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We studied 14 universities across Canada and Australia to examine how the COVID-19 crisis, mediated through management strategies and conflict over financial control in higher education, influenced workers’ job security and affective outcomes like stress and happiness. The countries differed in their institutional frameworks, their union density, their embeddedness in neoliberalism and their negotiation patterns. Management strategies also differed between universities. Employee outcomes were influenced by differences in union involvement. Labour cost reductions negotiated with unions could improve financial outcomes, but, even in a crisis, management might not be willing to forego absolute control over finance, and it was not the depth of the crisis that shaped management decisions.

In this qualitative study of 27 bank employees, we investigated how learning algorithms affected their working conditions, their autonomy and the meaning of their work. We show that employees responded to the AI-induced changes through job crafting behaviours (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Employees reshaped their task and relationship boundaries, and cognitively reframed their jobs, to maintain their autonomy, their desired social relationships and the meaning of their work. By considering the effects of learning algorithms on the employees’ work experience from their perspective, we provide a novel application of job crafting theory. Employees’ concerted response across the three job crafting dimensions underlines the importance of synergy across job crafting dimensions if they are to be successful in altering employees’ experience of work and enhancing the human value of their services.

L’étude du droit du travail restauré au cours de la transition économique chinoise nous montre que, comme ailleurs à d’autres époques, il accompagne le développement capitaliste et assure la construction du marché du travail. Suivant la tradition institutionnaliste en économie fondée sur le lien étroit économie-droit, nous pouvons mettre à jour les choix faits par l’État concernant les droits à protéger à travers des normes du travail élevées. Ces droits du travailleur s’exerçant dans un pays autoritaire se trouvent soumis avant tout au projet de « société harmonieuse » mené par le Parti communiste chinois. En fin de compte, l’ancrage du droit du travail dans le dispositif de « management social », destiné à assurer le contrôle de l’État sur les travailleurs, se retourne contre eux.

Dans un contexte de transformation du système français de relations d’emploi, à la fois dans son coeur (contrat à durée indéterminée) et dans ses marges (contrats à durée déterminée de plus en plus courts, autoentrepreneuriat, …), cet article cherche à comprendre les diverses stratégies de gestion de la main-d’oeuvre, en particulier celles relatives à la flexibilité des entreprises à l’échelle d’une région française : la Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Nous adoptons une approche renouvelée des théories de la segmentation, à la fois diversifiée et dynamique. Au-delà de l’opposition marché interne-marché externe, nous avons d’abord caractérisé les pratiques de segmentation, non seulement selon la nature du contrat de travail, mais également selon la durée du contrat, le niveau de rémunération et le type de temps de travail (complet ou partiel). Nous avons ensuite étudié l’évolution que cette segmentation a connue entre 2006 et 2016 et avons décliné cette segmentation des pratiques selon la taille des établissements. À partir d’une base de données exhaustive sur les emplois et les établissements de la région étudiée, nous avons mis à jour quatre segments caractérisant les relations d’emploi en Provence-Côte d’Azur : le premier, typique du marché primaire, est qualifié de « stabilité de l’emploi » ; le deuxième, au contraire, typique du marché secondaire, est nommé « flexibilité par les contrats courts » ; le troisième est marqué par l’usage de contrats à durée déterminée (CDD) de plus de six mois, d’où la qualification de « flexibilité par les CDD longs » ; le quatrième, plus diversifié, est qualifié de « pratiques mixtes ». L’évolution entre 2006 et 2016 se caractérise ensuite par le renforcement des caractéristiques propres à chaque segment, mais aussi par l’érosion du segment de « stabilité de l’emploi » et la progression du segment de « pratiques mixtes », qui semble illustrer la diffusion de formes d’emplois subventionnés par les pouvoirs publics sur la période 2006-2016. La déclinaison de la typologie des pratiques par taille d’établissement a, elle, permis de confirmer de manière générale la pertinence des 4 segments, même si pour les grands établissements, les segments de « flexibilité par les CDD longs » et de « pratiques mixtes » pourraient former un unique segment.

The article reviews the book, "Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies," edited by Michele Fazio et al.

The article reviews the book, "In the Kingdom of Shoes: Bata Zlĭn, Globalization, 1894–1945," by Zachary Austin Doleshal.

Introduces and summarizes the five articles presented for the roundtable that was convened on the 50th anniversary of the founding of National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Takes note of the various themes explored, including labour feminism.

The article reviews the book, "Public Education, Neoliberalism, and Teachers: New York, Mexico City, Toronto," by Paul Bocking.

