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This catalogue of the Nii Ndahlohke exhibition at Art Windsor Essex (September 26, 2023 – June 25, 2024) features work by First Nations artists exploring the history of forced labour of students at Mount Elgin Industrial School (1851-1946). --WorldCat catalogue record

This article examines the history and relationship between organizing library workers and creating spaces for critical conversations among those in the field that have occurred in Edmonton since 2010. The reflective piece begins with a short history of the rise of the Edmonton Chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG). Despite PLG’s early successes, PLG Edmonton disaffiliated from the broader PLG organization in 2016, and its successor organization, the Information Workers Collective (IWC), ultimately and rapidly failed as an organization. However, an ongoing space for critical conversation was facilitated the emergence of the local Politics of Libraries (PoL) conference largely organized by student volunteers. The article concludes by reflecting on the limits of organizing beyond Edmonton.

Given the importance of the fishing industry to the Newfoundland economy and identity, understanding the realities of fish work in the province allows for a deeper understanding of labour practices, safety regulations, and the health of the many fisheries the bolster that Newfoundland economy and identity. Initially designed to assess the working experiences of migrant workers on Canadian fishing boats, this thesis turns to domestic workers to unpack labour realties and address the potential of exploitative and abusive practices that help chart fishing among one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. This research took place in Newfoundland in October of 2022, where crew members, boat captains, their owners, and industry and union representatives were approached to gather work experiences and opinions on the broader regional fishing industry in the province. From these experiences, an assessment of how and if exploitative working conditions can be improved utilizes existing and proposed international labour conventions, understandings of unionization, and the political economy, to represent exploitative labour conditions along a continuum. The evolving and changing economic and environmental realities of fishing both globally and in eastern Canada highlight how an already risk-taking, masculine, and community focused industry lives with, is shaped by, and can work towards limiting, the more damaging forms of exploitation. This thesis utilizes qualitative data to inform its assessment of precarious labour realities at sea in the Newfoundland fishing industry to further advocate for the move towards regionalized and industry specific seafarer support mechanisms. Through promoting these mechanisms, such as a seafarer support centre and the ratification of the Work in Fishing Convention (C188), this research calls for Newfoundland's fishing industry to lead the way towards better practices nationally.

Critiques Bryan Palmer's essay, "The Past is Before Us," published in the same issue. The paper was originally presented as a set of comments at the conference, Challenging Labour conference/Le défi du travail, Mount Royal University, Calgary, October 2022. Author hagwil hayetsk is also known as Charles Menzies.

This thesis explores the lived experiences of international students in Canada, examining the impacts and outcomes of Canada’s International Student Program (ISP) that positions students as not only educational participants but also flexible economic assets. Through a brief review of international student policy developments, it is argued that these changes reflect a deliberate effort to commodify international students' labor to meet Canadian labor market demands. The thesis also draws on migration literature to highlight the exploitative risks inherent in foreign labor pathways, applying these concerns to the International Student Program. Through the use of qualitative semi-structured interviews with international students and support professionals, this study reveals the challenges students face under these policies including permit or program navigation, financial instability, and most notably adverse impacts on well-being. This study highlights the complex relationship between Canada’s various mobility programs and notes the benefits of utilizing qualitative methodologies in researching program outcomes.

