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In this dissertation, I draw on Frantz Fanon’s concepts of cultural imposition and collective catharsis to examine how the colonized subject, like the incarcerated Black worker, undergoes a double process of dehumanization wherein they are perceived as both an invisible and hypervisible subject. I argue that the colonized subject is invisible insofar as they are subjected to various forms of dehumanization such as physiological and psychological abuse, lack of access to resources, and neglect. However, they are also perceived as hypervisible because they are viewed as existing in excess as hypersexual, hyper deviant, and hyper criminal creatures and therefore deserving of the treatment they endure. Similarly, the incarcerated worker is viewed as invisible and hypervisible because they are viewed as unskilled and subhuman beings undeserving of adequate pay and protections but are also perceived as best suited to work in poor conditions doing less skilled, undervalued, low-paying work. By tracing how this relationship between race, racialization and labour is underpinned by whiteness both historically and in a contemporary sense, I demonstrate how the use of prison labour within a Canadian multicultural context must necessarily be read through a normalizing white gaze, under the guise of public safety and rehabilitation; here the prison functions as a disciplinary site wherein Black and racialized prisoners are constructed as inferior beings in need of heightened control through labour. In doing so, I argue that the use of prison labour in Canadian prisons is a form of colonial violence that reproduces inferior and superior colonial identities.

Falling Short is the third community report released by the Migrant Workers in the Canadian Maritimes Partnership. The report follows the publication of Safe at Work, Unsafe at Home: COVID-19 and Temporary Foreign Workers in Prince Edward Island in 2021 and Unfree Labour: COVID-19 and Migrant Workers in the Seafood Industry in New Brunswick in 2023. The report is based on desk research and worker interviews. Data was obtained from freedom of information requests to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and Nova Scotia’s regulatory bodies responsible for work safety, employment standards, and housing. 15 interviews with migrant workers in Nova Scotia employed under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) were also conducted. Fourteen of these workers were employed under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) stream of the TFWP, and one worker was employed under the low-wage stream of the TFWP. Falling Short found that in Nova Scotia, migrant workers frequently encounter a lack of regulatory implementation. Rules exist, but governments are failing to adequately enforce them to create a safe and dignified work environment for migrant workers. The report provides recommendations to both the federal and provincial governments aimed at improving the working and living conditions of the temporary migrant workforce in the province. --Website description

With the advancement of science and technology and the improvement of social attitudes and mentalities, many Canadian women nowadays hold professions that have always been held exclusively by men. They have been able to integrate educational training, academic programs, and professional careers that have always been “masculine”, such as engineering, architecture, accounting, finance, military, trades, construction, and law enforcement, to name a few. Women in Canada have successfully performed and integrated these “masculine” professions. However, this integration was only a one-way street in many circumstances, not appreciated or accepted by men who considered it an invasion of their professional property and territory. Therefore, it unfortunately opens the door to bullying, discrimination, intimidation, and even sexual harassment. Sexual harassment of women in the workplace has always been persistent, especially in male-dominated industries. Not only does it harm women’s health, advancement, and career, but it also harms the organizations and their reputations. This research will investigate the impacts of sexual harassment on the overall health of women working in male-dominated industries in Canada.

The article reviews and comments on two books by John Kelly: "Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain" and "The Twilight of World Trotskyism."

The article reviews the book, "Travailler moins ne suffit pas," by Julia Posca.

This article explores union responses to workplace-based covid-19 vaccine mandates in Canada. Specifically, the authors examine the complex interplay of factors that drove unions to adopt their respective positions on vaccine mandates and to frame those positions in particular ways for the benefit of their members and the wider public. Interviews with key informants, along with analysis of documents and arbitration decisions, reveal a disjuncture between the discursive quality of certain unions’ positions and their actual positions. In particular, media framing of unions as either “for” or “against” vaccine mandates oversimplified or misrepresented the actual positions adopted. In response, the article introduces a typology of union positions that distinguishes between support for mandatory-vaccination policies and support for voluntary-vaccination policies and reveals that the vast majority of unions favoured the latter. The authors further reveal that workplace vaccine mandates were both internally divisive and disorienting for unions, given the central role labour organizations play in managing workplace disputes and representing the interests of workers, both individually and collectively.

This paper utilizes the job demands–resources (JD-R) model to examine how the neoliberal governance of Employment Ontario (EO) contributes to worker burnout. The work of Employment Ontario specialists is governed by neoliberal policies, which are an apparatus of austerity politics mechanized through New Public Management (NPM). NPM places a strong emphasis on performance management, quantitative targets and the marketization of public services. This paper demonstrates how these neoliberal policies contribute to worker burnout in public employment services (PES). EO specialists who deliver PES, are tasked with helping vulnerable jobseekers quickly re-enter the paid labour force regardless of systemic barriers, which this study has revealed as a largely unachievable pursuit within a neoliberal market environment. Utilizing data from thirty-two interviews, our analysis indicates that EO workers/specialists experience burnout due to unreasonable job demands and a lack of sufficient resources, which inhibit their ability to meaningfully support vulnerable jobseekers. Having identified time pressures, work overload, lack of training and development opportunities and job insecurity as some of the stressors experienced by EO specialists, we conclude that prolonged exposure to these stressors leads to burnout.

