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Designed for educators and facilitators from the union hall to the lecture hall, Roles of Resistance: Game Plans for Teachers and Troublemakers outlines revolutionary lesson plans on how to fight the power with people power. The thirteen lesson plans in this book created by John-Henry Harter and Mark Leier can be used independently or combined to create a semester-long course. Sections include units on teaching political economy, labour history, and social activism based on democratic, experiential teaching, including role-plays, simulations, and games. The tried and tested classroom activities in this teacher's guide--successfully applied in high schools, universities, and union classrooms--are bound to create a vibrant learning experience, enriching debates, and providing the main tool we need to change the world: collective action. --Publisher's description

This article takes up the challenge of examining whether, and to what extent, existing labour laws in Canada are equipped to respond to new technological changes in the workplace. While the notion that technology changes labour is not new, both the types of technology associated with this new wave of change, and their rapid deployment, make this an urgently needed inquiry, given their impacts on material working conditions. Further, given that core statutory provisions regulating labour relations in Canada have remained relatively unchanged over the past 50 years, there is reason to speculate about their continued relevance, or suitability to respond to new technology in the workplace. --From Introduction

In this chapter, I examine the spatial constraints Amazon is confronted with in its logistics operations within Canada and specifically in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. I argue that central to Amazon's production of logistics work space has been the construction of its own internal labor regime to buttress the effects of Amazon's response to state regulatory constraints, federal and provincial, on its production regime. Amazon seeks to balance the harmful effects of digital Taylorism on workers through what I call “corporate Keynesianism.” Yet, this was insufficient to prevent union organizing, and the company opted to close operations in the province altogether in the wake of a union organizing victory, with claims-making over the impact still pending. The chapter draws on ethnographic research as a community organizer supporting Amazon workers and semi-structured interviews with workers, trade union representatives, and public policy experts.

This article reviews the book, "Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics," by Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage.

This article analyzes Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians organizing in Canada through three local case studies in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto, showing how struggles over unpaid caring labour generated feminist alliances across race, class, sexuality, and immigration status. Using interviews with movement leaders and rank-and-file activists alongside private and public archival collections, it traces both solidarities and conflicts between these Marxist feminist groups, low-income mothers, immigrant women’s organizations, Indigenous women, and mainstream feminist bodies such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The authors argue that Canadian Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians activism was locally vibrant, transnationally connected, and has left a durable legacy in contemporary organizing around welfare rights, immigrant domestic workers, queer politics, and the recognition of women’s unpaid and underpaid care work.

Precarious work is becoming more common globally and the healthcare sector in Ontario, Canada is no exception. Aspects of precarious work such as low wages and job uncertainty have negative influences on work quality. Digital platforms (DPs) introduce the threat of gig work as a form of precarious work. With the growth of precarious gig work and its expansion into healthcare, it is important to understand how platform technology shapes actual work practices and the work-related protections for workers. This dissertation focuses on unregulated personal support workers (PSWs) who use DPs to find work. Specifically, there are two aims of this research: first is to examine the precarious work experiences of women PSWs who seek eldercare work via a DP model in order to understand socio-technical implications of DP; second is to examine the work-related protections that apply to digital platform care workers and how these shape work conditions. Using Institutional Ethnography as a guiding methodology, in 2023 and 2024 in Ontario I conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 PSWs who used DPs to find gig care work; I also interviewed 10 key informants who were in various positions of expertise about gig care work platforms. This included end-users of DPs such as clients and companies. Additionally, I observed workers demonstrating their use of DPs and examined screen shots from DPs. These PSWs face precarious work conditions, with precarity deepened by the technology of DPs. In the three papers comprising this thesis, I cover socio-technical elements of the DP model of care and portray how this form of work makes both workers and clients vulnerable. In the first manuscript, I describe two different models of gig care work platform, (marketplace and on-demand platforms) and explicate how each model is found in a separate sector of healthcare: marketplace models are found only in homecare, and on-demand models are found exclusively in long-term care and hospital organisations hiring workers. In the second manuscript, I describe the risk to hospital and LTC organisations in hiring gig care workers. In the third manuscript, I explore trust as I write about how homecare workers using DPs experience this work and how a couple of clients experience hiring workers. This thesis allowed me to closely examine how platform technology shaped the actual practices of women using DPs and their work circumstances. The primary contribution of this dissertation is revealing day-to-day experiences of gig care workers, filling a gap in the literature on location-based care platforms. The findings of this thesis underscore that DPs increase precarity for already-precarious PSWs. I demonstrate that instead of being neutral technology, DPs introduce a governing text of entrepreneurial self-employment which involves risk for the workers and clients using DPs. Organisations may not have opportunity to properly vet staff, train staff, or insure staff. Private clients gain access to more services when they use DPs, but then they shoulder all the risk when something goes wrong. Overall the DP form of gig care threatens growing precarious work, dodges social security and employment protections, and undermines publicly-provided care employment in Ontario, Canada.

