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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.

The article reviews the book, "A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America," by Karen Pastorello.

In the summer of 2005, the Society of Energy Professionals Hydro One Local engaged in unprecedented strike action that lasted 105 days. This article documents the strike, and explores how and why it occurred, and with such significant support and participation from the 1000 members of a union that had no militant history. I trace the build-up, progression and resolution of the strike, drawing from Society materials, media reports and ethnographic observation, as well as the insights of elected leaders, staff representatives, and rank and file members of the Society collected through interviews and written questionnaires. I conclude that government policy and management behaviour caused worker anger but that union education, organization and democracy were integral to moving these "professional" workers into job action.

Le groupe des jeunes voyageurs combinant le travail dans leur expérience de voyage constitue le segment du marché touristique mondial qui enregistre la croissance la plus importante cette dernière décennie. Certaines économies régionales dépendent de cette force de travail temporaire. C'est le cas de l'industrie agricole des vallées de l'Okanagan-Similkameen et de Creston en Colombie-Britannique qui accueille annuellement des milliers de migrant fruit pickers provenant majoritairement du Québec. Ce mémoire porte sur le quotidien de ces jeunes québécois et s'attarde à comprendre le sens qu'ils accordent à leurs projets de mobilité. Sur la base d'entretiens, je dégage l'imaginaire commun, les mythes, les idéaux et les représentations qui ont incité les jeunes à partir: Les résultats indiquent que ces jeunes inscrivent leur mouvement dans une double logique de quête et de fuite et que le sens attribué à l'expérience de vacances-travail diffère entre les nouveaux arrivants et ceux qui reviennent d'année en année.

European Unions: Labor's Quest for a Transnational Democracy, by Roland Erne, is reviewed.

Based on a qualitative study of the trajectories of 22 workers aged 50 or older who lost or left a standard job and then undertook some form of non-standard employment, this article wants to shed light on the quality of non-standard jobs often held by seniors. Can these jobs be categorized as precarious, and if so, what are the dimensions of this precariousness? Our analysis enabled us to identify three main profiles: early retirees, "competitive" non-standard workers, and vulnerable non-standard workers. This diversity is mainly related to the characteristics of the previous occupational trajectory but also to the characteristics of the repositioning job, the type of skills the worker has, gender, age, and the fact of living or not with a spouse.

Employment Regimes and the Quality of Work, edited by Duncan Gallie, is reviewed.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in B.C. Health Services, holding that collective bargaining attracts Charter protection, emphasizes the importance of context in constitutional interpretation. The author agrees with the Court in looking to context as part of a purposive approach to interpretation of laws, and he argues that such an approach can be compared to the way in which labour laws have been developed in Israel — a country which, in his view, is a useful source of comparative law for Canada. In an effort to respond to changing realities in the labour market and labour relations (most notably the weakening of trade unions), Israeli judges have in recent years created a number of collective rights in the area of freedom of association, collective bargaining, and strikes. On the basis of the experience of Israeli courts in developing new workplace protections where they are needed, the author contends that the Supreme Court of Canada should now take the next step and extend Charter protection to the right to strike.

De nombreux travaux ont mis au jour l’inadéquation existant entre les lois du travail conçues pour des relations bipartites entre un salarié et un seul employeur clairement identifiable et les relations de travail tripartites qui découlent des nouveaux modes d’organisation de la production qu’adoptent les entreprises en quête de flexibilité. Le présent texte porte de manière particulière sur l’application d’une importante loi québécoise, la Loi sur les normes du travail, aux relations tripartites découlant du recours à des agences de location de personnel. Cette loi édicte des conditions de travail minimales en matière notamment de rémunération, de durée de travail, de congés ou de protection de d’emploi. Elle met aussi en place des mécanismes particuliers de mise en oeuvre de ces normes qui confèrent un rôle important à un organisme administratif spécialisé, la Commission des normes du travail. L’étude s’appuie sur l’analyse qualitative des plaintes déposées entre 2004 et 2006 par des salariés d’agences auprès de la Commission ainsi que sur des entrevues réalisées avec des membres de son personnel. Les résultats révèlent l’effectivité toute relative de la loi dans le contexte des relations de travail tripartites. Ils illustrent, d’une part, des problèmes concrets d’application qui ont été regroupés sous trois grands types : les difficultés liées à la complexité inhérente aux relations tripartites; les contournements ou les fraudes à la loi; et les défaillances structurelles de la loi. Ils témoignent, d’autre part, des difficultés dans le traitement des plaintes relatives à des relations de travail tripartites. Même si les intervenants (inspecteurs-enquêteurs et procureurs) de la Commission développent des pratiques d’application adaptées aux relations tripartites en tentant d’impliquer toutes les parties qui se partagent le pouvoir de direction du salarié dans la recherche d’une solution, il reste que, conformément au mandat de la Commission, plusieurs plaintes se concluent par des règlements, au demeurant rarement tripartites. Ces pratiques d’application n’ont pas de portée normative au-delà de la sphère d’intervention de la Commission et ne peuvent influencer le traitement judiciaire des litiges soulevant l’application du droit du travail à des relations tripartites. C’est pourquoi des réformes législatives doivent être envisagées. Celles-ci sont d’autant plus nécessaires que le recours à des salariés d’agences de location de personnel n’est pas un phénomène marginal et temporaire. À cause de son expansion et de la diversification de son offre de services, l’industrie de la location de personnel est un phénomène susceptible de transformer profondément le marché du Numerous studies have highlighted the existing mismatch between labour laws conceived for bipartite relations involving an employee and a single and clearly identifiable employer, and tripartite labour relations ensuing from the new modes of

This paper considers the relationship between equaliy rights and the right to freedom of conscience and religion, in the context of employ- ment discrimination by religious organizations. The author points out that while some human rights statutes in Canada grant religious organ- izations an exemption from the prohibition against discrimination, oth- ers provide such organizations with access to a BFOR defence. She explains the importance of the distinction between these contrasting appraches, and discusses how courts and tribunals have interpreted and applied them. The paper also includes an overview of the "special case" of denominational schools in Canada, whose rights and privileges are specificall protected by the Constitution Act, 1867. The author then turns to a consideration of which of the two approaches - the BFOR defence or the exemption - is to be preferred. In this respect, she dis- agrees with Alvin Esau, who has argued (most recentl, in a paper pub- lished in this issue of the Journal) that only the exemption approach is capable of effectivel guaranteeing the exercise offreedom of religion. Rather basing her analysis on the model of separation of church and state set out in Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, she contends that although the two approaches will often yield the same result in a given case, the BFOR defence approach is preferable, because it better pro- tects both equality rights and freedom of religion.

Introduction : Doctorat honorifique décerné au professeur Mark Thompson/Honorary Doctorate Awarded to Professor Mark Thompson