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The article reviews the book, "Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune," by Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart.

Analyzes from a national perspective the role of teachers in capitalist society, the growth of professionalism, the emergence of unions, and the ongoing battle for collective bargaining rights in the face of neoliberal austerity regimes.

This dissertation examines the rise of teachers’ union militancy in Ontario through a case study of the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) and the Ontario Public School Teachers’ Federation (OPSTF) between 1970 and their amalgamation into the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) in 1998. It uses the archival records of the two unions, relevant legislation, media records, personal collections, and interviews to explore how these two professional organizations became politicized, militant labour unions able to engage with the state and the trustees of boards of education. The Introduction situates the public education project within nation building in a capitalist-democracy and outlines the theoretical influences informing the dissertation. Chapter 1 follows the two unions during the 1970s as they developed into labour unions. The 18 December 1973 one-day, province-wide, political strike achieved the right to strike and established a unique labour regime for teachers. Chapter 2 examines the advance of the unions during the 1980s as they developed labour militancy. At the same time, neo-liberalism was ascending and the post-war social accord was coming to an end resulting in attacks on unions and cuts to social programs. How gender affected the elementary teachers’ unions between 1970 and 1990 is developed in Chapter 3. The FWTAO campaigned for women’s equality on a platform of liberal feminism while the OPSTF followed a unionist path in an effort to convince women teachers to join them. iii Chapter 4 scrutinizes the effect of neo-liberal ideology on education during the 1990–1995 Bob Rae NDP government and the impact the Social Contract had on teachers. The development of teacher resistance to the neo-liberal state is explored in Chapter 5. Alliances with other labour organizations during the Days of Action campaign culminated in a two-week, province-wide strike in the fall of 1997 against the Mike Harris Conservative government. The Conclusion brings together the findings of the dissertation and suggests future research exploring teacher union strength in the Canadian context.

Une des principales innovations syndicales en matière de régulation sociale des firmes transnationales réside dans l’émergence d’alliances syndicales internationales visant à fournir un espace de concertation et de développement de stratégies communes aux syndicats représentant les travailleurs d’une même firme. Sur la base de deux études de cas menées au sein de deux multinationales de différents secteurs et d’un corpus empirique incluant plus d’une centaine d’entretiens avec des syndicalistes de différents pays, cet article analyse la construction de l’action collective syndicale au sein de ces alliances. Partant de trois clés de lecture découlant d’autant de théories classiques de l’action collective – soit la théorie de la mobilisation des ressources, celle de la régulation sociale ainsi que celle dite de la structure d’opportunités politiques –, cet article met en relief certains facteurs déterminants du développement de cette action au sein des alliances syndicales internationales. Au-delà de l’importance pour les acteurs d’investir des ressources dans ces alliances, on observe que la formalisation organisationnelle de ces dernières, par l’intermédiaire de la définition de certaines règles d’organisation et la création de « centres » décisionnels, peut jouer un rôle déterminant dans leur propension à initier des actions collectives. Notre étude souligne également l’importance pour les acteurs syndicaux impliqués de définir un projet commun mobilisateur qui donne à la fois une cible et un sens aux actions planifiées. Au final, étant donné le bilan contrasté pouvant être tiré de ces deux cas, cet article met en lumière à la fois l’importante contribution potentielle de ces alliances au renouveau syndical mais aussi les nombreux obstacles qui se posent au développement de l’action syndicale internationale.

The article reviews the book, "The Real Dope: Social, Legal, and Historical Perspectives on the Regulation of Drugs in Canada," edited by Edgar-André Montigny.

Today, hazardous work kills 2.3 million people each year and injures millions more. Among the most compelling yet controversial forms of legal protection for workers is the right to refuse unsafe work. The rise of globalization, precarious work, neoliberal politics, attacks on unions, and the idea of individual employment rights have challenged the protection of occupational health and safety for workers worldwide. This book presents the protection of refusal rights as a moral and a human rights question. The book finds that the protection of the right to refuse unsafe work, as constituted under international labor standards, is a failure and calls for a reexamination of worker health and safety policy from the ground up. The current model of protection follows an individual employment rights framework, which fails to protect workers against the inherent social inequalities within the employment relationship. To adequately protect the right to refuse as a human right, both in North America and around the world, the book argues that a broader protection must be granted under a freedom of association framework.

