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The article reviews the books, "Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation," by Jack Reid, and "Thumbing a Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada," by Linda Mahood.

The article reviews the book, "Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada," by Esyllt W. Jones.

The article reviews the book, "Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison," by Ted McCoy.

Many large cities in North America have jurisdiction over licensing rules that shape the employment and health conditions of ride-hail and taxi drivers. Yet there is a lack of research on the role of licensing agencies relating to the occupational health and safety (OHS) of taxi drivers. Most taxi and ride-hail drivers in Canada are self-employed workers and are, by default, exempt from OHS and worker compensation laws. Additionally, municipal licensing regimes in Canada and the US have undergone various changes as a result of pressures from new platform-based ride-hail services, like Uber and Lyft. The analysis is part of a larger study on the health and safety conditions faced by ride-hail drivers. The research approach adopted a multi-level sampling and analysis strategy with the aim of connecting taxi drivers’ everyday work experiences to company and sector practices, and with various regulatory arenas, including municipal licensing, taxation and car insurance. In this paper, the analysis draws from in-depth interviews at these different levels: with taxi and ride-hail drivers, with taxi and ride-hail managers, and with key informants in government, law, insurance, tax and elsewhere. The paper identifies features and impacts of municipal deregulation in the era of on-demand taxi services, focusing on a large Canadian city in a province where municipal authorities regulate the vehicle-for-hire sector. The research identified regulatory changes that included removing centralized taxi vehicle inspections, cancelling mandatory driver training, and instigating rapid changes to competition in the taxi workforce by issuing unlimited numbers of ride-hail licenses. Our analysis indicates that regulatory changes adopted by the city administration have compounded work vulnerabilities and hazards for taxi drivers, while extending hazardous conditions to ride-hail drivers. These hazards suggest the need for interventions at a range of levels, actors and agencies, rather than solely by city licensing officials.

Mental health challenges appear to be extremely prolific and challenging for correctional service employees, affecting persons working in community, institutional, and administrative correctional services. Focusing specifically on correctional workers employed by the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, we shed light on their interpretations of the complexities of their occupational work and of how their work affects staff. Using a qualitative thematic approach to data analyses, we show that participants (n = 67) encounter barriers to treatment seeking, which they describe as tremendous, starting with benefits, wages, and shift work. We let the voices of staff elucidate what is needed to create a healthier correctional workforce. Recommendations include more training opportunities and programs; quarterly, semiannual, or annual appointments with a mental health professional who can assess changes in the mental health status of employees; offsite assessments to ensure confidentiality; and team building opportunities to reduce interpersonal conflict at work and increase moral by improving the work environment.

The article reviews the book, "Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics," by Jorge J. Santos, Jr .

The article reviews the book, "A Primer on American Labor Law," by William Gould IV.

The article reviews the book, "Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History," by Richard J. Evans.

This article uses case studies from three comparable Ontario-based universities to explore the relationship between bargaining unit structures and collective bargaining outcomes for unionized sessional contract academic faculty. The article charts the complex network of bargaining unit structures and inter-union or association relationships in Ontario universities and uses both quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate how different structures influence internal debates about sessional contract academic faculty, bargaining priorities, and collective bargaining strategies. The authors conclude that bargaining unit structures have less of an impact than practitioners assume and that success at the bargaining table for sessional contract academic faculty is dependent on a broad range of factors rather than any particular structure.

The automotive industry has long been a leader in the introduction of new forms of work organization and technology—including mass production and high performance work systems (HPWS). It has also been a focal point for how trade unions negotiate such systems. Recently, much attention has focused on Industry 4.0 (I 4.0)—a manufacturing system featuring advanced robotics, digitalization and artificial intelligence. However, in the automotive industry, I 4.0 is confronted with considerable technical and social challenges, and I 4.0 paradigms have been criticized for marginalizing the continuing importance of employees in shaping, if not ‘hybridizing,’ such new production processes. Based on a study of UNIFOR union locals in Canadian automotive assembly plants, we argue that I 4.0 has to be analyzed in terms of the ways unions have influenced the almost universal adoption of HPWS in that sector. We thus investigate the ways unions have impacted HPWS and its implications for their roles in workplace integration of I 4.0. As such, we first argue that, while overlapping, HPWS and I 4.0 represent different managerial strategies. Second, we develop an exploratory analytical framework for use in examining union roles in negotiating HPWS and technology adoption. Based on this framework, we then analyze 18 interviews we conducted in 2017-2018 with plant managers and key UNIFOR representatives at five southern Ontario assembly plants. The interviews illustrate not only commonalities in adoption of HPWS, but also differing ways in which the union influences the ‘hybridization’ of HPWS. Union practices differ significantly from one plant to another as a function of three variables: 1- firm-plant competitive positions; 2- the union’s overall monopoly face; and 3- internal union local solidarity and narratives around HPWS. Keeping these commonalities and differences in mind, we then consider the challenges that unions are likely to confront as they begin negotiating I 4.0.

