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The article reviews and comments on the books, "Images du travail, travail des images" edited by Jean-Paul Géhin et Hélène Stevens, and "Le travail, entre droit et cinéma," edited by Magalie Flores-Lonjou.

This article reviews the book, "Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America's Working Class," by Carol Quirke.

The organization of contemporary labour markets has radically altered the nature of work and its embodied or bodily performance. Changes from standard, permanent jobs to non-standard or precarious work arrangements have increasingly become the normative template for many workers, including persons with disabilities. Drawing on findings from 13 qualitative interviews associated with ‘Project EDGE,’ Episodic Disabilities in the Global Economy, I describe how Canadian workers with “episodic” or fluctuating disabilities experience and negotiate barriers to work within precarious work environments in Toronto, Ontario. Implications that consider the episodic dimension of disability for workforce participation and employment policy are considered.

This article delves into the nexus between workers' conversions of troubled firms in Argentina into worker cooperatives (empreseas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, or ERTs), the processes of learning new cooperative skills and values through struggle, and the subsequent transformations of communities. To do so, the study deploys research findings from workplace ethnographies and in-depth interviews at four ERT case studies. The article shows how transformations of employees to self-managed workers; troubled firms into worker cooperatives; and the social, cultural, and economic revitalization of communities catalyzed by ERTs are rooted simultaneously in inter-cooperative and intra-cooperative informal learning dynamics. A theoretical framework combining class-struggle analysis and workplace and social action learning approaches helps clarify how this informal "learning in struggle" ultimately makes ERTs transformative learning organizations for workers, organizations, and communities.

Temporary migrant work is a central feature of labour markets in many host states, and an increasing cause of concern for its potential impacts on workers’ rights and protections. In Canada, as elsewhere, policymakers utilise it as a regulatory device to lower labour standards. In this context, workers labouring transnationally are turning to unions for assistance. Yet they are confronting obstacles to securing access to their labour rights through representation. This article analyses one example involving a group of temporary migrant agricultural workers engaged seasonally on a British Columbian (BC) farm under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) seeking union representation. It considers the question, confronting courts and tribunals in host states across the OECD, of meaningful access to collective bargaining for temporary migrant workers. Focussing on how the BC Labour Relations Board determines an appropriate bargaining unit, the inquiry demonstrates that temporary migrant workers are ill-served by mechanisms aimed at promoting collective bargaining. Although the union involved in the case secured a certification, the outcome was tenuous unionisation. The resulting collective agreement contained provisions augmenting workers’ job security by facilitating their circular movement between the sending and host state. However, the structure of the SAWP, which reinforces workers’ deportability, together with the limits of the prevailing regime of collective bargaining in BC, modelled on the US Wagner Act, contributed to a certification that was weakly institutionalised and underscored labour law’s subsidiarity to legal frameworks governing work across borders.

