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The article reviews the books, "Coffret 1 : La boîte à idées : volume M : Les pratiques observables du management des équipes et des personnes ; volume P : Le pilotage du management ; Coffret 2 : La boîte à outils," by Jean-Louis Langevin.

Using the postal service as an example, the critical role played by a series of "implicit" judgments when estimating the government earnings differential is highlighted. Regression estimates demonstrate that alternative treatments of location, gender, industry, occupation and union status result in estimates ranging from a double digit advantage for postal workers to no advantage at all. It is shown that women employees and those in rural locations generate substantial positive postal differentials, while the differentials for men and urban employees are very modest. Ignoring this point and making policy based on the average differential is unlikely to be effective. It is argued that the standard of comparability, comparing similar workers doing similar work, requires that judgments about samples and controls be made explicit as they largely determine the resulting estimates.

An examination of the social, political, and demographic history of British miners and their households on Vancouver Island in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century coal-miners imported from Europe, Asia, and eastern North America burrowed beneath the Vancouver Island towns of Nanaimo, Wellington, and Cumberland. No group was as numerous and influential in this enterprise as the hundreds of British immigrants who traveled half-way around the world to take up back-breaking work in the most remote colony in the Empire. What drew the British miners and their families to the north Pacific? Why did they set aside six months to journey to a colony about which they knew little? Once they reached Vancouver Island, what did they make of it and what did they make it into? And how did they re-make themselves in the process? In Colonization and Community John Belshaw takes a new look at British Columbia's first working class, the men, women, and children beneath and beyond the pit-head. Beginning with an exploration of emigrant expectations and ambitions, he investigates working conditions, household wages, racism, industrial organization, gender, schooling, leisure, community building, and the fluid identity of the British mining colony, the archetypal west coast proletariat. By connecting the story of Vancouver Island to the larger story of Victorian industrialization, he delineates what was distinctive and what was common about the lot of the settler society. Belshaw breaks new ground, challenging the easy assumptions of transferred British political traditions, analyzing the colonial at the household level, and revealing the emergent communities of Vancouver Island as the cradle of British Columbian working-class culture. --Publisher's description

This study investigates the prevalence and impacts of employer resistance to union certification applications in 8 Canadian jurisdictions. Employer resistance was found to be the norm, with 80% of employers overtly and actively opposing union certification applications. Analysis demonstrated that employer opposition to union certification can impact upon both initial certification outcomes and on the probability the parties will establish and sustain a collective bargaining relationship. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that focusing only on the probability of certification success seriously underestimates the impact of employer opposition.

Les relations industrielles (RI) influencent-elles la performance des organisations ? Des données financières de même que des données traitant d’une douzaine de pratiques RI et du climat RI ont été colligées dans 241 caisses populaires faisant partie du Mouvement Desjardins au Québec afin d’estimer l’effet des RI sur trois dimensions de la performance. Les résultats sont à l’effet que lorsque l’influence des autres déterminants est tenue constante, les pratiques RI et le climat RI ont un impact significatif sur la performance organisationnelle, en particulier sur la productivité et les coûts de main-d’oeuvre.

The article reviews the book, "Workers' Compensation: Foundations for Reform," edited by Morley Gunderson and Douglas Hyatt.

The article reviews the book, "The World's Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman.," by Albert Moritz and Theresa Moritz.

The article reviews the book, "La révolution du travail : de l’artisan au manager," by Rolande Pinard.

L’analyse des organisations s’est-elle engagée dans une fausse voie depuis la première parution, il y a plus de quarante ans, de la revue Administrative Science Quarterly ? Il y aurait eu divorce entre la théorie et l’empirie, le lien aurait été perdu entre les deux. L’auteur montre que cette perte est due aux références à des ensembles théoriques structuraux, alors que les organisations, comme la société dans sa globalité, ne sont explicables qu’en partant des interactions entre acteurs, interactions qui permettent de comprendre comment se vivent les incertitudes de l’action. Des exemples précis montrent que le fondement de ces interactions est, dans les organisations productives, la relation des salariés aux objets techniques, la rationalité instrumentale. Elle leur permet d’entrer en relations et de gérer les incertitudes sans réifier ni contrôler ces relations.

The article reviews the book, "Sociologies du travail : quarante ans après," edited by Amélie Pouchet.