Canada's occupational health and safety (OHS) legislative frameworks describe the general rights and responsibilities of employers and employees to ensure safe workplaces. However, the extent to which these OHS frameworks recognize and safeguard reproductive health and fetal development remains understudied. Protections for reproductive health and fetal development were evaluated in OHS legislation, employment standards, and associated regulations across Canada's federal and 13 provincial/territorial jurisdictions by a policy analysis, supported by a sex and gender-based thematic and content analysis. OHS and reproductive health keyword frequencies were also determined. Three major themes were identified: (1) inconsistent recognition of workplace risks to reproductive health, (2) job modification, and (3) employer-mandated pregnancy leave. Our review found that workplace protections were generally limited to pregnancy, with little recognition of workplace risks to fertility, suggesting gaps in workplace protections for reproductive health and fetal development. We recommend contemporary reform of Canada's OHS legislation and regulations to support universal, comprehensive, and inclusive protections for reproductive health and fetal development for all workers, regardless of sex and pregnancy status.

This article reviews the book, "After Redress: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice," edited by Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Mona Oikawa.

This article reviews the book, "A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist ," by Don Hamerquist; edited by Luis Brennan.

This article reviews the book, "200 ans de cohabitation sociale," by Camille Champagne-Tremblay and Martin Petitclerc.

This article reviews the book, "Remapping an Ableist World: Disability and Oppression Under Capitalism," by Vera Chouinard.

Canada’s mobile workforce keeps the economy moving—but at what cost to safety and health? This timely and revealing book investigates the often-overlooked risks faced by workers who engage in extended geographical mobility related to their work including extended daily commuting, intra- and inter-provincial rotational work, international labour migration into Canada and mobility as or within work such as within transportation and homecare work. It uncovers the unique hazards tied to employment-related mobility and documents the regulatory gaps, inconsistencies and other determinants that leave these workers vulnerable to injury and that can constrain their access to workers’ compensation. With particular attention to temporary foreign workers and the systemic failings highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the book paints a compelling picture of injustice hidden in plain sight. Blending rigorous legal analysis with a wide-ranging review of international and Canadian research, it makes a powerful case for stronger protections and equitable access to compensation. Essential reading for policymakers, legal and other scholars, and advocates alike, this is a bold call to rethink both how work-related mobility puts workers at risk and how we could better protect workers on the move. --Publisher's description

The International Coalition to End Domestic Exploitation (intercede) was a Toronto-based organization that began to mobilize in 1979 in response to the growing crisis of abuse faced by domestic workers as a result of exclusionary immigration laws and the absence of workplace rights. The organization convened its activism on three main fronts: lobbying the federal government for new immigration policies that would allow domestic workers to settle in Canada permanently; petitioning for basic protections for domestic workers to be enshrined under provincial labour laws; and undertaking public advocacy that politically linked issues of women’s rights, workers’ rights, and migrant justice through transnational analysis and coalition building. Despite the unprecedented achievements made by intercede, it has largely been excluded from histories of workers’ struggle in Canada. This essay looks at the publication archive of Domestics’ Cross-Cultural News (dc-cn), a monthly newsletter published by intercede from 1984 to 2006 and housed within the online collection of the Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive. As one of only a few periodicals produced by racialized women during this period, dc-cn is not only culturally significant but also an important historiographical tool, offering insight into how work and workers’ struggles have been racialized and gendered within a multicultural and transnational framework. This essay therefore positions dc-cn as a rich artifact that allowed domestic workers to become narrators of their own historical experience.

