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We examine the relationship between union power and redistribution in Canada’s ten provinces between 1986 and 2014. Subnational jurisdictions are thus the focus of research questions that have previously been addressed at the international level. Multilevel models with time-series cross-sectional data are used to estimate the long-term association between union density and redistribution through provincial transfer payments and income taxes. We found that higher union density correlates with considerably more redistribution over the long term but not over the short term. This finding is confirmed by three distinct measures of inequality and poverty reduction, an indication that it is quite robust. The association is significant for the entire study period and for its second half. This finding is consistent with power resource theory in its original form, but not with more recent work in that area or with comparative political economy scholarship, which generally now neglects or downplays the impact of organized labour on social and economic policy outcomes. Our findings suggest a need to re-assess the diminished interest of recent researchers in the political influence of organized labour. It will also interest scholars in other countries where tax and transfer systems are decentralized, and where the impact of organized labour on such measures has been understudied at the subnational level. Additionally, we show that unionized voters in Canada are more favourably disposed than their non-unionized counterparts toward redistribution and toward pro-redistribution political parties. Unions may consequently affect redistribution in part by socializing their members to favour it. This possibility is advanced with preliminary data in this paper. We argue that further scholarly attention is both required and deserved on this subject in Canada and elsewhere.

In this inspiring history of a union, labour historian Andy Hanson delves deep into the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and how it evolved from two deeply divided unions to one of the province’s most united and powerful voices for educators. Today’s teacher is under constant pressure to raise students’ test scores, while the rise of neoliberalism in Canada has systematically stripped our education system of funding and support. But educators have been fighting back with decades of fierce labour action, from a landmark province-wide strike in the 1970s, to record-breaking front-line organizing against the Harris government and the Common Sense Revolution, to present-day picket lines and bargaining tables. Hanson follows the making of elementary teachers in Ontario as a distinct class of white-collar, public-sector workers who awoke in the last quarter of the twentieth century to the power of their collective strength. --Publisher's description

This study aims to shed light on the main determinants of and barriers to union commitment among young workers and, more generally, the relationship young workers have with union life. So far, the relationship between young workers and unionism has been examined mainly in terms of the challenges of access to unionization that confront young workers, a group generally underrepresented in union membership. The more specific issue of union commitment among young workers, once they become unionized, has remained largely underexplored in the literature. Using quantitative and qualitative data from an empirical survey of young unionized workers in the Quebec public service, our study identifies and compares the main factors that explain union commitment among young unionized workers and the theoretical underpinnings. It also seeks to shed light on the barriers to this commitment and identifies the organizational measures that could facilitate union commitment among young workers, based on the perceptions expressed by young union members. Our findings indicate that unions should adopt multidimensional organizational measures to foster union commitment among young workers, with a first step being to increase personalized contact between local union representatives and young members. Such investments at the local level are critical, as shown by our quantitative and qualitative findings. Thus, any reform or measure aimed at encouraging union involvement of young workers should not be limited merely to structural aspects but should also take into account the attitudinal and relational underpinnings of young workers’ commitment to their union. By shifting the focus from youth unionization to young members’ involvement in union bodies, our study will contribute to debate about union representation and the generational renewal of the labour movement’s activist base.

This thesis explores the experiences of Black women who are in tenured, tenure-stream, and non-tenured faculty positions and presents how Black women negotiate their intersectional identities in the academy. The study documents their self-identifications and struggles with the academy in terms of power relations in their respective universities, including racial and sexual discrimination. In addition, the study explores the career paths of Black women faculty from contract faculty to full professor. Methodologically, the study uses Black Feminist theorizing along with autoethnography in order to explore the nature of the experiences of Black Canadian women faculty within the academy. I interviewed 13 self-identified Black women across Canadian universities, including myself as the fourteenth key informant. This study reveals a complex and rich text of how Black women see themselves in the university, their experiences with multiple and overlapping oppressions and how this affects their careers, and finally, their contributions to the academy and their visions of success.

