Search

This Handbook addresses the changing nature of academic labour markets, as they respond to moving university goals and developments in the measurement of research and teaching. Experts examine case studies from across the Global North and South and consider key issues such as equity, diversity, cross-border employment, and the precarity of academic labour. The Research Handbook on Academic Labour Markets highlights how national university systems interact with international policies. Chapters include in-depth research on the decline in permanent, tenured employment and the increase in temporary, insecure work, culminating in uncertain or non-existent career paths for many academics. Contributing authors discuss intersectional initiatives to increase the gender and ethnic diversity of academic staff, as well as complex topics such as third space work, for-profit institutions, online education, entrepreneurial gig research, work-life balance and the role of trade unions. Ultimately, this Handbook argues for new approaches to organising academic work, reinforcing the priority of serving the public good. Comprehensive and innovative, this Research Handbook is a crucial read for scholars of higher education leadership and management, education policy, labour policy, and sociology of work. It will also benefit university staff and researchers considering and reflecting on their own careers. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Nii Ndahlohke: Boys' and Girls' Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.

Environmental racism is a structural, historical and ongoing fact of life for many Indigenous, Black and racially marginalized communities in Canada. Yet climate change discussions, lacking an anti-racism and intersectional lens, have largely ignored how Indigenous, Black and racially marginalized communities are inequitably impacted by the climate emergency. At the same time, policies to promote a just transition to a sustainable economy provide an opportunity for the creation of good green jobs. Such pathways into the green economy will only be inclusive if the voices of Indigenous, Black and racialized people and their communities are heard. Otherwise, the green economic transformation will only further reinforce the structural racial economic inequalities present in Canadian society and the genocidal impacts of the climate emergency will continue. In the end, we believe that worker power guided by a critical race, class, gender and intersectional analysis is an essential component in a strategy to win and secure a just transition to a green, sustainable and inclusive economy. The scale of the engagement must involve the entire movement working in genuine partnership with community coalition partners to ensure that the new green economy does not look like the old White economy.

New research on the workings of the ‘web of empire’ have revealed that the British Empire was not only sustained by raw materials from India but depended significantly on its manpower working as ‘coolies’, or indentured labourers, in distant plantations in Mauritius, Fiji, West Indies, East and South Africa, and the Straits Settlements. The white dominions of Canada, Australia and the United States (US) similarly depended on low-paid labourers from the East for much of their work of opening up and colonising the prairie wastes. Initially, the bulk of migrants from India in North America came from among the strong and hard-working Sikhs of the Punjab province of India, who found it lucrative to work in these places, lured by the comparatively higher wages than they could obtain at home. However, as the market for labour became saturated by the first decade of the twentieth century, these countries began to erect legal barriers to the free entry of these Indian migrants under pressure from domestic workers, unwilling to face competition from migrants. This came as a great shock to migrant Indians, who had until then been thinking of the empire as a vast field of ‘shared opportunities’. In 1908, Canada tried to exclude Indian migrant labour by legislation, which insisted on ‘continuous passage’ for entering into the ports of the country. This would automatically disable Sikh migrants, who had to change ships to reach Canada. Gurdit Singh’s attempt to charter a Japanese ship, Komagata Maru, in June 1914 to ensure continuous passage for the Sikh migrants to Canada was a challenge to this legal barrier against the migrants. The turning back of this ship from Vancouver shattered the belief of the migrants in an equal imperial citizenship, and it became incendiary material for the revolutionary nationalist propaganda of the Ghadr conspirators, based in San Francisco. Student radicals in Canada and America, such as Lala Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, G. D. Kumar and Husain Rahim tried to contact radicals all over the world, in India House in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Egypt, Turkey and Switzerland, and tried to spread their message through journals, like the Ghadr and the Hindustanee from San Francisco and the Al Kasas from Egypt. They even linked their efforts with German imperialist conspirators to gain funding and guidance in their common mission against British imperialism. --Publisher's summary

The article reviews the book, "Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty in Britain," by Jim Silver.

The article reviews the book, "Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law," by Luke Taylor.

The article reviews the book, "Le droit du travail en sociologie," by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe and Jean-Philippe Tonneau.