[E]xplores the complex ways in which temporariness is being institutionalized as a condition of life for a growing number of people worldwide. The collection emphasizes contemporary developments, but also provides historical context on nation-state membership as the fundamental means for accessing rights in an era of expanding temporariness - in recognition of why pathways to permanence remain so compelling. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, contributors explore various dimensions of temporariness, especially as it relates to the legal status of migrants and refugees, to the spread of precarious employment, and to limitations on social rights. While the focus is on Canada, a number of chapters investigate and contrast developments in Canada with those in Europe as well as Australia and the United States. Together, these essays reveal changing and enduring temporariness at local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels, and in different domains, such as health care, language programs, and security. The question at the heart of this collection is whether temporariness can be liberated from current constraints. While not denying the desirability of permanence for migrants and labourers, "Liberating Temporariness?" presents alternative possibilities of security and liberation. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction: Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion  / Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Melisa Bretón. Part 1: Security, Temporary Status, and Rights. Rethinking Canadian Citizenship: The Politics of Social Exclusion in the Age of Security and Suppression / Yasmeen Abu-Laban -- Permanent Patriots and Temporary Predators? Post-9/11 Institutionalization of the Arab/Orientalized “Other” in the United States and the Contributions of Arendt and Said / Abigail B. Bakan -- Indefinitely Pending: Security Certificates and Permanent Temporariness / Mike Larsen. Part 2: International Organizations and Transnational Dynamics of Temporary Work. Managed Migration and the Temporary Labour Fix / Christina Gabriel -- Institutionalizing Temporary Labour Migration in Europe: Creating an “In-between”’ Migration Status / Tesseltje de Lange and Sarah van Walsu -- The Permanence of Temporary Labour Mobility: Migrant Worker Programs across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand / Emily Gilbert. Part 3: Temporary Status, Social Welfare, and Marginalization. Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour? Conceptualizing Temporariness in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service / Parvati Raghuram -- Language Training and Labour Market Integration for Newcomers to Canada / Eve Haque -- Resituating Temporariness as the Precarity and Conditionality of Non-citizenship / Luin Goldring -- Constructing and “Liberating” Temporariness in the Canadian Non-profit Sector: Neoliberalism and Non-profit Service Providers / John Shields. Part 4: (Re)Framing Temporariness. Mexican Migrant Transnationalism and Imaginaries of Temporary/Permanent Belonging / Marianne H. Marchand -- Temporariness: Other than Permanence, and in the Lives of People - Always… / Deepa Rajkumar -- Temporal Orders, Re-collective Justice, and the Making of Untimely States / Robert Latham.

Employment standards (ES) are legislated standards that set minimum terms and conditions of employment in areas such as wages, working time, vacations and leaves, and termination and severance. In Canada, the majority of workers rely on ES for basic regulatory protection; however, a significant ‘enforcement gap’ exists. In the province of Ontario, this enforcement gap has been exacerbated in recent years due to the deregulation of ES through inadequate funding, workplace restructuring, legislative reforms that place greater emphasis on individualized complaints processes and voluntary compliance, and a formal separation of unions from ES enforcement. The implications of these developments are that, increasingly, those in precarious jobs, many of whom lack union representation, are left with insufficient regulatory protection from employer non-compliance, further heightening their insecurity. Taking the province of Ontario as our focus, in this article we critically examine alternative proposals for ES enforcement, placing our attention on those that enhance the involvement of unions in addressing ES violations. Through this analysis, we suggest that augmenting unions’ supportive roles in ES enforcement holds the potential to enhance unions’ regulatory function and offers a possible means to support the ongoing efforts of other workers’ organizations to improve employer compliance with ES.

La surqualification, définie comme la situation qui caractérise un individu dont le niveau de formation dépasse celui qui est normalement requis pour l’emploi occupé, a subi une forte tendance à la hausse au cours des vingt dernières années. Au Québec et au Canada, elle touche un tiers des travailleurs, surtout les plus jeunes. Ce phénomène, qui témoigne de l’incapacité du marché du travail à offrir à un grand nombre de personnes des emplois qui correspondent à leurs qualifications, est devenu pour tous les acteurs de la vie économique et sociale un enjeu de premier ordre. Ce livre présente un ensemble d’études récentes sur la surqualification. Son objectif est de mesurer l’étendue du phénomène du point de vue statistique et de mettre en relief les facteurs qui interviennent dans sa genèse et son développement. L’ouvrage évalue plusieurs approches et modèles analytiques et présente des résultats de recherches qui utilisent diverses bases de données. Il offre un portrait détaillé de la surqualification au Québec et au Canada. De manière plus fondamentale, il soulève la question de la valeur des diplômes sur le marché du travail et suggère des pistes de réflexion pour atteindre l’adéquation entre la formation de la main-d’œuvre et le profil des emplois. --Publisher's description

The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Teamsters Strikes of 1934," by Bryan D. Palmer.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities," edited by D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly; and "Academic Careers and the Gender Gap," by Maureen Baker.

Argues that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's exercise of political power falls outside of parliamentary and constitutional norms, such as the repeated use of omnibus bills, prerogation of Parliament, and closure of debates.

