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The Construction of the $1.2 billion Vancouver Island Highway Project provided an opportunity for the building trades unions and the Government of BC to negotiate an innovative collective agreement that included union membership, training for local residents and members of equity groups, new employment opportunities for members of designated equity groups and a comprehensive health and safety program. The Project implemented the most comprehensive system of tracking progress in employment equity in BC’s history. By its completion, women, First Nations, persons with disabilities and visible minorities accounted for just under 20% of total hours worked in an industry where 2% representation is the norm. Over 94% of payroll went to local residents, ensuring their communities the benefits of this major capital project. Finally, the health and safety record was significantly better than on any comparable construction project. Far from being an impediment to the efficient and timely completion of this major construction project, the collective agreement made it possible to deliver training, employment opportunities and regional development

Reviews the book "Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship," by Leah F. Vosko.

The article reviews the book, "Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada," by Tom Warner.

The article reviews the book "The New Parapolice: Risk Markets and Commodified Social Control," by George Rigakos.

The article reviews the book, "Families, Labour and Love: Family Diversity in a Changing World," by Maureen Baker.

Changing Canada examines political transformations, welfare state restructuring, international boundaries and contexts, the new urban experience, and creative resistance. The authors question dominant ways of thinking and promote alternative ways of understanding and explaining Canadian society and politics that encourage progressive social change. They examine how the evolution of capitalism is producing new types of transformations and new forms of resistance, and show that aspects of the state and the wider society are being contested. They also discuss the often paradoxical or contradictory effects of various social forces, such as the liberating but also constraining features of new communications technologies, new employment norms, and new household forms. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book "Gaia's Wager: Environmental Movements and the Challenge of Sustainability," by Gary C. Byner.

The article reviews the book "Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla," by Ann Hansen.

The article reviews the book "The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940," by Kenneth Michael Sylvester.

'Precarious employment' is a better concept for understanding labour market insecurity than the dominant concept in Canada, 'non-standard work.' We examine dimensions of precariousness between and within mutually exclusive forms of employment. The growth of 'non-standard work' is fuelled by increases in forms of employment that lack regulatory protection, such as own- account self-employment. Wage work falls along a continuum of precariousness measured as regulatory protection, control and income. Finally, employment in precarious forms is shaped by social location. White men are concentrated in the least precarious forms of employment, while white women, women of colour and youth are concentrated in the more precarious forms.

This article examines the relationship between gender, forms of employment and dimensions of precarious employment in Canada, using data from the Labour Force Survey and the General Social Survey. Full-time permanent wage work decreased for both women and men between 1989 and 2001, but women remain more likely to be employed in part-time and temporary wage work as compared to men. Layering forms of wage work with indicators of regulatory protection, control and income results in a continuum with full-time permanent employees as the least precarious followed by full-time temporary, part-time permanent and then part-time temporary employees as the most precarious. The continuum is gendered through both inequalities between full-time permanent women and men and convergence in precariousness among part-time and temporary women and men. These findings reflect a feminization of employment norms characterized by both continuity and change in the social relations of gender. (English)

In February, 1948, a group of fish and blueberry processors formed the exclusively female, Ladies' Cold Storage Workers Union at Job Brothers fish plant in St. John's, Newfoundland. Unusual for the time, this organization was founded in the context of structural and social change in the Newfoundland fishery that altered the social relations of paid and unpaid work for women fish plant labourers. Cullum carefully explores this specific labour process and provides an open reading of the workers' narratives; a study of how the women of Job Brothers recounted stories of their work and domestic lives, and thus fashioned shifting identities as gendered, classed, and racialized subjects. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord," by Colin M. Coates and Cecilia Morgan.

Globalization and neo-liberalism have been associated with a decline in unions. In seeking to respond to these problems, unions could cooperate internationally. The orthodoxy among industrial relations scholars is that the European Treaty is antithetical to international unionism because of various provisions which promote competition. The experience of the International Federation of Professional Footballers' Associations (FIFPro) contradicts this orthodoxy. In August 2001, FIFPro entered into a framework collective bargaining agreement with Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) on a new set of rules to govern the worldwide employment of professional footballers. Football's transfer and compensation system violated competitive provisions, in particular the freedom of movement of workers, contained in the European Treaty. Following the 1995 decision of the European Court of Justice in Bosman, and strategic interventions by the European Commission, FIFA sought an accommodation with FIFPro, to protect its new employment rules from further legal attack.

The article reviews the book, "The Political Economy of Work in the 21st Century: Implications for an Aging American Workforce," by Martin Sicker.

The article rebuts Nelson Lichtenstein's conclusion (published in the same issue of the journal) that Walter Reuther was affiliated with the US Communist Party in the mid to late 1930s. (At the time, Reuther was a vice president of the United Automobile, Aircraft, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW); he went on to become UAW president from 1946 till his death in 1970.)

Recruitment processes are seen as critical to the success of contemporary organizations and integral to human resource practices, particularly in those firms setting up greenfield operations or undertaking organizational change programs. This article analyses the recruitment methods used in several large call centres in the Australian telecommunications industry. It particularly focuses on the issue of how recruitment was explicitly or implicitly designed to recruit customer service representatives who might be antithetic to workplace trade unionism. Three processes are identified. These include the use of sophisticated recruitment processes which identify those with unitarist tendencies, identifying and excluding, or blacklisting, those with union backgrounds or those who previously worked in highly unionized firms and lastly applying pressure on recruits to sign individual non-union contracts at the appointment or promotion stage.

A number of conflicting theoretical hypotheses have been advanced regarding the impact of unions on investment behaviour. The net impact of unions on investment is thus an empirical issue. In this article, the available empirical literature is reviewed. In addition, new evidence of the impact of unions on investment is presented using French data. In contrast to previous studies, both aggregate and disaggregate measures of union activity are used. The results indicate that French unions, in general, have not had a negative impact on investment behaviour. However, there is some evidence that the more militant unions have a negative impact on investment.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "Betrayal of Local 14: Paperworkers, Politics, & Personal Replacements," by Julius Getman, "Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America," by Timothy J. Minchin and "Forging a Common Bond: Labor & Environmental Activism During the BASF Lockout," by Jonathon D. Rosenblum.

The article reviews the book, "Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881-1905," by Hadassa Kosak.