Your search

The article reviews the book, "The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada: Development Programs and Democracy, 1964-1979," by Will Langford.

Du point de vue théorique, l’article examine le rapport à l’identité professionnelle dans des contextes de mutations de la filière nucléaire, ce qui requiert un regard rétrospectif sur ces transformations. Par ailleurs, il contribue à la connaissance empirique de la filière uranifère qui est restée pendant de longues années un secteur marqué du sceau du secret militaire. Cet article, qui s’appuie sur une enquête auprès de deux générations de mineurs de l’uranium de l’ouest de la France et l’étude d’archives, analyse l’évolution des identités professionnelles des mineurs d’uranium depuis l’après-guerre jusqu’à la fermeture des mines dans les années 1990. En effet, l’histoire des mines d’uranium n’est pas linéaire et la « mise en intrigue » (Ricoeur, 1983) du passé s’est faite tardivement autour des déchets laissés par l’exploitation, mais en omettant le travail à proprement parler de la mine. Depuis les témoignages d’époque qui présentent l’exploration puis l’exploitation sur le mode du développement économique, en passant par la fermeture puis l’oubli des mines, jusqu’à la prise en compte récente des risques inhérents, l’histoire se révèle plurielle et fragmentée (Brunet, 2004). Ce problème de linéarité repose en partie sur les discontinuités induites à la fois par l’oubli et le travail de mémoire partiel, fait très récemment. À partir de la question de la genèse des identités des mineurs, cet article montre, depuis l’exploration en 1945 jusqu’à la fermeture des mines en 1990, l’évolution de trois éléments structurants de l’identité professionnelle : le contexte institutionnel, le rapport au travail et la nature des relations professionnelles. Si le cas de mineurs d’uranium pose avec force la question du maintien d’une identité dans des contextes de transformation de la filière nucléaire, il met en perspective le rôle des contextes institutionnels sur la nature des relations professionnelles.

Members of the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) played a prominent role in the labour revolt of 1919, the One Big Union, and the Winnipeg General Strike. The “failure” of all three has led labour historians to focus on the inability of the party to connect with Canadian workers, an inability fuelled by dogmatism, “impossibilism,” and the exclusion of women and workers of colour. This article turns this approach on its head, pointing out that these events have been unequalled in Canadian history, and seeks to explain why this should be so. It challenges the perception of the party as being wed to evolutionary thinking that caused its members to wait around for the revolution to happen. Instead, it reveals the powerful influence of the dialectical method developed by G. W. F. Hegel; its focus on human action was the philosophical underpinning of the spc’s relentless attack on the wage system and the capitalist system’s commodification of labour power. Far from being “metaphysical” or “otherworldly,” the SPC’s insistence that workers must gain control of the product of their own labour spoke directly to them, including women and workers of colour. In the creation of the One Big Union, in the solidarity of the Winnipeg General Strike, and in the promise of the labour revolt of 1919, we find the legacy of a party committed to workers rising up.

The article reviews the book, "Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize," by Leah Vosko.

The article reviews the book, "America’s Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States," by Timothy Minchin.

The article reviews the book, "The Class Politics of Law: Essays Inspired by Harry Glasbeek," edited by Eric Tucker and Judy Fudge.

The article reviews the book, "The Two-Hundred-Million Pound Strike : The 2003 British Airways Walkout," by Ed Blissett.

Ce travail cherche à appréhender les déterminants de la résilience du personnel soignant dans le contexte de la crise sanitaire Covid-19. Son but est d’accéder à une compréhension profonde des motifs, des forces et des processus à l’oeuvre dans la dynamique complexe de la résilience.

The article reviews the book, "Les pathologies au travail," by Élisabeth Grebot.

Our empirical analysis is based on Statistics Canada’s worker-firm matched data set, the 2003 Workplace and Employee Survey (WES). The sample size is substantial: about 4,000 workers over the age of 50 and 12,000 between the ages of 25 and 49. Training was a focus of the survey, which offers a wealth of worker-related and firm-related training variables. We found that the mean probability of receiving training was 9.3 percentage points higher for younger workers than for older ones. Almost half of the gap is explained by older workers having fewer training-associated characteristics (personal, employment, workplace, human resource practices and occupation/industry/region), and slightly more than half by them having a lower propensity to receive training, this being the gap that remained after we controlled for differences in training-associated characteristics. Their lower propensity to receive training likely reflects the higher opportunity cost of lost wages during the time spent in training, possible higher psychological costs and lower expected benefits due to their shorter remaining work-life and lower productivity gains from training, as discussed in the literature. The lower propensity of older workers to receive training tended to prevail across 54 different training measures, with notable exceptions discussed in detail. We found that older workers can be trained, but their training should be redesigned in several ways: by making instruction slower and self-paced; by assigning hands-on practical exercises; by providing modular training components to be taken in stages; by familiarizing the trainees with new equipment; and by minimizing required reading and amount of material covered. The concept of “one-size-fits- all” does not apply to the design and implementation of training programs for older workers.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to knowledge of profit-sharing by utilizing a before-and-after analysis of panel data to assess whether the effects of profit-sharing adoption on productivity growth vary, depending on whether a profit-sharing adopter utilizes work teams or not, while controlling for numerous variables that may affect these results within a carefully constructed sample of Canadian establishments. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderating role of teamwork in the relationship between profit-sharing and productivity growth. Besides the implications for profit-sharing, ascertaining whether profit-sharing and work teams are complementary practices would have important implications for understanding how to develop more effective work teams, a topic of ongoing interest. We utilized a longitudinal research design to compare within-firm productivity growth during the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to profit-sharing adoption and within-firm productivity growth during the same periods in firms that had not adopted profit-sharing. Overall, our results suggest that use of team-based production plays an important moderating role in the success of employee profit-sharing—at least in terms of workplace productivity growth. Establishments that had adopted profit-sharing showed a substantial and highly significant increase in workplace productivity over both the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to adoption, but only if they had work teams. These findings are in line with the notion that work teams help to mitigate potential shirking behaviour in profit-sharing firms (Freeman, Kruse and Blasi, 2010) and are also in line with the argument that work teams serve as an effective mechanism to help translate the purported motivational and other benefits of profit-sharing into tangible productivity gains (Heywood and Jirjahn, 2009).

