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In the digital games industry women are statistical and cultural outliers. Using a cultural studies lens, this thesis examines the experiences of women game-makers in order to more deeply understand the attitudes of female game-workers, and to ascertain whether work in the male dominated gamed industry can be ‘good work’ for women. When compared to other cultural sectors, female game workers face unique barriers to sustaining careers in this high status industry. Gender stereotypes keep many women from fully participating in games industry culture which in turn discriminates against any worker who does not fit in to the ‘might is right’ mindset. Female game workers are getting mixed signals from an industry that appears to desire gender diversity in order to attract the growing ranks of female gamers, but is resistant to change sexist and discriminatory work practices that continue to alienate women.

Contrary to government official discourses that present the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) as a ‘human and just’ labour migration model, in this paper, the SAWP is presented as a migrant labour regime that functions as labour apartheid system of discipline and control, which is in place to satisfy the needs of capitalist development in the Canadian agricultural industry. By identifying the parallels and similarities of the differential treatment of Black migrant workers under South African apartheid with the differential treatment to which migrant farm workers are subjected under the SAWP, I explore how coercive migrant labour regimes of work function today in the context of heightened neoliberal hegemony and state multiculturalism. Through empirical evidences and theoretical claims, I identify main constitutive elements and forms of governance that cause workers to living and experiencing apartheid conditions; I explain how these forms of governance actually work on the ground, and how are they embodied, lived and contested by migrant farm workers participating in the program. I also delve in workers’ politics and their expressions of resistance and contestation to such system as they speak directly to the ways they experience apartheid conditions and the particular forms of how racism is inflicted over them. The SAWP presents an interesting opportunity to closely examine the ways in which colonialism works, how it is manifested today through labour and immigration schemes, and how these regimes are contested and challenged through migrant farm workers’ political subjectivities. In this respect, this paper paves the way for future movement-related research study of seasonal agricultural workers, which can generate collective insight and knowledge to support the organizing efforts of the precarious migrant workers in Canada.

My dissertation project examines women’s family lives, career trajectories, and status attainment. I draw on the concept of the work-family interface to highlight how work and families operate as contextual layers that cross-over in shaping definitions and appraisals of mothers as workers and workers as mothers. Utilizing data on married mothers’ complete working histories, I demonstrate that job exits due to motherhood negatively impact women’s occupational status attainment (SES), but I also show that women face penalties when changing jobs involuntarily and also due to personal reasons not tied to the maternal role. Importantly, in each instance, I demonstrate that these effects operate independently of the non-employment durations they engender, offering broad support for the status characteristics framework which points to the role of employer appraisals of women’s work commitment in shaping their SES outcomes. I also bring families back into the discussion of the work-family interface via the construction of a family-level framework that draws on mothers’, fathers’ and children’s attitudes about maternal employment as a platform for the development of discrete family configurations. I reveal a wide array of family attitude configurations that underscore that maternal employment continues to be contested moral terrain in some families while it is ii supported in others. In particular, I show that in egalitarian families—where maternal employment is not seen as a risk to ‘good’ mothering—mothers report more positive experiences of family and marital relations, less housework and more paid work, and higher earnings. I argue that family contexts represent an important yet understudied contextual reality that is more than the sum of individual views and which have unique consequences for women’s family lives and status trajectories.

Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation.

This dissertation explores the claim that, in advanced capitalist countries like Canada, a powerful knowledge class is assuming increasing dominance within the social relations of production. Attached to such theories are claims of trends toward post-bureaucratic organizations, rising job complexity and autonomy, and increased power within operational and strategic decision-making processes. In my study I focus on Canadian “specialist” employees (professionals and semi-professionals) and managers. I present aggregated and disaggregated data from two Canadian surveys conducted in 1983 and 2004 and complement this with original interviews with information technology (IT) workers and engineers. I find a seeming paradox within the labour process of specialists and managers, with task-level autonomy declining even as job complexity and involvement in organizational decisions are rising. I provide evidence that imperatives for profit/cost effectiveness are leading to efforts to make specialist and managerial labour and knowledge more transparent, integrated, and manageable, but this is not the same as degradation or proletarianization. In contrast to my expectation, I find boundaries in the division of labour are durable despite this “socialization” of many labour processes. I argue that a specialist-and-managerial class (SMC) exists in Canada, and will continue to exist, though it is subordinate to and exploited by the capitalist elite even as it excludes and exploits the working class through occupational closure and credential barriers. The SMC is thus contradictory, internally heterogeneous and fraying at its borders, but simultaneously resilient. The resiliency comes via possession of specific strategic knowledge and consequent ability to secure rents and/or control specific organization assets via delegated authority. Resiliency is also structural, with management in many organizations retaining an interest in separating planning and design (“conception”), on the one hand, from process and completion (“execution”), on the other, in order to maximize efficiency and productivity through more centralized control.

This thesis challenges the historiography that asserts the waterfront strike in Vancouver in 1935 was a failed militant surge by a new radical leadership in an otherwise twenty-year period of dormancy among the city's longshoremen. Using union documents, employer records, and interviews with workers, the thesis presents the entire company era, between 1923 and 1944, as a period of developing solidarity and resistance. In this context the 1935 strike and the union's leadership were a product of, not a radical departure from that continuity. The thesis shows that despite two lost strikes in 1923 and again in 1935, the administrative structures the employers established produced a resilient culture of solidarity that was in place before Partiament acted in 1944 to provide longshorement with the legal framework for union representation.

