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How and why have firefighters been able to maintain and even strengthen their labour position during a neoliberal period characterized by attacks on public sector wages and working conditions? This paper contributes to discussions about labour inequities by investigating the relations that have supported this masculinized labour sectors’ position. I contend that firefighters have experienced advantages due to their sectors’ ties to capital interests and the organization of the labour process. Further, the honourable white masculinity associated with firefighting has been mobilized to strengthen firefighters’ political influence. [Excerpt from Introduction}

[E]xamines how coalition building between and across equity-seeking groups within unions contribute to union revitalization by building solidarity. [The author's] main focus is on what types of organizing structures contribute to unity in diversity, for example, by protecting the particular interests of each equity-seeking group while enabling a common equity agenda to be advanced. --Editor's introduction

The article reviews the book, "Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought 1900-64," by Ben Jackson.

The article reviews the book, "Healing the World's Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century," edited by Cynthia Comacchio, Janet Golden and George Weisz.

Countering the more placid depictions of call-centre work on offer from academic literature, this paper illuminates the labour antagonisms currently being produced within this growing form of employment. It brings into sharper focus one of the ways in which call centre workers are organising to protect and their interests, by describing their participation in the emerging model of 'convergent' trade unionism of the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) and their 2004 strike against the Canadian telecommunications company Aliant. The five-month strike was provoked by a set of processes that characterised the transformation of the Canadian telecommunications sector in the 1990s, including the privatisation of public telephone companies, corporate convergence, and the restructuring of the labour process at the telecommunications companies that emerged. Drawing on the descriptions offered by a group of call-centre workers who are members of Local 506 of the CEP, the paper focuses on the transformation of the Aliant customer contact labour process from its 'help-desk' functions towards conditions prevailing within non-unionised outsourced call centres across New Brunswick, and recounts the 2004 strike. It concludes by assessing the significance of these events for unionised call-centre workers in the Canadian telecommunications sector and reflecting on how convergent unionism might be extended to include non-unionised workers at outsourced call centres across the region.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Labours Old and New: The Parliamentary Right of the British Labour Party 1970-79 and the Roots of New Labour," by Stephen Meredith, and "Trade Unions in a Neoliberal World: British Trade Unions Under New Labour," edited Gary Daniels and John McIlroy.

Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviors for Good, by Philip Kotler and Nancy R. Lee, is reviewed.

The article reviews the books "Mining Town Crisis: Globalization, Labour and Resistance in Sudbury," edited by David Leadbeater, "Fighting for Justice and Dignity: The Homer Seguin Story: An Autobiography," by Homer Seguin, and "As Strong as Steel," by Gilbert H. Gilchrist.

Le présent article vise à présenter, d’une part, les éléments contextuels d’une réflexion en éthique professionnelle, puis en éthique de l’ingénierie et, d’autre part, les résultats d’une étude qualitative réalisée auprès d’ingénieurs conseils oeuvrant dans divers domaines de l’ingénierie. Dans l’optique où peu de recherches ont été effectuées sur ce sujet jusqu’à présent, alors que l’éthique constitue un enjeu de plus en plus important de la sphère organisationnelle, cette étude se veut le point de départ d’une réflexion à fois théorique et empirique quant aux problèmes liés à l’éthique professionnelle. Le but de cette étude est d’explorer les relations mises en évidence entre le type de dilemme éthique vécu et le sexe, l’âge et le nombre d’années d’expérience des participants.

This paper traces the steps in the denouement of the Supreme Court of Canada's 1987 Labour Trilogy, which denied constitutional protection to collective bargaining and strikes. The first blow to those decisions came in Dunmore, where the Court adopted a collective rather than individual definition of the Charter freedom of association, while another was dealt by B.C. Health, where the Court extended s. 2(d) pro- tection to collective bargaining. The Supreme Court might still avoid finding a constitutional right to strike, but, in the author's view, the Court has probably gone too far to turn back. If and when the time comes to read the Trilogy its "last rites," the author argues against set- ting a high threshold for a breach of s. 2(d), by adopting the "substantial interference" test set out in B.C. Health. In this respect, she points to an important difference between collective bargaining and strikes: the for- mer is a positive obligation which imposes on governments a correspon- ding duty, whereas the latter is a negative entitlement to be free from government interference. While there is a risk that the constitutionaliza- tion of strike activity may involve the courts in reviewing labour policy, the solution is not to dilute the content of s. 2(d), but to create a "cus- tomized" s. I test for justifying infringements of the guarantee in the labour context - one which would explicitly defer to policy decisions by the legislature.

