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Grounded in occupational justice and sociotechnical perspectives, this focused ethnographic study explored how immigrant platform workers construct meaning through diverse forms of occupational engagement—doing, being, becoming, and belonging—within sociotechnical contexts. Drawing on interviews with 30 immigrant platform workers in Vancouver, Canada, the study highlights the heterogeneity of platform labour, moving beyond commonly studied sectors such as ride-hailing and food delivery to challenge conventional narratives that frame platform-mediated employment solely as income-generating activity. The findings, organized into four interrelated themes, provide an in-depth account of how workers engage in, make sense of, and reconfigure their occupations within sociotechnically mediated contexts. The first theme, Doing Within and Beyond Sociotechnical Boundaries, examines how participants’ everyday occupations are shaped by both the technical demands of platforms and the social negotiations required to maintain client relationships, reputations, and relevance. The second theme, Being at the Edge of Visibility, explores how the interplay of social and technical systems renders workers simultaneously visible, through metrics, ratings, and platform profiles; and invisible, through lack of recognition and relational connection. The third theme, Boundless Becoming, reveals the fluid and aspirational nature of participants’ occupational trajectories, shaped by transnational opportunities and sociotechnical structures. Finally, Belonging Beyond the Bubble highlights how these workers cultivate inclusion within platform-specific communities while navigating broader structures of marginalization. This paper contributes to a more inclusive understanding of occupational engagement in platform-mediated labor, emphasizing the importance of supporting diverse occupational needs, rights, and aspirations beyond economic outcomes.

Analyzes the state of trade unionism in France with particular reference to union participation in the pensions movement of 2023 and the formation of a left-wing popular front during the 2024 national election. Argues that this return to the political sphere by unions during a time of crisis is in contrast to their narrow, industrial relations focus (called "démocratie social") that has predominated over the past 30 years. Concludes that political unionism and a class-based focus on the broader representation of work are the strategic challenges. The text is an address originally given by the author at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal, on June 19, 2024.

The Employment Standards Database is a research database for comparing employment standards, awareness and violations across national/regional context. It brings together a library of relevant sources, unique user-friendly statistical tables, and a thesaurus of concepts – designed to facilitate research on labour market insecurity in a comparative industrialized context. Users can analyze multidimensional tables to explore and compare the contours of precarious employment in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. --Website description

Digital content creation is a growing area of labour in Canada. Alongside the development of this labour market, it has been reported there are rising issues of harassment, racism, and racial representation. Research germane to this area has provided rich qualitative accounts of how harassment and social oppression impact marginalized content creators. This study builds on this scholarly area to demonstrate quantitatively the ways in which harassment manifests in a Canadian setting. Using data from an online survey targeting Canadian content creators (N = 103), I specifically examine the incidence of harassment and racism among this population. Drawing on critical race theories, I argue that although online harassment is a widespread workplace hazard for content creators – regardless of identity, the consequences of this harassment are qualitatively different for those who have been historically marginalized. I expand on these findings to articulate how these impacts have downstream effects for marginalized creators, which may hinder their ability to sustain their labour in this environment. Finally, I situate these findings in the platformized environment within which these workplace hazards exist and problematize the arms-length approach that platforms take in regulating these hazards.

Labour shortages have become increasingly widespread across Europe and other advanced economies since the post-2008 recovery, due to rising demand and structural labour market transitions—digital, green and demographic. They further worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, through shifts in worker preferences, and again during the post-pandemic economic rebound. While policymakers and academics often attribute the shortages to skill gaps, which may be reduced via training or increased migration, there is growing recognition that unattractive wages and poor working conditions are also hindering recruitment.

Discusses the CHL class actions and the settlement in Ontario and Alberta as well as the failure to settle in Quebec. Concludes that the present state of affairs is very unsatisfactory.

Walmart is notorious for its anti-union practices, pouring millions of dollars into union-busting campaigns every year. But this didn’t stop Angela Drew Kimelman, an Organizer at Unifor, from helping unionize over 800 workers at a Walmart warehouse in Mississauga, Ontario. In our first episode of Activists Make History, a new podcast series from Perspectives Journal, Kimelman shares [with host Peggy Nash] the concerns of the warehouse workers and the dangerous conditions they faced. The Mississauga warehouse union drive has shown to be a catalyst for labour organizing in warehouses across the country, with momentum swinging towards the working-class. --Website description

Discusses injury rates of warehouse workers at Amazon, with particular reference to Ontario. Concludes that workers must organize to counterbalance the management priorities of the world's second largest corporation.