The article reviews the book, "A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change," by E. Sylvia Pankhurst, edited with an introduction by Katherine Connelly,.

The article reviews the book, "The Social Cost of Cheap Food: Labour and the Political Economy of Food Distribution in Britain, 1830–1914," by Sébastien Rioux.

Review essay of "A Grander Vision: My Life in the Labour Movement" (2019) by Sid Ryan, and "A New Kind of Union: Unifor and the Birth of the Modern Canadian Union" (2019) by Fred Wilson.

The article reviews the book, "Research Handbook on Employee Turnover," edited by George Saridakis and Cary L. Cooper.

While decades of scholarship point to the broad consensus that unions compress the distribution of wages and incomes, recent empirical contributions suggest that unions’ within-country egalitarian effect is dwindling, as unions decline and membership composition changes. What is more, unions now operate in an increasingly difficult political economy transformed by, among other forces, globalization, financialization and fiscal austerity. At the same time, there is an increased demand for unions to play a broader role in a movement for distributive justice. Transposing these debates to the Canadian provincial context, this article asks whether unions still matter for reducing inequality. Considering the role of industrial relations more broadly by taking into account strike activity and collective labour statutes, the article explores the relationship between union power and market income inequality over a period ranging from 1984 to 2012. This empirical contribution is framed in theories from comparative capitalism, economics, and sociology. Descriptive longitudinal statistics support the well-documented union decline narrative. On average, union density and strike activity have declined in the provinces. As for the quality of collective labour rights, it is argued that the relative apparent stability of statutes conceals more substantive issues with Wagnerism as an organizing model. Linking unions to inequality, results from multivariate regressions using panel data suggest that union power still matters for limiting market income inequality. While estimates for strike action are not statistically significant, those for union density and the quality of collective labour statutes suggest that unions still exert an inequality-reducing effect. However, the rarity of significant estimates across models using different measures of inequality indicates that this effect is by no means comprehensive.

The article reviews the book, "All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence," by Emily L. Thuma.

For decades, the Supreme Court of Canada has contemplated the appropriate standard of judicial review of decisions by administrative tribunals. The Court has grappled with the tension between the role of, and relationship between, courts and tribunals. The author, who has been both a judge and a tribunal member, argues for an attitude of humility towards these administrative bodies. With this approach, the author argues, even those most skeptical of tribunals might recognize their value as less formal, more expeditious, more expert, and binding dispute resolution mechanisms that complement—rather than detract from or compete with—courts. They may come to appreciate tribunals as the court’s institutional justice sibling, pursuing similar ends through different means.

Compelling evidence exists that centralized bargaining structures, including broader-based and sectoral bargaining (bbb), offer significant benefits to workers. Examining the role of bbb in major Canadian labour law reform initiatives between the late 1980s and 2019, this article explores why the labour movement, despite the potential advantages of bbb, has not collectively pursued bbb reforms. It concludes with an analysis of the failure to incorporate bbb proposals into labour legislation and an assessment of the key challenges to adopting significant bbb reforms in the future. Earlier research concluded that bbb proposals in the 1990s failed because of employer opposition and lack of understanding, including by labour. This study departs from earlier conclusions to find that neither of these factors has been prominent regarding bbb in recent decades. Instead, lack of support for bbb arises from some unions’ concerns about preserving existing representation rights, resistance to the prospect of mandatory councils of unions, and anticipation of jurisdictional conflicts. Lack of support for bbb from some peak labour organizations arises from a consensus approach to deciding which labour law reform issues to promote. An additional challenge to its adoption is the politicized nature of labour law reform, and the political cost of innovative and untried proposals deter governments from adopting bbb.

During the pandemic employees in the US have engaged in a wave of strikes, protests, and other collective action over concerns about unsafe working conditions, and many of these involved non-unionized workers in the private sector. Similar employee protests were notably absent in Canada. This article examines the differences in labour legislation between the US and Canada, which may help to explain these diverging experiences, primarily: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) section 7 protection for concerted activity, and the NLRA section 502 ability for a good faith strike due to abnormally dangerous conditions for work. This article outlines and compares the situation of, and consequences for, three categories of workers engaging in a strike over fears of workplace safety: unionized employees, non-unionized employees, and non-employees, such as independent contractors under the NLRA compared to under the Ontario Labour Relations Act (OLRA), as generally representative of Canadian labour legislation. In the final section, this article considers how a statutory provision similar to the NLRA protected concerted activity provision might be incorporated into Canadian labour legislation such as the OLRA. It also considers some more fundamental questions that such changes might prompt policymakers to reconsider, including: the focus of our statutory system on “organizing” collective action to the exclusion of “mobilizing” collective action, and questions about the potential role of minority unionism in our labour legislation system.

Analyzes the historical context of class struggle and strikes under capitalism, the restrictions on strike activity in Canada, and the entrenchment of back-to-work legislation under the Canadian neoliberal regime.