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Cet article se concentre sur l’acteur patronal et ses préférences en matière de structures de négociation collective. Les nouvelles réalités économiques, conjuguées aux nouvelles stratégies organisationnelles et étatiques, conduiraient les employeurs dans bon nombre de pays à vouloir décentraliser les structures de négociation. Il y a toutefois des cas d’exception auxquels nous portons une attention particulière. Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude auprès des employeurs de l’industrie du vêtement pour hommes au Québec où prévaut toujours la négociation coordonnée malgré les pressions de la mondialisation. Pour analyser cette réponse différenciée des employeurs, nous avons utilisé une méthodologie qualitative. Grâce à des entretiens en profondeur et une analyse documentaire, nous avons construit un cadre analytique regroupant quatre types de facteurs en mesure d’influencer les préférences patronales pour des structures de négociation centralisées ou décentralisées : économique, organisationnel, institutionnel et stratégique.Au plan empirique, nous dégageons deux principaux constats de nos observations. D’abord, nous avons observé une volonté partagée par les parties patronale et syndicale à poursuivre une négociation coordonnée. Notons toutefois qu’une certaine hétérogénéité dans la propension des employeurs à adhérer à ce type de négociation a pu être remarquée surtout en raison de la diversité des firmes en termes de taille, de marchés desservis et de capacité de payer. Ensuite, nos résultats suggèrent une tension entre les influences exercées par les facteurs considérés dans l’étude : d’une part, les facteurs économiques et organisationnels influencent les acteurs patronaux vers l’individualisation des négociations collectives ; d’autre part, les facteurs institutionnels, en imposant certaines contraintes qui limitent leurs choix stratégiques, influencent les employeurs vers l’action collective. Au plan théorique, les résultats démontrent que les facteurs généralement associés à la mondialisation ne surdéterminent pas le comportement des acteurs. Au contraire, les acteurs conservent une marge de manoeuvre pour réagir aux pressions de l’environnement. En fonction du contexte institutionnel en place, différentes réponses peuvent ainsi être offertes par les employeurs en regard du type de structure de négociation à privilégier.

The article reviews the book, "Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History," by Rebecca Hill.

The article reviews the book, "Travail et genre : regards croisés France, Europe, Amérique latine," edited by Luis L.M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod

The article reviews and comments on three books: "Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914" by Tom Goyens, "Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism" by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, and "Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism" by Paul McLaughlin.

During the interwar period, Quebec was a strongly patriarchal society, where men in the Church, politics, and medicine, maintained a traditional norm of social and sexual standards that women were expected to abide by. Some women in the media and religious communities were complicit with this vision, upholding the "ideal" as the norm and tending to those "deviants" who failed to meet society's expectations. By examining the underside of a staid and repressive society, Andrée Lévesque reveals an alternate and more accurate history of women and sexual politics in early twentieth-century Quebec. Women, mainly of the working class, left traces in the historical record of their transgressions from the norm, including the rejection of motherhood (e.g., abortion, abandonment, infanticide), pregnancy and birth outside of marriage, and prostitution. Professor Lévesque concludes, "They were deviant, but only in relation to a norm upheld to stave off a modernism that threatened to swallow up a Quebec based on long-established social and sexual roles. --Publisher's description --T.p. verso; Includes bibliographical references and index

The article reviews the book ,"Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry," by Bruce E. Kaufman.

The article reviews two books: "New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness," edited by Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, and "Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era" by Bryan D. Palmer.

The article reviews the book, "Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People," by Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd, and Alex Kent Williamson.

The article reviews the book, "Les Débardeurs au Port de Québec: Tableau des luttes syndicales, 1831-1902," by Peter C. Bischoff.

The article reviews the book, "Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women's Studies in Canada and Quebec, 1966-76," edited by Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton, Margrit Eichler, and Francine Descarries.

The article reviews the book, "Some Like It Cold: The Politics of Climate Change in Canada," by Robert C. Paehlke.

Competitive pressure and desire for success drive enterprises in general to involve in knowledge acquisition and dissemination activities that are becoming increasingly significant in the rapid changing and globalising economic world. In addition, with the increased mobility of information and the global labour force, knowledge and experience can be transferred instantaneously around the globe; thus, any advantage gained by one company can be eliminated by comparative improvements overnight. Therefore, the only comparative advantage a particular company will face will be its process of innovation – combining market and technology know-how with the resourceful talents of knowledgeable labour to solve a constant stream of competitive problems- and its ability to derive value from information. In this context, internal and external knowledge acquisition, intra-firm knowledge dissemination and management decisions taken in response to the significant information generated and subsequently filtered became the key factors of entrepreneurial success. This thesis explores how market orientation, learning orientation and entrepreneurial orientation systematically contribute to and are sources of competitive advantage in growth-oriented SMEs. The objective of this study was to investigate the likelihood of a growth-oriented enterprise established in Atlantic Canada to be involved in knowledge acquisition and dissemination activities and to succeed conditional on numerous internal and external factors. A ‘mixed-methods’ research approach was used in this study, comprised of: 1) a web-based questionnaire to study the knowledge management process and other aspects of entrepreneurial success and 2) ‘semi-structured’ interviews with a sample of the responding entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that knowledge management practices: external acquisition, intra-firm dissemination and responsiveness, do vary across the levels of entrepreneurial performance among the Atlantic Canadian SMEs investigated in the study. Having a market orientation and investing in human resources of the firm were found to be critical drivers of innovation leading to potential competitive advantage.

