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Introduces the roundtable on back-to-work legislation held at the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies' annual conference in 2019. Summarizes the papers presented and pays tribute to the work of Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz.

Abstracts of papers from no. 86, Fall 2020.

Western Canada’s oil-exporting economies have come to rely on migrant labour as a cornerstone of economic development. A global division of labour intersecting with the constellation of Canada’s migrant worker programs has shaped the contemporary political-economic character of many Canadian provinces, including Saskatchewan. These programs have worked to construct bifurcated labour markets for growing low-wage industries that exist alongside high-wage resource-sector employment. Although a majority of these migrant workers end up employed in non-unionized workplaces, foreign workers who secure occupations in health care, construction, warehousing, and manufacturing are often represented by a union. The study explores union attitudes and union-member engagement among migrant labour through the lens of union revitalization, in an attempt to confront claims that migrant workers are without an affinity to organized labour and avoid participating in union business and the collective-bargaining process.

New digital technologies are often framed as an inevitable and determining force that presents the risk of technological unemployment and the end of work (Lloyd and Payne, 2019). In manufacturing specifically, digitalization is referred to as Industry 4.0, a term that emerged in Germany as a central economic and industrial policy and has taken on a wider resonance across Europe (Pfeiffer, 2017). In this article, we explore the workplace implications of a specific Industry 4.0 innovation. We examine the insertion of drone technology—as a timely and topical example of industrial digital technological innovation—in the steel industry. The article brings to debates on the digital workplace a discussion of the relationship between the material forces of production and the social relations within which they are embedded (Edwards and Ramirez, 2016). Drawing on interview data from two European industrial sites, we suggest that the increasing use of drones is likely to be complicated by a number of social, economic and legal factors, the effects of which are, at best, extremely difficult to predict. Introduced for their potential as labour-saving devices, drones seemingly offer a safer and more efficient way of checking for defects in remote or inaccessible areas. However, whilst employers might imagine that digital technologies, like drones, might substitute, replace, or intensify labour, the workplace realities described by our interviewees make insertion highly contingent. We highlight several such contingencies, with examples of the ways that the steelworkers’ interests differ from those of their employers, to discuss how the insertion of digital technologies will ultimately be shaped by the power, interests, values and visions prevailing in the workplace, as well as in the wider polity and public culture.

The article reviews the book, " In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization," by Mark R. Reiff.

Despite an abundance of research on the Winnipeg Genral Strike of 1919, how the strike has been remembered and commemorated by subsequent generations of Winnipeggers has been understudied. Though many archived oral histories of those involved in the strike exist, the intergenerational memory of the strike has been largely unaddressed. In anticipaton of the strike's centennial, I conducted oral history interviews with six descedants of those involved in the 1919 strike, to learn how stories of the strike have been passed down in their families and how those stories shaped the interviewees' own understandings of labour and social justice. These interviews, though limited in number, attest to the importance of memory (both individual and collective) in oral history and, subsequently, in labour history.

With a focus on police unions in the United States and Canada, this article argues that the construction of ‘blue solidarity’, including through recent Blue Lives Matter campaigns, serves to repress racial justice movements that challenge police authority, acts as a counter to broader working class resistance to austerity and contributes to rising right-wing populism. Specifically, the article develops a case study analysis of Blue Lives Matter campaigns in North America to argue that police unions construct forms of ‘blue solidarity’ that produce divisions with other labour and social movements and contribute to a privileged status of their own members vis-a-vis the working class more generally. As part of this process, police unions support tactics that reproduce racialised ‘othering’ and that stigmatise and discriminate against racialised workers and communities. The article concludes by arguing that organised labour should maintain a critical distance from police unions.

In Ontario, hours of work and overtime standards are regulated by the Employment Standards Act (ESA). This legislation covers most employers and employees in the province. As part of an ESA reforms process designed to promote workplace flexibility and enhance competitiveness, the Ontario ESA (2000) allowed for the extension of weekly maximum hours from 48 to 60, and the calculation of overtime pay entitlements to be based on an averaging of hours of work over up to a four-week period. Situated in the context of shifts towards greater working time flexibility, this paper examines the dynamics of working time regulation in the Ontario ESA, with a specific focus on the regulation of excess and overtime hours. The paper considers these processes in relation to general trends towards forms of labour market regulation that support employer-oriented flexibility and that download the regulation of employment standards to privatized negotiations between individual employees and their employers, tendencies present in the ESA that were sustained through further reforms introduced in 2018 and 2019. The paper draws its analysis from interviews with both workers in precarious jobs and Employment Standards Officers from the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL), as well as administrative data from the MOL and archival records. In the general context of the rise of precarious employment, the paper argues that ESA hours of work and overtime provisions premised upon creating working time flexibility enhance employer control over time, exacerbate time pressures and uncertainty experienced by workers in precarious jobs, and thereby intensify conditions of precariousness. The article situates the working time provisions of Ontario’s ESA in the context of an ongoing fragmentation of the regulation of working time as legislated standards are eroded in ways that make workers in precarious jobs more vulnerable to employer exploitation.

