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The article reviews the book, "Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work," by Enobong Hannah Branch.

[This booklet] traces the development of International Workers’ Day, May 1st, against the ever-changing economic and political backdrop in Canada. Recognizing the importance of work and the historical struggles of workers to improve their lives, with a particular focus on the struggles of May 1st, the comic includes the reader as part of this history, and the story concludes that “We are all part of this historical struggle; it’s our history and our future." --Publisher's description

During the mid–2000s the number of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) present in Canada increased dramatically, more than tripling in eight years. The bulk of the increase was due to an expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to include lower–skilled occupations. The stated reason for the expansion was to address short–term labour shortages. Contrary to expectations, upon the onset of the economic downturn in 2008, the number of TFWs did not decrease significantly, and appears to be increasing again in 2010 and 2011. This paper tracks the evolution of the TFWP from a stable program designed to address short–term labour needs in high–skilled occupations into a broader labour market tool. The paper examines the most recent available statistical data for the TFWP and other documentary evidence to argue the role of the TFWP in Canada´s labour market has quietly shifted, becoming a permanent, large–scale labour pool for many industries, reminiscent of European migrant worker programs. The paper also examines the potential labour market implications of an expanded, entrenched TFWP.

This article focuses on interactions between dispatchers and drivers in addressing issues related to high turnover in the trucking industry. The study uses a qualitative approach, based on 17 individual interviews and three group discussions with dispatchers, truck drivers and labour and management representatives from 11 different Quebec-based organizations. The results reveal four key characteristics influencing the day-to-day dynamics of trucking operations: 1) the importance of dispatcher-driver interactions in efficient and quality work operations; 2) the precedence of customer satisfaction in these interactions; 3) the interdependent nature of the dispatcher-driver relationship; and 4) the role of listening and mutual respect. These findings provide new insight into understanding this relationship that is critical to driver retention.

This article examines the round of collective bargaining that took place between the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW), Canada’s largest private-sector union, and the ‘Big Three’ auto manufacturers (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors) during the most recent crisis of capitalism (sometimes popularly referred to as the ‘Great Recession’). During this round of bargaining, the union made concessions in order to secure production; the article argues what while this may have represented a short-term success, in the long run the union has implicitly bought into the logics of neoliberalism, which will have disastrous consequences for both the union and the larger labour movement.

À la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, le Canada menace de basculer dans une révolution sociale. Rassemblements et mobilisations des milieux ouvriers se succèdent durant l’hiver 1918-1919 et culminent avec la grève générale de Winnipeg en mai-juin 1919. Le mouvement est finalement écrasé par l’armée sur l’ordre de Robert Borden, premier ministre de l’époque. Cette suite d’événements, qui correspond dans les faits à un conflit de travail généralisé, est immédiatement associée par les autorités à la menace d’une révolution bolchevique. Le gouvernement et les médias lancent une grande campagne de diabolisation à l’endroit des chefs syndicaux et autres leaders politiques. Le but, bien évidemment, est d’user de la peur que suscitent partout les rouges pour étouffer le conflit social, et d’obtenir le soutien de l’opinion publique pour l’éradication de toute activité politique jugée radicale. Fondé sur des documents officiels et des témoignages de première main, cet ouvrage raconte un épisode méconnu mais déterminant de l’histoire canadienne. La campagne contre « le péril rouge » a joué un rôle fondamental dans la répression des conflits de travail de l’entre-deux-guerres. Depuis, la même recette a été utilisée pour les mêmes raisons. En outre, les parallèles avec la guerre actuelle contre le terrorisme se font sans effort. Aujourd’hui comme hier, les libertés d’expression et de contestation de l’ordre établi sont contraintes au nom d’une sécurité nationale aux frontières desquelles semblent s’arrêter les droits civils. (Sommaire de l'éditeur)

Examines the Supreme Court's decision on Fraser in the context of the broader political battle on labour rights. The author links the decline in union density to increasing inequality in income and taxation. Canada's failure to ratify or comply with international conventions of labour rights is also analyzed.

