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This paper invites labour and queer historians and sociologists to reconsider frameworks that have excluded attention to experiences of female workers who, throughout the 20th century, supplied sexual services to (largely) male consumers. Specifically, Vancouver, BC, 1945-1980, acts as a case study for the exploration of postwar erotic entertainment -- burlesque, go-go dancing, and striptease. Preliminary archival and ethnographie findings reveal the working conditions and artistic influences of former dancers, the racialized expectations of erotic spectacle, and the queer dimensions of strip culture. Adored and celebrated by fans, stripteasers also laboured under the 'whore stigma' circulated by moral reformers, the popular press, and the police. It is this tension between the reverence and the hostility aroused by erotic dancers that forms a central theme of the paper.

La grève de l'amiante de 1949 est certes le conflit qui a le plus marqué la conscience historique des Québécois. Depuis la publication en 1956 du volume sur la grève dirigé par Pierre Elliott Trudeau, le conflit est interprété comme un événement capital dans l'histoire sociale du Québec. À partir d'une recherche neuve dans divers fonds d'archives, nous en avons revu l'interprétation en faisant ressortir que le conflit représente une défaite assez cuisante des syndicats, qui aurait pu encore être plus désastreuse n'eut été l'aide du clergé. En outre, notre recherche nous a permis de mettre en relief un enjeu négligé de la grève, le projet de réforme de l'entreprise (cogestion, copropriété, participation aux bénéfices) mis de l'avant par de jeunes clercs qui reprennent des idées alors en vogue chez des intellectuels catholiques en Europe et qui trouvent une oreille sympathique chez certains évêques québécois. Cette revendication est reprise par des syndicats catholiques au Québec dont ceux de l'amiante en 1948 et 1949. Les compagnies minières y sont fermement opposées accusant les syndicats de vouloir s'arroger les droits de la direction et la Canadian Johns Manville insiste pour ajouter à la convention collective de 1950 un long paragraphe sur son droit de gérance. La question intéresse aussi vivement un organisme patronal, l'Association professionnelle des industriels fondée en 1943 pour regrouper les patrons catholiques. L'organisme combat vivement l'idée de cogestion auprès des autorités religieuses. Mais le dernier mot appartient au pape qui, en 1950, y voit un danger et un glissement vers une mentalité socialiste. La promotion de la réforme de l'entreprise est alors abandonnée par les clercs et mis en veilleuse par les syndicats catholiques.

The article reviews the book, "La contestation pragmatique dans le syndicalisme autonome : la question du modèle SUD-PTT," by Ivan Sainsaulieu.

The article reviews the book, "Contract and Commitment: Employment Relations in the New Economy," edited by Anil Verma and Richard P. Chaykowski.

The article reviews the book, "Unions In A Contrary World: The Future of the Australian Trade Union Movement," by David Peetz.

Afin de répondre aux pressions économiques, aux vagues de rationalisation et aux nouvelles formes d'organisation du travail, les entreprises considèrent pouvoir améliorer leur efficacité en impartissant certaines fonctions organisationnelles à des fournisseurs dans le but de réduire leurs coûts, d'avoir accès à des services d'experts et de s'attarder aux compétences-clés qui constituent une valeur ajoutée pour l'organisation. Basée sur une enquête auprès de 90 entreprises, notre recherche tente d'étudier le phénomène de l'impartition au sein de la fonction ressources humaines (RH). Les résultats de notre étude identifient les activités de gestion des RH visées par l'impartition, les motifs et les variables organisationnelles qui affectent l'ampleur du recours à l'impartition, et, finalement les répercussions de cette nouvelle tendance sur l'efficacité de la fonction.

The article reviews the book, "State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876-1914," by Gerald Friedman.

This paper explores the writing of women's labour history in Canada over the last thirty years. Three interconnected forces have shaped the contours of this intellectual production: the course of feminist, Left, and labour organizing; trends in international social theory; and directions in Canadian historiography. Feminist challenges to the initially 'masculinist' shape of working-class history, along with more recent calls to integrate race and ethnicity as categories of analysis, have produced important shifts in the overall narrative of Canadian working-class history and in the dominant paradigms used to examine labour. As a result, gender has been more effectively, though certainly not completely, integrated into our analysis of class formation. More recent post-structuralist theoretical trends, along with the decline of the Left and labour militancy, have called into question some fundamental suppositions of women's and working-class history, creating an unsettled and uncertain future for a feminist and materialist exposition of class formation in Canada.

On 4 June 1999, Madeline Parent was awarded an honorary doctorate at Trent University in recognition of her outstanding work in the trade union and feminist movements. Joan Sangster, Chair of Women's Studies, introduces Parent and offers a tribute to her historic contributions to improving the lives of workers and women in Canada.

Focuses on the role of the union local in the development of `research. Presents three case studies in steel, chemical, and telecommunications to illustrate how academic research can identify and respond to workers' needs. Discusses challenges faced by researchers. Concludes that academic research can be aligned with worker interests.

The article reviews the book, "The Limits of Labour: Class Formation and the Labour Movement in Calgary, 1883-1929," by David Bright.

The article reviews the book, "Négociations : essai de sociologie du lien social," by Christian Thuderoz.

The article reviews the book, "E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers," by Gerald J. Baldasty.

