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  • The article reviews the book, "Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States," by Sujani Reddy.

  • The article reviews the book, "Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland," by Stephen Meyer.

  • This article reviews the book, "Farm Workers in Western Canada: Injustices and Activism," edited by Shirley A. McDonald and Bob Barnetson.

  • Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of workers in Nova Scotia, a less populated and more economically depressed province. Interview with former SAWP participants demonstrate how the uncertainty characterising the legal, immigration, and employment status of seasonal agricultural workers is socially practised and individually experienced. In particular, we show how specific elements of current migrant labour regulation have everyday effects in organising and delimiting non-work dimensions of migrant workers’ lives. In attending to the spatio-temporal dimensions of migrant workers’ lives we develop the concept social quarantining as a characteristic feature of former workers’ experiences ‘on the contract’.

  • Recent research in the domain of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has underlined the importance of moving away from an institutional perspective of CSR towards research at the micro-level. Such calls have insisted on the necessity of a developing a deeper, and more nuanced understanding of its impacts and mechanisms at the individual level. This paper addresses this issue by focusing on the nexus between how employees judge their companies’ actual CSR performance and how that judgement can affect individual, micro-level outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intentions. We study this by a consideration of how perceived fit between employees and their organization mediates the relationship between perceived corporate social performance (CSP) on the one hand, and job satisfaction and turnover intentions on the other.While there is a notion, commonly embraced in the literature, that corporate social performance can have beneficial effects on individual employee outcomes, there have not been many empirical studies looking into the mechanisms by which this occurs. Through a survey of 317 young employees from differing company sizes and sectors in Europe and Asia, we find that positive assessment of CSP does not have a direct influence on job satisfaction and turnover intention, but is mediated by person-organization fit. The latter, in turn, has a positive effect on job satisfaction and reduced turnover intention.The implications of these findings are that the achievement of efficient and effective performance in social and environmental terms reinforces the perception of employees that their values fit with those of the organization. This process then creates value in terms of increased job satisfaction and reduced employee turnover intentions. We note also that simply improving CSP objectively, without involving and raising awareness among employees, will not necessarily lead to improved perceptions of how the employee fits within the organization and the potential positive knock-on employee outcomes.

  • In confronting the filth and decay of the early 20th century city, civic reformers often undertook ambitious programs that sought to not only eliminate the sources of disease from the urban environment but also to civilize urban dwellers, teaching them to live in pure and morally hygienic ways. Historical studies have tended to focus on the consumption side of this process, looking at how sanitary reformers and public health officials worked to establish fundamentally new understandings of household waste and its disposal, laying the foundation for the "throwaway" society of the 1950s and 1960s. However, they have tended to neglect the parallel efforts to fashion a new kind of city worker. Drawing on Toronto as a case study, this paper examines how the rise of a modern, scientifically managed waste regime in the early 20th century contributed to fundamentally new conceptions of civic employment, premised on the "purification" of the worker from the contaminating influence of neighbourhood-based patronage networks and an informal waste economy. I explore how efforts to expunge filth from urban space were paralleled by struggles to disentangle class from community-based solidarities in the labour process. Moreover, I explore how this contributed to the view that public workers somehow stood apart from the community as an anonymous and uniform service. I conclude by discussing the implications in how we think about city workers and their struggles today.

  • The article reviews the book, "We're Going to Run This City: Winnipeg's Political Left after the General Strike," by Stefan Epp-Koop.

  • The article reviews the book, "Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity," by Kendra Coulter.

  • This paper engages with workers’ accounts of a strike in Northern Ontario, Canada to consider the processes through which intra-union tensions develop and to examine their implications for member involvement and mobilization.

  • This article reviews the book, "A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada," by Ester Reiter.

  • This paper seeks to capture how unions are perceived by young workers in Portugal and to identify different types of perceptions. Our analysis considers both structural factors and subjective experiences and is based on semi-structured interviews with young people working in sectors with a high concentration of youth employment. The fact that young workers are increasingly exposed to the pressures of unemployment and precarious work might suggest that there is homogeneity in their perceptions about trade unions and collective action. However, our results show that young workers’ perceptions are not homogenous and that they interconnect with distinct segments, characterized by different socio-economic conditions, as defined by family status, education level and position in the labour market. Three types of perceptions were identified by content analysis of the interviews: positive, negative and critical perceptions. A final segment of younger and less-skilled workers, of families with low educational and economic resources and having left school prematurely, have neither information nor any understanding about unions. Our findings support the thesis that diversity of educational and early labour market experiences, which characterize transition processes to adulthood, shape the relation between young workers and unions, in particular the motivation to join unions. Capturing the diversity of young workers experiences and perceptions is a challenge to industrial relations research, as well as to trade unionism. It can provide unions with important insights into how to adapt their strategies to recruit new young members and to mobilize the latent interests of young workers in collective action.

