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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.

This collection of original essays investigates the social, political, and economic transformations associated with the emergence of the so-called new economy, and their impact on the organization of work within Canada. Essays in the book discuss the ways in which new management strategies, new communication technologies, and efforts to revitalize the labour movement have transformed the Canadian workplace. Focusing on changes in work organization, individuals' expectations regarding work, and the institutional support provided for workers and their families, the text constructs a critical analysis of the "new economy" in order to identify both the potential for quality work experiences and the ways in which the organization of work remains a profound social problem. --Publisher's description

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.

J.S. Woodsworth was a prominent Canadian socialist who was a member of the Canadian Parliament from 1921 to 1942 and a founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of the present New Democratic Party (NDP). This paper uses a Gramscian framework to explore his promotion of labour rights in the inter-war years, which I argue was an interregnum, a period when the hegemony of the old order was weakened. In this period, counter-hegemonic projects were launched to challenge the old order but, at the same time, so too were liberal passive revolutionary projects that aimed to restore the hegemony of capitalist relation by accommodating some of the demands of disgruntled workers, as well as coercive ones to restore order by force. J.S. Woodsworth strenuously fought against rising coercion and attempted to pursue a politics of amelioration in the hopes it would eventually lead toward socialism, but in the end it was the liberal counter-hegemonic project that was successful. I then examine the Woodsworth legacy for our time, a moment that I argue is also an interregnum, when the hegemony of the post-war order has been weakened, but because subordinated classes are weak, a counter-hegemonic project is not in the offing. Instead, we are witnessing an increase in coercion, on the one hand, and a weak politics of amelioration on the other.

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.

[E]xplores the precarious margins of contemporary labour markets. Over the last few decades, there has been much discussion of a shift from full-time permanent jobs to higher levels of part-time and temporary employment and self-employment. Despite such attention, regulatory approaches have not adapted accordingly. Instead, in the absence of genuine alternatives, old regulatory models are applied to new labour market realities, leaving the most precarious forms of employment intact. The book places this disjuncture in historical context and focuses on its implications for workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States, and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union. Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analysing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries. --Publisher's description

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.