In February 2011, a wave of creative direct action swept across postal depots in the city of Edmonton which saw rank-and-file workers organizing outside of the channels of formal-legal unionism. Fighting against management’s imposition of compulsory overtime as a staffing measure, Letter Carriers and other “outside” postal workers relied on solidarity and resistance at the point of production in a successful campaign to put an end to this practice. The relevance of this particular struggle to the Canadian labour movement is twofold. First, the intensified workloads of Edmonton postal workers reflect a wider shift in the nature of employment relationships away from the existence of employer support as part of the rise of neoliberal capitalism. Second, the choice of workers to organize at a distance from the historically militant Canadian Union of Postal Workers reveals both the predicament facing labour of a highly restrictive formal labour relations system as well as an alternative path of resistance. For Edmonton postal workers, this path was forged in large part as a result of the influence of IWW dual-carder organizers and, more specifically, their introduction of a mode of union praxis known as solidarity unionism.

In this thesis I address the question of sympathetic action - action by one group of workers designed to aid another group of workers in their struggle with an employer, manifested most obviously through refusals by workers to cross a picket line - through the lens of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As the law currently stands in Canada, undertaking sympathetic action collectively is invariably illegal as it is considered an illegal "strike" under Canadian labour legislation. Further, workers who undertake sympathetic action - whether collectively or individually - can be subject to discipline or discharge by their employer. I argue that workers who undertake sympathetic action can have numerous motivations, ranging from economic self-interest to deeply-held political or moral beliefs (the latter manifested through the concept of "solidarity"), and that when those motivations include expressive or conscientious interests, sympathetic action should be entitled to protection by the fundamental freedoms of conscience, expression, and association found in section 2 of the Charter. I further argue that a each of these freedoms represents a different aspect of the inherent dignity and worth of an individual, and that a right to sympathetic action promotes both those freedoms and Charter values. Finally, I argue that a constitutional right to sympathetic action is a free-standing right that can exist even in the absence of a constitutional right to strike. This thesis reviews the current and historical state of Canadian law (in both the statutory labour relations regimes and in common law) regarding sympathetic action, the potential application of the Charter freedoms of conscience, expression, and association to sympathetic action, and finally options for reform that reduce or eliminate restrictions on sympathetic action and therefore make our labour relations system more in keeping with Charter values.

Policymakers, politicians, and media outlets have declared an obesity epidemic. In doing so, they have named a variety of villains, including fast food. Despite the framing of fast food as being a leading contributor to weight gain and obesity, we have yet to understand the impact that fast food has on those who work with it every day. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the food choices, BMIs, and self perceived weights of the food service worker population. Using Pierre Bourdieu‘s concepts of habitus and field, I investigate the role of the workplace and external cultural influences, such as the family, in navigating an obseogenic workplace environment that is centered on selling highly caloric food to the Canadian public in a quick and cost effective manner. The first stage of this research addresses the question: Are food service workers more likely to be overweight or obese and perceive themselves as being overweight compared to the general population? In order to do this, I analyzed secondary survey data from the Canadian Community Health Survey cycle 5.1 (2009-2010). I used logistic regression techniques to construct models that analyze the likelihood of having high BMIs and high self perceived weights in both the food service worker and general Canadian populations. In addition to this, I sought to understand the food choices that contribute to weight gain in fast food workers. To do this, I conducted forty semi-structured qualitative interviews with workers from a variety of fast food chains. The results of my research disprove my original hypothesis that food service workers are more likely to be overweight or obese because of their frequent exposure to fast food. Instead, I found that they are less likely to be overweight or obese than the general Canadian population. Additionally, they are also less likely to perceive themselves as being overweight or obese. Through the qualitative interviews, I found that these individuals participate in a process of regulation where they monitor their food intake at work. Additionally, I found that their consumption patterns stemmed from habitus generated through cultural exposures in other areas of their lives. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues that we develop habitus through meaningful cultural exposure. We use our habitus, or engrained dispositions, to navigate hierarchical spaces or fields. Through this research, I found that workers viewed their jobs as being temporary and their cultural consumption patterns did not seem to change from their exposures to their workplaces. The majority were part time students, working in this industry to pay for living expenses and tuition. For the most part, they were raised in middle class homes where their mothers prepared food for their families from scratch on a daily basis. Fast food was viewed as a special treat and not an item to consume on a regular basis. I conclude that the meaningful exposures we have to food and cultural norms throughout life are more important in determining our food choices than our exposure to fast food restaurants.

The primary question for investigation throughout this research is how the environmental knowledges of settler-colonists and their descendants have been formed through processes of work and dwelling in place. This dissertation results from over a year of fieldwork in an aging community where retired loggers, semi-retired fishermen, and retired exurban migrants are actively renegotiating the meanings of local places and natures as the local economy shifts from a base in logging and fishing to one in recreational and retirement real estate development. Through archival research, life history interviews and participant-observation with loggers, fishermen, exurban retirees and other long-term residents I explored the complications and contradictions inherent in learning to value nature through processes of transforming and intervening in ecological processes for economic ends. Writing against hard social constructivism I examine the ways in which the life cycles of fish and fish populations, the contingencies of weather, topography and currents, and, the physical form of the land are active elements in the formation of labour and settlement patterns in coastal British Columbia. As a contribution to the underdeveloped field of first world political ecology this work maps environmental knowledges and values developed in tense complicity with regimes of natural resource management and accumulation by dispossession. Central to this process is how people become agents of the commodification of nature and place in their everyday lives and work, and, how private property has become naturalized as a prerequisite to "protecting" self, nature, and community from precarity in the era of late capitalism. This dissertation tracks the various ways, both historically and in the present, that settlers and their descendants on the BC Coast have attempted to simultaneously make a living and make a home of an occupied place-the imperialist nostalgia and (neo)liberal white guilt endemic to the process.