  • This article reviews the book, "Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik," by Barbara C. Allen.

  • The Charter of Quebec Values tabled several years ago by the province's former Parti Qu bicois government threw into sharp relief the divisions among the population as to the appropriate model for managing cultural and religious diversity in Quebec. The Charter, and specifically its proposal to prohibit public employees from wearing "conspicuous" religious symbols in the workplace, was rooted in the French republican model, which generally subordinates individual differences to the principle of equality before the law, and strictly adheres to the principle of state religious neutrality. As the author explains, the appeal of the republican model lay primarily in the fact that it was diametrically opposed to the Canadian model of multiculturalism, widely seen in Quebec as having been imposed on the province without its consent, and to certain controversial human rights decisions in which the right to accommodation of individual religious beliefs came into conflict with another fundamental right, such as gender equal- ity. In the author's view, the resolution of the contest between the republican and the multicultural models is to be found in the creation of a concrete legal framework for implementing Quebec's distinct, consensual model of diversity management - interculturalism. Pluralistic in outlook, interculturalism differs from multiculturalism mainly in that it recognizes key "collective values" - the use of French as a common language, the religious neutrality of the state, and equality between men and women - which could justify a refusal to accommo- date religious convictions in some cases. By incorporating Quebec's collective values into the accommodation analysis, interculturalism holds the promise of reconciling ethnocultural differences with the continuity of Quebec's French- speaking core, and protecting the rights of all residents.

  • Cet article s’intéresse au lien entre la stratégie adoptée par l’entreprise et les pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines (GRH) mises en oeuvre, en portant plus spécifiquement son attention sur les entreprises qui ont des stratégies d’innovation. Par innovation, nous entendons, à l’instar de King et Anderson (2002 cités par Lapointe et al., 2003), une nouvelle pratique, une nouvelle procédure ou un nouveau processus introduit sur le plan local dans un milieu de travail afin d’améliorer les performances économiques et sociales des entreprises. Nous intégrons également la notion d’innovation sociale, au sens de Klein et Harrisson (2006), afin de mettre l’accent sur l’aspect fondamentalement multidimensionnel de ce concept.À la suite d’une recension de littérature rigoureuse, nous proposons un modèle de recherche articulé autour de cinq hypothèses majeures relatives au contrôle des salariés, à leur formation, leur rémunération, mais également au climat social et à la négociation sociale. Pour tester ce modèle, nous nous appuyons sur les données 2011 de l’enquête REPONSE (Relations Professionnelles et Négociation d’Entreprise) de la DARES (Direction de l’Animation de la Recherche, des Études et des Statistiques) du ministère du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Santé, ainsi que du ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et de l’Industrie de France.À l’appui d’une étude empirique statistique (3 601 répondants « représentants de la direction »), nous montrons que les entreprises innovantes se distinguent nettement des autres en matière de GRH. Notamment, ces entreprises possèdent des systèmes de rémunération plus individualisés, elles fixent des objectifs plus généraux et effectuent moins de contrôle sur leurs salariés, favorisant donc la délégation dans le travail. Les entreprises innovantes investissent également davantage que les autres dans la formation et, enfin, elles mènent aussi plus de négociations avec les partenaires sociaux. Malgré de telles avancées, notre étude ne permet cependant pas de conclure à une quelconque relation entre stratégie et climat social. // Title in English: Human Resource Management and Innovation Strategies: A French Study based on the REPONSE 2011 Database. This article deals with the relationship between corporate strategy and human resource management (HRM) practices in France. It highlights that firms having innovation strategies differ from other companies, because they have different HRM practices. We adopt King and Anderson’s definition of innovation (2002, as quoted by Lapointe et al., 2003) as meaning the introduction of a new practice, a new procedure, or a new process, at the local level, with the aim of improving the economic and social performance of the firm. We also integrate Klein and Harrisson’s notion of social innovation (2006) in order to focus on the multidimensional aspect of the concept.Based on a rigorous literature review, we put forward a research model based on five major hypotheses concerning employee control/autonomy, training, remuneration, social climate and negotiation with trade unions. To test this model, we rely on the French public database called REPONSE 2011 from the French Ministry of Employment (N= 3,601 respondents).We show that innovative companies are very different from others in terms of HRM. In particular, these companies have more individualized pay systems, more general objectives, and have less control over their employees (they give more autonomy at work). Innovative companies also develop more training and, furthermore, are used to discussing and negotiating more than other firms. Conversely, no significant link is reached between social climate and strategy.

