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Employees living with disabilities often experience negative social attitudes about disability from employers and co-workers in their workplaces, as well as both overt and subtle forms of violence, discrimination, and harassment.... Our findings show that ableism often shows up in the context of employees needing accommodations to best do their job and is also present in the daily experiences of existing as a person living with a disability in a workplace. --From Introduction

Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts toward state-led economic development. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale industrial planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. State corporate entities, such as Industrial Estates Limited, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province’s efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This article examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia’s “new industries” that emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this Stellarton-based firm reveals how structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within sectors that were completely distinct from the province’s cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This case includes a reflection on the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia and represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies.

The article reviews the book, "The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program," by Pallavi Banerjee.

Nova Scotians understand economic hardships at both the personal and community levels. This is especially true for the residents of Pictou County. With the eclipse of coal, steel, and heavy manufacturing, successive governments looked to tourism to augment an eroding economic base and to commemorate the working lives of Nova Scotians. This article offers an analysis of the initial decision to construct and maintain the Museum of Industry in a region of the province subjected to sequential phases of deindustrialization. The venture, officially opened to regular attendance in 1995, is the largest facility in the province’s impressive system of 28 regional museums. The creation of the museum, however, was fraught with uncertainty and narrowly avoided financial collapse and plans to disperse the collection of artifacts. The project was subsequently left straddling an uneasy divide between celebrating industrial heritage and tempering controversies of economic and environmental development. Despite Nova Scotia’s proud heritage of worker resistance and union activism, visitors may exit the museum with the ambiguous message that while working lives are often harsh and riven with uncertainty, optimism for the future must prevail. The implication is that the appropriate response is selective anodyne forms of nostalgia, even resignation, but not resentment of the human and environmental costs of deindustrialization.

This fascinating book uncovers the little-known, surprisingly radical history of the Portuguese immigrant women who worked as night-time office cleaners and daytime “cleaning ladies” in postwar Toronto. Drawing on union records, newspapers, and interviews, feminist labour historians Susana P. Miranda and Franca Iacovetta piece together the lives of immigrant women who bucked convention by reshaping domestic labour and by leading union drives, striking for workers’ rights, and taking on corporate capital in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. Despite being sidelined within the labour movement and subjected to harsh working conditions in the commercial cleaning industry, the women forged critical alliances with local activists to shape picket-line culture and make an indelible mark on their communities. Richly detailed and engagingly written, Cleaning Up is an archival treasure about an undersung piece of working-class history in urban North America. --Publisher's description

Welcomes guest editors Lachlan MacKinnon and Steven High to the special issue on deindustrialization.

An illustrated, life-and times portrait of Mike Davis (1946-2022), the American writer, activist, urban theorist, and historian.

From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living. The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada--an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada's capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion--on force and on fear--to secure that subordination. From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics--of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy. -- Publisher's description

Objectif de la recherche : Cet article interroge la pérennité des communautés de pratique (CoP), généralement considérée par des approches déterministes, en utilisant le cadre théorique des communs. Cet article propose donc par analogie d’analyser les CoP en tant qu’organization et organizing. Cette approche doit permettre d’identifier les conditions internes pour une reproduction d’une CoP. L’objectif de cette recherche est ainsi de comprendre les conditions d’auto-organisation et de pérennité d’une CoP. Méthodologie : Pour ce faire, nous utilisons une méthodologie mixte. Après une étude qualitative de plusieurs mois à observer et analyser deux CoP, nous nous appuyons sur une étude quantitative menée auprès de sept CoP au sein d’une entreprise, MUTUALIS. Un questionnaire permettant d’analyser l’organization et l’organizing des CoP a été envoyé aux membres. 76 réponses ont été retenues et analysées avec SMART PLS. Contribution : Si cet article identifie un potentiel de reproduction interne des CoP et donc de pérennité, il souligne également que celle-ci demeure partielle par son usage instrumental. En raison de ce dernier, les CoP minimisent leur reproduction organisationnelle et donc leur auto-organisation. Pour dépasser cette limite, le cadre du commun propose in fine une approche intégrative de l’organisation d’une action collective auto-organisée qui nous amène à penser la démocratisation à une échelle multiniveaux. Finalement, cette étude démontre l’impératif d’une transformation organisationnelle plus générale de l’entreprise qui ne peut être réduite à des dispositifs ou des communautés sporadiques.

The article reviews the book, "Les couleurs de la révolution. La gauche à l’épreuve du pouvoir. Venezuela, Équateur, Bolivie : un bilan à travers l’histoire," by Patrick Guillaudat and Pierre Mouterde.