This article is concerned with the historical evolution of the mining industry in Canada since 1859. The focus is directed on changes that occurred in the industry and allows for the identification of four distinct mining regimes. These regimes are defined using the Regulation Theory, which connects conditions of production, technical progress, financial structures, and social relations. The identification of regimes gives a portrait of continuity and change in the industry. Continuity is present in the active role of the state, the legal framework based on Free Mining Principle and persistent speculation in the industry. Change is illustrated in price cycle, labour share and technological innovation. Interestingly, through time, price cycles have very different outcomes in financial and real economic terms. The most recent upswing in the late 1990s resulted in a punctual increase of financial assets but no significant increase in employment. Through this discussion, it becomes evident that the mechanisms underlying continuity and change have implications on the nature of state intervention and on the distribution of power between the corporate and regional actors like the workers and indigenous communities.

Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomenon of risk, upset, and misfortune has been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning. An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace accidents, domestic accidents, childhood accidents, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brought. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state. An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents--and our responses to them--reveal shared values. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Where are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites," edited by Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti.

Objective indicators, such as minority hiring rates or number of complaints, often fail to fully represent actual discrimination in hiring processes, particularly against racial and ethnic minorities (McGonagle et al., 2016). Despite legal efforts in Quebec to increase employment of minorities, their ongoing underrepresentation points to the need to examine discrimination in terms of perceived experiences. In line with Anderson (2011), we investigated perceived discrimination in hiring (PDH), its predictors and its effect on the intention to file a discrimination complaint, rather than solely considering actual complaints. Using a quasi-experimental design, we simulated a fictitious hiring process with 361 students from French-speaking Canadian universities. First, we confirmed the three dimensions of the recently developed PDH scale: differential treatment; breach of psychological contract; and non-competency-based assessment (Haeck-Pelletier, 2022). Second, using structural equation modelling (SEM), we found mediation effects: PDH scores were higher across all dimensions when a candidate belonged to a minority group, received a negative hiring decision or did not receive feedback on test results. However, only differential treatment predicted a candidate’s intention to file a complaint. In addition to this first empirical test of Anderson’s model, the results suggest that organizations should address perceptions of unfair treatment due to minority group membership by identifying and modifying the practices that contribute to them. The eventual outcome would be a more representative workforce.

Dans la foulée de l’expérience de télétravail obligatoire vécue pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 et pour tirer profit à la fois des avantages du télétravail et du travail en présence, de nombreuses organisations ont récemment embrassé le travail hybride. La fonction publique québécoise s’est engagée dans cette voie, en déployant une politique-cadre en matière de télétravail qui régule le nombre de jours de télétravail hebdomadaires. La récence du déploiement à large échelle de cette modalité d’organisation du travail appelle à mieux comprendre ses effets sur la réponse attitudinale du personnel. Prenant appui sur le modèle d’acceptation de la technologie et sur la théorie du signal, cet article vise à examiner la réponse perceptuelle et attitudinale du personnel au travail hybride. À partir de données quantitatives et qualitatives collectées en octobre 2022 auprès du personnel professionnel de la fonction publique et parapublique (n = 3 904), les résultats montrent l’effet positif de l’agréabilité perçue et de l’utilité perçue d’une journée de travail en présence sur la satisfaction à l’égard du travail hybride. La satisfaction à l’endroit du travail hybride influence positivement l’adéquation personne/organisation. L’adéquation personne/organisation exerce un effet positif sur l’engagement organisationnel ainsi que sur la satisfaction au travail. Elle joue un rôle médiateur dans la relation entre la satisfaction envers l’expérience de travail hybride et l’engagement organisationnel, ainsi qu’entre la satisfaction envers l’expérience de travail hybride et la satisfaction au travail. Les résultats qualitatifs témoignent de l’absence de valeur ajoutée des jours de travail en présence, d’une insatisfaction à l’égard du manque de flexibilité et d’une perception positive à l’égard des avantages du télétravail. Ces résultats ajoutent aux connaissances empiriques quant à l’appréciation de l’adéquation personne/organisation dans un contexte de travail hybride. Ils contribuent aux connaissances managériales en soulignant l’importance de considérer les attentes et les valeurs du personnel dans le déploiement des pratiques et politiques organisationnelles.

