Your search

In 1979, in the CUPE case, the Supreme Court of Canada held that a labour relations tribunal's interpretation of its constituent statute should be upheld on judicial review unless that interpretation was "patently unreasonable." By 2008, the Canadian courts were using three standards of review: patent unreasonableness, simple reasonableness, and correctness. In that year, however, in Dunsmuir, the Supreme Court held that the standard of patent unreasonableness was no longer to be used, but only the standards of simple reasonableness and correctness. By our count, during the 29 years between CUPE and Dunsnuir the courts decided 210 applications for judicial review of Ontario Labour Relations Board decisions. This research note sets out the results of our study examining those 210 cases and comparing them with 23 post-Dunsmuir cases in the Ontario courts involving applications for judicial review of the Board's decisions. --Introduction

Labor played a central role in nineteenth-century penitentiaries. It was intended to provide guidance and discipline to prisoners whose behavior was outside of social, moral, and economic norms. This article examines the relationship between medicine and labor in Canadian federal penitentiaries between 1867 and 1900. As penitentiaries grew and expanded throughout the century, increasing numbers of prisoners were unable to participate in penitentiary labor due to illness or disability. In these cases, penitentiary medicine helped form part of an “enlightened” response to nonworking prisoners. It suggests that medical records from this period demonstrate how penitentiaries reconciled nonworking prisoners with the prevailing model of reform constructed around labor. The article looks at two such groups. The first is sick prisoners, including physical and mental ailments. Mental illness was an increasingly vexing problem for penitentiaries in this era as they struggled to form appropriate responses to mentally ill prisoners within the prevailing penitentiary model. The second group is prisoners with disability, including physical and intellectual disability. Although both groups were understood through medical categories, their status as “unproductive” prisoners sometimes played a larger role in determining their experience of confinement. The article looks at the influence of ideas about labor on the delivery of medical services in penitentiaries and the resulting experience of illness. Although prison medicine in Canada expanded and improved throughout this period, the sick and disabled often experienced marginalization and moral condemnation on the basis of their uncertain relationship to penitentiary labor.

Affectionate portrait of John St. Amand (1943-2007) who, under the tutelage of the left-wing labour activist, Madeleine Parent, moved in 1981 from Ontario to Nova Scotia to become a union organizer.

In New Brunswick, in the early nineties, the Liberal government of Frank McKenna embraced both globalization and neoliberalism in the creation of a call centre industry. It seems a classic case of the adoption of a globalization and neoliberal strategy. However, further examination of the discourse of the period shows a very particular positioning vis-à-vis globalization and neoliberalism. It is one adopted by a ‘have-not’ province as a kind of desperate economic development strategy. Given recent attention in the literature to the various meanings and implications of globalization and neoliberalism, the New Brunswick case gives a particular vantage point from which to reflect on these debates.

For many years Canada has quietly rationalized importing temporary "low-skilled" migrant labour through managed migration programs to appease industries desiring cheap and flexible labour while avoiding extending citizenship rights to the workers. In an era of international human rights and global competitive markets, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) is often hailed as a "model" and "win-win" solution to migration and labour dilemmas, providing employers with a healthy, just-intime labour force and workers with various protections such as local labour standards, health care, and compensation. Tracing migrant workers' lives between Jamaica, Mexico and Canada (with a focus on Ontario's Niagara Region), this thesis assesses how their structural vulnerability as non-citizens effectively excludes them from many of the rights and norms otherwise expected in Canada. It analyzes how these exclusions are rationalized as permanent "exceptions" to the normal legal, social and political order, and how these infringements affect workers' lives, rights, and health. Employing critical medical anthropology, workers' health concerns are used as a lens through which to understand and explore the deeper "pathologies of power" and moral contradictions which underlie this system. Particular areas of focus include workers' occupational, sexual and reproductive, and mental and emotional health, as well as an assessment of their access to health care and compensation in Canada, Mexico and Jamaica. Working amidst perilous and demanding conditions, in communities where they remain socially and politically excluded, migrant workers in practice remain largely unprotected and their entitlements hard to secure, an enduring indictment of their exclusion from Canada's "imagined community." Yet the dynamics of this equation may be changing in light of the recent rise in social and political movements, in which citizenship and related rights have become subject to contestation and redefinition. In analyzing the various dynamics which underlie transnational migration, limit or extend migrants' rights, and influence the health of migrants across borders, this thesis explores crucial relationships between these themes. Further work is needed to measure these ongoing changes, and to address the myriad health concerns of migrants as they live and work across national borders.

The article reviews the book, "Artisans in Early Imperial China," by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low.

The article reviews the book, "New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China," by Yan Hairong.

The article reviews the book ,"The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style," edited by Dimitry Anastakis.

