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Global Competitive Strategy, by Daniel F. Spulber, is reviewed.

Industrial Relations: A Current Review, edited by Richard Hall, is reviewed.

Regulating Labour in the Wake of Globalisation: New Challenges, New Institutions, edited by Brian Bercusson and Cynthia Estlund, is reviewed.

US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below, by Kim Moody, is reviewed.

Rethinking the Future of Work: Directions and Visions, by Colin C. Williams, is reviewed.

The article focuses on declining and retreating of the North American labour movement. The combination of rapid and often reckless capitalist expansion and massive resistance by both unionized and non-unionized workers led to the collapse of the North American economy. Implying greater physical and cultural distance between employers and employees, technological displacement, industrial capitalism required new forms of organization and mobilization.

Mine Mill Local 598/Canadian Autoworkers union president Rick Grylls discusses the strikes at Falconbridge in Sudbury, Ontario, in 2000-2001 and 2004.

The article reviews the book, "Le développement durable comme compromis : la modernisation écologique de l’économie à l’ère de la mondialisation," by Corinne Gendron.

The article reviews the book, "Auteurs et textes classiques de la théorie des organisations," edited by Laurent Bélanger and Jean Mercier.

This text presents a hands-on examination of industrial relations balanced in both theoretical and practical coverage, as well as union and labour coverage. Industrial Relations in Canada is grounded in leading research and examines true-to-life issues. Experiential exercises, cases, and collective bargaining simulations bridge the academic content of the text with real-world issues in the field. --Publisher's description of 2011 edition.

The article reviews the book, "Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development," by David Harvey.

In this indispensable study of Canadian industrialization, Craig Heron examines the huge steel plants that were built at the turn of the twentieth century in Sydney and New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and Trenton, Hamilton, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Presenting a stimulating analysis of the Canadian working class in the early twentieth century, Working in Steel emphasizes the importance of changes in the work world for the larger patterns of working-class life. Heron's examination of the impact of new technology in Canada's Second Industrial Revolution challenges the popular notion that mass-production workers lost all skill, power, and pride in the work process. He shifts the explanation of managerial control in these plants from machines to the blunt authoritarianism and shrewd paternalism of corporate management. His discussion of Canada's first steelworkers illuminates the uneven, unpredictable, and conflict-ridden process of technological change in industrial capitalist society. As engaging today as when first published in 1988, Working in Steel remains an essential work in Canadian history. --Pubisher's description

This research undertakes an examination of the employment opportunities and experiences of black Caribbean women in Canada, particularly within the context of the growing trend towards precarious jobs—casual, part-time and low paying—in the restructured Canadian labour market. The specific purview of this study is the labour history and employment experience of a representative group of black Caribbean women who work as Personal Support Workers in nursing homes across the Greater Toronto Area. A main concern of the study is to understand the ways in which precarious work affects these women’s settlement and integration experiences, particularly their ability to gain economic independence; this, in turn, affects a number of variables related to their, and others, perception regarding their status and place in Canada. By focusing on the case of Personal Support Workers, the study aims to shed light not only on the employment experiences of black Caribbean women in this sector but also to examine more closely the policies and employment practices that create labour market “niches” or labour “segregation” along racial and gender lines.

The article reviews the book, "The Rich Man," by Henry Kreisel.

The extremely poor have often been cast as deviants or others, in both the past and the present. Historians of Atlantic Canada have used the idea of deviance as an acceptable approach to the poor and homeless of the past and tacitly encourage us to see the contemporary homeless as deviants. Victorian theorists such as Malthus and Mayhew pejoratively characterized the poor as an underclass. Contemporary writers have provided evidence that challenges the use of the concept in Canada. But it remains a powerful force within American sociology, which is able to cast its influence over Canadian historical writing. It is the contention of this research that it is possible to be true to the past, to reflect the warts and downfalls of the extremely poor and homeless who lived there, but at the same time recognize their efforts to follow prevailing norms and to empathize with their plight and in doing so generate at least the possibility of recognition and empathy in the present. Such recognition and empathy may be the keys to creating and maintaining humane solutions to poverty and homelessness. The examinations conducted by this research address an area of our past that has been largely overlooked. This research supplements broad historical surveys of social welfare legislation by examining social welfare policy in action at the local level. By positioning itself at the convergence of labour history and studies of poverty, and by demonstrating that the populations examined by these discrete areas of research are more alike than different, this research shows that labour history can be extended to include many of those who lived "rough" in the past. Through its approach this research hopes to encourage a view that can help to integrate the study of extreme poverty and homelessness into the mainstream of Canadian historiography.

Fairness at Work: Federal Labour Standards for the 21st Century, by Harry Arthurs, is reviewed.

This eclectic and carefully organized range of essays--from women's history and settler societies to colonialism and borderlands studies--is the first collection of comparative and transnational work on women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. It explores, expands, and advances the aspects of women's history that cross national borders. Out of the talks presented at the 2002 "Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women's History," Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus have edited a foundational text with a wide, inclusive perspective on our western past. --Publisher's description. Contents: Connecting the women's Wests / Elizabeth Jameson -- Unsettled pasts, unsettling borders: women, Wests, nations / Sheila McManus -- Making connections: gender, race and place in Oregon contry / Susan Armitage -- A transborder family in the Pacific North West: reflecting on race and gender in women's history / Sylvia van Kirk -- Writing women into the history of the North American Wests, one woman at a time / Jean Barman -- "That understanding with nature":region, race, and nation in women's stories from the modern Canadian and American Grasslands West / Molly P. Rozum -- The perils of rural women's history: (a note to storytellers who study the West's unsettled past) / Joan M. Jensen -- The great white mother: maternalism and American Indian child removal in the American West, 1880-1940 / Margaret D. Jacobs -- Pushing physical, racial, and ethnic boundaries: Edith Lucas and public education in British Columbia, 1903-1989 / Helen Raptis -- "Crossing the line": American prostitutes in Western Canada, 1895-1925 / Char Smith -- "Talented and charming strangers from across the line": gendered nationalism. class privilege, and the American woman's club of Calgary / Nora Faires -- Excerpts from Pourin' Down Rain / Cheryl Foggo -- "A union without women is only half organized": Mine Mill, women's auxiliaries, and cold war politics in the North American Wests / Laurie Mercier -- Jailed heroes and kithen heroines: class, gender, and the Medalta Potteries strike in postwar Alberta / Cynthia Loch-Drake -- Gendered steps across the border: teaching the history of women in the American and Canadian Wests / Margaret Walsh -- Latitudes and longitudes: teaching the history of women in the U.S. and Canadian Wests / Mary Murphy.

The article reviews the book, "Glass Houses: Saving Feminist Anti-Violence Agencies From Self-Destruction," by Rebekkah Adams.

The article reviews the book, "Qu’est-ce que l’intégration ?," by Dominique Schnapper.

This article examines the growth of one of the fastest-growing union locals in North America, the Services Employees International Union Local 880 in Chicago. As union membership has declined nationally, Local 880 has achieved exponential growth over the last twenty five years by being among the first to organize extremely low wage home based child care and home care workers. The article highlights the tenets of the local's organizing philosophy, including community organizing and political activism, as well as other strategies and tactics 880 has utilized in growing its membership to more than 65,000 members. Along the way, it has secured notable victories on behalf of its members, including winning the largest organizing campaign of home childcare workers in U.S. history.