The article reviews the book, "Work and the Carceral State," by Jon Burnett.

In 2019, Regina’s Co-operative Refinery Complex locked out the 730 members of Unifor Local 594 amid record profits in an aggressive drive for significant pension concessions. Marred by sweeping antipicketing injunctions, an enormous scab operation, police repression, and general public enmity, the lockout suggests two overlapping trends. First, the union’s adherence to co-operative and conciliatory bargaining had left it ill equipped to confront—either in the workplace or the public sphere—management’s costcutting agenda in the centre of Saskatchewan’s now hegemonic petrostate. Second, a marked tension developed between community outreach efforts and the circumstances in which legal industrial action was ineffective and civil disobedience emerged.

The article reviews the book, "Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea," by Eric W. Sager.

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between public health and settler colonialism, employing age and ability as key categories of analysis. I argue that settler colonialism and public health were constitutive of one another. Public health policy weaves together notions about land, race, labour, age, and ability, to structure and stratify societies. Public health relied on white supremacist tropes to justify the state's attempts to subjugate and dispossess the Anishinaabeg in Northern Ontario. The idea of a "public" was critical and contested in the intersection of policy and the emerging social science of public health. Settler standards of public imagined a "public" that was white, male, middle-class, and adult, with a body that could be made healthy through individual effort. Settler ideas about Indigenous Peoples shaped the "public" as a racialized and age-stratified concept in Canadian public health and health policy. In this dissertation, I seek to highlight how material and symbolic age, and material and symbolic children, figured in settler-colonial processes of state formation in the context of public health policies. I examine how bureaucrats and institutions in the public and voluntary sectors constructed and portrayed Indigenous and settler health, measuring each against a middle-class standard of "public" health. To do this, I set forth four interconnected arguments. First, settler colonialism and settler public health policy were mutually constitutive. Second, disability existed alongside and entangled with age as a key framing for settler public health policies. Third, these public health policies drew from a bifurcated notion of the "public," resulting in policies focused on protection and surveillance based on racialized lines. Finally, these framings of disability, age, and the "public" had clear material impacts in Northern Ontario's settler-colonial context, enabling settlement while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples.

The article reviews the book, "White Space: Race, Privilege, and Cultural Economies of the Okanagan Valley," edited by Daniel J. Keyes and Luís L.M. Aguiar.

The Canadian labour market has experienced numerous changes over the last four decades. Employment has moved away from manufacturing and towards service sector jobs. Technological changes have brought computer-based technologies and, more recently, robotics and artificial intelligence to the workplace. World prices of oil and natural resources have fluctuated considerably. International trade with China and other emerging countries has risen. E-commerce has become a growing part of firms’ sales. Since March 2020, work arrangements have been altered substantially, with thousands of employees starting to work from home. In this context, how have unionization rates evolved in Canada? The goal of this note is to answer this question. --Introduction

Doug Ford’s use of notwithstanding thus becomes a declaration that he is engaged in class war. The legal niceties do not matter. He has unleashed a weapon of mass destruction. The right response is for CUPE, and all those who want to support them, to fight the fight in the same spirit. It is time to show the dominant class that without workers, they would not have anything.

This paper considers the recently introduced New Zealand Fair Pay Agreement (FPA) sectoral bargaining framework and offers a preliminary series of ideas and proposals setting out how an FPA model for bargaining sectoral standards could work in Canada. It is intended as the beginning of a more detailed discussion on the development of an FPA regime culminating in model legislation that could be adapted to different Canadian jurisdictions. Guided by principles of accountability, integration, and inclusivity, this proposal is intended to apply to all workers in an employment relationship – including dependent contractors and gig and platform workers. The proposed system is to be structured as a new, stand-alone statute, drawing upon existing institutions administering collective bargaining legislation, incorporating some familiar collective bargaining concepts: good faith bargaining, dues check-off, and unfair labour practice protection. It is intended to preserve existing collective bargaining arrangements by excluding specified sectors with existing high union density or existing sectoral bargaining. However, it is also intended to offer a new, sectoral bargaining option based on industry or occupation sectors, producing FPA “sector agreements” containing minimum standards applying to all employees and employers in the sector. This proposed framework would operate in parallel and in conjunction with the existing enterprise-level collective bargaining system.

Canada’s trade preference programs should be improved to raise living standards and improve working conditions and environmental policies

For many Canadians, a professor is a professor. The truth is that the professional and economic conditions of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty and contracted instructors are drastically different.