Your search

The book, ``Culture and the Labour Market,`` by Siobhan Austen is reviewed.

In 1924 sixteen-year-old Kay Chetley along with her parents Jennie and Robert, and her sister Roberta, moved to the industrial city of Welland, Ontario. Kay was raised in east Saint John, New Brunswick where her father worked as a stationary engineer on dredging barges. Her mother, from a farming family in Petitcodiac, New Brunswick, had been a primary school teacher until her marriage. The family's economic status thus ranged between the artisan class and the emerging lower-middle class. To maintain that position, Kay's father moved the family to Ontario so that he could take up work in the construction of the new canal. Welland, however, soon became the setting for Kay's courtship, wedding, her first years as a married wom[a]n, and her subsequent years as a mother. This typical female life-cycle was played out not only within a tight-knit nuclear family, the dominant familial form in the early 20th century, but also within the community of First Baptist Church, Welland. Kay's life thus provides an illustration of the interconnectedness of religion, family, courtship, leisure, and work in one Ontario industrial community. The core of this study is constructed around a series of five-year diaries left by Kay Chetley. ...The diaries cover the bulk of the period from 1934 to 1944 and offer a few lines detailing Kay's activities each day. --Author's introduction

The article reviews the book, "John Reed and the Writing of Revolution," by Daniel W. Lehman.

The book ,"Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice," by John Budd, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Building Chaos: An International Comparison of Deregulation in the Construction Industry," edited by Gerhard Bosch and Peter Phillips.

The article reviews the book, "La chaîne invisible. Travailler aujourd’hui : flux tendu et servitude volontaire," by Jean-Pierre Durand.

A 1964 strike by women workers in Dunnville, Ontario provides an exceptional perspective on the complex ways in which class, gender, and ethnicity unite in the construction of identity. The women strikers drew on left-wing traditions of feisty femininity to claim an identity as real workers and authentic unionists while also embracing multi-ethnic identities that distinguished them from the Anglo-Celtic middle class. Their claims to authenticity challenged pervasive assumptions, including those of their union brothers, who defined labor militancy as implicitly male and distorted memories of the strike. Yet the limits on the women's own constructions of these identities are evident in their inability to perceive the Native women who scabbed during the strike as workers. By contrasting the ways in which identity was claimed, assigned, and contested by different groups of workers, this story problematizes categories of identity that are often used uncritically in labor history.

The book, "Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History," edited by Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Women in European History," by Gisela Bock.

The 1970's saw an explosion of new social movement activism. From the breakup of the New Left into single-issue groups at the end of the 1960's came a multitude of groups representing the peace, environmental, student, women's, and gay liberation movements. This explosion of new social movement activism has been heralded as the age of new radical politics. Many theorists and activists saw new social movements and the issues or identities they represented as replacing the working class as an agent for progressive social change. This article examines these claims through a case study of the quintessential social movement, Greenpeace, exploring Greenpeace Canada from 1971 to 2000 and its relationship to the working class. In order to understand the ideology behind Greenpeace, the author investigates its structure, personnel, and actions. The case study illustrates important contradictions between new social movement theory and practice and how those contradictions affect the working class. In particular, Greenpeace's actions against the seal hunt, forestry in British Columbia, and its own workers in Toronto demonstrate some of the historic obstacles to working out a common labor and environmental agenda.

The article reviews the book, "Workers After Workers' States: Labour and Politics in Post Communist Eastern Europe," edited by Stephen Crowley and David Ost.

The book, "The Next Upsurge: Labour and the New Social Movements," by Dan Clawson, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "The French Canadians of Michigan: Their Contribution to the Development of the Saginaw Valley and the Keweenaw Peninsula, 1840-1914," by Jean Lamarre.

The article reviews the book, "The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players Union, 1960-81," by Charles P. Korr.

Nonstandard Work in Developed Economies: Causes and Consequences, edited by Susan Houseman and Machiko Osawa, is reviewed.

In 1987-1988, a national debate erupted in Canada on the desirability of entering into a free trade agreement with the USA and its potential effect on Canadian culture, society, and national sovereignty-as well as its economy. A national coalition of labour unions and civil society groups emerged to oppose such an agreement with the USA, and later its expansion to Mexico as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The coalition was hailed by members as a groundbreaking alliance between labour unions and civil society, as well as a new grassroots challenge to the neo-liberal economic policies of the government at the time. The experience led to a longer-term pattern of collaboration between unions and NGOs in Canada, but the coalition also experienced difficulties in reconciling the different approaches and goals of participants, which were resolved with varying degrees of success. This paper discusses the coalition in relation to gendered attitudes and practices; issues of representation and accountability; different approaches to organisation, hierarchy, leadership, and decision making; resource conflicts; class-based versus new views of challenge and social movements; and views within the Canadian labour movement on coalition work with civil society groups.

Originally prepared to provide background information and analysis for a Canadian Labour Congress conference on rebuilding unions in the Fall of 2003, this article maps trends in union density i.e., the proportion of workers covered by a collective agreement. It provides a short overview of the period since the mid 1980s, and a much more detailed analysis of the period from 1997 to 2002 for which detailed data from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey are available. Union density has trended down in the private sector to below 20% more because of a density decline among male blue collar workers than because of deindustrialization per se. Union density has remained high in public and social services, including outside the direct public sector, and this mainly explains why union density has held up much better among women than men. Union density is low, but relatively stable, in private consumer and business services. Density has fallen proportionately less in the higher union density provinces, particularly Quebec, and has fallen to well below average levels among private sector workers in the fastest growing provinces of Ontario and Alberta.

The article reviews the book, "No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women," by Estelle B. Freedman.

This study focuses on the effectiveness of the federal Employment Equity Act (EEA). We assess the EEA with regard to visible minority employees using quantitative data from employer reports published under the provisions of the EEA and the Canadian Census. Data in this study cover the period 1987 to 1999. We find that large companies, and larger employment groups within companies, have higher levels of employment equity attainment. There are also considerable variations in employment equity attainment across industrial sectors, across provinces and across occupations. Overall, there has been general improvement in employment equity attainment over time. However, visible minorities continue to be disadvantaged in management, sales and service and technical positions. Several policy implications are drawn from these findings.

The article reviews the book, "Safe Haven: The Story of a Shelter for Homeless Women," by Rae Bridgman.