The article reviews the book, "The Socialist Challenge Today," by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin.

The article reviews the book, "Grève et paix. Une histoire des lois spéciales au Québec," by Martin Petitclerc and Martin Robert.

The article reviews the book, "The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity," by Eugene McCarraher.

The article reviews the book, "In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui," by Mike Gonzalez.

In recent years the issue of migrant workers with precarious status has increased in importance in Canada, in large part due to economic and policy changes that have led to greater numbers of migrant workers remaining in the country post permit expiry. This study tracks the employment experiences of low-skilled migrant workers who arrived through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and who remained following their permit expiry. Using a temporal analysis, the study identifies four timepoints that shape the workers’ employment outcomes both pre- and post-expiry. Events at these timepoints create differing employment pathways that, in turn, reveal different aspects of the workers’ precarity.  In addition to pathways, workers’ ability to access informal support networks shape their employment outcomes as workers with precarious status.

Discusses a biographical questionnaire that J.B. McLachlan completed for the Communist International during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1931. In it, the Nova Scotia labour leader briefly responded on his background, education, work and labour activism, political status (including his recruitment to the "Canadian section" of the Communist Party in 1922), and imprisonment in 1923-24. The questionnaire and other related materials came to light as a result of a request made by the author to the Russian State Archives in October 2020.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the interplay between safety committees and employee perceptions of organizational safety culture. Creating, managing and maintaining a safety culture in organizations involves significant investment in the establishment of safety committees. The role of such committees in improving safety culture perceptions has remained underexplored in the safety management and organizational literature. This study addresses that gap and focuses on a safety committee within the facilities management operations of a large American academic institution. The objective is to generate understandings of how a committee can influence organizational cultural change and impact employee perceptions of safety. Using Schein’s organizational culture model as a prism, we unpack the employees’ implicit cultural beliefs. Data from over sixty employee interviews revealed that formation of the Safety Committee resulted in unintended consequences in terms of employee perceptions. Employees attributed most safety-related actions to the committee when, in fact, the managers and supervisors had actually carried them out. This overestimation of committee activities and concomitant underestimation of managerial actions by employees was an unintended consequence of establishing a committee. Employees, in fact, collectively attributed all positive changes in the organizational culture to the committee. The committee ultimately influenced the employees’ basic assumptions, such change being, according to Schein, a prerequisite for organizational cultural change. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature by proposing that unintended consequences can operate in three different ways to support organizational change. First, unintended consequences can promote positive outcomes; second, they can reveal a new understanding of committees, which under certain circumstances can act as a proxy for management and encourage positive perceptions of managerial commitment. Lastly, unintended consequences can provide a means to detect and ‘excavate’ hidden, implicit assumptions that drive organizational culture’s deepest layers.

...Ces changements récents entrainent des conséquences assez génériques pour ceux qui pensent et écrivent sur le travail et l’emploi. À travers le monde, les questions urgentes ont toutes une certaine homogénéité. Comment travailler en pratiquant la distanciation sociale ? Comment gérer à distance la main-d’oeuvre ? Qu’advient-il de la productivité si les travailleurs sont dispersés sur des lieux et des horaires différents ? Enfin, dans cette nouvelle réalité, que deviendront la négociation collective et l’asymétrie actuelle entre le capital et le travail ? Voilà autant de questions que nous devons poser et en trouver la réponse. Puis nous devons le faire ensemble, vraiment ensemble, à travers un effort collaboratif mondial. C’est ainsi, je crois, que changera le programme de recherche orthodoxe sur les relations de travail. En tant qu’individus, le défi est d’être en avant de ce qui se passe actuellement et de ne pas s’interroger sur ce qui s’est déjà passé. Voici, donc, ce que la revue entend privilégier : une variété de perspectives sur le plan géographique, une analyse critique, une volonté de tirer des leçons de l’histoire, ainsi qu’une préoccupation constante pour les oubliés et les défavorisés de la nouvelle normalité. Enfin, mon équipe et moi demeureront attachés à une politique de gestion beaucoup plus élargie qui visera l’inclusion et l’adaptation. En gardant ces priorités à l’esprit, je suis fier de présenter les contenus de l’édition 76(3). // These recent lifestyle changes are having somewhat generic consequences for those who think and write about work and employment. The pressing issues throughout the world have a sameness about them. How do jobs get done with social distancing? How are workforces remotely managed? What happens to productivity when workers are geographically dispersed and running on different schedules? Finally, in this new reality, what happens to collective bargaining and the existing capital/labour power asymmetry? We need to ask and answer these questions together—really together—through a collaborative global effort. In this way, I believe, change will come to the orthodox agenda of research on employment relations. As individuals, the challenge is to be ahead of what is happening and not wonder what has happened. Here is what we at the journal are currently emphasizing: geographically diverse perspectives, critical analysis, an emphasis on what history has to teach and an ongoing preoccupation with those who might be left behind and/or disadvantaged by the new normal. Meanwhile, my team and I will continue to be committed to a much broader policy of inclusion and accommodation when it comes to how we manage. It is with these priorities in mind that I am proud to present the content of edition 76(3).