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The article reviews the book, "Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871," by Catharine Anne Wilson.

Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means - such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales - to the forces driving labour market insecurity. --Publisher's description

This paper explores the history of Ontario’s labour laws as they relate to agricultural workers, examines the way these laws have been interpreted by the judiciary, provides an overview of the most recent case affirming the right of agricultural workers to bargain, and analyzes the likely effects of the Court of Appeal’s recent decision. In so doing, it provides commentary on the relationship between the labour movement, human rights and the legal system more generally, and provides specific commentary on this situation as applies to agricultural workers in Ontario.

Labour rights are increasingly being constructed as human rights. While this construction is gaining popularity, there is still considerable opposition to it. Recently, the debate has made its way to the pages of Just Labour. Building upon a pragmatic approach utilized by feminist legal scholars, the present article seeks to continue this important dialogue and offers an alternative that combines elements of both rights-based pluralism and critical legal scholarship. It contends that the labour movement ought to employ a multi-faceted strategy to protect and promote the rights of working people. Such a strategy recognizes the limitations of rights-discourse, but also recognizes its potential benefits. The paper argues that the labour movement cannot rely solely on rights-discourse to protect its interests but that it should also not be dismissed out of hand. Thus, the construction of labour rights as human rights can be only part of the labour movement's broader fight back strategy.

The article reviews the book, "Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States," by David Rayside.

[D]raws on the [the author's] experiences in the Canadian Labour Congress and the Ontario labour movement to elaborate on the causes and consequenes of the limited progress made in advancing equity for racialized people within the labour movement. --Editor's introduction

[P]resents statistics documenting the changing face of Canada's labour force, which is projected to become more feminized, more racialized, and more Aboriginal. ...[The author] warns that many of the most underprivileged workers are already turning to worker advocacy centres for help, rather than unions, because of unions' continuing failure to respond to their needs. --Editor's introduction

In most advanced capitalist societies, the feminist challenge to labour unions began well over twenty-five years ago. This essay examines the history of the ambivalent relationship between women and unions and assesses the difference feminism has made in terms of the structure, practices and overall vision of unions' role and goals. Has feminism helped to renew union movements across the capitalist world and moved them at all towards socialism? The answer to this is complex and involves assessing both the different strands of feminist influence and the way these were interwoven with the attack on unions and working people that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

Examines the legal dispute that occurred during the Stelco restructuring that occurred between 2004 and 2006, in which labour law was trumped by corporate law. The union ultimately emerged victorious because it made no concessions despite the series of legal defeats.

If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, the role chefs can and should play in society – how a city nourishes itself makes a statement about the kind of city it is.With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how one city eats. It includes dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches. There are incisive studies of food-security policy, of feeding the needy and of waste, and a happy tale about a hardy fig tree.Together they form a saucy picture of how Toronto – and, by extension, every city – sustains itself, from growing basilon balconies to four-star restaurants. Dig into The Edible City and get the whole story, from field to fork. --Publisher's description

Global Unions, Global Business: Global Union Federations and International Business, by Richard Croucher and Elizabeth Cotton, is reviewed.

“If you’re in my way I’m walking.” This arrogant statement by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the occasion of his physical altercation with a protester in Hull, Quebec in the mid-1990s symbolizes the spirit of the relentless drive of capital to rewrite the historical compromise reached with working people after World War II. This early post-war compromise—sometimes referred to as the Fordist Compact—was associated with improving wages and rising living standards for working people. But in recent decades those achievements of the working class are being deliberately rolled back. Workman surveys many features of this experience: changing public perceptions of working life, the deregulation of labour law, the decline in unionization rates, the eclipse of union militancy, the stagnation of real wages, the disproportionate absorption of women into the low-wage sphere and the dismantling of social policy. He demonstrates the unravelling of the post-war compact and its replacement with a far more ex-ploitative relationship between capital and labour. He also points to the decline of the Canadian left and its inability to counter the capitalist onslaught effectively. Nevertheless, there are reasons to be hopeful. Workman calls for a rebuilding of the left through the restoration of left culture. To do this he says that the left must “quit politics,” work to promote the collective memory of working-class achievements, create venues to listen to working people in today’s economy, reject nationalism outright and encourage the labour movement to exploit its disruptive capacity. This revitalized left will form the basis of a deepening social critique, the political lessons of which will prove to be invaluable for working people in the long run. -- Publisher's description

This third volume of the Osgoode Society’s Canadian State Trials series covers the period from the 1840s to the First World War. It examines a range of political trials as traditionally defined, including those arising from the Fenian invasions and the North-West Rebellions. The volume also expands the definition of state trials to include studies on the early development of secret policing and the evolution of the legal regulation of riot and public order. The editors have assembled a team of experts from across the country in a variety of fields, and produced a comprehensive and fascinating set of studies of the use of law to control political dissent and public disorder.--Publisher's description.

Using a proprietary dataset containing personnel records on over 22,000 full-time, non-unionized employees from a large Canadian firm with nationwide operations from 1996 to 2000, this paper explores the incidence of promotion for women and racial minorities. The findings show that women and racial minorities are less likely than their white male counterparts to be promoted. For both white women and minority women, the disadvantage is most severe at the lower rungs of the organizational hierarchy, lending support to the "sticky floor" hypothesis. Significant promotion disadvantages occur for white women, visible minority women, and visible minority men at the middle ranks of the organization, and visible minority men continue to experience a promotion disadvantage at the highest organizational levels.

Do low strike rates suggest that the ‘age of strikes’ has come to an end? Have we reached a time when unions can and should give up the right to strike as a weapon more suited to the ‘old’ economy, or ‘old’ unions who are themselves better suited for the industrial than the post-industrial age? Or should unions continue to defend the right to strike and if so why? This research note explores some answers to these questions that underline the critical importance of defending the right to strike. --From introduction

In this new edition the author shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. The author uses both data, and examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not only updates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice, and the Employee Free Choice Act. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "GRH et genre : les défis de l’égalité hommes-femmes," edited by Annie Cornet, Jacqueline Laufer and Sophia Belghiti-Mahut.

This paper examines whether flexible work schedules in Canada are created by employers for business reasons or to assist their workers achieve work-life balance. We focus on long workweek, flextime, compressed workweek, variable workweek length and/or variable workweek schedule. Statistics Canada's 2003 Workplace and Employee Survey data linking employee microdata to workplace (i.e.. employer) microdata are used in the analysis. Results show that more than half of the workers covered in this data have at least one of the five specified types of flexible work schedules. Employment status, unionized work, occupation, and sector are factors consistently associated with flexible work schedules. Personal characteristics such as marital status, dependent children, and childcare use are not significantly associated with flexible work schedules, and females are less likely to have a flexible work schedule than are males. Overall, results suggest that flexible work schedules are created for business reasons rather than individual worker interests.

The article reviews several books including "Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt," by Ching Kwan Lee, "Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People Are Shaping Class and Status in China," by Carolyn L. Hsu and "Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China," by Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden.

[The author] brings to the pages of this journal two closely intertwined debates regarding the meaning of social movement unionism and strategies for rebuilding labour movement power in Canada and the United States. It offers an important overview of this debate and raises critical points about the meaning and place of union democracy. The author provides a pertinent critique of the “organizing unionism” “model” that has emerged in the United States. It also serves as a useful foil for distinguishing greater member participation of the sort called for by the organizing model from greater member control.