Search

Introduces the second of the two-part series in the journal on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Making of the English Working Class" by E.P. Thompson. Articles include: "The Lost Causes of E. P. Thompson" by Dipesh Chakrabarty; "Class Formation, Politics, Structures of Feeling" by Geoff Eley; "Comrade Thompson and Saint Foucault" by Todd McCallum; "Exploitation: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?" by James Epstein; "Looking Back and Ahead" by August Carbonella; "The Making dans les eaux troubles de l’historiographie québécoise : réception hésitante d’un livre en avant de son temps" by Robert Tremblay; "Who now reads E.P. Thompson? Or, (Re)reading The Making at UQAM" by Magda Fahrni; and "Individual Statements on E.P. Thompson" by, respectively, Jesse Lemisch, Alice Kessler-Harris, and June Hannam.

The article introduces the first of a two-part series in the journal on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Making of the English Working Class" by British historian E.P. Thompson. In addition to describing their own responses, the authors discuss how the book has influenced working-class studies, its political impact, Thompson's Marxism, and his critique of Methodism. The articles in the presentation include: "E.P. Thompson’s Capital: Political Economy in The Making" by Michael Merrill; "Among the Autodidacts: The Making of E.P. Thompson" by Margaret C. Jacob; “The something that has called itself ‘Marxism’” by Peter Way; "The Face of Power" by Tina Loo; "A Definitive ‘And fookin’ Amen to that!" by David Levine; "Frame Breaking Then and Now" by Rebecca Hill; and "The Privilege of History" by Sean Cadigan.

Examines back-to-work legislation and various other measures that federal/provincial governments have used on public sector unions since 1975, as well as related court decisons under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Concludes that greater solidarity is needed to counter the governmental resort to coercion.

Special Issue Introduction: This special issue interrogates race as a labour. The “labor of race,” writes David Theo Goldberg in his book "The Threat of Race" (2009:4, emphasis in original), “is the work for which the category and its assumptions are employed to effect and rationalize social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation.” Race, for Goldberg, is a “foundational code” that has been built by “racial thinkers,” that is “the day-laborers, the brick-layers, of racial foundations” (2009:4). Understanding race as a labour underscores the ontological unreality of race, which is now, of course, the constructivist orthodoxy in critical sociologies of race. In other words, conceptualizing race as a labour asserts race as an accomplishment, however unstable: an historical, social, economic, and cultural achievement that designates a constantly shifting political grammar. At the same time, understanding race as a labour, or the labour of race, demands that we ask to what work race is put. Following Zygmunt Bauman’s (2004) theorization of “wasted lives,” race might be theorized as a method of social ordering.

The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline" by Alice Mah.

The article reviews the book, "For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America," by John Curl.

The decline in trade union membership in a number of countries has led to concerns over a ‘representation gap’, where workers are deprived of a voice not only in regard to their workplace grievances, but also in regard to their contributions to productivity and the quality of working life. While a number of alternatives have been raised, including joint consultation and works councils, there are concerns that these alternatives may further weaken union organization by establishing rival forms of organization. This article examines the interwar experience with three types of workplace non-union employee representation in Canada, Germany, the US and the UK. Where management recognizes unions and unions actively ensure that they dominate these representation mechanisms, they can enhance union organization.

The article reviews the book, "Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788-1920s: 'We like to be free in this country,'" by Patricia A. McCormack.

Contrary to government official discourses that present the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) as a ‘human and just’ labour migration model, in this paper, the SAWP is presented as a migrant labour regime that functions as labour apartheid system of discipline and control, which is in place to satisfy the needs of capitalist development in the Canadian agricultural industry. By identifying the parallels and similarities of the differential treatment of Black migrant workers under South African apartheid with the differential treatment to which migrant farm workers are subjected under the SAWP, I explore how coercive migrant labour regimes of work function today in the context of heightened neoliberal hegemony and state multiculturalism. Through empirical evidences and theoretical claims, I identify main constitutive elements and forms of governance that cause workers to living and experiencing apartheid conditions; I explain how these forms of governance actually work on the ground, and how are they embodied, lived and contested by migrant farm workers participating in the program. I also delve in workers’ politics and their expressions of resistance and contestation to such system as they speak directly to the ways they experience apartheid conditions and the particular forms of how racism is inflicted over them. The SAWP presents an interesting opportunity to closely examine the ways in which colonialism works, how it is manifested today through labour and immigration schemes, and how these regimes are contested and challenged through migrant farm workers’ political subjectivities. In this respect, this paper paves the way for future movement-related research study of seasonal agricultural workers, which can generate collective insight and knowledge to support the organizing efforts of the precarious migrant workers in Canada.

