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The editor pays tribute to managing editor Irene Whitfield, who retired after 25 years' service. Josephine Thompson has succeeded her in various capacities.

Compared to Canada, Australian trade union membership grew dramatically in the period from 1900 to 1914. Through a comparative analysis of two iron and steel plants in Canada and Australia, this article broadens the debate about union growth in this particular period as well as generally. One plant was located at Lithgow, New South Wales, and the other at Sydney, Nova Scotia. While workers at both plants unionized in September-October 1902, the union at the Sydney plant collapsed following a major strike in 1904. Iron and steel unionism did not revive at the Sydney plant until during World War I. With the exception of a brief period, iron and steel unionism continued at the Lithgow plant for the period under examination. This article attempts to explain why iron and steel unionism persisted at Lithgow rather than Sydney and focuses on the factors of the state, the ethnic diversity of the workforce, management, and community or locality.

This article studies trade unions' response to transnational change in a large multinational corporation within the motor industry in Europe. We show how the use of the European Works Councils (EWCs) as a forum for European negotiation did not counter the management's effort to whipsaw trade unions, such as to play off workers against each other in local negotiations. This seems to suggest that the effort to network and coordinate between employee representatives, and to negotiate with management through 'active' EWCs is ineffective at controlling inter-union competition in cases of transnational restructuring. Hence, research outcomes illustrate that an analysis of the impact of European-level agreements on plant level is requested in order to assess the effectiveness of 'active' EWCs in forging cross-national links.

In the late nineteenth century, thousands of Indigenous women journeyed hundreds of miles annually along the Pacific Northwest coast and converged around Puget Sound. They came to pick hops in the fields of farmers who occupied lands in western Washington. These migrants did not look like modern factory workers, yet they were laborers in a late-nineteenth-century incarnation of industrial agriculture. They came en masse to harvest a cash crop destined for sale on the global market, a crop internationally sought as a preservative and fl avoring for beer, a crop that could provide no sustenance to them or their families. Field workers were paid in cash wages, not in kind. This was no shop floor, but a labor hierarchy (both racialized and gendered) structured the conditions of their work all the same. --Introduction

The article reviews the book, "Le travailleur forestier québécois : transformations technologiques, socioéconomiques et organisationnelles," by Camille Legendre,.

Les nouvelles relations industrielles en Europe centrale sont en partie le résultat du rejet du système communiste et des structures qui lui étaient associées. Mais la trajectoire empruntée par ces pays est également la conséquence de l’influence exercée par les firmes multinationales. Pour continuer à attirer des flux significatifs d’investissements étrangers, les pays d’Europe centrale ont défini des législations sur la protection de l’emploi moins contraignantes pour les employeurs qu’en Europe de l’Ouest et ont favorisé l’émergence de relations du travail et d’un gouvernement d’entreprise marqués par la liberté contractuelle. Les firmes multinationales, acteurs centraux dans ces pays, privilégient des relations industrielles décentralisées et « désintermédiées ». Les firmes multinationales qui se sont implantées en Europe centrale contribuent à engager ces pays sur une trajectoire qui fait la part belle à la liberté de négociation entre acteurs individuels.

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

Nous posons dans le cas d’une monographie française (les syndicats Sud) la question de la régénérescence démocratique du syndicalisme bureaucratique. Malgré des référents politiques communs, notamment le souci de rénovation « démocratique » via la recherche de proximité avec la base, le réveil de l’action revendicative met aux prises des logiques d’action et des porteparole opposés au nom du réveil de sensibilités politiques divergentes, mais tous héritiers d’une même culture politique soixante-huitarde. Dimensions collectives et individuelles se mêlent donc à des problèmes de structure du syndicalisme, partagé entre deux conceptions contradictoires du contrôle (salarial ou social) ou de la démocratie (directe et indirecte). Le procès d’institutionnalisation contredit la réactivation des référentiels politiques du syndicalisme français, tandis que le procès d’individuation sociale accentue le rôle des individus dans un contexte de rareté de l’action collective.

In 1971, the word "Texpack" became a flashpoint of political attention, debate, and anger for labour activists across Canada. Many mobilized to support strikers at Texpack's small textile firm in Brantford, Ontario, though some trade unionists from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) turned their backs on the independent Canadian union, the Canadian Textile and Chemical Workers Union (CTCU), leading the strike. The significance of Texpack lay not simply in this stark manifestation of schisms within the house of labour, but rather in the strike's central role as a touchstone for political debates concerning economic and Left nationalism, and what kind of unions best served Canadian workers. This article explores the strike as a microcosm of broader political struggles of the period, particularly questions of nationalism and internationalism of unions. --From introduction

The article reviews the book, "The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America," by Dorothy Sue Cobble.

The article reviews the book, "East Asian Welfare Regimes in Transition: From Confucianism to Globalization," edited by Alan Walker and Chack-kie Wong.

The article reviews the conference papers, "Y-a-t-il une politique européenne d’emploi, de sécurité professionnelle et de dialogue social ?," from the Conférence EUROCAP, Nantes, février 2006.

The article reviews the book, "The Politics of the Past in an Argentine Working-Class Neighborhood," by Lindsay DuBois.

In different ways, Marxist autonomist, regulation school, and neoliberal theories all claim that work in the new economy is increasingly characterised by high levels of creativity, cooperation, and innovation, albeit accompanied by uncertainty and a relentless pace of work, introducing a new form of labour that differs fundamentally from past forms. This paper does not disagree with the proposition that capital is currently in the process of intensifying its search for more efficient value extraction. However, through a case study of lawsuits launched against the video game company Electronic Arts regarding its labour practices, it argues that the change in the nature of knowledge work and immaterial labour has been overstated by the adherents of these three schools and that what we are witnessing is not so much a replacement of traditional Fordist practices by post-Fordist ones as a new fusion of the two forms.

The article reviews the book, "Labour After Communism," by David Mandel.

The article reviews the book, "The Spirit of Labor," by Hutchins Hapgood, with introduction and notes by James R. Barrett.

The article reviews the book, "Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany," by Dogmar Herzog.

The article reviews the book, "The Porto Alegre Experiment: Learning Lessons for Better Democracy," by Marion Gret and Yves Sintomer.