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The article reviews the book, "Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France," by Susan B. Whitney.

The article reviews the book, "Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America," by Ann Norton Greene.

The article reviews the book, "Handbook of Work-Family Integration: Research, Theory and Best Practices," edited by Karen Korabik, Donna S. Lero and Denise L. Whitehead.

Temporary workers come to Canada under the auspices of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and specifically, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). They are unfree in the sense that they are unable to circulate within the labour market due to legal constraints. This article contextualizes Canada's TFWP within the global political economy in terms of flexible labour, racialization and genderization. Temporary workers are flexible; they provide "j ust- in- time" labour to meet what are perceived to be shortages of workers in the labour market. While this labour is flexible from the point of view of the employer, it is "precarious" from the vantage point of the worker. Employers use the TFWP to have direct power over who immigrates to Canada, slowly eroding the goals of meritocratic fairness that have supported Canadian purported efforts to make (im)migration an impartial process. Although global political economy is a good starting point for framing temporary labour in Canada, it is not sufficient. Since Confederation, Canada has always had some type of temporary worker process. The ideal of creating a British settler community was Canada's original nation-building goal, but the reality was that the Canadian capitalist class preferred temporary workers for agricultural and industrial work, infrastructure and railway construction, and domestic work; Asian and Southern and Eastern European males filled many of these positions. In railway construction and mining, for example, there were racialized labour segments with distinct groups of workers: "Whites" in higher paid and "safe" occupations, and "foreigners" who were in lower-paid and dangerous jobs (Vosko 2000) - the latter group often being hired as temporary workers. There is also a long history in Canada of foreign domestic workers serving middle- and upper-class families dating back to the late 180Os and early 1900s. Formally, under the strict logic of the immigration legislation that vows to bring to Canada the "best and the brightest" (or the very skilled), the "unskilled" workers should not be allowed to stay in Canada. However, as the work of researchers at Brandon University points out, after six months, many temporary workers arriving in Manitoba who labour in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations apply to the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP). In this sense, temporary migrants become "transitional" foreign workers (Annis 2008, Bucklaschuk 2008). Unfree labour becomes both a vehicle for a probationary period for migrants and for a new style of immigration that is driven by employers rather than the state, allowing for unsupervised racial, geographical, or gender bias.

The term "industrial voluntarism" has been used to describe the norm that dominated union organizing and, more broadly, union-management relations in Canada during most of the first half of the 20th century. In practical terms, the principle defines situations in which unions and employers initiate, develop, and enforce agreements without state assistance or compulsion. This paper investigates the history of voluntarism in Canada with attention to post-war legal accommodations and various manifestations of voluntarism related to union recognition. We show how aspects of the Framework of Fairness Agreement (FFA) negotiated between Magna International and the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) in 2007 is informed by industrial voluntarism. The FFA facilitates voluntary recognition of CAW locals at Magna plants in exchange for a no-strike promise and acceptance of many features of Magna's existing human resource management system. Overall, the historical and contemporary evidence show that voluntarism continues to manifest in different forms in response to changing labour relations conditions.

The article reviews the book, "Fresh: A Perishable History," by Susanne Freidberg.

The article reviews the book, "Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia," by Jasmin Hristov.

The article reviews the book, "International and Comparative Labour Law: Current Challenges," by Arturo Bronstein.

The article reviews the book, "The Transformation of Labour Law in Europe : A Comparative Study of 15 Countries, 1945-2004," edited by Bob Heppel and Bruno Veneziani.

In 2009, Ontario adopted the Employment Standards Amendment Act (Temporary Help Agencies) partly in response to public concern over temporary agency workers' lack of protection. Analyzing consequent changes to the Employment Standards Act in historical and international context, this article argues that while the Act now contains a section extending protections to temporary agency workers, several of its features take the province back to the future: specifically, its focus on temporary help agencies to the neglect of an overlapping group of private employment agencies and its exclusion of a key occupational group resemble unprincipled omissions and exclusions permitted previously. Limits on workers' politico-legal freedoms sanctioned under the new section also mirror precarious labour market conditions in early 20th century Ontario -- conditions prompting state intervention in the first place.

