Your search
Results 615 resources
-
The article reviews the book, "Empreintes de résistance. Filiations et récits de femmes autochtones et racisées," by Alexandra Pierre.
-
Introduces the first issue of the journal that is solely available online.
-
Foodsters United, a work-place organizing campaign by Toronto food couriers, shows that, even in the gig economy, the classic organizing methods work. The Foodsters successfully challenged their misclassification as independent contractors, got over 40 per cent of a large workforce to sign union cards, and triggered a union vote that they won with 88.8 per cent support. These victories were tempered by a devastating setback: their employer, Foodora, exited from Canadian markets. Nevertheless, what Foodsters United achieved through work-place organizing sustained its transformation into Gig Workers United, which is organizing all delivery platform workers in Toronto. Although platform companies like Foodora promote the idea that the gig economy is unprecedented, its historical continuities are more important than its discontinuities. This is also true of the work-place organizing in the gig economy. Foodsters United achieved substantial victories, not because they invented new organizing methods but because they adapted the classic methods, in often ingenious ways, to their gig economy work-place. This article is based on interviews with the campaign organizers. It is organized thematically according to classic work-place organizing methods, particularly those developed in the industrial organizing tradition, including organizing conversations, mapping, charting, leader identification, issue identification, and the creation of democratic organizations.
-
Research has struggled with the task of distinguishing high from low-quality employment. Making the distinction between challenging and hindering job demands in a context of social exchange, our study develops a generalizable heuristic for employment quality research. Latent class analysis with mixture modelling was applied to a sample of 2,143 adults from a diversity of occupations. A two-factor model provided substantial support for the distinction between challenging and hindering employment. Challenging employment was characterized by hard and emotionally demanding work and by provision of greater resources. Hindering employment involved several hindering demands and fewer resources. As predicted, challenging employment was associated with better self-reported general health and less psychological distress. The positive associations between higher education levels and longer work experience and challenging employment also supported the challenging/hindering heuristic.
-
This study examines worker voice in the development and implementation of safety plans or protocols for covid-19 prevention among hospital workers, long-term care workers, and education workers in the Canadian province of Ontario. Although Ontario occupational health and safety law and official public health policy appear to recognize the need for active consultation with workers and labour unions, there were limited – and in some cases no – efforts by employers to meaningfully involve workers, worker representatives (reps), or union officials in assessing covid-19 risks and planning protection and prevention measures. The political and legal efforts of workers and unions to assert their right to participate and the outcomes of those efforts are also documented through archival evidence and interviews with worker reps and union officials. The article concludes with an assessment of weaknesses in the government promotion and protection of worker health and safety rights and calls for greater labour attention to the critical importance of worker health and safety representation.
-
This article reviews the book, "Capital and Ideology," by Thomas Piketty. translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
-
Income inequality has risen in Canada with the decline in union density and, thus, in union influence. Both trends have occasioned various proposals to reform federal and provincial labour relations systems, especially those aspects concerning certification. However, most proposals have been based on minor modifications to the Wagner Model of exclusive, majoritarian representation. To realize the full potential of these reform proposals, including, importantly, the likes of ‘broad-based bargaining,’ we contend that union membership should be the default option for new workers. Such a change would enable these proposals to increase absolute and relative levels of union membership, thereby providing the organizing resources (financial, human) required for much higher levels of union influence. In this study, we show that those living in Canada generally support union membership by default and would not opt out afterwards. We believe this popular support justifies making union membership automatic for new workers.
-
On 3 February 1989, leaders of the British Columbia labour movement, members of the environmental movement, and representatives from the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht Tribal Council (ntc) gathered to meet at Tin Wis, the ntc meeting space, in Tofino, BC, to discuss an alliance around environmental issues on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. This article takes this meeting, and subsequent alliance, as a way to explore the impact, potential, and contested meanings of alliances forged among workers, environmentalists, and First Nations in British Columbia in the late 20th century and beyond. In this way, the article examines from a historical perspective what sociologists have framed as the period of new social movements.
-
Cet article démontre l’importance pour les travailleurs et travailleuses migrants et immigrés de s’organiser en fonction de leurs réalités. Pour ce faire, l’auteur s’appuie sur l’expérience du Centre des travailleurs et travailleuses immigrants (CTI) de Montréal. Beaucoup de ces travailleurs ont un statut d’immigration précaire, qui les rend vulnérables à une exploitation capitaliste poussée. On présume que leur besoin de rester au Canada et de gagner de l’argent les empêchera de parler des inégalités en milieu de travail et dans les pratiques patronales. Quand la COVID-19 a frappé, ce sont ces travailleurs, chargés des tâches reconnues « essentielles » par les gouvernements, qui ont permis à la société de fonctionner. Des promesses de régulariser leur statut d’immigration ont été faites. Mais deux ans après, ces promesses ne se sont pas réalisées et le statut des travailleurs demeure précaire. Toutefois, l’expérience acquise par la CTI dans sa lutte contre l’imposition de mesures néolibérales lui a permis de tenir bon face aux conditions de travail dictées par la pandémie. Les efforts pour régulariser le statut des travailleurs migrants s’intensifient. Il y a actuellement une mobilisation à l’échelle du Canada pour presser le gouvernement de tenir ses engagements, confortée par la reconnaissance croissante de l’importance de ces travailleurs pour le pays. L’article dépeint la réalité de nombreux travailleurs qui vivent et besognent à la confluence de la racialisation et du statut précaire de migrant, et révèle combien ces conditions sont essentielles au maintien du système capitaliste. / This article demonstrates the importance for migrant and immigrant workers to organize in ways that represent their realities. It draws on the experience of Montreal’s Immigrant Workers’ Centre (IWC) to do this. Many of these workers have a precarious immigration status, making them vulnerable to acute capitalist exploitation. The presumption is that since workers’ need to remain in Canada and earn their living, they would remain silent about workplace inequalities and labour practices. When COVID-19 hit, it was these workers, doing what governments recognized as ‘essential’ work that kept societies functioning. Promises were made about regularization of their immigration status. However, it has been two years since the imposition of pandemic restrictions and these promises have rung hollow, leaving them with a precarious immigration status. Yet the organising experience gained by the IWC in the struggle against the imposition of neoliberal measures, prior to the pandemic, held the IWC in good stead as it faced pandemic working conditions. The struggle to regularize migrant workers’ status is mounting and at this moment there is a Canadawide mobilization to hold the government to its promise, bolstered by the growing recognition of the importance of these workers to the country. This article demonstrates the realities faced by many workers who live and work at the intersection of racialization and an insecure migrant status and reveals that it is key to propping up the capitalist system.