The article reviews the book, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America," by Andrew C. McKevitt.

This thesis explored the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based policing models in law enforcement anti-trafficking initiatives and examined potential impacts of expanding state surveillance through police use of AI-based policing models. Computer scientists aspire to develop AI to identify victims of trafficking through websites that host ads for sexual services. Little research has explored sex workers’ views on the proposed AI-based policing models and their likely impacts. To fill this gap, I conducted 21 semistructured interviews with sex workers, academics, and members of sex worker rights organizations to discuss the effects of AI-based policing models. Participants expressed concern that these models will continue a long history of anti-trafficking initiatives causing harm, particularly against racialized, migrant, and transgender sex workers. Findings also suggest developers should be cautious about creating AI-based policing models without input of sex workers and without a firm knowledge base of the sex industry.

The article reviews the cyberexposition, "Déjouer la fatalité : pauvreté, familles, institutions," by the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (Montréal, 2022).

This case study focuses on the United Nurses of Alberta, the union representing registered nurses in the province of Alberta, Canada; this explores United Nurses of Alberta's communication strategies. Drawing on the collective action frames previously identified in United Nurses of Alberta's social media and newsletters from 2010 to 2015, which frames nurses as unique healthcare providers and advocates, this study leverages insights from 23 interviews conducted with the United Nurses of Alberta staff, highly involved members, and general members from 2016 to 2017. The article explores the motivations and tensions around the framing of nurses and the union. The findings indicate that the United Nurses of Alberta could enhance its communications by better aligning with members’ current struggles through various collective action frame bridging and extensions. The research also suggests the potential benefits of United Nurses of Alberta shifting away from collective action frames rooted in self-sacrifice. Furthermore, this case study provides recommendations for communication strategies that could strengthen member engagement and involvement within their unions.

The article reviews the book, "Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program," by Catherine E. Connelly.

The construction industry accounts for 18 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is extensive evidence that this can be reduced significantly by implementing aggressive net zero building practices. However, the way the industry is organized impedes this achievement because it fails to promote the development of a broadly based, highly qualified, climate-literate workforce. Successful low carbon construction requires enhancement of workers’ knowledge, skills, and competencies because it requires much higher energy performance standards than traditional construction practice. Yet the industry remains wedded to the current system of low-bid, low-quality construction to cut costs. The organization of much construction work reflects a Taylorist approach, with extensive piecework and subcontracting that relies heavily on precarious, unskilled, and semi-skilled workers. Most employers avoid investing in trades training, leaving it to governments, unions, and individual workers to fund workforce development. Committed to a deregulated market with minimal government interference in their profit-making activities, many contractors oppose tougher building and energy regulations while lobbying against higher labour standards, occupational certification requirements, and union organizing. To meet their net zero targets, governments must recognize that market forces are inadequate to create the well-trained, highly skilled workforce needed. Major policy interventions are required to force industry to make the necessary changes in vocational education and training (vet) and employment practices – changes designed to upskill the construction workforce and give workers and unions a greater voice in shaping climate-informed building practice.

This Handbook addresses the changing nature of academic labour markets, as they respond to moving university goals and developments in the measurement of research and teaching. Experts examine case studies from across the Global North and South and consider key issues such as equity, diversity, cross-border employment, and the precarity of academic labour. The Research Handbook on Academic Labour Markets highlights how national university systems interact with international policies. Chapters include in-depth research on the decline in permanent, tenured employment and the increase in temporary, insecure work, culminating in uncertain or non-existent career paths for many academics. Contributing authors discuss intersectional initiatives to increase the gender and ethnic diversity of academic staff, as well as complex topics such as third space work, for-profit institutions, online education, entrepreneurial gig research, work-life balance and the role of trade unions. Ultimately, this Handbook argues for new approaches to organising academic work, reinforcing the priority of serving the public good. Comprehensive and innovative, this Research Handbook is a crucial read for scholars of higher education leadership and management, education policy, labour policy, and sociology of work. It will also benefit university staff and researchers considering and reflecting on their own careers. --Publisher's description

This thesis examines shifting masculinities and platform labour, following eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with male Toronto-based Uber and Lyft rideshare workers with dependents (children). Women have commonly done non-standard work, hence the proliferation of non-standard work being contextualized as the ‘feminization of work’ (Zahn, 2019). In contrast, rideshare work is a non-standard form of gig work done predominantly by men, rendering it a relevant form of platform work to examine with its complicated relationship to the historical context of gender and nonstandard work. This thesis argues for a need to organize the worker as a whole, examining how workers’ unpaid social reproductive labour and balancing of rideshare work, and often another form of paid work, impacts the viability of classic organizing methods. I argue that these issues of convoluted boundaries between paid and unpaid work must be incorporated into the potential organizing demands of a rideshare workers’ union and identify areas for further research on organizing rideshare workers accounting for shifting masculinities.

