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The article reviews the book, "I'm Neither Here nor There: Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles With Migration and Poverty," by Patricia Zavella.

Institutionalized forgetting about the scope of the Trotskyist experience in the United States was on display in every venue following the deaths of Peter Rafael Bloch (1921-2008), an authority on Puerto Rican artistic culture, and George Perle (born George Perlman, 1915-2009), a Pulitzer Prize-winning music theorist and composer once married to the sculptress and painter Laura Slobe (1909-58). Nothing written even hinted that the two iconoclasts were in the past highly educated and committed Marxists, or that revolutionary ideas oxygenated their cultural thinking at crucial moments. Alarm over memory loss of this type is the motive for this present essay, which appraises the lives of Bloch, Perle, and Slobe along with other "Bohemians" who sought a vexed amalgam of unconstrained cultural creativity, personal freedom, and disciplined "Bolshevik" politics in the Socialist Workers Party (swp) during the late 1940s and 1950s. What can be recovered of the political and personal passions of many "outlaw" lives on the Left, of cultural revolutionaries and sexual non-conformists, especially from those who infused anti-capitalism with anti-Stalinism, are only fragmentary narratives to be steered warily into coherency. For the postwar decade, one must write a kind of ghostly history, the reconstruction of the presence of an absence in a time of persecution.

The article reviews the book, "Woody Guthrie, American Radical," by William Kaufman.

This paper examines the impact of unions on employment growth in a longitudinal sample of Canadian workplaces collected during the period 2001-2006. To facilitate comparability with earlier Canadian results, we segment our analysis by industrial sector and establishment size, and find that unions suppress employment growth only in larger manufacturing establishments, and actually seem to promote employment growth among smaller service sector establishments. These results differ substantially from results found twenty-one years previously. We extend previous analysis by examining whether a declining union wage premium may have played a role in these results, and find suggestive evidence for such a contention.

This paper presents a case study of pregnancy/parental leave arrangements among faculty members at a mid-sized Canadian University from 2000-2010. The data show that leave arrangements were very inconsistent across faculties, across and within departments, and even for individual faculty members who had taken more than one leave. The majority of problematic cases were instances where a faculty member began or ended a leave in the middle of an academic term. Without specific language in their collective agreement, these faculty members often negotiated circumstances that carried individual penalties for duties that were unassigned in light of the leave. This research has implications for unions who must be particularly vigilant and active in professional environments where individual negotiation takes place and union consciousness is lower. It also emphasizes the burden placed on parents when the bearing and rearing of children is framed as an individual right rather than an issue of social reproduction. The paper uses data from a sample of collective agreements across Canadian universities to make recommendations to clarify the procedures for pregnancy and parental leave.

Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this interpretation by exploring how these communities were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance. Far from being homogeneous, these company towns are shown to be unique communities with equally unique histories. Company Towns provides a multi-layered, international comparison between the development of two settlements—the mining community of Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and the mill town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. White pinpoints crucial differences between the towns' experiences by contrasting each region's histories from various perspectives—business, urban, labour, civic, and socio-cultural. Company Towns also makes use of a sizable collection of previously neglected oral history sources and town records, providing an illuminating portrait of divergence that defies efforts to impose structure on the company town phenomenon. --Publisher's description

In 1927, Gabriel Sylliboy, the Grand Chief of the Mi'kmaw of Atlantic Canada, was charged with trapping muskrats out of season. At appeal in July 1928, Sylliboy and five other men recalled conversations with parents, grandparents, and community members to explain how they understood a treaty their people had signed with the British in 1752. Using this testimony as a starting point, William Wicken traces Mi'kmaw memories of the treaty, arguing that as colonization altered Mi'kmaw society, community interpretations of the treaty changed as well. The Sylliboy case was part of a broader debate within Canada about Aboriginal peoples' legal status within Confederation. In using the 1752 treaty to try and establish a legal identity separate from that of other Nova Scotians, Mi'kmaw leaders contested federal and provincial attempts to force their assimilation into Anglo-Canadian society. Integrating matters of governance and legality with an exploration of historical memory, The Colonization of Mi'kmaw Memory and History offers a nuanced understanding of how and why individuals and communities recall the past."--Publisher's description. Contents: Part 1: Why the Men Testified. 1. Accounting for Alex Gillis's actions: the Mi'kmaq in rural society -- 2. Why Nova Scotia prosecuted Gabriel Sylliboy -- 3. Moving to appeal: Mi'kmaw and government motivations. Part 2: How the Men Remembered. 4. Parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, 1794-1853. 5. Reserve life, 1850-1881: remembering the treaty. Part 3: Why the Men Remembered. 6. The demography of Mi'kmaw communities, 1871-1911 -- 7. Moving into the city: the King's Road Reserve and the politics of relocation. Appendix: The Federal and DIA censuses, 1871-1911.

