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The article reviews the book, "In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America," by Alice Kessler-Harris.

The article reviews the book, "Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miners' Struggle of '31," by Stephen L. Endicott.

The past decade has been marked by increased awareness concerning employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. Yet, to the author's knowledge, there has been limited research regarding the response of Canadian labour organizations to the workplace needs of gay and lesbian members. Limitations of these previous studies include small sample size, lack of theoretical framework, and the absence of empirical testing of hypotheses. The present study builds on these works through the use of Craig's model, the inclusion of multi-disciplinary research, and the empirical testing of data collected from more than 240 Canadian collective agreements. Key findings include that larger, public sector bargaining units with equality clauses in their collective agreements were most likely also to contain clauses that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

The article reviews the book, "How New is the "New Employment Contract"? Evidence from North American Pay Practices," by David I. Levine, Dale Belman, Gary Charness, Erica L. Groshen and K.C. O'Shaughnessy.

This study examines female self-employment in British Columbia from 1901 to 1971. Entrepreneurial women comprised a small proportion of the total female labour force but they exhibited differences from the rest of the labour force that deserve attention. The study relies on the Census of Canada to gain perspective on trends in female self-employment over a broad time period; qualitative sources are also utilized, including Business and Professional Women’s Club records, to illustrate how individual businesswomen reflected patterns of age, marital status, and family observed at a broad level. The role of gender in women’s decisions to run their own enterprises and in their choice of enterprise is also explored. While the research focus is British Columbia, this study is comparative: self-employed women in the province are compared to their counterparts in the rest of Canada, but also to self-employed men, and to other working women, in both regions. Regionally, women in British Columbia had higher rates of self-employment than women in the rest of the country between 1901 and 1971. Self-employed women in both British Columbia and Canada were, like wage-earning women, limited to a narrow range of occupational types, but they were more likely to work in male-dominated occupations. Self employed women were also older and more likely to be married, widowed or divorced than wage-earning women; in these aspects, they resembled self-employed men. But there were gender differences: whether women worked in female or male-dominated enterprises, they stressed their femininity. The need to take care of their families, particularly if they had lost a spouse through death or desertion, provided additional rationale for women’s presence in the business world. Family, marital status, age, gender and region all played a role in women’s decisions to enter into self-employment between 1901 and 1971.

This paper analyses the travel writings composed by the oil drillers from Enniskillen township, in southwestern Ontario, to explain how they went about re-inforcing the project of European capitalist imperialism while simultaneously disavowing the agency of native "Others." As British subjects and Anglo-Canadians, travel and travel writing helped to define Enniskillen's "foreign drillers" as both colonizers and colonized. As agents of imperialism Enniskillen drillers became part of an imperial overclass by virtue of their "whiteness," "Britishness," and technical expertise in the mining and refining of petroleum. The colonial oil fields also became a space for the re-invention of Victorian ideals of domesticity. The wives and children of foreign drillers also travelled abroad with their husbands. In their role as homemakers, women also reinforced imperialism and its hierarchies of race and class.

The article reviews the book, "Public Enterprise Revisited: A Closer Look at the 1954-79 UK Labour Productivity Record," by Christafis H. Iordanoglou.

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

The article 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.