sur ce critère. D’ailleurs, près des deux tiers des nouveaux arrivants au Québec connaissent le français en 2011. It is well documented that immigrants face many difficulties in the Canadian labour market. Particularly, compared to native-born, they earn lower wages, occupy more precarious jobs and are often overqualified. In this research, we discuss these three issues in terms of job quality. Using the data from the 1991 to 2006 Canadian population censuses, we compare the trends in job quality of immigrants and native-born in Canada, Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. These comparisons highlight the rising gap in job quality between immigrants and native-born in the four geographical areas, but especially in Quebec. This gap persists even after controlling human capital, demographic variables and unemployment rate at entry in the labour market. Overall, we found that education, work experience and language skills improve the job quality of immigrants and their native-born counterparts. However, when we separate Canadian and foreign work experience, we find that the latter type of experience reduces job quality of immigrants. In these circumstances, it is counterproductive that Canada and Quebec continue to insist on this criterion in the point systems. We also suggest increasing the importance of age in the point systems in order to encourage the admission of younger candidates with little or no foreign experience. Youth, foreign students and temporary workers who already have work experience in Canada appear to be ideal candidates for immigration. Nevertheless, using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method, we show that the job quality gap between immigrants and natives is mainly due to unfavourable treatment of immigrants in the labour market. This means that immigrants are penalized in terms of job quality regardless of their characteristics. In this context, the selection of the best candidates for immigration may produce a limited effect. We therefore suggest acting downstream with public policy to support employment integration of immigrants. To do so, a better coordination between all actors in the labour market is required. Professional orders, government, employers and immigrants must establish accelerated pathways of skills recognition for newcomers. In addition, our results indicate that the treatment of immigrants in the labour market is more problematic in Quebec compared to Ontario and British Columbia. It is likely that Quebec society is less open to immigration given its francophone character and its minority status in North America. Since the beginning, the desire to protect the French language motivates Quebec to be actively involved in immigration and the Quebec point system already emphasizes this criterion. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of newcomers to Quebec speak French in 2011.

In the mid-1970s, three employee groups at Carleton University changed campus labour relations dramatically: the professors and librarians who belonged to the Carleton University Academic Staff formed the first Ontario faculty union in June 1975; nine months later the Ontario Labour Relations Board certified the Carleton University Support Staff Association as the bargaining agent for the administrative and technical staff. The history of faculty labour action at Carleton has been told but not that of either academic librarians or support staff so this case of unionism provides a unique opportunity to compare their experiences. Working primarily with oral histories, I argue that status was critical to mobilizing labour action at Carleton. These employees—many of whom were women—wanted a fair workplace but deliberately chose an independent association over a trade union because such “solidarity by association” was compatible with their deeply held beliefs about their work and place on campus.

Commentary on freelance work in the cultural industries suggests that freelancers are autonomous "free agents" who enjoy fulfilling work and control over their careers. Yet empirical research demonstrates that freelance media work is becoming increasingly precarious. This dissertation is a case study of the working conditions of Canadian freelance writers, the political economic and cultural context in which they work, and their efforts to organize collectively to address challenges they face. The dissertation examines the underlying processes, practices, and power relations that shape the work of freelance writing to argue that freelancers' experiences flow directly from the capitalist logic of the corporate cultural industries in which they work. In this view, freelance writing has been transformed from being primarily a strategy of resisting salaried labour by journalists—an effort to gain some control over the terms of commodification of their labour power and autonomy over their craft—into a strategy for media firms to intensify exploitation of freelance writers' labour power through two primary strategies: the exploitation of unpaid labour time and control of copyright to writers' works. Drawing on Marxist political economic analysis, a survey of Canadian freelance writers, and interviews with freelance writers' unions and organizations, the dissertation examines how exploitation is obscured in freelance cultural work and how it can be confronted through collective organization. The dissertation examines Canadian freelance writers' current organizing efforts: a professional association, a union, and an agency-union hybrid, arguing that the models freelancers favour tend to reinforce notions of professionalism and a preference for service-based organizations, which has not given freelancers the power required to effectively defend themselves against corporations' changing business practices. The dissertation outlines the challenges writers' organizations need to overcome, not least freelance writers' ambivalence toward their status as workers. Finally, the dissertation foregrounds labour processes as central to understanding media, suggesting that continual downloading of the risks of journalistic labour onto precarious workers will have implications for the future of freelance writing as an occupation and the media content produced.

