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The article reviews the book, "Regulating Flexibility: The Political Economy of Employment Standards," by Mark P. Thomas.

The technique of permitting unions to derogations from core employment standards has been increasingly advocated as a means of making labour law more flexible while still protecting workers since the union is considered to bring countervailing power in support of workers' preferences. The new British Columbia Employment Standards Act contains a broad union derogation provision. Industrial relations experts have commented that employment standards that permit the opting out of statutory employee protections in this way invites corrupt arrangements between employers and employer-dominated unions. Using the new BC statute as a case study, the assumption that requiring the union's consent to derogation from core standards ensures that the derogation reflects workers' preferences is tested using two sources of empirical data: collective agreements entered into by an employer friendly union (the Christian Labour Association of Canada); and collective agreements in which the union had neither the opportunity nor the strength to prevent derogation.

From a case-study based on an analysis model, which takes into account four levels of explanation (personal, interpersonal, group and organizational), and includes the study of the interactions between these different levels, this report puts forward six observations: (1) the importance of performing the analysis on several levels, (2) the existence within harassment situations of two types of process (victimizing and conflictual), (3) the fact that these processes can co-exist at different levels of analysis, (4) the existence of interactions between processes, (5) the variability of a situation across time, and (6) the necessity of distinguishing two categories of influence involved in contextual processes. From these conclusions, the authors develop a new analysis model, which is process-based, integrative and dynamic.

The article briefly reviews "Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle," by Laurie B. Green, "A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work? Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain," by Sheila Blackburn, "Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy From a Strong Society to a Third Way," by Jenny Anderson, "Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe," by Stephen Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, "Voices from the Ships: Australia’s Seafarers and their Union," by Diane Kirkby, "Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa," by Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass, "Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000," by Giovanni Federico, and "Reforming Early Retirement in Europe, Japan and the USA," by Bernhard Ebbinghaus.

The article reviews the book, "Creating a Failed State: The U.S. and Canada in Afghanistan," by John W. Warnock.

Cet article examine les modalités d’entrée dans l’âge adulte de deux cohortes de jeunes québécois, nés entre 1942 et 1951 (génération lyrique) et entre 1962-71 (génération X). Examinant l’effet net de la précarisation du marché du travail à partir des données rétrospectives de l’Enquête sociale générale de 2001, il tente plus spécifiquement de savoir jusqu’à quel point les mutations économiques des années 1980-90 permettent d’expliquer le phénomène d’allongement de la jeunesse et de la désynchronisation des parcours de vie. L’analyse montre qu’en définitive, la précarisation de l’emploi semble assez peu liée à ces mutations des parcours de vie, celles-ci semblant davantage s’expliquer par des transformations de nature non-économique tels que l’allongement des études et le changement de valeurs.

Cet article examine les modalités d'entrée dans l'âge adulte de deux cohortes de jeunes québécois, nés entre 1942 et 1951 (génération lyrique) et entre 1962-71 (génération X). Examinant l'effet net de la précarisation du marché du travail à partir des données rétrospectives de l'Enquête sociale générale de 2001, il tente plus spécifiquement de savoir jusqu'à quel point les mutations économiques des années 1980-90 permettent d'expliquer le phénomène d'allongement de la jeunesse et de la désynchronisation des parcours de vie. L'analyse montre qu'en définitive, la précarisation de l'emploi semble assez peu liée à ces mutations des parcours de vie. Ces mutations s'expliqueraient en fait davantage par des transformations de nature non-économique telles que l'allongement des études et l'assouplissement de certaines contraintes normatives au sein de la société québécoise.

The article reviews the book, "A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed," by David Barner.

The article reviews the book, "Unruly Masses: The Other Side of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna," by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner,

[F]ocuses on the legal regime that regulates the entry and exit of low-skilled temporary foreign workers and these workers' rights and terms and conditions of employment while in Canada. ...We are also interested in beginning to explore the impact of this program in relation to the Canadian labor market. In order to understand the distinctive features and effects of the low-skilled temporary foreign workers program, we situate the low-skilled TFWP in the context of the emergence and development of Canada's general TFWP.

As a result of decreased funding from the state, universities rely more and more on user fees, that is, tuition, to cover operation costs. According to Tyler Shipley, this situation has led to a “factory model of education” in which the focus of administrators is to pump as many undergraduates through the system as possible. Classes that once held fifty students now hold 150, those that once held 150 now hold 500. To accommodate this mass influx of students, universities are left scrambling to find cost-efficient means to get these students through the system, which more than often means expanding graduate programs in order to build a workforce (that is, teaching assistants and sessionals) that can teach classes, mark papers, and mediate distance education courses at a fraction of the price it would cost to pay a tenured professor.

Employment Research and State Traditions: A Comparative History of Britain, Germany and the US, by Carola M. Frege, is reviewed.

Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains, by Nicola Yeates, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island," by Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum.

The article reviews the book, "New World Dawning: The Sixties at Regina Campus," by James M. Pitsula.

The article reviews the book, "Criminalizing Race, Criminalizing Poverty: Welfare Fraud Enforcement in Canada," by Kiran Mirchandani and Wendy Chan.

An influential strand of the finance literature focuses on the nature and extent of shareholder rights vis-a-vis employees. Most of the extant literature on the subject relies on a limited number of case studies and/or broad macroeconomic data, whereas this article draws on evidence from a large scale survey of organizations to test the predictions of the theories on the relative strength of workers and managers across the different governance regimes. This evidence highlights the complex relationship between societal institutions, legal traditions, political parties and electoral systems, on corporate governance regimes and the relative strength of unions and collective representation at workplace level, highlighting the limitations of the mainstream finance and economics rational-incentive based literature, and the value of alternative socio-economic approaches.

The article reviews the book, "U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform From Above, the Promise of Revival From Below," by Kim Moody.