Queer history in Canada has often centred around metropolitan areas, like Toronto and Montreal, usually foregrounding social movements. This means that queer histories of the periphery are often overlooked, and that histories of metropole are taken as representative of the national context. In this thesis, I examine queer oral histories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Through these oral histories I aim to complicate dominant narratives in both queer history and histories of deindustrialization in Canada. Cape Breton is a former steel and coal region in Nova Scotia that underwent a comparatively slow, state-managed deindustrialization in the latter half of the 20th century. Today, like in deindustrialized areas across the world, the “structure of feeling” of industrial life remains, despite plant and mine closure. Often, histories of deindustrialization center around a mythologized white male (and indubitably heterosexual) breadwinner, centering not just workers, but the specific function that masculine industrial labour played in the social reproduction of the Fordist accord in the household. By taking up the life stories of queer people, we can critically examine this centring of the nuclear family in deindustrialization studies. In the first chapter, I offer a theoretical and historiographical intervention arguing for a queer investigation of deindustrialization. In the second chapter, I apply this line of thinking to oral histories of Cape Breton queers, arguing that these narrators’ desires for queer history and queer future are ultimately filtered through the prism of deindustrialization’s half-life.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to renewed discussion of decent work for people at the margins of the labour market. This article explores public policy on platform workers across three liberal market economies, namely the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, taking the pandemic as a focal point. Liberal market economies are generally difficult environments for unions, and we examine the nature of union political pressure on the state to enhance protections for platform workers and the extent to which policy has changed in each state. We find uneven levels of such union pressure, with the most limited attention afforded by Irish unions. In the United Kingdom, the unions did exert some influence through strategic litigation, creating a policy problem for the government. More progressive policies are evident in Canada, where the government recognises that platform workers’ precarious position has undesirable consequences for the state.

The article reviews the book, "Regards croisés sur la grève d'Amoco à Hawkesbury, une histoire ouvrière de l'Ontario français," by Andréane Gagnon.

In 2019, Regina’s Co-op Refinery Complex (CRC), a subsidiary of Federated Co-operative, locked out Unifor Local 594 after collective bargaining negotiations failed. CRC used the transition to a “low carbon” future as the justification for concessions on working conditions and reducing the workers' pension plan. The lockout demonstrates what a “just transition” means to fossil fuel corporations: rollbacks of collective bargaining, worker rights, cooperative spirit and environmental justice. In the name of a new future, Federated Co-operative and the Saskatchewan government trampled all over important worker rights — the right to strike and picket, occupational health and safety, pensions and collective bargaining. It also highlights the sorry state of co-operative values in Canada. As corporations and governments are poised to make a transition that will be detrimental to workers and communities, this books argues that solidarity between unions and community movements is absolutely necessary to make the transition away from fossil fuels a just one. -- Publisher's description

There have never been more favourable conditions for drawing Indigenous workers into the unionized building trades. The construction industry needs to replenish and diversify its overwhelmingly white, male, and aging workforce to meet skilled labour demands in the next few decades, when major civil infrastructure, mining, and green energy developments are expected to occur in northern Indigenous territories. These projects will be mandated by impact benefit agreements to employ a significant number of Indigenous workers who will first need to be trained. At the same time, Indigenous peoples are the fastest-growing population in Canada and have shown a propensity for pursuing trades education. In recent years, Ontario's largest building trade unions have taken significant steps to recruit, train, and employ northern Indigenous workers, including in Nunavut. In collaboration with various stakeholders, the unions' efforts are starting to show positive results. But are their methods and goals informed by decolonization, reconciliation, and Indigenization? This article reflects on this question while examining the case of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 793, which has been a leader among building trades unions when it comes to establishing relationships with Indigenous partners, training Indigenous workers, and contributing to their economic self-determination.

This report examines the ways governments, and specifically the Government of Alberta, interfere in public-sector collective bargaining through both legislative measures and non-legislative actions. It also explores how this growing interference may impact the 2024 bargaining round in Alberta.

Governments in Canada are increasingly using multiple tools to advance their political agenda at the expense of free collective bargaining in the public sector. Legislative intervention has long been a strategy to curtail bargaining rights (Evans et al., 2023). Recently, governments have turned to non-legislative means to influence bargaining outcomes. This article is about the use of a coordination office, a decidedly non-legislative tactic, and how, over two rounds of negotiations, it transformed public-sector bargaining in Alberta. Bargaining has been further transformed by enactment of a legal requirement to keep the government’s mandates secret, the outcome being increased frustration among union representatives and potential damage to long-term relationships. Together, these measures have provided the government with a powerful means of influence, which, if successful, could spread to other jurisdictions.

Tribute to the life and work of union activist and social historian Raymond Léger, who also was a member of Labour/Le Travail's editorial board.