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The article reviews the book, "Le Mouvement familial au Québec, 1960-1990. Une politique et des services pour les familles," by Denise Lemieux and Michelle Comeau.

The article reviews the book, "The Corporation As Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890-1930," by Nikki Mandel.

Reviews the book "At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor Market Performance in International Perspective," by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn.

Reviews the book 'Immigration and American Unionism,' by Vernon M. Briggs Jr.

The article reviews the book, "Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933," by Prometheus Research Library Staff.

This article offers a preliminary theoretical statement on the law as a set of boundaries constraining class struggle in the interests of capitalist authority. But those boundaries are not forever fixed, and are constantly evolving through the pressures exerted on them by active working-class resistance, some of which takes the form of overt civil disobedience. To illustrate this process, the author explores the ways in which specific moments of labour upheaval in 1886, 1919, 1937, and 1946 conditioned the eventual making of industrial legality. When this legality unravelled in the post-World War II period, workers were left vulnerable and their trade union leaders increasingly trapped in an ossified understanding of the rules of labour-capital-state relations, rules that had long been abandoned by other players on the unequal field of class relations. The article closes by arguing for the necessity of the workers' movement recovering its civil disobedience heritage.

Examines the "coercive assault" (i.e., legislative overrides) on trade union rights in Canada by both federal and provincial governments from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Also discusses labour-related decisions of the Supreme Court, and strategies for union renewal. Includes tables of union membership, strikes and lockouts, back-to-work measures, use of designations, and complaints of violations of union rights filed with the International Labor Organization.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation," by Edwin Black, "Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor During the Second World War," by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Hitler, and Nicholas Levis and "Hitler, der Westen und die Schweiz 1936-1945," by Walter Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin.

Reviews the book 'Personnel et DRH: l'affirmation de la fonction personnel dans les entreprises,' by Jean Fombonne.

The article reviews the book "No Plaster Saint: The Life of Mildred Osterhout Fahrni," by Nancy Knickerbrocker.

In the period since the Second World War there has been both a massive influx of women into the Canadian job market and substantive changes to the welfare state as early expansion gave way, by the 1970s, to a prolonged period of retrenchment and restructuring. Through a detailed historical account of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program from 1945 to 1997, Ann Porter demonstrates how gender was central both to the construction of the post-war welfare state, as well as to its subsequent crisis and restructuring. Drawing on a wide range of sources (including archival material, UI administrative tribunal decisions, and documents from the government, labour and women's groups) she examines the implications of restructuring for women's equality, as well as how women's groups, labour and the state interacted in efforts to shape the policy agenda. Porter argues that, while the post-war welfare state model was based on a family with a single male breadwinner, the new model is one that assumes multiple family earners and encourages employability for both men and women. The result has been greater formal equality for women, but at the same time the restructuring and reduction of benefits have undermined these gains and made women's lives increasingly difficult. Using concepts from political economy, feminism, and public policy, this study will be of interest across a range of disciplines. --Publisher's description

This essay offers an initial exploration of the Canadian labour movement’s international policies during the early Cold War period, with particular reference to views on Asia where the Cold War had its most devastating effects. --Introduction

The article reviews the book, "Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry," by Ellen Israel Rosen.

Canada's oldest and largest public housing project. Regent Park in Toronto, was originally conceived as an ideal community for low-income families in housing hardship. By the 1990s, however, it had become virtually synonymous with socio-economic marginalization and behavioural depravity. Indeed, the broader social identity of Regent Park has become an accumulation and escalation of the stigma of its residents. The first section of this article charts the historical escalation of polarization between Regent Park residents and the Metropolitan Toronto population by comparing a series of broadly illustrative statistical traits over a 40-year period. This long-term historical perspective allows us to scrutinize the development of socio-economic marginalization both before and after the boom period of postwar capitalism from the 1940s to the 1970s. It confirms that Regent's resident population underwent a dramatic process of socio-economic divergence in comparison to the general Metropolitan Toronto population, which began in the mid to late 1960s before the onset of outright assaults on the welfare state. I flesh out the stark statistical portrayal by considering various qualitative sources such as oral testimony, letters to the author by former tenants, rare resident case files, and internal and public documents from the various housing authorities. In the second section, I explain the rise of socio-economic inequality. Contrary to currently popular underclass theories, I directly point the arrow of responsibility for rising poverty and inequality towards state housing policies, including wider urban renewal strategies and internal public housing practices, and neoliberal economic restructuring. Unlike most studies, I centre in a third section on the potently deleterious effects of stereotyping Regent Park as an outcast space. Stigmatizing renderings by extemal observers were not free-floating ideological representations but real reflections and shapers of spatial and social divisions with concrete economic and social consequences for tenants. I conclude by discussing what residents themselves thought about their homes and how they coped with stigmatization and material deprivation. Sometimes accepting and internalizing negative external representations and/or projecting these labels onto their neighbours and other times resolutely battling against these brutalizing depictions. Regent Park residents were always active players in building a meaningful living space.

