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The article reviews the book, "New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks," by William J. Mello.

The term ‘working poor’ is in common usage, but it does not have a widely accepted definition. We use the term throughout the paper to refer to persons with non-trivial paid earnings who live in a household with low income. Our report provides a new definition of ‘working poverty,’ one that allows researchers to measure the incidence of working poverty now and in the future. It identifies the areas in the Toronto Region where they live, and describes the changing trends for this group, based on custom tabulations drawn from Statistics Canada microdata using both the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) and the Canadian Census. --From Summary

The article reviews the book, "We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing," by Dana Cloud and Keith Thomas.

Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home and The Civil Wars in US Labor: Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old?, both by Steve Early, are reviewed.

The brief histories of the Steveston Fishers’ Strike of 1900 are dominated by the arrival of the militia on 24 July and images of racialized violence between Japanese and white fishers. This thesis analyzes Japanese language sources and re-evaluates contemporary English language press reports to expand the strike narrative and demonstrate that Japanese fishers held significant negotiating power throughout the standoff. It argues that labeling Japanese as strikebreakers ignores their perspectives and goals in the labour dispute; however, this thesis also explains that there were important differences within the Japanese community and that to speak of a single Japanese perspective is to privilege individuals in positions of power who benefitted financially from fellow community members. It also demonstrates that by emphasizing tensions between groups of fishers, existing histories overlook the fact that the most violent acts of the month were done by the cannery owners through their connections with government.

The article reviews the book, "Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies," by Frances Swyripa.

The article reviews the book, "The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada," by Bob Barnetson.

[The authors] recount the story of the canals, with particular emphasis on the experiences of the engineers, contractors, and labourers who built the inland waterways between 1824 and 1889. Making extensive use of the National Archives and the Archives of Ontario, Styran and Taylor unveil previously unpublished information about the construction of the canals, including technical plans and drawings from a wide variety of sources. They illustrate the technical and management intricacies of building a navigational trade and commerce lifeline while also revealing the vivid characters - from businessman William Hamilton Merritt to engineer John Page - who inspired the project and drove it to completion. The history of the Welland Canals is a gripping tale of epic proportions. Given the ongoing importance of the Great Lakes in the North American economy, interest in the St. Lawrence Seaway - of which the Welland is "the Great Swivel Link" - and the relevance of labour history, This Great National Object will be of interest to enthusiasts and historians alike. --Publisher's description

The ubiquity of the immigrant worker in the service sector has come to symbolize the global city, with the taxi industry as a prime example. As participants in a growing number of international conferences, festivals, and business meetings fly into Toronto, they are met and taken to their destination by a taxi driver who himself has journeyed here from some part of the Global South. The trajectories of the taxi drivers greeting visitors in any other “global city,” at least in North America, such as New York or San Francisco or Vancouver, are similar…. From introduction

[The authors] explore the narrow and legalistic form of labour solidarity entrenched and institutionalized in the wake of the Second World War, and argue that the seeds of labour's current political impasse are to be found in that era. --Editor's introduction

The article reviews the book "Sailor's Hope: The Life and Times of William Cooper, Agrarian Radical in an Age of Revolutions," by Rusty Bittermann.

Examines the Canadian and American legal approaches to assessing employee’s claims of unfair discipline over allegedly egregious comments on social media, and argues that the Canadian approach is more flexible and better suited to handle these claims in the social media context. Both countries apply traditional labour law frameworks to manage employee conduct online, despite the fact that Facebook, et al, represent a novel form of communication. However, the two systems are quite different. While American triers of fact examine whether an employee’s social media communications constitute protected concerted activity, Canadian triers of fact apply the doctrine of just cause dismissal. The American framework is problematic, as it cannot always distinguish between employees who use Facebook to advance their workplace interests from those who use it for other purposes. Consequently, American employers may be forced to tolerate an employee’s social media posts, regardless of how malicious they might be.

[E]xplores the dynamics of labour organizing amongst migrant workers in Canada, focusing on two case studies. First, [the authors] examine recent efforts to unionize migrant farmworkers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. ...[The authors] then turn to the case of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, Québec. ...[Concludes] by assessing the limits and possibilities of [various] strategies, particularly in terms of the implications for labour organizing amongst the growning number of temporary foreign workers in Canada. --From editors' introduction

Examines labor relations between the state (federal and provincial governments) and public sector workers since the 1960s, including interventions into collective bargaining through wage control legislation, wage control policies, back-to-work legislation, and emergency no-strike legislation. Concludes that while Canadian governments have generally accepted the industrial relations system, they have not accepted the outcomes of bargaining. In addition, the authors conclude that there is little evidence to support the thesis of Wellington and Winters (1969) that public sector labor unions use their power to threaten democracy by settling agreements that are contrary to the mandate and best interests of the electorate.

The article reviews the book, "The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age," by Rosanne Currarino.

In recent years, the attractiveness of temporary placement agencies for nurses has grown significantly. In a labour scarcity context, it is worth exploring the motivations that encourage nurses to choose temporary work and remain loyal to their agency. Building on the classification of Tan and Tan (2002), four sources of motivation were explored: individual or family incentives, economic incentives, professional motivations and personal preferences. Regarding family motivations, this study was mainly interested in the role of flexible working conditions offered by placement agencies. Concerning economic motivations, we examined the influence of pay conditions. Our investigation of professional motivations centered on agency nurses' opportunities for skills development. Finally, the role of personal preferences was explored via workload. The results of our study, conducted on two samples, one of 500 nurses working in nursing agencies in Quebec and the other of 99 nurses from two agencies, showed that family and professional development motivations had a positive influence on agency nurses' satisfaction. In contrast, their loyalty is more closely related to the need for flexible hours, training and skills development, job security and the possibility of choosing one's assignments. Good salary conditions are not sufficient. Nurses who choose temporary work are motivated by more than a quest for better economic conditions. They also want greater freedom of choice and self-determination, and more opportunities for professional development.

The way industrial conflict and worker resistance have been analyzed has undergone significant transformation over the past few decades. While researchers have observed the quantitative decline of traditional forms of employee resistance, others have highlighted the diversity and range of more informal employee behaviours. Following Peetz (2002), we show six distinct forms of worker resistance in response to three overlapping decollectivizing employer strategies. We locate the trajectory and significance of these employer strategies and subsequent forms of worker resistance in a neglected consideration of institutional and industrial context. The implications for the way worker resistance and misbehaviour is analyzed and theorized in an increasingly non-union world are discussed. The paper indicates the need to consider the importance of institutional factors in reassessing potential delineations between what are considered formal (and often collective) indicators of conflict, and those more informal instances of workplace misbehaviour.

Research on sex work has documented the harmful effects of criminalization on sex workers' safety. Despite this body of research, the effects of criminalization on the organization of labour within the sex industry and sex workers' suggestions for labour improvements have been largely ignored. In part, this is .due to the mostly hypothetical nature of sex work labour organizing, as many common work-related activities are illegal. When one cannot work from a fixed location, have a manager or employer, or communicate about the terms and conditions of services, focusing on labour improvements can become secondary to protecting oneself from criminal charges. However, the 2010 Ontario Superior Court ruling to decriminalize aspects of prostitution opens the door for a mole nuanced analysis of sex work as a form of labour and for the development of diverse labour organizing strategies. This article presents narratives from a qualitative study with ten current and former sex workers and two allies. It begins by highlighting interviewees' arguments in favour of a "sex is work" paradigm before presenting their suggestions for workplace improvements and ideas about effective labour organizing efforts.