The inclusion of new groups of workers has been an important component of union renewal efforts. Sev- eral unions in Canada have begun to dedicate significant resources to better organize and represent Aboriginal workers. Drawing on interviews with union activists, organizers and representatives from two national public sector unions in Canada, we present an overview of union strategies to engage with Aboriginal peoples. Results suggest that understanding the distinct territorial context of Aboriginal peo- ples’ relationships to work and unions has been necessary to the success of these union strategies. This approach begins by drawing connections between Aboriginal peoples’ present-day relationships to work and their prior occupancy of, and dispossession from, lands and resources. Because of the geographical specificity of how the colonial experience affected Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions, unions have had to adopt non-normative approaches to their engagements with Aboriginal peoples. In workplaces where settlers were dominant, addressing racism in the workplace and gaining support for initiatives to hire and train Aboriginal workers were important. Alternatively, in Aboriginal workplaces, organizing was a priority. Here questions of union legitimacy have taken precedence and the focus of unions has been on partnership building. Most importantly, however, engagement with Aboriginal peo- ples has brought attention to the colonial practices within unions and helped to foster growing Aboriginal voice within the labour movement.

The article focuses on issues concerning revisionism, which is described by John Manley as an international historiographical tendency. It explains that one problem about the concept of revisionism was the uncertainty of method, argument and genre. It discusses the arguments of Manley about the differences of the communist parties in Canada, Great Britain and the U.S. as well as the possibility to make and break government policy in one particular country in the interests of Socialism. It also examines the impact of failing to adopt evaluative criteria on Comintern historiography.

Plan de l’article : Retour au début -- Distinction entre la partie et le tout -- De la mixité des sources de droit -- Fonctions et réactions des parties et de l’arbitre -- Face à ces différentes situations, que peut faire l’arbitre de grief ? -- En guise de conclusion -- Note biographique -- Notes.

Through painful struggles and changing relationships, Thunder Bay’s working class defined itself during the tumultuous years before World War I. Labour Pains looks at many responses to the harshness of industrialism: trade unionism and labour politics, unrest and violence, the Social Gospel and socialism, mediation and conciliation. Alliances and conflict, many ethnicities and various expressions of class consciousness all contributed to the making of the working class whose members and defenders embraced many remarkable individuals, known and unknown. --Publisher's description. Contents: The beginnings of Thunder Bay's working class [Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario] -- Trade unions, municipal ownership & labour politics : Harry Bryan and the advent of organized labour] -- Dock workers, immigrants and the railways -- Socialism, the social gospel and labour politics [labor] -- The 1909 Freight Handlers Strike -- Who won the 1909 strike? -- Labour, socialists and the 1912 Coal Handlers Strike -- The Justice system, immigrants and waterfront strikes : socialists and violence -- The 1913 Street Railwaymen's Strike -- Reformers and rebels, good deeds and discord -- Appendix A. Labour unions in Port Arthur and Fort William in 1910. Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-174) and index.

The article reviews the book, "On the Move: The Caribbean Since 1989," by Alejandra Bronfman.

The article reviews the book, "Taking Back the Workers' Law: How to Fight the Assault on Labor Rights," by Ellen Dannin.

The article reviews the book, "Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice," edited by Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius.

The article reviews the book, "Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925," by Douglas C. Harris.

The NFU was formed in 1969 through a merger of the Saskatchewan Farmers Union, the Ontario Farmers Union, the Farmers Union of British Columbia, and the Farmers Union of Alberta. In addition to these provincial unions, farmers from the Maritime provinces—not organized into farmers’ unions at the time—also became part of the NFU structure. Prior to ’69, these provincial unions each had worked autonomously in its respective province, but increasingly they were finding themselves at a disadvantage in attempting to work with the federal government. In an effort to solve that problem, the unions created a coordinating body, the National Farmers Union Council, consisting of representatives of the executives of each provincial union and representatives from the Maritime provinces. Over time, the officials and members from the provincial unions and the Maritimes realized that the major policy decisions affecting farmers were being made at the federal level. At a joint meeting of the executives of the provincial unions and others in Winnipeg in March 1968, the executive members passed a motion to strike a committee to develop a constitution for a direct membership national farm organization. The founding convention of the National Farmers Union was held in Winnipeg in July 1969. In the following months the provincial unions were phased out and their assets and liabilities transferred to the national organization. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West," by Scott Martelle.

The International Labour Organization’s supervisory bodies responsible for assessing state compliance with “freedom of association” have established an extensive jurisprudence on the right to strike. This jurisprudence is based on their interpretation of the ILO Constitution and various key ILO conventions concerning the right to organize and collective bargaining, in both the private and the public sector. Since the end of the Cold War, the employer lobby within the ILO has increasingly tried to undermine this aspect of ILO jurisprudence, so as to deny that there is any necessary link between freedom of association and the right to take industrial action. This pressure has come at a time when ILO norms are beginning to receive greater attention and respect, and are being applied in the human rights jurisprudence of other legal systems, including those of Canada and Europe. In 2007, the European Court of Justice for the first time explicitly recognized a right to strike, referring to ILO Convention 87 as a source of this entitlement, but limited it by imposing a proportionality requirement on its exercise. In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights indicated for the first time that the right to strike was implicit in Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, again in reliance on ILO standards. This paper compares and contrasts those cases, investigating the extent to which European recognition of a right to strike can serve to reinforce or undermine ILO standards. The paper also considers the more general implications of these developments for Canadian human rights jurisprudence.