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This book deals with the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act and the Public Service Act, the statutes that primarily govern unionized and non-unionized employment and labour relations in the Ontario Public Service and Crown Agencies. This updated edition provides a full review of all sections, and all judicial and arbitral consideration, of both acts. It also discusses the unique treatment of the Crown and its employees in the Public Sector Labour Relations Transition Act and the Employment Standards Act. -- Publisher's description

An original history of those who made tattooing their livelihood. In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career. Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered. --Publisher's description

To be published: June 2025. The Canadian postwar economic boom did not include one western coal-mining region. When the Canadian Pacific Railway switched to diesel power, over 2,000 coal-production jobs were lost in the Crowsnest Pass and Elk Valley. The Lights on the Tipple Are Going Out tells the story of its fight for survival. Underground mine closures began in 1950, prompting attempts by unions, leftist parties, municipal governments, and business groups to save the local economy. Efforts to reindustrialize in the mid-1960s brought unregulated growth, unsafe working conditions, and pollution. Starting in 1968, new strip mines were built to produce metallurgical coal for Asia-Pacific steelmakers. Not only is this an interesting regional history, but the consideration of the role of labour unions, local communists, and grassroots environmentalists makes it especially compelling. Today, with technological change in steel manufacturing on the horizon, propelled by the climate crisis, Langford argues that the Crowsnest Pass and Elk Valley must look toward ecosystem restoration, sustainable economic activities, and the inclusion of First Nations in decision making in order to embrace a future beyond coal. -- Publisher's description

Autoworkers unionized the General Motors plant in Oshawa in 1937 after a bitterly fought strike that pitted them against a rabidly anti-union government, hostile press and GM corporation. It was a major turning point in Canadian labour history. Crucial factors contributing to the strike’s success include the historical background of working-class struggle in the community, patient and courageous prior organizing by Communists, the engaged leadership of rank-and-file GM workers, and the solid support of the United Autoworkers International Union. The author focuses on the voices and actions of rank-and-file workers and on the day-to-day events, many of which have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. The Truth About the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike takes down the long-accepted—but false—narrative espoused by the academic Irving Abella that the Oshawa workers were “on their own” without significant support from the UAW/CIO leadership and that they would have been better off not to organize under the banner of an international union. It also shows how that narrative fails to grasp the degree to which class struggle organizing principles were crucial to the strike’s success. A true understanding of the ’37 strike provides valuable lessons for people seeking to revive the labour movement today. --Publisher's description

The emergence, dominance, and alarmingly rapid retreat of modernist industrial capitalism on Cape Breton Island during the “long twentieth century” offers a particularly captivating window on the lasting and varied effects of deindustrialization. Now, at the tail end of the industrial moment in North American history, the story of Cape Breton Island presents an opportunity to reflect on how industrialization and deindustrialization have shaped human experiences. Covering the period between 1860 and the early 2000s, this volume looks at trade unionism, state and cultural responses to deindustrialization, including the more recent pivot towards the tourist industry, and the lived experiences of Indigenous and Black people. Rather than focusing on the separate or distinct nature of Cape Breton, contributors place the island within broad transnational networks such as the financial world of the Anglo-Atlantic, the Celtic music revival, the Black diaspora, Canadian development programs, and more. In capturing the vital elements of a region on the rural resource frontier that was battered by deindustrialization, the histories included here show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively. --Publisher's description

This catalogue of the Nii Ndahlohke exhibition at Art Windsor Essex (September 26, 2023 – June 25, 2024) features work by First Nations artists exploring the history of forced labour of students at Mount Elgin Industrial School (1851-1946). --WorldCat catalogue record

Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. Gary Mucciaroni examines five Anglophone nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States – whose differences are often overlooked in the literature on political economy, which lumps them together as liberal, “market-led” economies. Despite their many shared characteristics and common historical origins, these nations’ responses to the labour question diverged dramatically. Mucciaroni identifies the factors that explain why these nations developed such different industrial relations regimes and how the paths each nation took to the adoption of its regime reflected a different logic of institutional change. Drawing on newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, and personal memoirs, among other sources, Answers to the Labour Question aims to understand the variety of state responses to industrial unrest and institutional change beyond the domain of industrial relations. --Publisher's description