In most communities the relationship between trade unions and social activist organizations is usually underdeveloped and uneven. Likewise trade unions usually have no organic connections to unorganized workers and contribute little to the task of representing these workers in their struggles against employers and government agencies. The Workers Organizing and Resource Centre (WORC), a collective administered by trade unionists and social activists, is an attempt to bridge this solitude. Since it was established in 1998, WORC has been the home to numerous working class advocacy organizations and a hub of progressive activity in Winnipeg. Its mandate is to facilitate the development of community organizations, provide advocacy work for non union workers, and to assist in organizing the unorganized. This paper describes the function that WORC plays in the Winnipeg progressive community and discusses the relationship to its sole source of funding, the national office of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

The article reviews the book, "Initiation à la négociation collective by Jean Sexton.

“The west wants in” was the rallying cry of the Reform Party launched in 1987. What the West wanted, how its aspirations could be fulfilled within Confederation, and how fulfilling them might change Canada itself came to dominate the party’s agenda over the next decade or so. The West’s relationship to the rest of the country has also been a major theme in Canadian labour history, of ten with respect to notions of “western radicalism” or “western exceptionalism.” Reviewing Labour / Le Travail’s coverage of Canadian labour over the past quarter-century, this article reviews the extent to which western workers have been represented, the varying ways in which their identity has been characterized, and the degree to which traditional perceptions of a “radical” West have been either reinforced or revised as a result.

Des jeunes salariés québécois reprochent à leurs syndicats de ne pas tenir suffisamment compte de leurs intérêts dans la négociation de leurs conditions de travail. Ils ont ainsi fondé leurs propres associations en réaction à la façon dont le syndicat exerce son monopole de représentation. Ce nouveau phénomène traduit une insatisfaction certaine face à la façon dont s’exerce la démocratie syndicale dans certains milieux de travail. L’émergence de ces associations parallèles devrait inciter les leaders syndicaux à faire montre de plus d’ouverture, à engager le dialogue et à entreprendre une réflexion devenue nécessaire sur leur conception de la démocratie — et la notion d’égalité qui y est sous-jacente — à l’ère des droits fondamentaux de la personne.

This article attempts to explain the similarities and parallels between Labour/ Le Travail and its Australian equivalent, Labour History; as well as analysing Labour/Le Travail's distinctive interests and concerns, which reflect the peculiarities of the Canadian. It suggests, in particular, that the timing of Labour/Le Travail's appearance was propitious and that it was well positioned for various reasons to take advantage of the Thompsonian moment in labour historiography. Further, by responding to the rise of the new social movements, it was able to enrich further the study of labour history through attention to forms of oppression other than class. With class nonetheless remaining its central focus, a degree of political pessimism is understandably evident from the mid-1980s onwards, with the downturn in labour movement activity and allegations about the death of class. By the same token, signs of working-class remobilization in the late 1990s have encouraged a renewed sense of political purpose in the journal. It is argued that this situation also offers opportunities for new forms of dialogue between academics and activists challenging corporate globalization, enabling the journal and those associated with it to continue to reach out to audiences beyond the academy, to place their knowledge of labour's past at the service of movements contesting the current circumstances of the working class.

The article reviews the book, "Where was the working class? Revolution in Eastern Germany," by Linda Fuller.

This interdisciplinary dissertation aims to develop social and political theory capable of understanding social class as a structured process and relationship mediated by gender, race and other social relations and taking place in time and specific socio-material contexts, in order to analyse working classes as historical formations. It also aims to use this perspective and the existing body of historical scholarship to conduct a theoretically-rigorous study of the remaking of the Canadian working class in the 1940s. Arguing that recent theoretical work on class formation is inadequate, the dissertation critically appropriates ideas drawn from classical and contemporary scholarship to outline a theory of working classes as historical formations. An account of how dominant classes exercise power in capitalist societies is a necessary complement to this theory; the overview developed theorizes the existence of capitalist rule in differentiated forms and as inherently, but not primarily, ideological. From this perspective, the dissertation analyses the remaking of the Canadian working class in the paid workplace, community and household spheres in the 1940s. It argues that between 1941 and 1947 a broad but uneven process of class recomposition took place, focussing on such issues as the character of struggles in this period, their participants, their organizations and ideologies in order to illuminate the dynamics of change in working-class formations. In the course of struggle, both the working-class formation and capitalist rule were altered in important ways. The new formation that stabilized in the late 1940s featured improved living standards and greater unity against capital at the most elementary level. It was also shaped in important respects by a particular configuration of racist, sexist and heterosexist social relations. Unions changed from within and without, becoming generally committed to a responsible and bureaucratic practice. The CCF became the undisputed party of the English-Canadian workers' movement, weakening and marginalizing political radicalism. Although it is misleading to interpret this as working-class incorporation, working-class capacities to change society had been constrained and undermined in new ways, in part as a result of the very reforms workers wrested from employers and state power.

The article reviews the book, "Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope," by Susan Weissman.