The scope of labour rights that are protected by constitutional protections of freedom of association is highly contested and, increasingly, is being litigated before courts. In Canada, the Supreme Court began in 2001 to chip away at jurisprudence that provided a narrow interpretation of freedom of association, and, in 2007, it over-ruled precedent to hold that freedom of association includes collective bargaining. However, this incremental expansion of the freedom of association to include core labour rights came to a halt in the Supreme Court's April 2011 decision Attorney General of Ontario v Fraser. Although a majority of the Court agreed that freedom of association includes collective bargaining, Fraser is remarkable for the extent of disagreement amongst members of the Court over the scope of collective bargaining and how this disagreement has influenced the tone and cogency of the Court's reasoning. This article begins by providing a history of the successive rounds of litigation leading to the Supreme Court's decision in Fraser. This legal context is important because it is barely visible in the majority and concurring judgments, which read as if collective bargaining rights for agricultural workers were a subsidiary concern, and not the issue in dispute. The article then examines the four judgments that make up the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Fraser, focusing exclusively on the freedom of association arguments. The implications of the Fraser decision for the immediate future of constitutional litigation and labour rights in Canada are discussed in the final section.

Explains in detail the purpose of the book (see publisher's description) and provides a synopsis of the essays contained therein.

On 29 April 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada released its much-anticipated decision in Attorney General of Ontario v Fraser, which dealt with the scope of constitutional protection of collective bargaining. The case involved a constitutional challenge to an Ontario statute on the grounds that it violated agricultural workers’ freedom of association and right to equality by excluding them from the statutory protection that is available to virtually all other private sector workers and by failing to provide them with alternative legislative support for meaningful and effective collective bargaining rights. Although the Court upheld the constitutionality of the legislation by an eight to one majority, it provided four different, and incommensurable, sets of reasons. For the union that instigated the litigation, Fraser is a defeat. For the labour movement and their advocates, Fraser is ambiguous. What is clear, however, is that the Supreme Court of Canada was badly divided over the scope of protection that freedom of association provides to the right to bargain collectively. This collection of original essays untangles the two stories that are intertwined in the Fraser decision—the story of the farm workers and their union’s attempt to obtain rights at work available to other working people in Ontario, and the tale of judicial discord over the meaning of freedom of association in the context of work. The contributors include trade unionists, lawyers, and academics (several of whom were involved in Fraser as witnesses, parties, lawyers, and interveners). The collection provides the social context out of which the decision emerged, including a photo essay on migrant workers, while at the same time illuminating Fraser’s broader jurisprudential and institutional implications. --Publisher's description. Introduction: Farm Workers, Collective Bargaining Rights, and the Meaning of Constitutional Protection / Judy Fudge -- Farm Worker Exceptionalism: Past, Present, and the post-Fraser Future / Eric Tucker -- The Roots of Organizing Agriculture Workers in Canada / Wayne Hanley -- Development as Remittances or Development as Freedom? Exploring Canada’s Temporary Migration Programs from a Rights-based Approach / Kerry Preibisch -- Envisioning Equality: Analogous Grounds and Farm Workers’ Experience of Discrimination / Fay Faraday -- Harvest Pilgrims: Migrant Farm Workers in Ontario / Vincenzo Pietropaolo --The Fraser Case: A Wrong Turn in a Fog of Judicial Deference / Paul J.J. Cavalluzzo -- What Fraser Means For Labour Rights in Canada / Steven Barrett and Ethan Poskanzer -- Labour Rights: A Democratic Counterweight to Growing Income Inequality in Canada / Derek Fudge -- The International Constitution / Patrick Macklem -- Giving Life to the ILO: Two Cheers for the SCC / K.D. Ewing and John Hendy.