The essays in [this book] create a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the contributors offer varied perspectives on the ways women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The essays address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations. --Publisher's description. Contents: Aboriginal women and work across the 49th Parallel : historical antecedents and new challenges / Joan Sangster -- Making a living : Anishinaabe women in Michigan's changing economy / Alice Littlefield -- Procuring passage : Southern Australian Aboriginal women and the early maritime industry of sealing / Lynette Russell -- The contours of agency : women's work, race, and Queensland's indentured labor trade / Tracey Banivanua Mar -- From "superabundance" to dependency : women agriculturalists and the negotiation of colonialism and capitalism for reservation-era Lummi / Chris Friday -- "We were real Skookum women" : The shíshálh economy and the logging industry on the Pacific Northwest Coast / Susan Roy and Ruth Taylor -- Unraveling the narratives of nostalgia : Navajo weavers and globalization / Kathy M'Closkey -- Labor and leisure in the "enchanted summer land" : Anishinaabe women's work and the growth of Wisconsin tourism, 1900-1940 / Melissa Rohde -- Nimble fingers and strong backs : First Nations and Métis women in fur trade and rural economies / Sherry Farrell Racette -- Northfork Mono women's agricultural work, "productive coexistence," and social well-being in the San Joaquin Valley, California, circa 1850-1950 / Heather A. Howard -- Diverted mothering among American Indian domestic servants, 1920-1940 / Margaret D. Jacobs -- Charity or industry? American Indian women and work relief in the New Deal era / Colleen O'Neill -- "An Indian teacher among Indians": Native women as federal employees / Cathleen D. Cahill -- "Assaulting the ears of government" : the Indian homemakers' clubs and the Maori Women's Welfare League in their formative years / Aroha Harris and Mary Jane Logan McCallum -- Politically purposeful work : Ojibwe women's labor and leadership in postwar Minneapolis / Brenda J. Child -- Maori sovereignty, Black feminism, and the New Zealand trade union movement / Cybèle Locke -- Beading lesson / Beth H. Piatote.

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

Analyzes the role played organized labour in advancing women's equity issues in the political arena, with particular focus on the period since the 2006 election of the Conservative [federal] government. --Editor's introduction

This study of Canadian national holidays examines their role as a complex and dynamic instrument of nation-building from 1867 to the early 2000s. It indentifies three phases of nation-building, labelled assimilation, transformation and multiculturalism. It takes the ideological change in Canada in 1971, namely the proclamation of Official Multiculturalism, as the momentous turning point which motivated the pioneering changes and creation of Canadian national holidays based on negotiations in the government and the interventions of varied ethnic groups, focusing on the relationship between the commemorative and recreational functions of these holidays. Specific holidays considered including Dominion Day (Canada Day), Labour Day, Victoria Day and Remembrance Day, as well as National Aboriginal Day, Canadian Multiculturalism Day and one minority festival – Chinese New Year. Counterparts in France and the United Kingdom are presented to contrast with Canadian practices, putting Canada in the global context of nation-building and decolonisation. It argues that debates surrounding national holidays are a good measure of underlying national ideology, which underwent a real change in Canada across the period studied.

The article reviews the book, "The Archaeology of American Capitalism: The American Experience in an Archaeological Perspective," by Christopher N. Matthews.