-
We are in an important technological moment in history, where experts in academia, research institutes, and non-governmental organizations posit that developments in artificial intelligence (ai) will lead to widespread disruptions in the labour market. This article addresses this claim by asking if organized labour sees ai as an equally imminent threat. Moreover, it asks how labour is preparing to challenge the power of capital as employers leverage automation in an age of neoliberal precarity. Online materials published by unions affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress are reviewed here through discursive analysis. Our findings indicate that while no union has expressed opposition to technological change, many have questioned how employers leverage it in the workplace and its wider geopolitical and societal effects that affect their members and communities. We find that discussion around technological change emphasizes that technology makes work better and safer in a human-centred work environment. Overall, organized labour in Canada is attentive to issues within the political-economic context of automation, precarious work, community impacts, the role of government and regulation, skills and retraining, and job loss, among others. Given the view of technology held by organized labour, we challenge perspectives of both techno-pessimism and techno-optimism and highlight instead that labour unions are in a unique position to both respond and adapt to the evolution of work. Expanded strategic interventions around automation are needed to combat precarious work and the erosion of working conditions at present and in the coming decade(s), and we point to some notable efforts that are underway.
-
The article reviews the book, "The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism," by Jennifer Delton.
-
This article examines the efforts to establish objective criteria in deciding on appropriate wage levels for non-professional service workers in Ontario's hospital sector during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing from recent literature in cultural political economy and the politics of valuation, it shows how industrial relations specialists sought to reframe the field of struggle through the practice of interest arbitration. Through a comparative study of arbitration cases in this period, the article explores the complex displacement of expertise from local hospital boards and medical professionals to law professors and labour economists, who sought to establish an industrial jurisprudence that could avoid strikes and lockouts in such essential industries by assigning awards based on the probable outcomes of industrial conflict. No longer were disputes settled through the ideological obfuscations of "justice"; instead, expert arbitrators drew on the science of economics in asserting irrefutable labour market "realities." While pretensions to scientific expertise in the settlement of disputes remained hegemonic through the late 1960s, hospital workers in Ontario, through their unions and in alliance with New Left organizations, effectively reasserted "justice" as a highly contextualized unit of value through their militant struggles in the early 1970s. The article concludes by discussing the tensions and contradictions produced out of these struggles and the subsequent challenges in regulating public-sector labour disputes.
-
The article reviews the book, "Transgender Marxism," edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke.
-
This study examines the effects of demographic characteristics of arbitrators on arbitration outcomes in the Canadian university sector. More specifically, we attempt to explain whether five characteristics of arbitrators (their experiences in law, management, and union affairs as well as their age and gender) could significantly determine how they adjudicate in cases heard in labor relations tribunals. Therefore, we examine whether the five aforementioned characteristics, as the group of independent variables, could significantly determine the variations of two dependent variables, namely the outcome of the arbitration procedure and compensation of any damages- interests.
-
The article reviews the book, "James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928–38," by Bryan D. Palmer.
-
The article reviews the book, "Stampede: Misogyny, White Supremacy, and Settler Colonialism," by Kimberly A. Williams.
-
The article reviews the book, "Bent Out of Shape: Shame, Solidarity and Women's Bodies at Work," by Karen Messing.
-
Section 50 of the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act prohibits an employer from punishing a worker who complains about a health and safety concern and who seeks to exercise the right to raise or report this concern. A worker who suffers such a reprisal may file a grievance if covered by a collective agreement or make an application to the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB).
-
Despite the organic movement’s early connections to labour advocacy and commitment to the principle of “Fairness”, the evolution of the organic sector has generated questions about the strength of its links to food justice in certified organic farming. Scholar-activists have, in particular, highlighted the problematic nature of labour relations on many organic farms. This article reports on a growing relationship between an organic farming association (the Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia) and a migrant workers justice collective (Fuerza Migrante) with aspirations of alliance building. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participant observation, we examine the extent to which efforts by the organic community towards fairness in labour relations may signal an opening whereby the organic movement may take up the more radical struggle for rights, status and justice for racialized migrant workers. We draw on theoretical work on post-capitalist relations and emancipatory social transformations to provide scaffolding to our assessment, and illuminate the importance of complementary efforts. While the primary demands raised by migrant workers and their allies (eg structural changes to temporary foreign worker programs) are not yet mirrored by the organic community’s advocacy, this paper documents preliminary efforts towards centering of migrant worker struggles for justice that may open up spaces for social emancipation for workers in organic farming systems. We also provide recommendations for how the organic community could act in solidarity with migrants and advance migrant justice priorities.