The article reviews the book, "Handbook of Research in International Human Resource Management," 2nd edition, edited by Gunter K. Stahl.

Analyzes the impact of climate change and climate policy on employment in the forest industry. --Editor's introduction

Analyzes the impact of climate change and climate policy on employment and skill requirements in the transportation equipment industry. --Editor's introduction

The Canadian labour movement faces an existential crisis. State and business hostility to unions is not new, but the attack has recently intensified as conservative political forces and major employer groups have embraced the agenda of the US Republican right. Mirroring anti-union US labour law would lead to the precipitous decline of union density in Canada, which is already eroding due to the manufacturing crisis and the long-standing failure of unions to organize in private services. The new attack is more a product of labour movement weakness than strength, and will be most effectively resisted by increasing union density and bargaining power in the private sector.

The article reviews the book, "A Labour History of Ireland, 1824-2000," by Emmet O'Connor.

In the late 1970s, feminist historians urged us to “rethink” Canada by placing women’s perspectives and experiences at the centre of historical analysis. Forty years later, feminism continues to inform history writing in Canada and has inspired historians to look beyond the nation and adopt a more global perspective. This exciting new volume of original essays opens with a discussion of the debates, themes, and methodological approaches that have preoccupied women’s and gender historians across Canada over the past twenty years. The chapters that follow showcase the work of new and established scholars who draw on the insights of critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and transnational history to re-examine familiar topics such as biography and oral history, paid and unpaid work, marriage and family, and women’s political action. Whether they focus on the marriage of Governor James Douglas and his Metis wife, Amelia; representations of saleswomen in department store catalogues; or the careers of professional women such as international child activist Charlotte Whitton and Quebec social work professors at Laval University, the contributors demonstrate the continued relevance – and growth – of history informed by feminist perspectives, and they open a much-needed dialogue between francophone and anglophone historians in Canada.-- Publisher's description

This thesis provides a multi-method – historical, quantitative, qualitative, and jurisprudential – socio-legal case study of the unionization of agricultural workers in British Columbia. Agricultural employees have access to the Labour Relations Code of British Columbia. A historical examination of exclusion of agricultural workers from labour relations legislation from 1937 to 1975 explores the rationale behind labour relations laws and the political context of the legislative exclusion. Next, economic aspects of BC’s agricultural sector are described, with a focus on employment characteristics and the regionalised nature of agricultural production. Finally, this thesis explains the legal aspects of an ongoing campaign by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to unionize migrant and resident agricultural workers. The union organizing campaign shows how legal labour relations processes operate in relation to migrant workers in a sector with low rates of unionization and high rates of precarious and low-paid, dangerous work.

The article reviews the book, "Stalin's Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage," by David Levy.

Pays homage to Irene Whitfield (1941-2013), who was managing editor of the journal from 1982 to 2007.

During World War I and the 1920s, African American trainmen throughout the South took advantage of federal administrative bodies that had set anti-discrimination rules to challenge racist employers and white trainmen alike. After the war, white workers insisted that African Americans be relegated to porter jobs. White employers demanded that African American workers who continued to work as brakemen and flagmen, as they had during the war, accept lower wages for such skilled work than their white counterparts were paid. The federal government preferred to turn a blind eye to racial discrimination against African American workers in the period after federal control of the railways ended. Despite this concerted attack from all sides on their rights, unions of African American trainmen continued their fight, with some success, before federal administrative tribunals as well as the courts to retain skilled positions and receive the same pay as their white equivalents. Only the devastation of rail jobs in the 1930s largely destroyed the African American trainmen's wartime gains.

The article reviews the book, "Du côté des vainqueurs : une sociologie de l’incertitude sur les marchés du travail," by François Sarfati.

The article reviews the book, "Game Plan: A Social History of Sport in Alberta," Karen L. Wall.

The article reviews the book, "Relentless Change: A Casebook for the Study of Canadian Business History," edited by Joe Martin.

Labour law does and must have a theory of justice. Without such a theory labour law has no account of the scope of its application or the point of its normative content. Scope and content are answerable to labour law's idea of justice and a change in our thinking about either entails a necessary rethinking of the other. Because labour law's world is changing labour law will have a new theory of justice. This chapter outlines briefly what such a theory might look like. It also discusses two lines of resistance to this way of thinking. --From editors' introduction