The article reviews the book, "Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools," by Steven Conn.

When health care workers call a Code White, its an emergency response for a violent incident: a call for help. But its one that goes unanswered in hospitals, clinics, and long-term care homes across the country. Code White exposes a shocking epidemic of violence thats hidden in plain sight, one in which workers are bruised, battered, assaulted, and demeaned, but carry on in silence, with little recourse or support. Researchers Margaret M. Keith and James T. Brophy lay bare the stories of over one hundred nurses and personal support workers, aides and porters, clerical workers and cleaners. The nightmarish experiences they relate are not one-off incidents, but symptoms of deep systemic flaws that have transformed health care into one of the most dangerous occupational sectors in Canada. The same questions echo in the wake of each and every brutal encounter: Is violence and trauma really just 'part of the job'? Why is this going underreported and unchecked? What needs to be done, and how? --Publisher's description. Contents: Foreword / Michael Hurley -- Preface . Part 1: Exposing a Hidden Epidemic. 1. Drawing Back the Curtain -- 2. Under the Scope -- 3. Finding an Abnormality. Part 2: A Forensic Examination. 4. Birth and Decline of the Health Care System -- 5. Birth and Decline of the Long-Term Care System. Part 3: Prescription for Healing. 6. Treatment Strategies -- 7. Rocky Road to Recovery -- 8. Collective Quest for the Cure. Afterword: Health Care Workers during COVID-19 -- Notes.

The article reviews the book, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk," by James Wilt.

Trois grèves qui avaient pour objectif l’obtention du salaire minimum à 15 $ l’heure ont été menées par des syndicats québécois en 2016. Ces grèves se sont inscrites dans des campagnes politiques qui avaient le même objectif. Cet article propose une étude comparée de ces grèves dans le but d’analyser dans quelle mesure les formes de solidarité et les modes d’organisation déployés offrent des pistes de revitalisation qui permettraient au mouvement syndical québécois de relever les défis stratégiques contemporains auxquels fait face le mouvement syndical québécois. L’analyse de ces trois grèves, en s’appuyant sur une typologie des divers syndicalismes et activismes syndicaux, permet d’approfondir les formes de solidarité déployées par les syndicats ainsi que les formes de mobilisation originales qui, toutefois, n’ont pas mené à un progrès substantiel du contrôle démocratique exercé par les membres sur leur mouvement.

The article reviews the book, "Le régime des décrets de convention collective au Québec. Quel avenir ?," by Jean Bernier.

L’article présente les résultats d’une étude qualitative menée auprès de 31 intervenants et intervenantes qui travaillent en protection de l’enfance au Québec. Elle porte sur les conséquences des difficultés émotionnelles des intervenants sur leurs relations avec les gestionnaires et les collègues de travail, dans le contexte de la réforme du réseau de la santé et des services sociaux (projet de loi 10). Les résultats montrent qu’une large majorité d’intervenants et intervenantes rapportent une ou plusieurs conséquences délétères dans les relations avec les gestionnaires (colère et frustration, méfiance à l’égard d’une possible instrumentalisation des difficultés émotionnelles, évitement et perte de confiance). Également, une proportion très significative d’entre eux font état de conséquences à l’échelle des relations avec les collègues de travail (isolement et retrait, effet boule de neige sur les collègues et l’équipe de travail et diminution de la collaboration et de l’entraide). L’analyse montre que l’intensification du travail et la dégradation des conditions de pratique des intervenantes et intervenants sociaux, qui ont résulté de la dernière réforme (projet de loi 10) instituée par le ministre Barrette (2013), ont significativement contribué à fragiliser les collectifs de travail. Ce faisant, les possibilités d’entraide et de coopération, pourtant nécessaires à la réalisation de leur mandat professionnel, ont tendance à s’effacer au profit d’une activité professionnelle pratiquée par des travailleuses et travailleurs isolés et en souffrance.

