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The article reviews the book, "Building Chaos: An International Comparison of Deregulation in the Construction Industry," edited by Gerhard Bosch and Peter Phillips.

This thesis entails the study of both why and how decentralisation of government authority takes place. Decentralisation in Canada is explored by investigating a federal proposal for the devolution of active labour market policies from federal to provincial governments, and by closely examining the positions taken by both levels of government during the development of two federal-provincial labour market agreements in the mid-1990s. The two bilateral agreements chosen for this examination are, the Canada-Nova Scotia Agreement on a Framework for Strategic Partnerships, and the Canada-Alberta Labour Market Development Agreement. The central focus of this research is to examine the extent to which federal and provincial governments’ positions on the devolution of policy are influenced by ‘political’ and ‘public’ interests. The first argument holds that political imperatives influence governmental priorities, attitudes, and motivations as decisions about devolution are made. The second argument maintains that governmental positions on devolution are founded on the motivation to promote the best outcomes for the public at large. This study employs a research focus that is qualitative in nature, and it draws from interpretive and constructivist approaches to inquiry. Interviews were conducted with civil servants who represent federal and provincial interests in the provinces of Alberta and Nova Scotia. A comparative analysis of the evidence found that both political and public interests influenced federal and provincial positions on devolution. This research illustrates that while political and public interests might be separated analytically, in real cases of policy-making they overlap. Nonetheless, the evidence tips the scales towards a political interest explanation much more clearly and convincingly than a public interest interpretation.

The article reviews the book, "La chaîne invisible. Travailler aujourd’hui : flux tendu et servitude volontaire," by Jean-Pierre Durand.

A 1964 strike by women workers in Dunnville, Ontario provides an exceptional perspective on the complex ways in which class, gender, and ethnicity unite in the construction of identity. The women strikers drew on left-wing traditions of feisty femininity to claim an identity as real workers and authentic unionists while also embracing multi-ethnic identities that distinguished them from the Anglo-Celtic middle class. Their claims to authenticity challenged pervasive assumptions, including those of their union brothers, who defined labor militancy as implicitly male and distorted memories of the strike. Yet the limits on the women's own constructions of these identities are evident in their inability to perceive the Native women who scabbed during the strike as workers. By contrasting the ways in which identity was claimed, assigned, and contested by different groups of workers, this story problematizes categories of identity that are often used uncritically in labor history.

The book, "Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History," edited by Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Women in European History," by Gisela Bock.

The 1970's saw an explosion of new social movement activism. From the breakup of the New Left into single-issue groups at the end of the 1960's came a multitude of groups representing the peace, environmental, student, women's, and gay liberation movements. This explosion of new social movement activism has been heralded as the age of new radical politics. Many theorists and activists saw new social movements and the issues or identities they represented as replacing the working class as an agent for progressive social change. This article examines these claims through a case study of the quintessential social movement, Greenpeace, exploring Greenpeace Canada from 1971 to 2000 and its relationship to the working class. In order to understand the ideology behind Greenpeace, the author investigates its structure, personnel, and actions. The case study illustrates important contradictions between new social movement theory and practice and how those contradictions affect the working class. In particular, Greenpeace's actions against the seal hunt, forestry in British Columbia, and its own workers in Toronto demonstrate some of the historic obstacles to working out a common labor and environmental agenda.

The article reviews the book, "Workers After Workers' States: Labour and Politics in Post Communist Eastern Europe," edited by Stephen Crowley and David Ost.

The book, "The Next Upsurge: Labour and the New Social Movements," by Dan Clawson, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "The French Canadians of Michigan: Their Contribution to the Development of the Saginaw Valley and the Keweenaw Peninsula, 1840-1914," by Jean Lamarre.

The article reviews the book, "The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players Union, 1960-81," by Charles P. Korr.

Nonstandard Work in Developed Economies: Causes and Consequences, edited by Susan Houseman and Machiko Osawa, is reviewed.

In 1987-1988, a national debate erupted in Canada on the desirability of entering into a free trade agreement with the USA and its potential effect on Canadian culture, society, and national sovereignty-as well as its economy. A national coalition of labour unions and civil society groups emerged to oppose such an agreement with the USA, and later its expansion to Mexico as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The coalition was hailed by members as a groundbreaking alliance between labour unions and civil society, as well as a new grassroots challenge to the neo-liberal economic policies of the government at the time. The experience led to a longer-term pattern of collaboration between unions and NGOs in Canada, but the coalition also experienced difficulties in reconciling the different approaches and goals of participants, which were resolved with varying degrees of success. This paper discusses the coalition in relation to gendered attitudes and practices; issues of representation and accountability; different approaches to organisation, hierarchy, leadership, and decision making; resource conflicts; class-based versus new views of challenge and social movements; and views within the Canadian labour movement on coalition work with civil society groups.