During World War II thousands of workers entered the employ of wartime shipyards in British Columbia. Most Vancouver-area shipyards, following general practice in the United States along the Pacific Coast, operated on the basis of a closed shop, whereby membership was required in recognized labour unions holding agreements with the companies. Management at one shipyard, West Coast Shipbuilders Company Limited, however, bucked this trend and maintained an open shop in the face of growing pressure by the unions, in particular the marine boilermakers, to have a closed one. William McLaren, the main antagonist, reflected enduring older values among some employers in antithesis to labour-management cooperation prevalent in the United States and Canada in support of war production. Though the matter went to conciliation, the drawbacks of a legal approach were readily apparent when a board turned down labour’s request, and negotiations assisted by a judge resulted in adoption of a lesser maintenance of membership clause instead of the closed shop. Worker militancy and aggressive organizing, in the end, could not deliver the closed shop at West Coast Shipbuilders before war contracts concluded and shipbuilding contracted in the province. Taking a local, regional, and industry-specific perspective, this study argues that the union struggle for recognition and accommodation from employers in wartime Canada faltered in the case of obtaining a closed shop at this British Columbia wartime shipyard.

Human Rights in Labor and Employment Relations: International and Domestic Perspectives, edited by James A. Gross and Lance Compa, is reviewed.

The European Sectoral Social Dialogue: Actors, Developments and Challenges, edited by Anne Dufresne, Christophe Degryse and Philippe Pochet, is reviewed.

S’appuyant principalement sur une recension de données qualitatives, cet article vise à mettre en lumière les façons selon lesquelles les agents de service d’un centre d’appel de la région de Montréal parviennent à se dégager certains espaces d’autonomie pour s’engager activement dans le rôle associé à leur travail. Les résultats qui y sont présentés suggèrent que leur activité de travail s’articule autour des notions d’engagement et de distanciation dans une perspective duale. En fait, puisque leur prestation de service se déroule à la frontière de l’organisation et du marché, ils parviennent à mobiliser certaines ressources dans cette zone pour se réapproprier les contraintes pesant sur eux. Ils opérationnalisent cette réappropriation en appliquant les principes d’un engagement instrumental envers l’organisation et de distanciation envers la clientèle ou d’engagement envers la clientèle et de distanciation sociale envers leur entreprise, et ce, selon les comportements des clients qui sont en ligne avec eux. Ces stratégies génèrent des effets bénéfiques temporaires pour eux sur le plan d’une réhabilitation de leur subjectivité puisqu’elles contribuent à les protéger des clients désagréables et à actualiser une volonté de s’affirmer socialement dans leur rôle d’agent de service. En somme, ce jeu de l’engagement et de la distanciation mène à l’édification d’un engagement de leur part envers leur métier. Cet article contribue à l’avancée des connaissances scientifiques puisque, d’une part, il démontre qu’il demeure possible pour ce type de salariés de développer un engagement envers leur métier à partir de l’articulation duale de deux notions a priori contradictoires et, d’autre part, il repousse les courants de l’habilitation et de la domination sociale pour approfondir celui de la dualité en démontrant que ces salariés peuvent se réapproprier les contraintes pesant sur eux même si leur espace d’autonomie s’avère mince et fragile.

Globalization has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s and up to today's anti-globalisation movement. Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today's front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London's Docklands - and how they're being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. --Publisher's description

In the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of wooden sailing vessels became the single most important employer in Québec City. Thousands of people worked as shipwrights in the shipbuilding industry, but ship carpenters were the backbone of the trade. These workers displayed an extraordinary capacity for mobilization, being responsible for some of Canada's earliest labour organizations, starting in 1840 with the Société amicale et bienveillante des charpentiers de vaisseaux de Québec. This study demonstrates that ship carpenters' impressive capacity for organization was the result of the trade's remarkable ethnic homogeneity, as no less than 90% of ship carpenters were French Canadian, and most lived together in the working class suburb of Saint Roch. This homogeneity allowed ship carpenters to avoid the bitter internecine conflict that plagued the early labour movement, and allowed them to become part of the vanguard of the Canadian working class.

This book examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, the author connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era. By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the first-hand accounts of former sleeping car porters, the author shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism. Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, she historicizes Canadian racial attitudes and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction. Birth of a nation: race, empire, and nationalism during Canada's railway age -- Drawing the line: race and Canadian immigration policy -- Jim Crow rides this train: segregation in the Canadian workforce -- Fighting the empire: race, war, and mobilization -- Building an empire, uplifting a race: race, uplift, and transnational alliances -- Bonds of steel: depression, war, and international brotherhood. Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-267) and index.

Historians who have examined the BC socialist and labour movement have generally overlooked the First World War period, assuming that the left uniformly opposed the war. In reality, close attention to archival sources and newspapers has revealed that the war created a crisis of commitment for BC leftists between their commitment to socialist internationalism and thus opposition to the war, and their support for the British Empire and the war it was engaged in. Eventually, the need for socialist internationalism to protect ethnic Canadian socialists led the BC Federation of Labour to elect a new anti-war leadership coalition. This coalition built several new organizations, including the Federated Labour Party and the One Big Union, as well as led the general strikes in Vancouver and Winnipeg in 1918 and 1919. This study is the first to demonstrate the central importance of socialist internationalism to the success of the post-war left.