V. 1. In the past decade Canadian history has become a hotly contested subject. Iconic figures, notably Sir John A. Macdonald, are no longer unquestioned nation-builders. The narrative of two founding peoples has been set aside in favour of recognition of Indigenous nations whose lands were taken up by the incoming settlers. An authoritative and widely-respected Truth and Reconciliation Commission, together with an honoured Chief Justice of the Supreme Court have both described long-standing government policies and practices as "cultural genocide." Historians have researched and published a wide range of new research documenting the many complex threads comprising the Canadian experience. As a leading historian of labour and social movements, Bryan Palmer has been a major contributor to this literature. In this first volume of a major new survey history of Canada, he offers a narrative which is based on the recent and often specialized research and writing of his historian colleagues. One major theme in this book is the colonial practices of the authorities as they pushed aside the original peoples of this country. While the methods varied, the result was opening up Canada's rich resources for exploitation by the incoming European settlers. The second major theme is the role of capitalism in determining how those resources were exploited, and who would reap the enormous power and wealth that accrued. The first volume of this challenging and illuminating new survey history covers the period that concludes in the 1890s after the creation out of Britain's northern colonies of the semi-autonomous federal Canadian state. ----------------------- V.2. Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890–1960 continues the examination of our nation’s past through a new lens, incorporating the scholarship of Canadian historians to portray a richly endowed and wealthy but very unequal first-world country. This second volume of Bryan Palmer’s history of Canada covers 1890 to 1960. Weaving together themes that include business, labour, politics, and social history, this account brings the experiences of Indigenous peoples into the centre of the narrative. Canada experienced extraordinary growth during these decades, notably after the Second World War when many Canadians quickly became far better off Yet vast inequalities persisted, Indigenous peoples experienced ongoing and often worsening deprivation, and ordinary people saw little or no real improvement in their lives. These realities set the stage for the interplay of reform, resistance and reaction that followed after 1960. Palmer examines the continuing role of capitalism and colonialism in structuring Canada in the period between 1890 and 1960 from capital’s conflicts and fragile ententes with labour, to the struggles of Indigenous Peoples and francophone Canada, and the changing role of Canadian capital internationally. Relying on the work of scholars who have produced a vast academic literature on a wide range of topics in Canadian history, Bryan Palmer offers a new history of Canada which reflects the knowledge and values of 21st-century Canadians. -- Publisher's description

E-textbook that introduces Canadian labour relations, labour history, unions, collective bargaining (including resolving disputes), and grievance arbitration.

Amid the proliferating scholarship and often sensational public campaigns, Trafficking Harms offers fresh insights and critical analyses. The collection’s four thematic areas — Discourses and Representations; Law and Prosecutions; Policing and Surveillance; Migrant Labour Exploitation — examine an array of issues, including the contested definitions of human trafficking, the application of trafficking law and policy, the conflation of sex work and trafficking, the impacts of anti-trafficking frameworks on racialized communities, questions around “victims” and “traffickers” and much more. Showcasing a mix of scholarly research, public advocacy and first-person narratives, this book is the first of its kind in Canada. The authors include a diverse group of academics, legal advocates, frontline activists who work with migrant and sex-working communities, individuals who have been charged and/or convicted of trafficking offences and those who are directly impacted by trafficking law and policing, such as domestic and migrant sex workers. --Publisher's description

In the decades following the Second World War, autoworkers were at the forefront of the labour movement. Their union urged members to rally in the streets and use the ballot box to effect change for all working-class people. But by the turn of this century, the Canadian Auto Workers union had begun to pursue a more defensive political direction. "Shifting Gears" traces the evolution of CAW strategy from transformational activism to transactional politics. Class-based collective action and social democratic electoral mobilization gave way to transactional partnerships as relationships between the union, employers, and governments were refashioned. This new approach was maintained when the CAW merged with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union in 2013 to create Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union. Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage explain how and why the union shifted its political tactics, offering a critical perspective on the current state of working-class politics. -- Publisher's description

In this book, independent experts analyze the performance of Justin Trudeau’s years in power in over 20 important areas of government policy. The record of what has been done–and what hasn’t–will surprise even well-informed readers. The focus is on six policy areas: Indigenous rights, governance and housing; the environment and energy; taxes and spending; healthcare and social benefits; foreign policy, immigration, and trade; and social policy including drug reform, labour rights, and racism. Editors Katherine Scott, Laura Macdonald, and Stuart Trew of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have recruited Canada’s most knowledgeable experts in their areas to contribute to this volume. -- Publisher's description

The story of a people told through the story of a city. Niigaan Sinclair is often accused of being angry in his columns. But how can he not be? In a collection of writing that spans the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential school sites, the murder of young Indigenous girls, and the indifference towards the basic human rights of his family members, this book is inspired by his award-winning columns 'from the centre.' Niigaan examines the state of urban Indigenous life and legacy. At a crucial moment in Canada's reckoning with its crimes against the Indigenous peoples of the land, one of our most essential writers begins at the centre, capturing a web spanning centuries of community, art, and resistance. Based on years' worth of columns in the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC, and elsewhere, Niigaan Sinclair delivers a defining essay collection on the resilience of Indigenous peoples. Here, we meet the creators, leaders, and everyday people preserving the beauty of their heritage one day at a time. But we also meet the ugliest side of settler colonialism, and the communities who suffer most from its atrocities. Sinclair uses the story of Winnipeg to illuminate the reality of Indigenous life all over what is called Canada. This is a book that demands change and celebrates those fighting for it, that reminds us of what must be reconciled and holds accountable those who must do the work. It's a book that reminds us of the power that comes from loving a place, even as that place is violently taken away from you, and the magic of fighting your way back to it. -- Publisher's description