The dominant, nationalist tradition of left-wing political economy in Canada has always stood as an obstacle to the articulation of a Marxist political economy of Canada capable of contributing to the development of a class-struggle, socialist politics. The evolution of the New Canadian Political Economy that emerged in the 1960s is traced and its main schools of thought are delineated. Against the nationalist preoccupations of the NCPE, the argument is made that the economic troubles of Canada in the past quarter century are attributable to the "normal" crisis tendencies of an advanced capitalist economy (as analyzed by Marx) and should not be seen as the product of "foreign domination" of the Canadian economy.

The article reviews the book, "Les acteurs de l'innovation et l'entreprise," edited by Caroline Lanciano, Marc Maurice, Jean-Jacques Silvestre and Hiroatsu Nohara.

Cette recherche analyse l'influence de deux formes d'appui, l'appui affectif et l'appui instrumental, provenant de trois sources d'appui en milieu organisationnel — celui offert par le supérieur hiérarchique, les collègues et les dirigeants d'entreprise — sur le succès en télétravail. Les données ont été recueillies par questionnaire auprès de 193 employés qui télétravaillent depuis au moins six mois au sein de trois organisations ayant un programme de télétravail. En général, les résultats confirment que plus les télétravailleurs estiment recevoir certaines formes d'appui de leur supérieur hiérarchique et des dirigeants de leur entreprise, plus ils évaluent favorablement certains indicateurs de succès en télétravail. Les résultats peuvent servir de référence aux dirigeants d'entreprise et aux gestionnaires qui souhaitent implanter ou améliorer l'efficacité d'un programme de télétravail à domicile.

Documents the RCMP's monitoring of the women's auxiliaries of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in northeastern Ontario in the Cold War era.

The period 1935 to 1947 provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the ways in which the employment and training policies of Canadian welfare state forms delineated the boundaries of gender, race, class and nation in ways that actively constituted (il)legitimate social and economic forms of work, of motherhood, of sexuality and citizenship. Covering attempts starting in the Depression and accelerating during the Second World War into the postwar period, this study tracks the constitution and deployment of government attempts at mapping the female labour supply, of monitoring the activities of women in the labour market, of charting and opening up to scrutiny the conditions of women's labour force attachment: all in an effort to predict and prescribe patterns of women's employment and problems of female unemployment. I approach government reports, studies, commissions and committees as policy events—exercises in governance—as markers for policy analysis which signified important shifts in governmental approaches to the phenomenon of female participation in the formal waged economy. Viewed during the war as a crucial national resource, central to the war effort, women war workers would be cast as a largely ‘unskilled female labour reserve’ by war's end. I examine how ideas about mental testing, intelligence and human capacities—ideas that comprised the foundation of the mental hygiene programme during this period—informed employment and training policies in the formation of the Canadian welfare state for the period 1935–1947. During the Depression, studies of the labour force produced classifications of unemployed women and men. Scrutiny of female employment patterns resulted in the production of categorical knowledges about employability. These practices were further elaborated through the unprecedented research opportunities presented by the war. Suitable vocation, aptitude, and measures of intelligence: these concepts were drawn upon as part of a growing apparatus of employment policy intended to facilitate the smooth transition into the postwar period. I argue that the roster of policies and programmes devised in the name of postwar rehabilitation constituted ideas about female employability which were deeply imbued with the principles of scientific racism and sexism at the core of the mental hygiene program. Vocational planning, counselling and training practices reorganised relations of employment and of unemployment in ways that reflected the managing principles of the risk society. Postwar planning drew upon and constituted new areas of activity for government and community agencies, creating opportunities for the deployment of knowledge-practices such as personnel selection while opening up the interior of the subject as an object of governance, by assessing and calibrating allegedly innate human capacities.

A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War is one man's bittersweet account of fighting with the International Brigades against the forces of General Francisco Franco in Spain from 1936 to 1939. Douglas Patrick (Pat) Stephens was born in Armenia in 1910 and emigrated with his family to Canada in 1926. Like countless others, his dream of finding a new and more prosperous life was severely shaken by the onset of the Great Depression, and he turned to the Communist Party of Canada in an attempt to combat the political and economic deterioration which had gripped much of the world. Franco's attempt to overthrow by military force the republican government of Spain seemed to Pat Stephens the ideal opportunity to put his political convictions into action. Through his connections in the Communist Party, he became one of some 1400 Canadians, and 40,000 International Volunteers in all, who went to Spain. Many of the volunteers, including the Canadians, went to Spain against the laws and the wishes of their governments. Many of them never came back. Stephens' memoir, dictated to his wife Phyllis Stephens shortly before his death in 1987, puts a very human face on this strange and complex war. It is a portrait of political and moral conviction tinged by creeping disillusionment. It is also a compelling depiction of the strength, frailty, doubt, and courage which can result from the sometimes incongruous intersection of the personal and the political. A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the conflict which immediately preceded World War II, and of Canada's role in that conflict. -- Publisher's description

Discusses the unveiling of a plaque on 26 June 1999 at the site of No. 1 Mine in Nanaimo, B.C., where coal was mined from 1883 to 1938. The No. 1 Mine disaster in 1887 was the worst in British Columbia's history.