Most academic librarians working in the postsecondary sector in Canada and the United States today hold faculty status appointments and are represented by their campus faculty association (i.e., they are unionized). In some settings, librarians and archivists are included in the same collective bargaining unit as teaching and research faculty, while in others, information workers have their own bargaining unit. Still yet, there are campuses where librarians are not recognized as academic staff, and as such, they must actively advocate to win the rights and recognition that most of their peers who are employed at other college and university campuses in North America enjoy. This advocacy work takes place at both the individual and collective levels. The following case study explores the experiences of one Canadian and one American academic librarian who each offer their own, distinct perspectives of having held faculty status librarian appointments with permanence (i.e., tenure or continuing appointment) as well as appointments as academic library administrators, roles where librarians typically relinquish, formally and informally, their active membership in and representation by the faculty association and/or collective bargaining unit. Reflections shared will include: perspectives gained on collective action, having directly participated in labour action (e.g., a librarian and archivist strike) and collective labour advocacy work in the North American context; considerations for leaving, be it temporarily or permanently, a tenured librarian appointment for a library administrative post outside of the union (e.g., improved individual compensation, striving to improve individual and collective working conditions for librarians from within the leadership ranks) and the costs of doing so (e.g., relinquishing faculty status and its associated rights and responsibilities, including academic freedom and a workload that formally recognizes research and service work); and finally, the knowledge gained and insight gleaned after having returned to the privileged position of a faculty status librarian appointment with permanence. Arising out of this case study, strategies will be offered to help academic librarians resist corporate practices that erode their individual and collective autonomy and employment stability, and which are misaligned with academic librarians’ core professional values. The experiences of these two librarians, who have each engaged in advocacy work from both within and outside of the collective bargaining unit, will be explored in relation to the wider context of collective action, unionisation, and the overall employment conditions of information workers in Canada and the United States.

The article reviews the book, "Théories féministes voyageuses. Internationalisme et coalitions depuis les luttes latinoaméricaines," by Mara Montanaro.

Although counterintuitive for many academics and lay people alike, the Canadian environmental movement has long included significant engagement from organized labour. More surprising, perhaps, the most dedicated labour environmentalists came from unions representing workers in the auto, steel, mining, chemical, and oil industries. This was certainly the case in Alberta during the 1970s. There, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (ocaw) used their outsized influence within the Alberta Federation of Labour (afl) to conjoin growing concern about occupational health and safety with developing awareness about air and water pollution beyond the workplace. Drawing on fonds at the University of Calgary Glenbow Archives, Provincial Archives of Alberta, and Library and Archives Canada, this article chronicles and assesses efforts by ocaw officials within the afl to introduce and sustain a labour environmentalist agenda. It also makes an argument for historians interested in the origins and evolution of the Canadian environmental movement to pay closer attention to organized labour.

The article reviews the book, "L’Économie institutionnelle. Sa place dans l’économie politique," 2 volumes of John Rogers Commons, critical edition by Jean-Jacques Gislain and Bruno Théret.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. Gary Mucciaroni examines five Anglophone nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States – whose differences are often overlooked in the literature on political economy, which lumps them together as liberal, “market-led” economies. Despite their many shared characteristics and common historical origins, these nations’ responses to the labour question diverged dramatically. Mucciaroni identifies the factors that explain why these nations developed such different industrial relations regimes and how the paths each nation took to the adoption of its regime reflected a different logic of institutional change. Drawing on newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, and personal memoirs, among other sources, Answers to the Labour Question aims to understand the variety of state responses to industrial unrest and institutional change beyond the domain of industrial relations. --Publisher's description

In response to Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 10 (SDGs), organizations are collaborating with unions to integrate sustainability into their strategies by adopting socially responsible HR practices for social equity and equality. In this study, grounded in social justice ideology, we explore the antecedents, decisions and outcomes of sustainable HRM practices that promote workplace equity and equality with union support. We used a framework-based systematic literature review (SLR) method, guided by the antecedents-decisions-outcomes (ADO) framework of Paul et al. (2023), and followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocols to ensure comprehensive and transparent reporting. Using the ADO framework, we identified organizational culture and values, stakeholder engagement, union trends, legal framework and regulations, collective agreements and company size as “antecedents.” “Decisions” encompassed inclusive recruitment and hiring practices, equal pay and compensation initiatives, diversity and inclusion training, flexible work arrangements and mechanisms for conflict resolution and grievance handling. “Outcomes” included improved employee well-being, enhanced productivity and performance, greater support for diversity and inclusion and a positive impact on employee health and safety. Each of the explored practices corresponded to one of three types of social justice. We suggest several avenues for future research by identifying critical gaps in theory and practice.

The article reviews the book, "Questioning the Entrepreneurial State: Status-Quo, Pitfalls, and the Need for Credible Innovation Policy," by Karl Wennberg and Christian Sandström.