  • In South Korea, many struggles of non-regular workers, who attempted to organize their unions and engage in militant action to protest against employers’ inhumane discrimination and illegal exclusion, have failed to achieve the desired outcomes, due to their vulnerable employment status and their lack of action resources. In this light, our study examines the conditions that lead to victory in precarious workers’ struggles, by focusing on three attributes: internal solidarity with regular workers, external solidarity from labour and civil society groups outside the workplace, and mobilized protest repertoires. Specifically, this study seeks to identify the configurations of these three conditions that produce successful outcomes in precarious workers’ struggles, in terms of bargaining gains and organizational sustainability. We do this by employing fs/QCA modelling to examine 30 major cases of non-regular worker struggles occurring over a 16-year period from 1998 to 2013. Our analysis presents the finding that the conditional configuration of strong external solidarity, strong internal solidarity, and fewer struggle repertoires constitutes a significant causal path to successful outcomes. This reaffirms the idea that strong solidarity bridging, whether with regular workers that have a different employment status in the segmented workplace, or with labour and civil society groups outside the workplace, is the crucial causal condition for precarious workers to achieve their desired outcomes from struggle. An unexpected finding, however, is that when precarious worker struggles mobilize fewer struggle repertoires, they are likely to achieve the successful outcomes of bargaining and organizational gains. Our study contributes to the theoretical elaboration of labour movement revitalization for the precariat class, by shedding light on the activism of precarious workers, considering that the English-language literature that pays attention to the active role of such atypical workers in staging protests against employers’ inhumane treatments and the neoliberal labour regime is limited.

  • L’influence positive du soutien organisationnel par le biais d’attitudes et de pratiques favorables à la conciliation travail-famille (CTF) est largement reconnue. En revanche, peu d’études ont porté un regard spécifique sur les dynamiques entourant ces pratiques au sein de milieux où une organisation inflexible du temps de travail complique la manifestation de soutien à l’égard de la CTF, tout en créant des défis de conciliation importants. Réalisée en partenariat avec des syndicats québécois, cette étude s’intéresse aux pratiques informelles de CTF au sein de commerces d’alimentation québécois, un secteur d’emploi faiblement rémunéré où les horaires sont imposés, étendus, imprévisibles et variables.L’analyse thématique d’un corpus de trente entretiens semi-dirigés réalisés auprès de travailleuses syndiquées, de gestionnaires, de représentantes et de représentants syndicaux montre que, en dépit de règles liées à la convention collective, le mode d’établissement des horaires, en apparence neutre, témoigne de l’importance du caractère informel des pratiques de CTF. Ces dernières sont souvent individuelles, voire secrètes, et elles sont perçues comme le fruit d’un traitement privilégié accordé à certaines personnes. Compte tenu de l’accès restreint aux possibilités d’accommodements, ces pratiques peuvent entraîner une dynamique de « chacun pour soi », ce qui affecte la qualité des rapports entre collègues. Certaines mères de famille étaient particulièrement désavantagées par les normes de flexibilité valorisées dans leur milieu de travail. Enfin, des pratiques informelles sont acceptées au sein du collectif si elles sont transparentes et en autant que les gains des uns n’engendrent pas d’injustice perçue pour les autres.L’étude amène un éclairage sur l’impact collectif des pratiques informelles de CTF en contexte d’horaires atypiques, imprévisibles et variables. Elle montre la nécessité, pour les entreprises ainsi que pour les syndicats actifs dans ces milieux, de créer des conditions favorables au développement de relations interpersonnelles saines et équitables, ainsi que des pratiques qui valorisent l’expression des enjeux de CTF.