This article is a minimum filmography about the fundamental issue of mobility. The films reviewed here represent Mexican workers who travel to Canada as temporary workers, thus, who are legal economic migrants. ...This article seeks to introduce the main problems of SAWP [Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program] in the framework of an approach that takes place in the 2020’s; presenting the activists’ struggle, pointing out SAWP’s problems for the families affected and with regard to the process of temporary workers soliciting Canadian citizenship. I analyze five films produced over the last 15 years and present them chronologically to discover how seasonal agricultural workers’ participation in the programs signed by Mexico and Canada is documented.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into education has prompted significant reflection on the nature of work and labour among teachers and students. This essay examines the implications of AI on educational labour, highlighting the distinction between work, encompassing unpaid and broader educational contributions, and labour, defined by economic metrics. AI’s capability to perform educational tasks raises concerns about its potential to replace certain aspects of teaching while emphasizing its limitations in fostering genuine educational experiences. The discussion explores how AI may transform schooling and education, reshaping roles and responsibilities, and addressing broader socio-economic and technological dynamics. Ultimately, this analysis considers the future of work in education amidst the evolving presence of AI.Keywords: Educational labour, work and labour dichotomy, post-work society, AI and educational reform

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has approved a $30 million settlement resolving class action lawsuits regarding the employment status of players in the Canadian Hockey League’s Ontario Hockey League (OHL), Western Hockey League (WHL), and Québec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL). The decision comes after a complex legal battle spanning nearly a decade, affecting approximately 4,286 amateur hockey players. But it still needs to be approved by courts in Alberta and Quebec.

Marc Belanger was doing labour education and union organising online back in the 1980s. That's NOT a typo -- he established SoliNet (Solidarity Network) for Canada's largest union, CUPE, nearly 40 years ago. He went on to run the International Labour Organisation's training centre in Turin, Italy and now is back in Canada, where he founded and runs Radio Labour. In this interview with LabourStart's Eric Lee, Marc talks about what he calls "activist podcasting" and gives us a preview of his next challenge - helping trade unionists around the world acquire a working knowledge of English.

This paper examines freedom of association in Canada. In particular, it traces why Canada’s constitutional protection of freedom of association has developed only slowly and principally in the union context so far, reaching in a struggling way toward what I call “half a constitutional freedom.” --Introduction

Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this paper highlights two distinct but related dynamics of racial differentiation in relation to Amazon in Greater Toronto Area (GTA): at the level of the region’s broader political economy and within Amazon’s warehouses. I outline the ways in which the e-commerce giant both exploits and (re)makes the racialized geography of the GTA. Amazon’s capitalization on neoliberal austerity and corporate welfare perpetuates class and racialized inequalities. These processes adversely affect these suburban localities and negatively impact employment in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this context, I argue that Amazon’s success has been, in no small part, due to its exploitation of Canada’s racially stratified labour market. Within the warehouse, the notion that digital Taylorism produces an undifferentiated workforce and a uniform labour process is interrogated. Instead, workers’ own accounts point to the ways digital technologies enable management to generate racial/ethnic differentiation and further squeeze value from workers. By situating Amazon within this specific socio-historical and political economic context, I demonstrate that the GTA offers a case study through which to examine the racial dynamics of digital capitalism and show that racialized and gendered social relations inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.

We investigated the role of cultural intelligence (CQ) among immigrant workers (IWs) in their professional success within Quebec organizations. Professional success was assessed at two stages of a worker’s career: an intermediate (organizational socialization: OS) and an ultimate stage (objective career success: OCS). Data from a purposive sample of 103 IWs show that CQ predicts OS, but neither CQ nor OS predicts OCS, except for IWs from Global North countries. Thus, intermediate success depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to integrate into the organization’s culture, but this ability will increase objective career success only if the immigrant is from the Global North, and not from the Global South. These findings challenge the hypothesis that socio-economic integration depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to adapt. Finally, we discuss structural factors that may affect the CQ/OCS relationship.