Accelerating flows of remittances are dwarfing global development aid. This study deepens our understanding of remittance impacts on the families of workers who come to Canada annually for several months under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Interviews with SAWP workers, their spouses, adult children and teachers in Mexico deepen our understanding of the impacts of these remittances. They demonstrate that the remittances are often literally a lifeline to transnational family survival, allowing them to pay for basic needs such as shelter, food, and medical care. Yet, at the same time, the remittances do not allow most of these workers and their families to escape deep poverty and significant precarity, including new forms of precarity generated by the SAWP. Instead, SAWP remittances help reduce poverty, at least temporarily, to more moderate levels while precarious poverty expands through global neoliberal underdevelopment.

"[U]ses autoethnography to convey the experience of librarians participating in faculty associations, providing a compelling narrative of the impact on the participants and the communities they represent." -- Editors' introduction.

Argues that there is an underlying narrative incoherence in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper's use of history for partisan ends. Examines the government's reaction to traditional liberal interpretations of Canadian history and national identity.

This article reviews the book, "Detroit's Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism," by Colleen Doody.

This dissertation examines workplace issues and events that shaped men’s health, and the healthcare services in support of them, in northern Ontario’s resource extraction industries. Between 1890 and 1925 there were important transformations in the hardrock mining sector including: technological innovations and refinements of the materials and devices used to extract ores; the healthcare mandated and legislatively prescribed but challenging to deliver to frontier workspaces; and how the complex interactions of the men, their work, their communities, wartime demands and collective bargaining combined to construct new definitions of masculinity. Using quantitative data from the Ontario Bureau of Mines on the numbers of annual accidents and fatalities, a clearer understanding emerges that reveals how workingmen’s bodies were understood over time. Together with newspaper accounts, the reports of coroners’ juries, personal papers, doctors’ memoirs and popular histories, the role of work and workplace conditions clarifies how health was managed or how it suffered as the exploitation of the provinces natural resources began in earnest. The impact of World War One caused a wholesale change in the scale and importance of the mines and the men that worked them. This was seen in their solidarity, strength and successful strike immediately after the war and in fewer accidents and fatalities. The pace of change, however, faded in the post-war era. The gains that were made were kept and men’s health and safety never again saw the alarming losses as those enumerated here.

In contrast with Schein's theory, which presumes a single dominant career anchor, this study proposes an original model based on a career value structure that could explain why some individuals have several dominant career anchors. Career values, which are organized according a circular logic, are grouped into four large clusters of values which are opposed by pairs: bureaucratic self-concept opposed to the protean self-concept and careerist self-concept opposed to social self-concept. Using a new career value inventory, the model was tested on a sample of 240 employees and 155 managers in a health care organization. Construct validity was demonstrated by linking career values with career anchors, proactivity and collectivism. For instance, of the four career self-concepts, only the careerist self-concept is significantly related to the managerial competence.

This article reviews the book, "Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania 1897-1959," by Robert P. Wolensky and William A. Hastie, Sr.

This article reviews the book, "Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good," by Stephen D'Arcy.

Since the 2008 revisions to the Ontario Human Rights Code, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) has been responsible for providing fair, accessible, effective and timely resolution of human rights complaints. The author, formerly vice-chair of the HRTO, reviews the implementation and oper- ation of that system over its first five years, highlighting key challenges and the HRTO's responses to them. The author describes the principal stages of the current HRTO process, including applications and responses, mediation, and the hearing on the merits. He also outlines the ongoing restructuring of Ontario's administrative justice system into clusters, the development of a sum- mary hearings procedure, the use of litigation guardians, and efforts to control misuse of the system by vexatious litigants. In his view, the figures to date show progress in the areas of access to justice and efficient caseload management, but much remains to be done. Budget pressures make it difficult to fund such resource-heavy initiatives as active review of files, early case management, and the refining of the HRTO's processes to make them more accessible to appli- cants. The experience of the HRTO since 2008 can offer significant guidance in the design offuture direct access systems in human rights and other areas of administrative justice.