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Proactive and responsive governments can put in place the foundations for stability through transitions that empower worker and community resiliency and ensure those socioeconomic changes are positive. These foundations include key enabling factors and mechanisms for collaboration, accountability, and implementation. The Pembina Institute and the Canadian Labour Congress have partnered to develop a Sustainable Jobs Blueprint, which identifies policy and investment recommendations tosupport the Canadian workforce in the transition to a net-zero economy. This is the first report in a series on sustainable jobs planning in Canada to support the creation and maintenance of decent jobs across Canada. Part one outlines a governance framework needed for a robust sustainable jobs approach in Canada and includes recommendations for government action. Part two will offer recommendations for an implementation plan, supported by the governance framework, that will best support workers and communities. --Website description/Introduction

The article reviews the book, "Les couleurs de la révolution. La gauche à l’épreuve du pouvoir. Venezuela, Équateur, Bolivie : un bilan à travers l’histoire," by Patrick Guillaudat and Pierre Mouterde.

The article reviews the book, "Putting Skill to Work: How to Create Good Jobs in Uncertain Times," by Nichola Lowe.

The article reviews the book, "Frontiers of Feminism: Movements and Influences in Québec and Italy, 1960–1980," by Jacinthe Michaud.

This article will present a case study of Cargill’s High River meatpacking plant operations to show how at crucial historical junctures racial capitalism shaped its working conditions and in so doing determined the spread of COVID-19. First, the Canadian meatpacking industry’s 1980s-era economic restructuring relocated and reorganized its workforce from a core to peripheral one, allowing for the low wage employment of many precarious workers; this restructuring enabled the Cargill company to gain overwhelming control of the meatpacking industry in Canada and to become a “choke point” in the supply chain. Second, Canadian immigration policy from 2006 to 2010 supported a marked increase in migrant workers to meet the labour market needs of business; this reconstituted the labour class to heighten their disposability. With these pieces in place, the Albertan provincial government could classify meatpackers as “essential workers” who worked even in the face of mass COVID infection in April through June 2020. Across this crucial historical period racial capitalism enabled the plant to circumvent public health interventions protecting workers through the onset of the pandemic. Political championing of business interests, enacted through legislative mechanisms, allowed for the exploitation of workers and consistently rendered workers personally responsible for their own health and safety, despite their lack of control over what exposed them to risk.

This fourth edition...offers a comprehensive introductory overview of Canada’s labour movement. The book explores why workers form unions; assesses their organization and democratic potential; examines issues related to collective bargaining, grievances and strike activity; charts the historical development of labour unions; and describes the gains unions have achieved for their members and all working people. This new and expanded edition also analyzes the challenges facing today’s labour movement as a result of COVID-19 and the strategies being developed to overcome them. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities," by Mark Doussar and Greg Schrock.

The article reviews the book, "Work and the Carceral State," by Jon Burnett.

In the 1970s, women in Toronto created the Waitresses Action Committee to protest the introduction of a "differential" or lower minimum wage for wait staff serving alcohol. Their campaign was part of their broader feminist critique of women's exploitation and the gendered and sexualized nature of waitressing. Influenced by their origins in the Wages for Housework campaign, they stressed the linkages between women's unpaid work in the home and the workplace. Their campaign eschewed worksite organizing for an occupational mobilization outside of the established unions; they used petitions, publicity, and alliances with sympathizers to try to stop the rollback in their wages. They were successful in mobilizing support but not in altering the government's decision. Nonetheless, their spirited campaign publicized new feminist perspectives on women's gendered and sexualized labour, and it contributed to the ongoing labour feminist project of enhancing working-class women's equality, dignity, and economic autonomy. An analysis of their mobilization also helps to enrich and complicate our understanding of labour and socialist feminism in this period.

In this article, I will analyze the ways in which Brazilian workers are using social media to organize and mobilize. Although analysis of social media use has made great progress, in the case of worker movements it still needs further development. I will focus on the experience of Brazilian app-based delivery workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their dispersion across the country, delivery workers were able to carry out two national strikes through intense use of WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Using qualitative analysis of posts from worker organizations on social media, it was possible to identify the challenges faced by these movements when using digital media. Social media helped solve some organizational and communication problems, while producing others that workers had to deal with.

The covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted the education system in Canada from March 2020 throughout the 2020–21 school year. It also had disproportionate secondary effects on women in terms of unpaid care, economic loss, and poor mental health. This article explores the lived experience of women educators in the province of Alberta, drawing on interviews and focus groups with 39 educators. Findings indicate that the pandemic not only exacerbated the triple burden that women educators, in particular, bear but added additional layers of responsibility related to public health management, educating children at home, elder care responsibilities, and emotional labour. The essential role women educators fulfilled within the covid-19 response, at work and at home, cost them time, professional development opportunities, mental wellness, and the positive rewards that had drawn them to the educational field. Current concerns around educator burnout and retention may be mitigated by acting on the recommendations of women educators regarding the development of more equitable education systems and social policy.