A champion of impoverished women, children, immigrants, and the unemployed, Edith Hancox’s chosen family were capital’s dispossessed. Rosemary Hennessy’s material feminist theory of affect-culture and Antonio Gramsci’s articulation of the impassioned organic intellectual offer a conceptual framework for the emotive role Hancox played in nurturing and sustaining working-class resistance in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike. A partial biography is gleaned from contemporary newspaper reports, Hancox’s journalism, government records, family correspondence, and other archival sources. What emerges is a glimpse into the actions, thoughts, and lived experiences of a profoundly significant, yet neglected, socialist feminist. An illegitimate birth, servitude, marriage, motherhood, immigration, and a critical engagement with organized religion formed the basis of Hancox’s radical leadership during the Winnipeg revolt. As secretary of the first national unemployment association in Canada, Hancox mobilized thousands of the nation’s workless and presented a devastating gender, race, and class critique of liberal capitalism. Through her writing and activism, she also challenged the most important leftist organizations of her era – the Labor Church, the Women’s Labor League, the One Big Union, and the Communist Party of Canada – to build a more expansive and inclusive revolutionary movement.

The article reviews the book, "Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission," by Herb Childress.

Analyzes the historical and legal framework of restrictive labour laws that constrain the right to strike. Argues that, although the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutional freedom to strike in 2015, the impact of the SCC ruling should be assessed within this broader context.

Most people tend to join mainstream trade unions for instrumental motives and not so much for ideological reasons. This instrumentalism, together with the passivity of most union members, endangers members’ union loyalty and their willingness to act collectively. One possible way to de-emphasize the traditional model of service-oriented unionism and strengthen union commitment is to involve members in small union tasks. By partially assigning day-to-day union work to lay members, it is believed that over-stretched union representatives will be able to assign more time to implementing union policies of strategic importance. The article examines to what extent new union members are willing to voluntarily engage in union tasks inspired by organizing unionism. To test this empirically, an e-survey was conducted among first-time members of a Belgian union. Predominantly young, the respondents had been members of the union for maximum of seven years. Belgium is an interesting case for exploring how member-union ties can be boosted, as it is a quintessential example of a country with a high union density characterized by instrumental and passive membership. Following the deletion of cases with missing data, 518 observations are available for analysis. The dependent variable measures the organizing-oriented activism intent based on union tasks reflecting one-on-one organizing tactics for reaching out to potential members. A critical mass of 41.3% new members is (greatly) interested in at least one task. The regression results show that two variables derived from the planned behaviour theory significantly influence organizing-based union tasks: the pro-union context and behavioural self-control, with the latter in particular a very strong antecedent. Apart from the finding that a larger membership base is interested in performing organizing-oriented tasks, the results also, support a developmental view on union activism, i.e. a step-by-step approach to stimulating union activism via introducing various levels of union participation.

The article reviews the book, "Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Post War Canada," by Tina Loo.

This paper seeks to explore the history of miners’ struggles to represent their interests in health and safety in coalmines in a range of countries in the period between 1870 and 1925. It has two objectives, the first objective being to examine these struggles both in terms of what determined them and how effective they were. The second objective is to assess the significance of these struggles for current understandings of representative participation in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). Starting with late 19th century Australia, the research method involved search, retrieval and analysis of historical sources including newspaper accounts, recorded testimony to Commissions of Inquiry into mining incidents and disasters, records of the debates of the legislature on relevant regulatory reforms and records of trade union meetings, as well as the accounts of contemporary observers and published analysis. Extending its inquiry to other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Belgium, the methods used for these countries were less focused on newspaper accounts and more reliant on the analysis of published historical records of national and international trade union congresses, and those of the legislatures of these countries, as well as theses and accounts in the research literature. In combination, these sources corroborate one another and provide rich qualitative data, the analysis of which has achieved both research objectives. As well as filling an important gap in the literature on the development of worker involvement in OHS, this paper shows that coalminers’ struggles and strategies for workers to have a say in their health and safety, and the contexts that shaped them are both instructive and important in understanding current experiences.

The article reviews the book, "Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880," by Graham D. Taylor.

The article reviews the book, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution," by Toby Green.

In the early years of the Great Depression, the American Socialist Party (sp) attracted left-wing youth and intellectuals at the same time that it faced the challenges of distinguishing itself from the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. By 1936, as its right-wing historic leadership (the “Old Guard”) left the sp and many of the more left-wing members of the sp had decamped, the party dwindled to a shell of its former strength. This article examines the internal struggles within the sp between the Old Guard and the left-wing “Militant” groupings and analyzes how the groups to the left of the sp reacted, particularly the pro-Moscow Communist Party and the supporters of Trotsky and Bukharin who were organized into two smaller groups, the Communist Party (Opposition) and Workers Party.