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For many years, workers petitioned the Supreme Court of Canada to intervene in labour relations to protect their collective bargaining rights. Finally, the Court answered the call, but the drastic changes made were not what workers expected. This thesis outlines the effect that the Court’s decision to intervene in labour relations had on the existing collective bargaining model. In making this determination, a historical analysis was done of the Court’s attitude towards using section 2(d) Freedom to Associate to protect collective bargaining, followed by a comparative analysis with United States jurisprudence to explain the effect of the Canadian decisions on the statutory provisions. The analysis revealed that the decisions had significantly weakened protections for workers’ rights, and provided the basis to conclude that the Supreme Court of Canada had used the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to deradicalize the existing collective bargaining model.

The Shifting Landscape of Work is a contributed text that explores contemporary issues pertaining to labour in the context of race, class, age, economics, and gender, presented from a left-of-center perspective. All of the contributors are well known and respected scholars in their field of research. The authors challenge students to think about the dynamics of the labour market, including the realities of unpaid work and the impact of structural shifts in societal power relations. --Publisher's description

Comment évoluent depuis la fin 1970 les statut et pratiques de négociation collective ? Quelles transformations sont repérables dans le comportement des acteurs ? Les six pays retenus dans cet article – Allemagne, Espagne, France, Grande-Bretagne, Italie, Suède – disposent de systèmes de relations professionnelles originaux. Les bouleversements économiques et sociaux poussent à des transformations, parallèlement à l’enjeu de l’Europe en construction. Les difficultés nées de la longue crise économique ne déstructurent pas ces systèmes, ni ne nivellent leur diversité. Les acteurs se montrent adaptables et jouent sur une acceptation sociale historiquement acquise pour maintenir leur influence. Ils investissent de nouveaux thèmes (emploi) et de nouveaux espaces d’échange (comités d’entreprise européens, pactes sociaux). Réponse apparemment rationnelle et efficace dans la crise, la négociation collective voit plutôt renforcée son statut, son cahier des charges densifié – dans les pays du continent européen. La Grande-Bretagne fait exception ; la mise en cause frontale du système de négociation collective et du pouvoir syndical souligne par contraste la tendance commune aux autres pays.Progressivement la négociation collective est perçue comme le pivot des systèmes de relations professionnelles ; les acteurs collectifs tendent à s’identifier à leur fonction de négociateurs. La dissolution des anciennes alliances entre syndicats et partis inaugure un mouvement peu commenté de dépolitisation du projet syndical, avec recentrage sur l’espace des relations professionnelles. Avec le 21e siècle, des contradictions apparaissent. Les acteurs, patronaux et syndicaux, perdent en représentativité et en capacité d’intégration de bases hétérogènes. Les systèmes de négociation perdent en rendement ; les États les contournent ainsi que leurs acteurs pour piloter des transformations sociales. Plus qu’à une crise des systèmes, on a affaire à une crise des acteurs. Pour les syndicats, elle soulève la question de la revitalisation de leurs liens avec leurs mandants, comme celle des nouvelles alliances à construire.

The paper investigates the impact of flexitime programs in Britain using a linked dataset of employers and employees. Organizations adopt this practice for a variety of reasons, ranging from the concern for widening the scope for employee choice to the need to comply with public regulations. Recent public regulations are based on the premise that a rigid working hours culture exists in society that results in low levels of job satisfaction and ill and stressed employees. The results from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey data show a weak relationship between flexitime and measures of job control used and, more importantly, the relationship is negative between flexitime and job security. There is also no evidence of the establishments with flexitime arrangements having less stressed employees.

Canada’s agricultural sector has relied on temporary foreign workers from Latin America and the Caribbean for more than 40 years. Since 1999, their numbers have tripled. Most temporary workers on farms are men, but the number of women is on the rise. Both depend on these work opportunities for the livelihoods of their families, yet women rely more heavily than men on this source of income since most are single mothers who have limited access to the labour market in sending countries because of persisting gender inequalities. In Canada, they endure precarious working and living conditions on the farms and face gender-specific challenges. This policy brief documents this new trend in temporary migration and highlights the vulnerabilities of female workers employed in Canada’s agricultural industry. The analysis is informed by various research projects, observation work and interviews with female migrant farm workers conducted in rural Canada and in sending countries over the past 10 years.