The article reviews the book , "Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s Canada," by Candida Rifkind.

The article reviews the book, "Donner et prendre : la coopération en entreprise," by Norbert Alter.

The article reviews the book, "Are Worker Rights Human Rights?" by Richard P. McIntyre.

The traditional understanding of union-party relations in Canada suggests that the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) is the party of organized labour. Reality, however, dictates that this is no longer the case. This paper examines the rise of the Working Families Coalition (WFC) and its effects on union-party. While popular rhetoric suggests that the Coalition is simply a front for the Liberal Party, a more in-depth analysis suggests otherwise. The paper suggests that the emergence of the WFC has significantly changed the union-party relationship in Ontario and consequently has altered the political strategy of the labour movement.

Shifts in Canada’s immigration policy, most recently linked to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) with the US and Mexico, have created an increased reliance on temporary migrant workers, who constitute a disposable workforce, driven from their own countries by the same forces of neoliberal capitalism which foster their super-exploitation in the Canadian labour market. In this article, the operation of two migrant worker programmes, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), are considered in the context of the province of British Columbia. The various means by which migrant workers are maintained in a state of vulnerability, available as a pool of cheap labour but excluded from belonging to the nation, are discussed. The article concludes by examining examples and further possibilities of alliances across social movements in BC in order to advance the struggle for human dignity.

The article reviews the book, "Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism," by Jennifer Nelson.

The article reviews the book, "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976," by Paul Robeson Jr.

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey, this article estimates the union effect on a firm's ability to innovate new products. The results do not find a negative relationship between unions and product innovation. Surprisingly the presence of a union is found to have a small positive effect on a firm's ability to innovate new products. These results do not imply that unions are important determinants of product innovation; instead they are noteworthy because a negative effect is not observed. These findings contradict the popular assertion that unions generally detract from firm performance. The article then reviews the Canadian and U.S. empirical literature on the union effect on various measures of firm performance, such as labour costs, employment growth, sales and profitability. In keeping with the results of this paper it appears that the argument that unions detract from firm performance is not based on a conclusive body of empirical evidence.

The article reviews the book, "Contesting Clio's Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History," edited by Christopher Dummitt and Michael Dawson.

S’inspirant de la perspective des « variétés de capitalismes », cette contribution analyse le rôle des milieux patronaux de l’industrie suisse des machines, de l’électrotechnique et de la métallurgie (MEM) dans le fonctionnement des relations industrielles et la gouvernance d’entreprise dans ce secteur au cours des trente dernières années. En se centrant sur le rôle des associations patronales de branche et des réseaux d’interconnexions des Conseils d’administration, elle explore l’hypothèse d’un glissement du modèle d’économie coordonnée qui caractérise traditionnellement la Suisse vers un modèle anglo-saxon d’économie libérale, axé sur les marchés concurrentiels. D’une part, la défection des sociétés membres, la concurrence d’associations rejetant le système de négociations collectives et l’offensive patronale en faveur d’une décentralisation et flexibilisation des relations industrielles a affaibli la coordination par les associations traditionnelles. D’autre part, l’évolution des réseaux d’interconnexions des Conseils d’administration, qui constituent un mécanisme de contrôle et de réduction de l’incertitude, indique une rupture brutale du contrôle des banques sur les industries ainsi que l’impact différencié de l’affirmation des mécanismes de marché concurrentiels sur l’intégration des grandes entreprises MEM dans le réseau national des Conseils d’administration. Les connexions sectorielles témoignent en effet d’une plus grande résistance que les liens entre les grandes entreprises MEM et celles d’autres secteurs. La contribution conclue à un rapprochement du capitalisme helvétique d’un modèle libéral de marché centré sur la compétition et les marchés boursiers, même si les formes de coordination, toujours plus sectorielles, restent indéniablement à l’oeuvre.