The Canadian labour revolt was about more than wages and working conditions. The year 1919 was also a moment of socialist possibility in which the Russian Revolution and the influence of Marx and Engels fuelled the revolutionary intent of a radicalizing Canadian working class. The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, long since lost in the shadow of Stalin’s terror, fuelled this moment of socialist possibility. The longing for a workers’ state was a nation-wide phenomenon, but it manifested itself more deeply and broadly in western Canada than in the east. West of the Great Lakes, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was hotly debated in the pages of socialist papers and in the halls of the labour movement. Knowledge of the debate concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat provides a more complete understanding of the labour revolt of 1919 and its legacy for Canadian history and the international left.

We study the propensity of persons with disabilities to engage in volunteer activity using the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS). Our principal focus is on the effects of various income support programs on persons with disabilities participation in volunteer activities because income support programs can differ with respect to their treatment of unpaid work. For example, workers' compensation programs embody strong disincentives to volunteering while public disability insurance programs explicitly encourage unpaid work. We find that workers' compensation is associated with decreases in the probability of volunteering while public disability insurance is associated with increases in the propensity to volunteer. The relevance of these results to both theories of volunteerism and public policy is discussed.

The article reviews the book "Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations," by John Sutton Lutz.

In several parts of the world, the number of poor people in rural areas surpasses the capacity of agriculture to provide employment opportunities. The increasing role of off-farm income has highlighted the importance of rural migration, both within Mexico and to the United States (US) and Canada, as a vehicle for poverty reduction. A significant number of Mexican migrants are participating in guest worker programs, performing mainly agricultural activities. These programs allow Mexicans to enter the US and Canada through formal channels. Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Program (CSAWP) lets Mexican farmers enter Canada to work legally in agriculture, and participants in this Program send remittances home that are an important contribution to rural development. The main reasons to participate in guest worker programs relate to economic factors, such as the opportunity to earn a relatively high, stable income abroad and the lack of employment opportunities in Mexico, particularly in rural areas. The number of Mexican agricultural workers temporally migrating to Canada through CSAWP has increased significantly over time and now exceeds 12,000 annually. In Mexico, the program provides an estimated C$70 million in remittance income annually, mainly directed to rural and poorer regions. In these regions, this fungible income supports consumption activities and expenditures on family education. However, there are also investments in farming activities, in turn enhancing agrarian incomes. This research explores the impact of remittances on farm investments by migrant workers participating in CSAWP, which in turn impact farm income levels. The results highlight the extent to which temporary migrant labour to Canadian agriculture allows Mexican farmers to enhance their agricultural activities through increased farm investments, such as buying better seeds, fertilizer and farm equipment. The results show that, on the one hand, remittances can significantly enhance farm investments in Mexico that in turn increase farm incomes and, on the other, remittances increase non-farm incomes in Mexico, allowing farm migrants to expand their income portfolio. Hence, these results support the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM) hypothesis that remittances relax the liquidity constraint in production/investment decisions. Furthermore, family labour availability counterbalances any temporary labour loss because of migration.

Social benchmarking is an evaluation method in which the performance levels of different public social programs are compared, either relatively to each other or to an absolute value. The first part of this research discusses the use of social benchmarking for the evaluation of active labour market policies. This part also develops a social benchmark model, which can be used to assess the performance of active labour market policies in general, and work-based employment programs in specific. The second part of this research consists of the actual benchmarking of the work-based employment programs in five countries: Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

[This report] draws on Statistics Canada data and broad academic literature to present a conceptual and empirical profile of the Ontario’s service class. We define the ‘service class’ as an occupational grouping of typically low-pay service jobs. This term was developed by Richard Florida as part of his framework for understanding creativity-led economic growth; however, it is a concept developed in counterpoint to the creative class, and has been neglected in recent research and policy debates.

Examines the intersectionality of emotional labour in terms of gender, race and class processes. The study is based on the literature arising from Hochschild's "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling" (1983).

[D]ocuments the struggles of immigrant workers and analyses them within the context of neoliberal globalization and the international and national labour markets. Fight Back grew out of collaboration between a group of university-affiliated researchers who are active in different social movements and community organizations in partnership with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal. The book shares with us the experiences of immigrant workers in a variety of workplaces. It is based on the underlying belief that the best kind of research that tells “how it really is” comes from the lived experience of people themselves. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- Context -- Making immigrant workers -- Access to social rights for migrants to Canada: the long divide between the law and the real world -- Seasonal agricultural workers -- Canada's live-in caregiver program : popular among both employers and migrants, but structured for dependency and inequality -- Survival and fighting back.

The article reviews the book, "Sing It Pretty: A Memoir," by Bess Lomax Hawes.

On leur prête l’indépendance, la capacité à se protéger seuls et à établir un équilibre dans leurs rapports avec les donneurs d’ouvrages, mais ces attributs sont loin de refléter la réalité de certains travailleurs autonomes. En approchant l’industrie du taxi et plus précisément la situation des chauffeurs locataires de taxi, le présent article examine l’état du droit sur cette question au Québec et en France, en discute et propose élaboration d’un régime-cadre de représentation collective pour le Québec.