The economic crisis has revealed the extent to which sustaining the key tenets of the ‘Common Sense Revolution’, implemented by the Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris, have eroded the fiscal capacity of Ontario. The proposal to freeze public sector wages and the ensuing consultation with public sector unions and employers in the spring/summer of 2010 signal Ontario is about to return to the rollback neoliberalism that dominated the 1990s. The difference between now and then is the more defensive posture of organized labour and the limited capacities that exist to resist such an assault.

The article reviews the book, "The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages," by Robert Fossier, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane.

Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism, by Jim Stanford, is reviewed.

Regulating Flexibility: The Political Economy of Employment Standards, by Mark P. Thomas, is reviewed.

We analyze the Black-White earnings gap among Canadian workers using 2006 census data. The earnings gap is estimated using conventional earnings regressions, Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions and an empirical technique developed by Brown, Moon and Zoloth that allows an occupation attainment model to be incorporated into a standard earnings decomposition specification. Results from this latter method suggest that wage discrimination and occupational segregation account for the majority of the earnings gap, while endowment differences account for a fairly small portion. In light of the estimated impacts of wage discrimination and occupational segregation on full-time, full-year Black workers, we suggest various policy initiatives and further research aimed at reducing these earnings discrepancies.

Worker centres have emerged to address issues that low wage, largely immigrant workers, face at the workplace. They are attempting to fill a void left by the decline of labour unions, local political parties and other groups. Centres have had some significant organizing and public policy successes and have placed labour standards enforcement on the public policy agenda at the state and national levels. During their formative years, these organizations displayed important strengths but also exhibited weaknesses that appeared to limit their ability to get to scale. Over the last five years, they have moved into a new phase of development. Centres have shown institutional resilience. There is also a growing trend both toward federation and formation of institutional partnerships with unions and government. Finally, centres and their national networks are playing strategic roles in broader movement building around immigrant rights, global justice and the right to organize.

The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest scholarship of Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists as well as U.S. historians. These essays highlight both the supra- and sub-national aspect of selected topics without neglecting nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies, and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and advance their interests. What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich lead off the volume with critical commentaries on the project of transnational labor history. Their responses offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of labor and empire, indigenous peoples and labor systems, international feminism and reproductive labor, labor recruitment and immigration control, transnational labor politics, and labor internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars introduce each section and recommend further reading. -- Publisher's description. "Associate editors, Eileen Boris, John D. French, Julie Greene, Joan Sangster, Shelton Stromquist." Contents: Another World history is possible: reflections on the translocal, transnational, and global / John D. French -- Historians of the world: transnational forces, nation-states, and the practice of U.S. history / Julie Greene -- Transnational labor history: promise and perils / Neville Kirk -- Labor history as world history: linking regions over time / Aviva Chomsky -- Overlapping spaces: transregional and transcultural / Dirk Hoerder -- Transnational migration: a new historical phenomenon? / Vic Satzewich -- "black service ... white money": the peculiar institution of military labor in the British Army during the Seven Years' War / Peter Way -- "We speak the same language in the new world:: capital, class, and community in Mexico's "American century" / Steven J. Bachelor -- Indigenous labor in mid-nineteenth-century British North America: the Mi'kmaq of Cape Breton and Squamish of British Columbia in comparative perspective / Andrew Parnaby -- "De facto Mexicans": coffee workers and nationality on the Guatemalan-Mexican border, 1913-1941 / Catherine Nolan-Ferrell -- "No right to layettes or nursing time": maternity leave and the question of U.S. exceptionalism / Eileen Boris -- The battle within the home: development strategies and the commodification of caring labors at the 1975 International Women's Year Conference / Jocelyn Olcott -- Feminizing white slavery in the United States: Marcus Braun and the transnational traffic in white bodies, 1890-1910 / Gunther Peck -- Patronage and progress: the Bracero program from the perspective of Mexico / Michael Snodgrass -- Unspoken exclusions: race, nation, and empire in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s in North America and the greater Caribbean / Lara Putnam -- Claiming political space: workers, municipal socialism, and the reconstruction of local democracy in transnational perspective / Shelton Stromquist -- A migrating revolution: Mexican political organizers and their rejection of American assimilation, 1920-1940 / John H. Flores -- Fugitive slaves across North America / Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie -- Movable type: Toronto's transnational printers, 1866-1872 / Jacob Remes -- Global sea or national backwater? The International Labor Organization and the quixotic quest for maritime standards, 1919-1945 / Leon Fink.