  • Les horaires atypiques imposés compliquent la conciliation travail-famille (CTF), particulièrement lorsqu’ils sont associés à un travail impliquant un bas salaire, un faible contrôle sur le travail, ou du temps partiel involontaire. Un nombre grandissant de travailleuses et de travailleurs sont exposés à ces horaires, mais peu d’études se sont intéressées aux stratégies de CTF déployées pour faire face à ces conditions contraignantes. Les seuls accommodements possibles reposent souvent sur des ententes informelles. Ces ententes sont fragiles et individuelles et, de plus, elles sont marquées par les rapports avec un gestionnaire ou des collègues. Elles exercent aussi une pression importante sur le collectif de travail, ce qui peut venir limiter la marge de manoeuvre permettant de concilier les deux réalités, c’est-à-dire l’espace nécessaire afin d’adapter sa tâche en fonction de son contexte et de ses capacités.Notre étude interdisciplinaire (en communication et ergonomie) porte sur les stratégies de CTF d’agentes et d’agents de nettoyage, un emploi comportant des horaires atypiques imposés et un faible niveau de prestige social. Cet article porte sur les facteurs organisationnels et les dynamiques relationnelles qui influencent la marge de manoeuvre d’agentes de nettoyage qui, pour concilier horaires atypiques et vie familiale, font le choix de travailler la nuit.L’analyse des données provenant d’observations et d’entretiens met en évidence l’interaction entre le choix de l’horaire de travail, le soutien des collègues et les rapports liés au genre ainsi qu’à l’ancienneté. En situant les stratégies de CTF au coeur de l’activité de travail, nos résultats permettent d’illustrer les tensions collectives suscitées par l’accommodement des besoins individuels de CTF.Améliorer les marges de manoeuvre visant à concilier vie familiale et horaires atypiques nécessite d’intervenir simultanément sur l’organisation du travail et les dynamiques relationnelles afin de favoriser l’émergence de pratiques collectives de soutien autour des enjeux de CTF. Ces dynamiques doivent être prises en compte lors de la mise en place de mesures organisationnelles, voire même de dispositifs légaux ayant pour but de faciliter la CTF.

  • By the end of the 20th century, there was general agreement that most labour markets were in transition and that employment was becoming less secure. However, official labour market data have not shown a dramatic increase in temporary or casual employment. This article takes a new look at the changing characteristics of employment and offers a new method to measure employment security: the Employment Precarity Index. We use the Employment Precarity Index to assess how insecure employment associated with a ‘gig’ economy might affect well-being and social relations, including health outcomes, household well-being and community involvement.

  • Migrant workers in China are a distinctive group due to the existence of the hukou system under which they continue to face restrictions on housing, education, and health care in urban areas. The equal employment legislation does not solve the discrimination problems. Compared with their urban counterparts, migrant workers are more vulnerable, in terms of both precarity of employment and the occupational hazards that they are exposed to, and badly need OHS protection. Any weakness of OHS regime will have a disproportionately adverse effect on migrant workers.China’s OHS regime has been through constant evolution. The old prevention structure, which separated occupational health from occupational safety, was proved to be less effective in protecting migrant workers. In recognition of its deficiencies, China’s top legislature made adjustments to the OHS legal framework by enacting and updating a series of laws. The new prevention structure, unifying the occupational health administration and the occupational safety administration, represents a step forward in terms of OHS protection for migrant workers.According to worker citizenship theory, China’s OHS regime can be categorized as a direct state regulation model. It carries with it both the strengths and weaknesses of direct state regulation models. On the participation rights dimension, the lack of consultative joint OHS committees and the lack of effective collective bargaining shut migrant workers out from the decision-making process on OHS matters. On the social rights dimension, the gendered and aged-based approach becomes a hindrance for female migrant workers and young migrant workers. Furthermore, levels of enforcement vary considerably across different periods and areas, subject to the ever-changing priorities on the government’s agenda. Migrant workers are still facing tremendous obstacles and challenges in obtaining access to adequate protection under the current OHS regime in China. Future reform measures should focus on delivering OHS protection for migrant workers in the informal sector, strengthening participation, and centralizing OHS administration, especially enforcement.

  • This article reviews the book, "Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II," by Elliott Young.

Last update from database: 3/15/25, 4:14 AM (UTC)

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