Le présent article soutient que la rétention du personnel demeure une priorité essentielle pour de nombreux employeurs, même si ces derniers deviennent de moins en moins enclins à offrir des emplois stables. La recherche a montré que, face à cette précarité croissante de l’emploi, les travailleurs adoptent des stratégies individuelles de progression professionnelle axées sur la mobilité entre entreprises, lesquelles viennent renforcer les inquiétudes des employeurs en ce qui concerne le roulement du personnel. Cet article défend l’importance pour les chercheurs en relations industrielles d’étudier de plus près les pratiques organisationnelles qui restreignent la mobilité des employés, c’est-à-dire les « stratégies de capture des travailleurs ». Celles-ci se distinguent des autres pratiques en matière de mobilité du fait qu’elles sont unilatérales et qu’elles visent une réduction du roulement du personnel sans nécessairement chercher à favoriser un sentiment d’engagement ou de loyauté chez les employés.

This paper argues that employee retention remains a key priority for many employers, even as they become less likely to offer stable employment. In the face of increased job insecurity, researchers have shown that workers have adopted personalized career progression strategies that emphasize inter-firm mobility. Such strategies heighten employer concerns about employee turnover. The paper argues that the industrial relations literature would gain from closer study of organizational practices that restrict employee mobility, i.e., “worker capture strategies.” Such practices stand out from other mobility-reducing ones because they are unilateral and aim to reduce turnover without necessarily fostering a sense of commitment or loyalty among employees.

Depuis la pandémie, un nombre croissant d’employés travaillent partiellement ou totalement à distance et en présentiel selon leur volonté ou des balises définies par leur employeur. Cette étude explore (1) les liens entre l’adoption de ces modes de travail qualifiés d’« hybride » (un changement d’organisation du travail important qui a modifié, entre autres, les lieux, les heures et la charge de travail) et diverses formes de comportement hostiles parmi le personnel ; (2) les moyens de prévenir et contrer l’émergence de comportements hostiles dans un contexte de travail hybride appelé à s’intensifier.

In 2019, Regina’s Co-operative Refinery Complex locked out the 730 members of Unifor Local 594 amid record profits in an aggressive drive for significant pension concessions. Marred by sweeping antipicketing injunctions, an enormous scab operation, police repression, and general public enmity, the lockout suggests two overlapping trends. First, the union’s adherence to co-operative and conciliatory bargaining had left it ill equipped to confront—either in the workplace or the public sphere—management’s costcutting agenda in the centre of Saskatchewan’s now hegemonic petrostate. Second, a marked tension developed between community outreach efforts and the circumstances in which legal industrial action was ineffective and civil disobedience emerged.

Unionization and collective bargaining continue to deliver material gains for workers by way of higher wages and access to supplementary benefits like health insurance and pensions. While researchers have charted a declining union wage advantage over the last few decades, collective bargaining still yields important gains for workers. Unions have sought to remedy stagnating real wages and growing inflation by seeking wage increases that align with the cost of living through bargaining processes and labour militancy. This report provides comparison of wages and benefits for unionized and non-unionized workers across industries in Canada and in the province of Saskatchewan by drawing from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) as well as custom tabulations acquired from Statistics Canada, retrieved from the LFS. --Executive summary

With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labor organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International. The contrast reveals similarities, divergences and trade-offs, with important implications for the future potential for building global organizations of informal workers.

The article reviews the book, "Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea," by Eric W. Sager.

... Occupational health and safety regulation sits atop these structures of risk creation and distribution and historically has been shaped by the struggles of working people to limit the harm that unbridled capitalism would have otherwise inflicted upon them. The results, which are the subject of this chapter, have varied over time and place, and have secured real improvements for some workers. Given space limitations, the remainder of this chapter focuses on OHS regulation in advanced capitalist countries, with a concentration on the English-speaking world. The next section outlines the broad lines of the historical development of OHS regulation, beginning from the rise of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century through to the last decades of the twentieth century and the creation of a new mode of regulation, variously called regulated selfregulation or mandated partial self-regulation. The following section considers various debates over the performance of that regime, including the relation between self-regulation and state enforcement, the practice of state enforcement and the efficacy of worker participation rights. Finally, the last section of the chapter examines emerging OHS challenges to the regulatory regime. --From introduction

Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society's legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary. --Publisher's description