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This critical review draws on existing literature on the discourse of precarious work within the Canadian nation-state. The goal of this research work is to critically examine the impact of precarious work on the lives, well-being and mental health of immigrants with a specific focus on immigrant women. Given that most research works have been mainly focused on the way in which precarious work creates health inequalities, this paper aims to throw light on the way in which precarious work can affect mental health. Also, the paper will examine the Canadian public policy response to this issue. The paper argues that Canada’s policy response is a reflection of the dominant political ideology within this nation-state. The dominant political ideology of neoliberalism seeks to justify minimal state intervention in policies that directly affect health and more broadly citizen’s life. The following principal questions will guide this critical review. 1) Why are immigrants, particularly immigrant women of color disproportionately situated in precarious forms of labour within the Canadian nation-state? 2) How does precarious work affect the mental health of immigrant women? 3) How and to what extent has capitalism and neoliberalism within the Canadian nation-state helped to perpetuate precarious working conditions for racialized immigrant women? By interrogating Canada’s neoliberal policy agenda as it affects immigrants through entrenched legislations of immigrant classes, the primary goal of this paper is to advance the construction that immigrants/migrants exist for economic exploitation and gain. The main theoretical framework that will guide this analysis is based on a post-colonial feminist scholarship that analyzes how inequities grounded on gender, race, class, and migratory status intersect to create complex and diverse labour market results for racialized immigrant women in Canada. A common theme that emerged throughout the critical review of several scholarly and grey literatures is that more women than men are situated in precarious work, and of those women in precarious forms of employment, women who identified as members of a visible minority group were even more disproportionately situated in precarious forms of work. Also, it was observed that the Canadian nation-state has to date failed to respond appropriately to this social and economic situation. Since employment and working conditions, unemployment and employment security -- described as some of the most crucial social determinants of health -- are significantly correlated to income and its security, allowing precarious work has only served to reinforce high-levels of income inequality, income insecurity and poverty within Canada.
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[E]xamines a Communist union’s struggle to survive in the post-Second World War environment of anti-Communism and anti-trade unionism that marked one of the most violent periods in the history of the Canadian labour movement. In 1943, Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Trail, British Columbia, was nearing the end of a six-year battle for certification as the legal bargaining agent for about 4,000 smelter workers. After it achieved that goal the following year and for the next decade, it faced new battles with the employer, the powerful Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S) with its paternalistic president S.G. Blaylock. The local also faced an array of other opponents: a workforce suspicious of a Red-tainted union with a radical past, a company union that had been established by Blaylock after the First World War, a company-loyal newspaper, and a divided community situated in the rural West Kootenay district near the Canada- United States border. Among the local’s most vigorous adversaries were the local churches, the federal government with its secret service police, and the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL). By the 1950s, it had been purged from the CCL, shunned by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and victimized by cold warriors bent on its destruction. To survive it needed to win the support of a substantially immigrant workforce with a strong alternative culture to the dominant Anglo-Saxon one. It had to address the concerns of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women war workers who had been hired at lower wages to replace enlisted men. And it fell into the middle of an ideological clash between the region’s two dominant left-wing political parties. Its greatest strength and potential weakness was an unabashed Stalinist named Harvey Murphy. He had been a fugitive from justice and was incarcerated in a war-time internment camp as a threat to national security, but he became an influential leader of the provincial labour movement and an outspoken advocate of workers’ rights who was hated by some and respected by others. “Divided Loyalties” begins with a victory, but Local 480’s survival for the duration of the twelve-year period of this study was far from assured.
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This thesis is the product of a collaborative inquiry involving six occasional teachers, myself included, who came together over five months to share our experiences of navigating a teacher labour market ruled by teacher surplus, job shortages, and increasing employment precarity. Together we took an inquiry stance on occasional teaching (Cochran-Smith Lytle, 2009) and explored the consequences of precarious teacher employment for teaching, learning, working, and living. Here I document the myriad ways precariousness shapes not only our career trajectories but also our everyday experiences of practice, our professional identities as educators, and our engagement in political action and institutional change efforts. I also offer specific processes and interventions that mitigate the risks of long-term employment precarity for teaching and learning. Throughout, I rely on my participantsâ words as well as my own to tell a story about our work, what it means to us, and why it matters.