Working People in Alberta traces the history of labour in Alberta from the period of First Nations occupation to the present. Drawing on over two hundred interviews with labour leaders, activists, and ordinary working people, as well as on archival records, the volume gives voice to the people who have toiled in Alberta over the centuries. In so doing, it seeks to counter the view of Alberta as a one-class, one-party, one-ideology province, in which distinctions between those who work and those who own are irrelevant. Workers from across the generations tell another tale, of an ongoing collective struggle to improve their economic and social circumstances in the face of a dominant, exploitative elite. Their stories are set within a sequential analysis of provincial politics and economics, supplemented by chapters on women and the labour movement and on minority workers of colour and their quest for social justice. Published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Working People in Alberta contrasts the stories of workers who were union members and those who were not. In its depictions of union organizing drives, strikes, and working-class life in cities and towns, this lavishly illustrated volume creates a composite portrait of the men and women who have worked to build and sustain the province of Alberta. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction : Those who built Alberta -- Millennia of Native work / Alvin Finkel -- The fur trade and early European settlement / Alvin Finkel -- One step forward : Alberta workers, 1885-1914 / Jim Selby -- War, repression, and depression, 1914-1939 / Eric Strikwerda and Alvin Finkel -- Alberta labour and working-class life, 1940-1959 / James Muir -- The boomers become the workers : Alberta, 1960-1980 / Alvin Finkel -- Alberta labour in the 1980s / Winston Gereluk -- Revolution, retrenchment, and the new normal : the 1990s and beyond / Jason Foster -- Women, labour, and the labour movement / Joan Schiebelbein -- Racialization and work / Jennifer Kelly and Dan Cui -- Conclusion : A history to build upon / Alvin Finkel.

The article reviews and comments on the books "Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War," by Thomas G. Andrews, "The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales, 1890-1926," by Leighton S. James, and "Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields," by Ronald L. Lewis.

The article reviews the book, "The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government," by Thomas N. Bisson.

The article reviews the book, "Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change," by Amanda Tattersall.

This paper reports on research into the attitudes of mainstream New Zealand employers to collective bargaining, and its union agents, in New Zealand. Despite a legislative environment supportive of collective bargaining the process has been in substantial decline in New Zealand for 20 years, notably in the private sector. A series of national surveys found that employers indicated a strong preference for individual and workplace based bargaining consistent with a shift toward more Unitarist perspectives established post-1990. Furthermore, employers consistently argued that collective bargaining and its union agents, offered little real benefit to workplaces or employment relationships. This was the case even where those employers were actively engaged in, and had a long history of, collective bargaining with unions. Overall, these results suggest that improvements in private sector collective bargaining density are unlikely.

This case study explores a union organizing drive that revolved in large part around a group of temporary foreign workers. The impact of this group of workers on the union’s organizing strategy and the implications of the workers’ limited residence and labour rights are examined. This article also considers the factors that appeared to make the Justice for Janitors organizing model effective in this case as well as the potential risks associated with this approach.

The long view of New Brunswick history over the past century shows us glimpses of a vigorous tradition of social reform, much of it driven by the activism of organized labour. The New Brunswick Federation of Labour, established in 1913, was a major force in this history. The Federation played a leading part in the achievement of labour standards such as workmen’s compensation (1918) and subsequently in the enactment of laws to protect the right to union membership and collective bargaining. In pursuing these and other objectives, the province’s labour organizations have contributed to traditions of social democracy that are too easily overlooked in contemporary debates in New Brunswick. This essay sheds light on that important history, and why organized labour still matters in the province.