This article addresses two key questions. First, how have faculty associations and university administrations in Canada responded to the intertwined challenges of austerity and pandemic bargaining? And second, how can faculty associations apply strategic and tactical lessons from this period to future rounds of collective bargaining? The content of this article is informed by the secondary literature on university labour relations and faculty associations in Canada and is grounded in the author’s practical experience as Chief Negotiator for the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA) in the last two rounds of bargaining. The article uses the 2020 round of pandemic bargaining at Brock University as a case study to explore the obstacles and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 crisis within the broader context of the neoliberalization of higher education. The case study also serves as a jumping off point to compare and contrast the range of faculty association responses to pandemic bargaining and theorize more generally about how the pandemic intersects with strategic debates concerning models of faculty unionism. --From introduction

This article seeks to explain both convergence and divergence in Ontario teacher union electoral strategy. After coalescing around a strategy of anti-Progressive Conservative (PC) strategic voting beginning with the 1999 provincial election, Ontario’s major teachers’ unions developed an electoral alliance with the McGuinty Liberals designed to advance teacher union priorities and mitigate the possibility of a return to power for the PCs. The authors use campaign finance and interview data to demonstrate that this ad hoc partnership was strengthened over the course of several election campaigns before the Liberal government’s decision to legislate restrictions on teacher union collective bargaining rights in 2012 led to unprecedented tension in the union-party partnership. The authors adapt the concept of union-party loyalty dilemmas to explain why individual teachers’ unions responded differently to the Liberal government’s efforts to impose austerity measures in the education sector.

The article reviews the book, "Shaping the Futures of Work: Proactive Governance and Millennials," by Nilanjan Ragunath.

The article reviews the book, "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War," by Vincent Brown.

The article reviews the book, "Code White: Sounding the Alarm on Violence Against Health Care Workers," by Margaret M. Keith and James T. Brophy.

The development of work–life policies—e.g., employee assistance programs, on-site childcare, flextime, part-time, compressed week, and so on—is increasingly important for a growing number of organizations. Though such programs provide benefits for both employees and employers, usage rates are still low. Scholars have called for research that addresses this phenomenon and more particularly explains the underlying processes of individual decision-making concerning work–life balance, and describe why and how certain social groups differ in their approaches to policy use. Our inductive study –based on 44 individual interviews- aims to address these issues. We found that the policies are used differently depending on the employees’ social group, and that certain salient social identities—such as gender, parenthood and managerial status—shape their use. Such programs are a structural and cultural change for organizations and often present an opportunity for redefining the centrality of work. Indeed the values inherent in them, including resting and taking time for oneself or for one’s family, may conflict with the traditionally masculine values associated with the ‘ideal worker’, intuitively linked to performance and production of positive results. The clash between the two, which permeated the interviews, causes employees to fall back on the social identity or identities they find meaningful. Our findings show three main strategies that individuals use when they feel that their social identity is threatened: (1) engage in workaround activities to avoid using work-life policies; (2) try to compensate for policies use (by engaging in projects outside one’s job or doing overtime work) ; and (3) significantly limit policies use. These results contribute to literature by showing that many managers and men do not feel legitimate to use work-life policies and find workarounds to manage without them, thus perpetuating stereotypical masculine norms. We demonstrate that the identity threat that underlies work-life policies taking may help women in the short term, but also contributes to their discrimination in the long run as well as is detrimental to the work-life balance of men.

This article reviews the book, "People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent," by Joseph Stiglitz.

The article reviews the book, "No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding," by Sean Wilentz.

The article reviews the book, "Industrial Craft in Australia: Oral Histories of Creativity and Survival," by Jesse Adams Stein.

To appease public anxieties and limit exploitation, in recent years Canada has sought to more strictly regulate and reduce temporary migrant work, while expanding opportunities for international mobility. This article explores the division between mobility and migration in this settler colonial context by charting developments in two overarching Canadian immigration program streams dedicated to facilitating international migration for employment on a temporary basis – the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP) – focusing on the latter. Through an analysis of underexplored IMP subprograms directed at ‘national competitiveness,’ it probes the extent to which several fast-growing IMP subprograms entail a departure from temporary migrant work under exploitative conditions. Questioning the validity of the migration/mobility distinction assumed in policy discourse, it argues that far from providing for ideal conditions for ‘mobile’ workers, Inter-Company Transfer, Postgraduation, and Spousal subprograms are characterised by conditions poised to heighten exploitation. Meanwhile, many participants in these subprograms migrate from source countries with a history of subordination through differential inclusion, illustrating how the application of migration control devices is bound-up with residues of formal barriers to entry forged on the basis of nationality and the institutionalised racism that they engendered and threaten to perpetuate.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada imposed certain international travel bans and work-from-home orders, yet migrant farmworkers, declared essential to national food security, were exempt from such measures. In this context, farm worksites proved to be particularly prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. To apprehend this trend, we engaged an expanded and transnational employment strain framework that identified the employment demands and resources understood from a transnational perspective, as well as the immigration, labour, and public health policies and practices contributing to and/or buffering employment demands during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We applied mixed methods to analyze administrative data, immigration, labour, and public health policy, as well as qualitative interviews with thirty migrant farmworkers employed in Ontario and Quebec. We concluded that the deleterious outcomes of the pandemic for this group were rooted in the deplorable pre-pandemic conditions they endured. Consequently, the band-aid solutions adopted by federal and provincial governments to address these conditions before and during the pandemic were limited in their efficacy because they failed to account for the transnational employment strains among precarious status workers labouring on temporary employer-tied work permits. Such findings underscore the need for transformative policies to better support health equity among migrant farmworkers in Canada.

The article reviews the book, "The Subjectivities and Politics of Occupational Risk: Mines, Farms and Auto-Factories," by Alan Hall.