We believe there is a need to move beyond simply privileging formal or informal organization as the most authentic expression of worker activity, but rather to recognize both and analyse the interrelationship between the two. The present article provides a method for achieving this as well as presenting the resultsof applying this method to a particular country and historical context [namely, workers in the Australian colonies from 1795 to 1850]. --From authors' introduction

Rabagliati's strip "Paul: Apprentice Typographer" was one of the highlights of 1999's Drawn & Quarterly anthology, and his first comic book Paul in the Country won the 2000 Harvey award for Best New Talent. This, his first graphic novel, is eagerly anticipated by comix connoisseurs who enjoy a sweet, unsentimental story about being a teenager and Rabagliati's crisp retro-modern 1950s drawing style. This book continues the story of Paul, a Quebecois teenager in the 1970s, as he experiences the first conflicts of responsibility with his desire to be free. Paul is outraged that he is forced to stop his high school art training. But he's been asked to put art aside because his other grades are so terribly low. Defiant, he quits school and anticipates a summer of leisure. But instead Paul follows the path of so many Quebecois teenagers: he lands a job as a counselor at one of the many summer camps in the mountains outside the city. There he finds himself guiding a motley band of kids, misfits and troublemakers, much like himself. After quitting school and trying his luck in the "real world," average teenager Paul gets a job as a counselor at a summer camp run for underprivileged children in 1970s Quebec. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures," by Sheila Smith.

The article provides a "contrapuntal reading" of Frederic M. Bell-Smith's painting, The Heart of the Empire (1909). Born in the UK, Bell-Smith emigrated to Canada at age 21 in the confederation year of 1867. Although Bell-Smith also painted country landscapes,The Heart of the Empire depicts a busy confluence in London's financial district known as Bank Junction. The author contrasts the painting with Niels Moeller Lund's 1904 work, which had the same title. Contextual themes of gender, industrialization (notably, the newspaper industry), nationalism, modernity, neo-imperialism, and post-colonialism are also explored. By pointing to the painting's layers of meaning, the author intends to promote dialogue on post-confederation Canadian art.

The article reviews the book "Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography," by John McIlroy.

The election of neo-conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario in the early 1990s brought dramatic changes to provincial public policy; both the Ralph Klein Revolution and Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution emphasized fundamental changes in the role of government, balanced budgets, and the elimination of provincial debts. While public sector unions were forced to react, the response of the Alberta and Ontario unions differed significantly. The reasons, outcome, and long-term impact of the difference is the focus of Yonatan Reshef and Sandra Rastin's careful and revealing analysis. The authors' argument concentrates on union responses to the neo-conservative transformation in the two affected provinces, but the scope of the discussion expands to cover such issues as the differences between the two regimes, the damage to the Ontario labour movement dealt by the labour-oriented NDP government, the limits of inter-union cooperation, and the role of modern unions in politics. Lively and timely, Unions in the Time of Revolution places Canada's unions in the full context of the neo-conservative trend in provincial politics, and demonstrates the importance of individual union responses in times of such significant change. --Publisher's description. Contents: Alberta and Ontario: Industrial relations and their contexts -- Revolutions, Canada style -- Collective action conceptual framework -- Revolutionizing the Civil Service: OPSEU and AUPE -- Teachers: Protecting the profession, defending the union organization -- Sins of commission and sins of omissions: The Ontario days of action and missed opportunities in Alberta -- Sleeping with the devil: Strategic voting in the 1999 Ontario Election -- Revisiting the collective action model -- Additional thoughts on collective action.