The article reviews the book, "The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise," by Richard N. Langlois

...Some shocking statistics underpin Adrian Murray's examination of COVID-19 in Canada: underfunded and poorly regulated for-profit care homes for the aged experienced a death rate four times that of public care homes. Murray details the uneven impacts of the pandemic in Canada, with the burden falling hardest on those in precarious work, women, black, Indigenous and other racalised groups - as shaped by Canada's colonial history of dispossession and racism, now exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies. Murray highlights the contradictions of Canadian exceptionalism, suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic be read through the lens of a colonial present epitomised by internal inequalities and internationally by hoarding of vaccines. --From Editors' Introduction

The article reviews the book, "After Populism: The Agrarian Left on the Northern Plains, 1900-1960," by William C. Pratt.

The article reviews the book, "Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America," by Margot Canaday.

Dans un contexte de déclin continu des taux de syndicalisation aussi bien dans les pays développés que dans les pays en développement, l’organizing model – « politiques actives de syndicalisation » ou « syndicalisme axé sur le recrutement » − est apparu au coeur de la littérature sur la revitalisation syndicale comme la stratégie la plus adéquate pour contrer la baisse des effectifs syndicaux. Devant un tel constat, et pour la première fois au Cameroun, cet article examine la relation entre l’organizing model et le recrutement des adhérents à partir des données d’une enquête par questionnaire menée auprès de 187 responsables syndicaux. Les résultats des estimations du modèle probit ordonné généralisé montrent que l’utilisation de l’organizing model par les responsables syndicaux n’a pas eu d’effet significatif sur l’évolution du nombre total de membres ainsi que sur l’évolution du nombre de nouveaux membres entre 2019 et 2021. Ces résultats, bien que conditionnés par la taille de l’échantillon et la mesure de l’organizing model, n’apportent aucun soutien aux partisans de cette stratégie de revitalisation syndicale qui la considèrent comme la plus adéquate pour recruter et retenir les adhérents. Dès lors, et afin d’obtenir les résultats escomptés, il est de l’intérêt des responsables syndicaux enquêtés de renforcer leurs méthodes d’organisation et de recrutement des adhérents et de considérer l’organizing model comme un outil qui doit être appris, systématisé et pratiqué de manière routinière.

Quebec jurisprudence in civil matters constitutes a valuable source for the history of work and employment. It reveals a vast range of conflicts experienced among workers during the transition to industrial capitalism and the way in which the judicial system proceeded to regulate such conflicts. Working with 128 reported cases, the author examines the fate of lawsuits filed by – or against – ordinary workers, factory workers, day labourers and carters, workers directly affected by the levy of surplus value generated by physical labor and through the free play of power relations in the economic world. Six categories of disputes mark this jurisprudence: divisions established by law among manual labour (notably under the legislation on masters and servants); failure to pay wages; the difficult implementation of worker privileges; challenges to employer discipline; the imposition of damages during work; and, finally, the hazards of seizures carried out against workers. Many indicators betray the incapacity of bringing together civil law and civil justice, as instruments of social regulation, in order to take precautions against the profound fragility of wage-earning status in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Precarious Employment (PE) is characterized by job, income, and benefit insecurities. Studies surrounding PE and well-being have been predominantly quantitative, leaving a gap in rich descriptions of employment experiences. We recruited a sample of 40 adults aged 25-55 who were involved in PE during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic or lost employment due to the pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were administered. Employment and income insecurities were common and had negative impacts on the well-being of participants and their families. Uncertainty about future employment prospects and job and income loss resulted in chronic distress. Other insecurities—access to benefits, violation of worker rights, worker safety—was also reported as impacting well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened insecurities, hardships, and distress among workers with PE conditions. Given the myriad insecurities experienced by those engaged in PE, the focus of precarious work research should also include working conditions, violation of worker rights, and managerial domination.

The Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences, Tomoya Obokata, visited Canada from 23 August to 6 September 2023. During his visit, he travelled to Ottawa, Moncton, Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver.