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Reviews the book "At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor Market Performance in International Perspective," by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn.

Reviews the book 'Immigration and American Unionism,' by Vernon M. Briggs Jr.

The article reviews the book, "Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933," by Prometheus Research Library Staff.

This article offers a preliminary theoretical statement on the law as a set of boundaries constraining class struggle in the interests of capitalist authority. But those boundaries are not forever fixed, and are constantly evolving through the pressures exerted on them by active working-class resistance, some of which takes the form of overt civil disobedience. To illustrate this process, the author explores the ways in which specific moments of labour upheaval in 1886, 1919, 1937, and 1946 conditioned the eventual making of industrial legality. When this legality unravelled in the post-World War II period, workers were left vulnerable and their trade union leaders increasingly trapped in an ossified understanding of the rules of labour-capital-state relations, rules that had long been abandoned by other players on the unequal field of class relations. The article closes by arguing for the necessity of the workers' movement recovering its civil disobedience heritage.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation," by Edwin Black, "Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor During the Second World War," by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Hitler, and Nicholas Levis and "Hitler, der Westen und die Schweiz 1936-1945," by Walter Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin.

Reviews the book 'Personnel et DRH: l'affirmation de la fonction personnel dans les entreprises,' by Jean Fombonne.

The article reviews the book "No Plaster Saint: The Life of Mildred Osterhout Fahrni," by Nancy Knickerbrocker.

The article reviews the book, "Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry," by Ellen Israel Rosen.

Canada's oldest and largest public housing project. Regent Park in Toronto, was originally conceived as an ideal community for low-income families in housing hardship. By the 1990s, however, it had become virtually synonymous with socio-economic marginalization and behavioural depravity. Indeed, the broader social identity of Regent Park has become an accumulation and escalation of the stigma of its residents. The first section of this article charts the historical escalation of polarization between Regent Park residents and the Metropolitan Toronto population by comparing a series of broadly illustrative statistical traits over a 40-year period. This long-term historical perspective allows us to scrutinize the development of socio-economic marginalization both before and after the boom period of postwar capitalism from the 1940s to the 1970s. It confirms that Regent's resident population underwent a dramatic process of socio-economic divergence in comparison to the general Metropolitan Toronto population, which began in the mid to late 1960s before the onset of outright assaults on the welfare state. I flesh out the stark statistical portrayal by considering various qualitative sources such as oral testimony, letters to the author by former tenants, rare resident case files, and internal and public documents from the various housing authorities. In the second section, I explain the rise of socio-economic inequality. Contrary to currently popular underclass theories, I directly point the arrow of responsibility for rising poverty and inequality towards state housing policies, including wider urban renewal strategies and internal public housing practices, and neoliberal economic restructuring. Unlike most studies, I centre in a third section on the potently deleterious effects of stereotyping Regent Park as an outcast space. Stigmatizing renderings by extemal observers were not free-floating ideological representations but real reflections and shapers of spatial and social divisions with concrete economic and social consequences for tenants. I conclude by discussing what residents themselves thought about their homes and how they coped with stigmatization and material deprivation. Sometimes accepting and internalizing negative external representations and/or projecting these labels onto their neighbours and other times resolutely battling against these brutalizing depictions. Regent Park residents were always active players in building a meaningful living space.

We believe there is a need to move beyond simply privileging formal or informal organization as the most authentic expression of worker activity, but rather to recognize both and analyse the interrelationship between the two. The present article provides a method for achieving this as well as presenting the resultsof applying this method to a particular country and historical context [namely, workers in the Australian colonies from 1795 to 1850]. --From authors' introduction

The article reviews the book, "When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures," by Sheila Smith.

The article provides a "contrapuntal reading" of Frederic M. Bell-Smith's painting, The Heart of the Empire (1909). Born in the UK, Bell-Smith emigrated to Canada at age 21 in the confederation year of 1867. Although Bell-Smith also painted country landscapes,The Heart of the Empire depicts a busy confluence in London's financial district known as Bank Junction. The author contrasts the painting with Niels Moeller Lund's 1904 work, which had the same title. Contextual themes of gender, industrialization (notably, the newspaper industry), nationalism, modernity, neo-imperialism, and post-colonialism are also explored. By pointing to the painting's layers of meaning, the author intends to promote dialogue on post-confederation Canadian art.

The article reviews the book "Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography," by John McIlroy.

The promotion of systematic occupational health and safety management (SOHSM) represents a comparatively recent but significant realignment of regulatory strategy that has been embraced by many, if not most, industrialized countries. As yet there has been little critical evaluation of the origins and implications of this shift, and to what extent the experience of these measures differs between countries. This article seeks to start the process of answering these questions by comparing SOHSM in Norway and Australia. A number of common challenges (problems of "paper" compliance, limited union input and the growth of precarious employment) are identified. In particular, the article highlights the interdependence of OHS and industrial relations regulatory regimes and argues the move away from inclusive collectivist regimes places significant constraints on independent vetting of SOHSM - a crucial element in their effectiveness.

The article reviews the book "Unions and Learning in a Global Economy: International and Comparative Perspectives," edited by Bruce Spencer.

Reviews the book "Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto," by Dan La Botz.

The article reviews and comments on several books, including "Global Showdown: How the New Activists Are Fighting Global Corporate Rule," by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, "Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity," by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith and "Reshaping World Politics: NGOs, the Internet, and Global Civil Society," by Craig Warkentin.

For a long time, it has been believed that it is possible to leave our emotions at the threshold of the workplace. This excessively simplifies the complexity and heterogeneity of work, leading to an underestimation of the effects of work on health. Our objective is to understand one particular form of the expression of workers’ emotions: crying at work, which may be linked to an excess of emotional labour or to the impossibility of its achievement. Thus, differences between male and female crying, at least at work, may be explained not only by a gendered socialisation of individuals, but also by the sexual division of emotional labour. This imposes an emotional overload on women, since a more intensive management of emotions is demanded of them at work.

This article argues the case for recognising the value of labour learning within the formal education system. It is based on an introduction to the report by Gereluk (2001) and discusses the impact of prior learning and recognition (PLAR) on Canadian labour education as well as outlining why labour education deserves recognition. The article reviews aspects of labour education detailed in the report including the content and purposes of union courses and who participates in, and who delivers, union courses.

The article reviews the book "Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960," by Joan Sangster.