Mexican migrant workers have been coming to Canada since 1974 to work in agriculture as participants of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Presently, Mexicans constitute the majority of SAWP workers. As well, Ontario is the main receiver of these workers followed by British Columbia and Quebec. Accordingly, the scope of this thesis mainly encompasses Mexican workers in Ontario. However, the thesis also includes Mexican SAWP workers in Quebec and British Columbia. This thesis reveals two main issues: (1) that all SAWP workers, particularly Mexican workers, lack key legal rights and protections relating to labour relations, employment, health and safety standards at the structural level of the SAWP; and at the federal, provincial, and international levels. (2) Even when they have rights under legislation relating to the above-mentioned subject matters, Mexicans, especially, lack the capacity to access them. Thus, they become 'unfree labourers' who are placed in a perpetual state of disadvantage, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation once in Canada.To describe the issues above, the thesis is divided into five chapters addressing the following: Chapter 1 presents the historical context behind the SAWP as well as the Mexican workers' circumstances that attract them to participate in the Program. Chapter 2 examines the applicable constitutional and federal framework for SAWP workers. In addition, it highlights key federal exclusions placed on them, which originate in the federal immigration and employment insurance legislation. Chapter 3 concludes that Ontario does not protect its agricultural workers from unfair treatment and exploitation in the workplace; rather, it perpetuates such practices. This reality is intensified for SAWP Mexican workers. Particularly, chapter 3 analyses a constitutional challenge to the Ontario legislation excluding agricultural worker from its labour relations regime; said challenge is based on ss. 2(d) and 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Chapter 4 maintains that similarly to workers in Ontario, SAWP workers in Quebec and British Columbia also face extreme disadvantages due in great part to the lack of or limited legal protections. Finally, chapter 5 asserts that due to its implementation in the Canadian framework, international law is inadequate to protect domestic and SAWP workers' rights. While each chapter identifies tangible drawbacks or anomalies, which affect SAWP workers negatively, the thesis also provides recommendations to alleviate said weaknesses.

Contemporary migration has become increasingly transnational as migrants maintain linkages with their place of origin and, in many cases, with multiple places. Transnational practices and identities highlight the complex ways that contemporary immigrants negotiate home. This dissertation explores the ways in which transnational Filipina care workers construct home and a sense of belonging, here and elsewhere. In order to examine these experiences of belonging, I investigate the linkages between paid and unpaid work in various workplaces and places of residence. This research weaves together experiences of paid and unpaid work and the locations that (re)create their feminized, racialized and classed circumstances. . To capture the intricacies of home for transnational Filipina care workers, I analyze the 2006 Canadian Census and Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Survey. I elaborate on these data with in-depth interviews and focus groups with three groups of Filipinas: recent health care workers, recent live-in caregivers and well-established residents. The analysis takes place in the inner suburbs of Scarborough, ON and the outer suburbs of Markham, ON; two locations that are key immigrant reception zones. My methodology investigates how various qualitative and quantitative methods can be employed to better understand how the complex relations between paid and unpaid work in various places of residence and workplaces influence the construction of home for transnational care workers.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays examining the link between Aboriginal identity and economic success in the Canadian labour market. The analytical approach encompasses mixed methods research, with two empirical tests and one qualitative inquiry. Both the neoclassical and institutional economics approaches to labour market analysis are considered, as discussed in the introduction to the thesis. Essay I employs monthly Labour Force Survey data and examines the difference in the impact of the 2008-2011 economic downturn on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal workers. The main findings in this essay indicate that the economic downturn had a markedly more negative impact on Aboriginal than on non-Aboriginal workers. For one subgroup of Aboriginal workers - Métis - a large portion of the difference in the impact can be attributed to the difference in endowments while for the other subgroup of Aboriginal workers - North American Indian - only a small portion of the difference in the impact can be attributed to the difference in endowments, much remains unexplained. Essay II employs the 2006 Census and Aboriginal Peoples Survey data and examines the relative impact of various sources of capital -- human, social and cultural -- on the employment success of Aboriginal labour force participants living on-reserve, off-reserve, in urban and in rural areas across Canada. The single most important finding in this essay is that the predictions of human capital theory do not hold up when the associated empirical models are applied to different Aboriginal groups. Another important finding is that for some subgroups of Aboriginal population social capital and cultural factors are potentially important omitted variables in the associated equations. Essay III employs primary data collected from knowledgeable key informants working in the area of Aboriginal labour force development and investigates the role institutional and other constraints, not observable in the statistical information, play in the labour market experience of Aboriginal people. Findings here suggest that many paradoxes and puzzles that persist in the empirical literature can be better understood once the institutional arrangements related to the investment in human and other capital, the legacy of historical disadvantage, and the experience of workplace discrimination are taken into account.