L’objectif de cet article consiste à analyser les spécificités et les enjeux entrepreneuriaux de la relation de travail atypique que constitue la coopération amapienne entretenue entre un petit producteur agricole et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Assimilable à une forme spécifique d’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole, la création d’une association pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne (AMAP) se matérialise par un engagement contractualisé des consommateurs dans l’activité de production agricole et de vente directe de produits alimentaires locaux. L’engagement de ces consommateurs constitue alors une véritable force de travail pour le petit producteur agricole facilitant l’accès à des expertises et compétences complémentaires. Notre recherche vise à comprendre comment la coopération amapienne, en tant que relation de travail atypique, permet de stimuler, au sein d’un territoire, l’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole entre un petit producteur et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Basés sur une méthodologie qualitative, nos résultats montrent que cette relation de travail atypique se caractérise par un système de coproduction, de cogestion et de réciprocité apprenante. Par ailleurs, elle favorise, pour l’entrepreneur agricole, la mise en place d’un environnement capacitant grâce aux principes de suppléance, de soutien, d’éducation et d’accompagnement auxquels obéit la création d’une AMAP et qui renforcent la capacité d’action et d’autonomisation du petit producteur. Ainsi, la finalité de cette relation de travail atypique réside dans un « entreprendre ensemble » pour, in fine, cocréer de la valeur sociale. Cette approche entrepreneuriale et altruiste de la relation de travail atypique enrichit la littérature académique qui l’envisageait, jusqu’à présent, principalement à partir de la situation de vulnérabilité du travailleur. Nous proposons en effet de la considérer aussi à partir de la capacité du travailleur à prendre part à un projet d’entrepreneuriat collectif en mettant à disposition d’une communauté un ensemble d’expertises et de compétences.

The anti-sweatshop movement has long committed to abolishing sweatshop labour and ensuring workers’ rights for all. There is an established body of literature on sport and the anti-sweatshop movement on the roles played by a range of actors concerning the mega-sporting events, which have been plagued with abuses of workers’ lives in the name of the sport spectacle. In effort to move past this troubled history, FIFA has embedded internationally recognized human and labour rights into their 2026 bid process. This study evaluates how the City of Toronto, Canada Soccer Association, and FIFA have considered ethical procurement and sweatshop labour as part of their bid for co-hosting the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup. Employing a critical theoretical approach, this study finds that despite the varying levels of considerations given to ethical (anti-sweatshop) procurement, the efforts remain insufficient. This is attributed to the unequal power dynamics that prioritize a discourse of (neoliberal capitalist) development for soft power.

Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective ‘social’ bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure.

Despite a large body of research exploring the obstacles sex workers face due to their occupational stigma, little research focuses on how their stigmatized paid work influences their navigation of unpaid care, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. My dissertation examines the narrated and photographic experiences of womxn in Canada who identify as both mothers and sex workers and asks: how do these womxn navigate and negotiate the daily work of unwaged social reproduction and paid work in stigmatized and precarious conditions? This dissertation is informed by feminist methodologies, visual methodologies, and contributes to literatures on stigma, sex work stigma, social reproduction, unpaid care work, mothering, and working motherhood. Fourteen participants in this qualitative project engaged in autophotography, capturing their daily routines and surroundings to provide visual insight into their daily lives. Then each participant attended a photo elicitation interview to discuss the meanings, experiences, and feelings being conveyed in their selected photographs. My findings illuminate that sex work stigma operates contextually, influencing these mothers’ engagement with and disclosure of their stigmatized paid work, their families’ experiences with courtesy stigma, and the structural barriers they face as sex working mothers. This dissertation also explores participants’ engagement with mothering practices, crediting their ability to be good, empathetic mothers because of their experiences navigating stigmatic occupations and their transferrable skills as sex workers. Womxn’s choices to navigate sex work and mothering are acknowledged as being both calculated and meaningful— granting sex workers financial security, flexible working hours, and unique opportunities to invest time into themselves and their families. To uphold the aims of producing accessible research, these images were displayed in public fundraising exhibits, relying on participant observation and anonymous feedback to further assess the project’s ability to co-produce destigmatizing and empathetic knowledges—by, with and for sex workers. All funds raised from these exhibits were donated to various sex worker grassroots organizations in Canada to assist in funding their ongoing mutual aid efforts and to ensure this research possess tangible benefits for sex workers themselves.

The article reviews the book, "The Happiness of the British Working Class," by Jamie L. Bronstein.