This research note examines Canada’s wartime Women’s Land Army and associated farmerette programs to highlight the value of visual sources for understanding women’s agricultural labour during the First and Second World Wars. Drawing on twenty photographs of women working in orchards, fields, and canneries alongside feminist ethnohistorical methods, it shows how images of uniforms, camp life, and physically demanding farm work both document women’s contributions to the war effort and recover experiences largely absent from conventional archives and policy records. The author argues that combining visual evidence with narrative and reflexive analysis can personalize the historical record, challenge male-centred accounts of wartime labour, and make scholarship on rural women’s work more accessible beyond academia.

Examines the sharp escalation in incidents of workplace violence over the past decade in Manitoba, the failure of employers to meet their mitigation and hazard elimination obligations, and the lack of enforcement by the provincial government. The evidence is drawn from a variety of sectors, including healthcare and education, as well as interviews with 38 workers. Concludes with 10 policy recommendations.

The “Red Baron” from Local 213 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) was Les McDonald, once a firebrand Communist activist and the youthful leader of the left faction within the Vancouver electrical workers’ union. His fate would be intertwined with the Lenkurt Electric strike of 1966, a wildcat strike that led to the imprisonment of four trade union leaders. Following his involvement as a long-time trade unionist, McDonald went on to be better known for his dedication to the establishment of triathlon as an official sport of the Olympic Games. However, McDonald’s important role in Local 213 and the Lenkurt strike—a watershed moment in Canadian labour history—was, until now, the untold story of the first half of his life. Referencing Local 213’s Minute Books, newspaper articles, collected correspondence, as well as dozens of personal interviews conducted by the author, this book examines the history of IBEW Local 213 in the turbulent years leading up to the Lenkurt strike. In addition to describing these events and their important historical ramifications, author Ian McDonald chronicles how his father helped to rebuild a left faction within the local union. With a focus on the period between 1955 to 1985, this ground-breaking study of a single construction trade union local—its brief post-World War II experience with Communist leadership, well-known work-site militancy, and repeated interventions by the IBEW’s International Office—sheds light on the local’s “red” minority activism and ultimately explains why McDonald returned to the world of sport to finish his career. --Publisher's description

This article reviews the book, "Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988," by David Wight.

This article reviews the book, "Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism," by Shelton Stromquist.

Though working-class literatures poorly fit within the theoretical purview of contemporary literary studies, the absence of scholarship in the Canadian context is particularly acute. Neoliberal readings thrive at the expense of labour-focused readings, with the possible result of insulating against the desired change such readings wish to bring into being. Because Chris Pannell’s poetry is so focused on work, its representations and spiritual qualities amidst a particular post-industrial location (Hamilton, Ontario), it makes for poetry well suited my goal: to create an ambidextrous reading method. In this article, I summarize the work done to date in Canadian literary studies on both labour and neoliberalism. Due to the relatively thin literature in CanLit available over the past few decades, I bring in Lukács and some American literary scholars (Jameson, Christopher and Whitson, Clarke) to round out what a working-class literature might be theorized as, and read as, in Canada while also keeping in view how critiques of neoliberalism are inadequate to the task of serving the working-class. To recalibrate Canadian literary studies, I bring forward Marx’s ideas concerning surplus value and alienation as they pertain to the production of poetry. While acknowledging the contributions of critiques of neoliberalism in Canadian literature, I critique those readings as rooted in Marx.

This article reviews the book, "Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943," by Andy Friend.