This article examines the resettlement of Japanese-Canadian internally displaced persons (IDPS), who were relocated from the West Coast of British Columbia to sugar beet communities in southern Alberta between 1942 and 1953. It argues that the IDPS, assisted both by pre-World War II Japanese residents in southern Alberta and by the federal government, contributed to the rising awareness of ethnic rights. For this purpose, my study adds two new angles to the study of human rights and Japanese Canadians. First, while ethnic activism for human rights has often been examined in an urban context, it was the negotiations in the local sphere between the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers' Association and Japanese IDPS that played a significant role in promoting human rights. Second, this study applies both local and transnational contexts to the question of Japanese-Canadian IDPS, which has hitherto been studied only in terms of state violence against, an ethnic minority. The Japanese IDPS retained Pure Land Buddhism as a symbol of their loyalty to Japan, and the religion strengthened its influence in southern Alberta as a focal point of their identity.

This article presents results from research carried out in France on the transmission of professional knowledge between more experienced nurses and healthcare assistants and the new recruits. Based on an ergonomic analysis of three transmission situations, this article analyzes the place of care when passing on knowledge, looking at organizational, individual and collective aspects. It is suggested that transmission should be considered as a nodal activity. It is certainly an activity that ensures that links can be established within the profession and that there can be discussion between staff with different levels of experience and different career paths; however, it is also an area of tension between the demands of the organization and those of the profession, especially in relation to the cure and care of patients. One of the key points in relation to transmission is that it ensures that existing and new staff remain healthy and are able to provide the quality of work to which they aspire.

Global Knowledge Work: Diversity and Relational Perspectives, edited by Katerina Nicolopoulou, Mine Karatas-Ozkan, Ahu Tatli and John Taylor, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945," by Lisa Rose Mar.

Through a series of interviews with workers in the automotive parts industry, Negotiating Risk argues that the restructuring of labour markets and welfare states, paired with firm-level work and management reorganization, has exposed working-class families to greater levels of job risk and insecurity. Focusing on workers in Canada and Mexico and using a gender and race analysis, this book paints a bleak portrait of the lives of working people, where workers and their families continually renegotiate the effects of neo-liberal economic and social change. These changes see individuals working harder, longer and travelling further from home to keep their jobs, while straining familial and community relations and eroding the basis for worker solidarity and collective action. --Publisher's description. Contents: Negotiating risk, seeking security, eroding solidarity -- Labour markets, the state and work through the lens of the automotive parts industry -- Communities and their labour markets -- Experiencing risk and seeking security -- Gendered practices of coping with risk and insecurity -- Sustaining livelihoods through mobility -- Whither solidarity?

Examines the effect of the Tar Sands oil boom on the Alberta economy and society, and the business-friendly policies of the provincial government of Ralph Klein (in office, 1992-2006).

[The author] reminds us that faculty power, and not only student power, helped to change the structure and governance of the modern university. --From editors' introduction

The article reviews the book, "L'émergence de la modernité urbaine au Québec. Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, 1880-1930," by Jean Gaudette.

The Live-in Caregiver Program is a temporary foreign worker program that allows workers to come to Canada in order to labour as private caregivers for children, the elderly, and disabled individuals. This program allows caregivers to apply for permanent residency after the successful completion of 24 months of full time work. There are a number of scholars, advocacy groups, former caregivers, and other parties that have raised concerns about certain regulations of this program. For example, caregivers under this program have an employer-specific work permit, must live in the homes of the employers, and have no external monitoring of their work environments. Subsequently, the Live-in Caregiver Program has been seen as problematic because of the high number of abusive labour situations. This thesis is dedicated to an analysis of how the Canadian news print media represents the Live-in Caregiver Program. Although there has been much research done on migrant care work within Canada, and around the world, there are few studies on how the news media construct arguments that describe these transnational labour flows. The main topics that guided the research questions for this thesis were: temporary foreign worker programs; citizenship status; globalized, gendered, and racial stereotypes; the live-in regulation; employer specific work permits, and power relations in the labour relationship. This research was not geared to proving or disproving the main findings of key migrant domestic worker literature, rather it was focused on how these conclusions are interpreted, transferred and argued within a publically accessible format, Canadian news print media. This analysis revealed how journalists within Canadian news media construct important cultural narratives to persuade audiences to either reject the LCP as exploitative and problematic, or embrace it as economically beneficial.