The article reviews the book, "The Southern Key: Class, Race and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s," by Michael Goldfield.

The article reviews the book and CD, "Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song," edited by Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore.

The decline in the prevalence of the Standard Employment Relationship in Canada has created challenges for Canadian unions. This article reviews the available estimates of the prevalence of precarious employment and gig work in Canada. Using data from the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) research group it evaluates both the success of unions in organising workers in precarious employment and bargaining for them. The last section reviews recent union strategies to organise workers in precarious employment with a focus on the subset of precarious employment referred to as gig work. Organising gig workers presents unique challenges for unions as many are deemed by their employers as independent contractors and as a result not covered by existing Canadian labour legislation and hence not eligible for union membership. The paper concludes by arguing that organising precarious workers is a work in progress, whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

Predicated on a narrative of mutuality and cooperation, what has come to be known as the Canadian fur trade has long been positioned as exceptional in its relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples. In this framing the fur trade in what would become Canada is represented as having experienced little of the colonial violence that manifested in other colonial encounters and has been constructed as devoid of the unfreedom of chattel slavery. In fact, this characterization is untrue. Located within the French and British empires, the Canadian fur trade reflected the violences of its empires. From the seventeenth, and well into the nineteenth centuries chattel slavery existed in the fur trade as it did in the empires of which it was a part. Here, as elsewhere, complex webs of family/business relationships carried the violence of empire to and between its colonies. The creation and maintenance of these webs offered spaces where women as well as men could participate in the success of their family/businesses, but also in the transmission of colonial violence. One example of this is the Wedderburn Colvile family, their involvement in both West Indian plantation slavery and in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and in the interventions of one of its members, Jean Wedderburn Douglas, Lady Selkirk in what has become known as the fur trade wars. A closer look at the Wedderburn Colvile family and their interests in the Northern North American fur trade offers insights into how colonial violence and changes in the laws relating to chattel slavery impacted the fur trade, as the effects of these changes traveled along family/business webs of networks of relationship. This research draws on primary sources gleaned from archives and libraries in Scotland, England, the West Indies, the United States and Canada. It brings together a wide range of secondary literature to argue that, just as in other parts of empire, colonial violence, including chattel slavery, connected through webs of family/business relationships, existed in the Canadian fur trade. At the same time, this project argues, the erasure of that story is something we are only now beginning to address.

This article discusses the sector-wide organization of contractual archaeologists in Québec, beginning with the formation of a workers’ committee and leading subsequently to union accreditation. We theorize the difficulty of organizing these “precarious professionals” and suggest that self-organization outside of an industrial relations framework may be required to overcome barriers to their unionization. Deliberation, norm setting, and informal parlays with employers lead to clarifying class distinctions that professional identification often occludes, while self-organization increases worker confidence in collective action.

Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York, by 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be "one of the most dangerous men in Canada." Able to Lead traces Kingsley's political journey from soapbox speaker in San Francisco to prominence in the Socialist Party of Canada. Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt illuminate a figure who shaped a generation of Canadian leftists during a time when it was uncommon for disabled people to lead. They examine Kingsley's endeavours for justice against the Northern Pacific Railway, and how Kingsley's life intersected with immigration law and free speech rights. Able to Lead brings a turbulent period in North American history to life, highlighting Kingsley's profound legacy for the twenty-first-century political left. --Publisher's description. Contents: Kingsley in Context: Labour History, Legal History, and Critical Disability Theory -- Incident at Spring Gulch: Disablement, Litigation, and the Birth of a Revolutionary -- California Radical: Fighting for Free Speech and Running for Congress in the Socialist Labor Party -- Crossing the Line: Kingsley Arrives in British Columbia -- No Compromise: Kingsley and the Socialist Party of Canada -- Kingsley and the State: Clashes with Authority in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada -- The Twilight Years: Kingsley and the 1920s Canadian Left.

