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The article reviews the book, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire," by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

A renewal of the study of public sector unionism in Canada is long overdue. This article explains why public sector unions deserve more attention from researchers than they have received of late and proposes that studies of public sector unions would benefit from adopting a new theoretical framework that conceptualizes contemporary unions as not only labour relations institutions but also as particular kinds of working-class movement organizations within a historically-specific class formation. It also identifies two obstacles to the production of accounts of contemporary public sector unions from this perspective.

The article reviews the book, "What's Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century," edited by Michael Zweig.

Le présent article interroge l'action syndicale en France dans un contexte caractérisé par une remise en cause de la loi relative à la réduction de la durée du travail. En prenant appui sur le cas d'un établissement qui s'engage dans un processus d'allongement de la durée du travail, l'auteur retrace le cheminement parcouru par les acteurs en présence qui débute par la renégociation de la règle sur les 35 heures pour aboutir à l'invention d'une nouvelle régulation entre salariés et direction. Loin d'abroger les lois Aubry, ce mouvement d'allongement de la durée du travail questionne la capacité des acteurs à mener des négociations collectives. // This paper questions the way French trade unions have dealt with the effects of the legislation purporting to limit maximum working time to 35 hours per week. The research is based on a case study of a manufacturing firm. The author examines the ways in which local actors evolved from the negotiation over the implementation of the 35 hour work week to the development of new relationships between the employees and their employer. In this specific case study, the negotiation actually ended up lengthening working time. This result does not deny the importance of working time legislation but it does call into question the capacity of local unions to achieve in collective bargaining the objectives set out legislatively.

The article reviews the book, "Workplace Equality: International Perspectives on Legislation, Policy, and Practice," edited by Carol Agocs.

We examine the connections between neo-liberal forms of state restructuring and intervention in disabled people’s lives, looking in particular at how these have affected disabled women’s experi- ences of an income support program, the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), in Ontario, Canada. We first outline why and how state programs have been re-designed and imple- mented in increasingly harsh ways as a result of such neo-liberal forms of state restructuring. Even groups formerly considered among the ‘deserving poor’ have found their access to social assistance diminished. We then argue that this is an outcome of state programs, policies and practices which are re-asserting and more deeply entrenching ‘ableness’ as a necessary condition of citizenship, inclusion and access to justice. Finally, we illustrate how disabled women’s lives and well-being have been altered as a result of changes in the provision of these forms of state assistance using in- depth semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 women in Ontario.

The article reviews the book, "Farm to Factory: A Reinterprétation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution," by Robert C. Allen.

The article reviews the book, "Industrial Relations in China," by Bill Taylor, Chang Kai and Li Qi.

This study examines the multi-dimensional nature of the dual commitment to the organization and the union. Most research that has examined this concept has used only one dimension for each commitment. The most established, multi-dimensional scales of organizational and union commitment were examined in their relationship to work and union correlates. The participants were 489 members (a 65% response rate) of the Union of Nurses in Israel. The findings showed that while affective commitment and union loyalty are related to the correlates examined here, the additional dimensions added significant variance to the results already explained by affective commitment and union loyalty. For example, normative commitment is related to four correlates and the variable "willingness to work for the union" is also strongly related to the correlates. The study concluded that utilizing only one dimension to examine each commitment might result in the loss of valuable information on dual commitment.

The article reviews the book, "CCF Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan: Battling Parish Priests, Bootleggers, and Fur Sharks," by David M. Quiring.

The book From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms, 3rd edition, by Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, is reviewed.

Editorial introduction to the issue.

The article reviews the book, "Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal's Public Memories, 1891-1930," by Alan Gordon.

The article reviews the book, "The Internet in the Workplace : How New Technology is Transforming Work," by Patricia Wallace.

The article reviews the book. "Working Children Around the World: Child Rights and Child Reality," by G.K. Lieten.

The article reviews the book, "Trade Unions in Europe: Meeting the Challenge," edited by Deborah Foster and Peter Scott.

The article reviews the book, "L’économie sociale dans les services à domicile," edited by Yves Vaillancourt, François Aubry and Christian Jetté.

This paper develops and applies several meta-analytic techniques to investigate the presence of publication bias in industrial relations research, specifically in the union-productivity effects literature. Publication bias arises when statistically insignificant results are suppressed or when results satisfying prior expectations are given preference. Like most fields, research in industrial relations is vulnerable to publication bias. Unlike other fields such as economics, there is no evidence of publication bias in the union-productivity literature, as a whole. However, there are pockets of publication selection, as well as negative autoregression, confirming the controversial nature of this area of research. Meta-regression analysis reveals evidence of publication bias (or selection) among US studies.

The article reviews the book, "The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950," by Charles K. Armstrong.

International trade unionism faces a major challenge. Historically, Global Union Federations have been small and relatively remote international union secretariats with limited capacity to mobilize and speak on behalf of local members. However, with the changing architecture of international capital and nation states, these union bodies have started to renew themselves. The argument is that the emergent political economy provides the base upon which these unions can begin to campaign and represent members in more dynamic ways than in the past. Critical to these developments has been the promulgation of International Framework Agreements which adapt and extend familiar tools of representation. The outcome is the possibility of a multi-faceted form of trade unionism.