Originally prepared to provide background information and analysis for a Canadian Labour Congress conference on rebuilding unions in the Fall of 2003, this article maps trends in union density i.e., the proportion of workers covered by a collective agreement. It provides a short overview of the period since the mid 1980s, and a much more detailed analysis of the period from 1997 to 2002 for which detailed data from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey are available. Union density has trended down in the private sector to below 20% more because of a density decline among male blue collar workers than because of deindustrialization per se. Union density has remained high in public and social services, including outside the direct public sector, and this mainly explains why union density has held up much better among women than men. Union density is low, but relatively stable, in private consumer and business services. Density has fallen proportionately less in the higher union density provinces, particularly Quebec, and has fallen to well below average levels among private sector workers in the fastest growing provinces of Ontario and Alberta.

The article reviews the book, "No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women," by Estelle B. Freedman.

This study focuses on the effectiveness of the federal Employment Equity Act (EEA). We assess the EEA with regard to visible minority employees using quantitative data from employer reports published under the provisions of the EEA and the Canadian Census. Data in this study cover the period 1987 to 1999. We find that large companies, and larger employment groups within companies, have higher levels of employment equity attainment. There are also considerable variations in employment equity attainment across industrial sectors, across provinces and across occupations. Overall, there has been general improvement in employment equity attainment over time. However, visible minorities continue to be disadvantaged in management, sales and service and technical positions. Several policy implications are drawn from these findings.

In this dissertation I propose the existence of a distinct and previously unacknowledged sub-genre in the Canadian social-reform writing of the 1890s, namely the industrial novel. I concentrate on several late-Victorian Canadian examples: Agnes Maule Machar's Roland Graeme: Knight: A Novel of Our Time (1892), Robert Barr's The Mutable Many (1896), and Albert Richardson Carman's The Preparation of Ryerson Embury: A Purpose (1900). These novels each reflect the expansion of industrial production in the Victorian period and the concomitant social effects of urban industrialism upon the labouring poor. I undertake an examination of these works that analyses the relationship between the novels' middle-class protagonists and the workers whose rights they are defending, seeing in the narrative patterns, imagery, and intertextual references both the articulation of an alternative kind of social justice and a tension emerging between political dissent and political conservatism. These novels of labour unrest caution against violent revolution and instead preach a doctrine of reconciliation and compromise, rooted in a reorientation of conventional notions of justice, a rejuvenation of social institutions, and the imperative of individual moral responsibility. First I focus on Machar's representation of Christian socialism, and how the language of "brotherhood" acts as an antidote and alternative to the morally degenerative effects of industrialism. Machar parallels the labour reform movement to the Christian belief in an afterlife: both are predicated upon faith and deferral, the commission of good works in the present for the benefit of some future blessing. Next, I examine Barr's novel about two strikes in a London factory, looking in particular at issues of leadership and representation. I propose that his novel works to reveal the complexities inherent in any project in which one man must speak for a crowd of others, as the end of the novel amply demonstrates the failure of communication. Finally, in my examination of Carman's novel, I analyse his refashioning of conventional notions of justice. I argue that Carman's narrative suggests the sterility of intellectual debate in the absence of any commitment to social action. I conclude by connecting the late-Victorian Canadian industrial novel to early twentieth-century literary responses to labour advocacy, urbanism, and industrialism.

The article reviews the book, "Safe Haven: The Story of a Shelter for Homeless Women," by Rae Bridgman.

[This article analyzes the letters of Swedish immigrant Martin Johannson to his family in Sweden during the period 1928-34.] The letters provide glimpses into the contradictory and confusing experiences that shaped the working class during times of extreme distress, and inform on how immigrant workers in Canada perceived labour conditions and came to terms with new social circumstances. Important indications of how the depression hit the logging industry in the interior of BC more than a year before the crash of the Wall Street market in October 1929 are also conveyed. Martin felt frissons of panic as his savings dried up and he found himself competing for temporary, low-income jobs in isolated locations. Painfully aware that his failure to pay the loan instalments meant an extra burden for his grandfather, the Depression scarred Martin's faith in capitalism. His letters provide a unique insight into the complicated and ambiguous birth of a radical political consciousness. --Author's introduction

The article reviews the book, "Being Heard: The Experiences of Young Women in Prostitution," edited by Kelly Gorkoff and Jane Runner.