« L’heure des pétitions est passée, il faut des actes » présente une histoire vue d’en bas des sans-travail québécois au cours de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919-1939). L’objectif de cette thèse est de démontrer la contribution de l’action collective des sans-emploi à la politisation du problème du chômage au Québec durant les années 1920 et 1930. Cette période est un événement matrice pour l’histoire du chômage au Québec et au Canada. Le chômage, qui est déjà un phénomène important au cours du processus d’industrialisation au XIXe siècle, atteint au cours de la Grande Dépression des proportions jusqu’alors inégalées. Ce problème, qui jusqu’à la Première Guerre mondiale est encore largement considéré comme relevant d’une éthique du travail déficiente, de l’imprévoyance des individus, ou encore la conséquence des cycles saisonniers de l’économie, se présente de plus en plus comme un phénomène politique et systémique remettant en cause l’organisation de la société québécoise et canadienne. Dans ce changement de paradigme, l’action collective des sans-travail joue un rôle déterminant. Grâce à celle-ci, le chômage prend la forme d’un problème à la fois collectif, social et politique, qui ultimement remet en question la relation entre la démocratie et le capitalisme. L’étude du répertoire d’action collective des sans-travail québécois permet de mieux comprendre leur rôle dans l’histoire du chômage. Leurs protestations prennent racine dans une économie morale qui annonce une redéfinition de la citoyenneté fondée sur la formulation de nouvelles attentes envers l’État. Considérant que le chômage est indépendant de leur volonté, les sans-emploi estiment alors avoir le droit à une assistance contre le chômage. Bien que les manifestations de sans-travail ne soient pas un phénomène nouveau dans l’histoire québécoise, au cours des années 1920 et 1930, celles-ci apparaissent de moins en moins marginales. Prenant racine à Montréal dans le contexte de la Révolte ouvrière, elles s’étendent à plusieurs autres villes de la province au cours de la Grande Dépression. Perçus comme une menace à la paix sociale, dans un moment fortement marqué par l’anticommunisme, ces mouvements forcent les pouvoirs publics à intervenir. Encore peu étudiées à ce jour, ces manifestations, jumelées à celles qui se déroulent ailleurs au Canada, expliquent pourquoi le chômage devient, pour la première fois, un problème politique d’importance et débattu au sein de la sphère publique.

Award-winning ergonomist Karen Messing is talking with women—women who wire circuit boards, sew clothes, clean toilets, drive forklifts, care for children, serve food, run labs. What she finds is a workforce in harm’s way, choked into silence, whose physical and mental health invariably comes in second place: underestimated, underrepresented, understudied, underpaid. Should workplaces treat all bodies the same? With confidence, empathy, and humour, Messing navigates the minefield that is naming sex and biology on the job, refusing to play into stereotypes or play down the lived experiences of women. Her findings leap beyond thermostat settings and adjustable chairs and into candid, deeply reported storytelling that follows in the muckraking tradition of social critic Barbara Ehrenreich. Messing’s questions are vexing and her demands are bold: we need to dare to direct attention to women’s bodies, champion solidarity, stamp out shame, and transform the workplace—a task that turns out to be as scientific as it is political. --Publisher's description. Contents: Part 1: Shame and the Workplace. The third hour -- Shame and silence in health care -- A feminist intervention that hurt women? Part 2: Segregated Bodies. Jobs and bodies -- Same, different, or understudied? Part 3.Changing the Workplace: Re-engineering women's work -- Looking the dragon in the face -- Feminist ergonomic intervention with a feminist employer -- Solidarity. Part 4: Changing Occupational Health Science. Science and the second body -- Understanding women's pain -- The technical is political -- Going forward together. Index.

Discusses the shifting relationship between Indigneous peoples and the labour movement, where historically there has been deep tension. Concludes that labour organizing should engage with and learn from the frameworks of Indigenous communities as they struggle to develop in the context of the capitalist system and their changing relationship with the state. A revised version of the essay published in the 2012 edition.

The article reviews the book, "Les relations industrielles en questions," edited by Patrice Jalette.