The article reviews the book, "Nii Ndahlohke: Boys' and Girls' Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.

Environmental racism is a structural, historical and ongoing fact of life for many Indigenous, Black and racially marginalized communities in Canada. Yet climate change discussions, lacking an anti-racism and intersectional lens, have largely ignored how Indigenous, Black and racially marginalized communities are inequitably impacted by the climate emergency. At the same time, policies to promote a just transition to a sustainable economy provide an opportunity for the creation of good green jobs. Such pathways into the green economy will only be inclusive if the voices of Indigenous, Black and racialized people and their communities are heard. Otherwise, the green economic transformation will only further reinforce the structural racial economic inequalities present in Canadian society and the genocidal impacts of the climate emergency will continue. In the end, we believe that worker power guided by a critical race, class, gender and intersectional analysis is an essential component in a strategy to win and secure a just transition to a green, sustainable and inclusive economy. The scale of the engagement must involve the entire movement working in genuine partnership with community coalition partners to ensure that the new green economy does not look like the old White economy.

New research on the workings of the ‘web of empire’ have revealed that the British Empire was not only sustained by raw materials from India but depended significantly on its manpower working as ‘coolies’, or indentured labourers, in distant plantations in Mauritius, Fiji, West Indies, East and South Africa, and the Straits Settlements. The white dominions of Canada, Australia and the United States (US) similarly depended on low-paid labourers from the East for much of their work of opening up and colonising the prairie wastes. Initially, the bulk of migrants from India in North America came from among the strong and hard-working Sikhs of the Punjab province of India, who found it lucrative to work in these places, lured by the comparatively higher wages than they could obtain at home. However, as the market for labour became saturated by the first decade of the twentieth century, these countries began to erect legal barriers to the free entry of these Indian migrants under pressure from domestic workers, unwilling to face competition from migrants. This came as a great shock to migrant Indians, who had until then been thinking of the empire as a vast field of ‘shared opportunities’. In 1908, Canada tried to exclude Indian migrant labour by legislation, which insisted on ‘continuous passage’ for entering into the ports of the country. This would automatically disable Sikh migrants, who had to change ships to reach Canada. Gurdit Singh’s attempt to charter a Japanese ship, Komagata Maru, in June 1914 to ensure continuous passage for the Sikh migrants to Canada was a challenge to this legal barrier against the migrants. The turning back of this ship from Vancouver shattered the belief of the migrants in an equal imperial citizenship, and it became incendiary material for the revolutionary nationalist propaganda of the Ghadr conspirators, based in San Francisco. Student radicals in Canada and America, such as Lala Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, G. D. Kumar and Husain Rahim tried to contact radicals all over the world, in India House in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Egypt, Turkey and Switzerland, and tried to spread their message through journals, like the Ghadr and the Hindustanee from San Francisco and the Al Kasas from Egypt. They even linked their efforts with German imperialist conspirators to gain funding and guidance in their common mission against British imperialism. --Publisher's summary

This qualitative research study examines how the Labour Market Integration (LMI) site constitutes a site of ongoing colonial violence and spirit injury, where race plays a central role in legitimizing the politics of credential recognition, in which Foreign Educated Racialized Immigrant Women (FERIW) are evicted from the category “qualified” in Canada. My analysis draws upon concepts of racial capitalism and structural violence to locate the acts of eviction that FERIW are subjected to within the LMI space in Canada and the consequences and impacts of this eviction. I argue that racialized immigration on the move to Canada represents the human face of Canada’s ongoing nation-building and economic policy agenda. The LMI space reinforces and reproduces the colonial racial hierarchical order in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 FERIW, I explore how within the LMI space, racialized immigrant women are stripped of their foreign credentials, discursively framed as unqualified and deficient, and repurposed as a source of cheap labour within the political economy. Delegitimization carries severe material and socio-economic consequences. The intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigrant status results in FERIW becoming “ghettoized” into low-paying, precarious, low-end jobs, and, for many of these women, low income and poverty. This work represents a decolonial work articulated through anti-colonial and feminist anti-racist theory, to present a nuanced historical account of the experiences of gendered racialized immigrant labour within global and local structures that look very similar to the old structures of colonialism.

The article reviews the book, "Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty in Britain," by Jim Silver.