[D]iscusses the surprising silence in English-language academic publishing on climate warming since 1995, finding that four-fifths of the research published is grey literature: reports and commissioned research, rather than publications in traditional, peer-reviewed journals. Why have the mainstream social sciences failed to invest in this important new field of research? What are the implications? -- Editor's introduction

The article reviews the book, "L’intervention en ergonomie," by Marie Saint-Vincent, Nicole Vézina, Marie Bellemare, Denys Denis, Élise Ledoux and Daniel Imbeau.

The article reviews the book, "Judging Homosexuals: A History of Gay Persecution in Quebec and France," by Patrice Corriveau.

The Psychology of Assessment Centers, edited by Duncan J. R. Jackson, Charles E. Lance and Brian J. Hoffman, is reviewed.

The structure, content and space of union transnational co-ordination are much richer and complex than simply revolving around tensions and relations between bureaucrats and local activists. This is illustrated through the ETUC TRACE project, a study of a managed and steered form of international union coordination. Drawing on this study, this paper discerns a form of co-ordination that worked across various dimensions of action (i.e. "influencing" politics and "communicating" policy), various political relations (internal and external relations) and different organizational levels (micro and macro). By adding original material to the existing literature, the paper stresses the relevance of the project and the various dimensions for appreciating the problems unions face in establishing and sustaining effective cross-national coordination and a supportive environment of "union learning". The TRACE project acknowledged the need to build coordination through a variety of means and serves as an invaluable insight and lesson into more managed and conscious forms of coordination.

The article reviews the book, "La colonie nantaise de Lac-Mégantic. Une implantation française au Québec au XIXe siècle," by Marcel Fournier.

This article examines occupational health and safety (OHS), with a particular focus on youth apprentices. It uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the incidence of injuries among youth apprentices, and their experiences related to health and safety at work in Canada. Analysis of large-scale national surveys suggests a high incidence of work-related injuries among youth and low participation rates of younger workers in formal OHS training. A survey of 173 former Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program (OYAP) and Registered Apprenticeship Program in Alberta (RAP) participants finds that one-fifth suffered serious occupational injuries, which required time off work. The results from this study have important implications for youth apprenticeship programs, particularly the OHS- and trade-specific knowledge required for youth to work safely during and following their apprenticeship training.

This paper considers the likelihood of whether freedom of association under section 2(d) of the Charter will be held to include a constitutional right to strike - a question which the Supreme Court of Canada will have an opportun- ity to answer when it hears the upcoming appeal in the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour case. The authors note that the prospects for the recognition of such a right have changed dramatically in the five years since the Supreme Court concluded in B.C. Health that the Charter provided protection for a limited process of collective bargaining. The main reason for this shift is the Court's subsequent decision in the Fraser case, holding that collective bargaining is merely a "derivative right" of freedom of association and that an infringement of section 2(d) in the labour relations context will be found only where the impugned legislation or state action has the effect of making it "impossible" for employees to collectively pursue workplace goals. The authors go on to review how this "effective impossibility" test has been applied by appellate courts in Ontario, British Columbia and the federal jurisdiction in recent freedom of asso- ciation claims. In their view, the restrictive approach now taken by the courts makes it highly unlikely that section 2(d) will be found to protect a right to strike. Even if strike activity is held to attract constitutional protection, they argue, such protection would apply only in very limited situations.

My dissertation project examines women’s family lives, career trajectories, and status attainment. I draw on the concept of the work-family interface to highlight how work and families operate as contextual layers that cross-over in shaping definitions and appraisals of mothers as workers and workers as mothers. Utilizing data on married mothers’ complete working histories, I demonstrate that job exits due to motherhood negatively impact women’s occupational status attainment (SES), but I also show that women face penalties when changing jobs involuntarily and also due to personal reasons not tied to the maternal role. Importantly, in each instance, I demonstrate that these effects operate independently of the non-employment durations they engender, offering broad support for the status characteristics framework which points to the role of employer appraisals of women’s work commitment in shaping their SES outcomes. I also bring families back into the discussion of the work-family interface via the construction of a family-level framework that draws on mothers’, fathers’ and children’s attitudes about maternal employment as a platform for the development of discrete family configurations. I reveal a wide array of family attitude configurations that underscore that maternal employment continues to be contested moral terrain in some families while it is ii supported in others. In particular, I show that in egalitarian families—where maternal employment is not seen as a risk to ‘good’ mothering—mothers report more positive experiences of family and marital relations, less housework and more paid work, and higher earnings. I argue that family contexts represent an important yet understudied contextual reality that is more than the sum of individual views and which have unique consequences for women’s family lives and status trajectories.

The article reviews the book, "Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada," by Alan Filewood.

Boom, Bust and Crisis: Labour, Corporate Power and Politics in Canada, edited by John Peters, is reviewed.