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading work published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers. -- Publisher's description

In this singular firsthand account, a former migrant worker reveals a disturbing system of exploitation at the heart of Canada’s farm labour system. When Gabriel Allahdua applied to the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Canada, he thought he would be leaving his home in St. Lucia to work in a country with a sterling human rights reputation and commitment to multiculturalism. Instead, breakneck quotas and a culture of fear dominated his four years in a mega-greenhouse in Ontario. This deeply personal memoir takes readers behind the scenes to see what life is really like for the people who produce Canada’s food. Now, as a leading activist in the migrant justice movement in Canada, Gabriel is fighting back against the Canadian government to demand rights and respect for temporary foreign labourers. Harvesting Freedom shows Canada’s place in the long history of slavery, colonialism, and inequality that has linked the Caribbean to the wider world for half a millennium--but also the tireless determination of Caribbean people to fight for their freedom. -- Publisher's description

Au cours des dix à quinze dernières années, les plateformes de travail numériques se sont fortement développées dans différents secteurs d'activité, comme le transport de personnes et la livraison de repas, ou sous forme d'une multitude de microtâches réalisées en ligne. Des centaines de milliers de travailleurs et travailleuses se retrouvent actuellement dans cette nouvelle gig economy. Quelle est l'importance des plateformes numériques et quelle est leur signification pour le monde du travail ? Menacent-elles de supplanter les relations d'emploi traditionnelles fondées sur des contrats légalement réglementés ? Sont-elles compatibles avec les promesses d'autonomie et de liberté qui constituent leur image de marque ? Quelle est la situation vécue par les travailleurs et les travailleuses des plateformes ? Cet ouvrage tente de répondre à ces interrogations selon une perspective à la fois internationale et multidisciplinaire. Sociologues, économistes et juristes, spécialistes de la question, dressent un portrait saisissant de l'économie des plateformes numériques, analysent les effets de leur développement sur les manières de vivre le travail et soulèvent des nouveaux questionnements et enjeux sociaux pour l'action publique

The first full-length treatment of Ed Broadbent's ideas and remarkable seven-decade engagement in public life. Ed Broadbent is unique among living political leaders of international stature in offering a fully developed analysis of social democracy and its relevance in the 21st century. His career as a political philosopher, activist, and politician and his conversations with contemporaries such as Willy Brandt, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Fidel Castro, and Mikhail Gorbachev inform his analysis of the struggles for social justice in the long 20th century. Having come to the socialist and social democratic traditions by way of academic study, Broadbent tested and tempered his ideas in the great postwar struggles over social rights, gender and racial equality, workers' rights, the containment of capital, and reversing the commodification of private life. The book explores the roots of his egalitarianism and the formation of his social democratic ideas, Broadbent's engaged internationalism and relationship with key historical figures, and his experiences and reflections in practical politics and pursuit of government across several of the most momentous decades in the history of Canada. He was a Member of Parliament for over two decades and was, for most of this period, leader of the New Democratic Party. He remains to this day an important social democratic voice in the public debates of the nation. Part political history, part intellectual biography, part manifesto for social democracy this first-ever full-length treatment of Broadbent's thought will be animated in dialogue with three collaborators from different generations, each similarly immersed in the history of social democratic ideas--the result being a fresh analysis of social democracy, Canadian politics, and a lively contribution to current debates and dilemmas. -- Publisher's description

A poignant memoir of a rough-and-tumble boyhood on the streets of Toronto's Cabbagetown. When the Burke family left Ireland in 1959, they thought they were leaving the trials and tribulations of the Dublin slums behind. Instead, Molly, Bill, and their nine children found the same poverty and hardship awaiting them in the east end of Toronto. For their sixth-born son, Terry, growing up in Cabbagetown was a daily struggle to survive. Whether it was the bullies on the street or the gangs in Regent Park, fights were an everyday occurrence. School should have been a refuge, but some of the priests and nuns were more terrifying than any street bully. The only escape for Terry was to find his way down into the Don Valley, where he could search the river for muskrat or imagine himself escaping on one of the freight trains, chucking north, up the valley floor. But a childhood in Cabbagetown didn't seem to last very long. Forced into adulthood and driven from home in the wake of tragedy, Terry struggled to survive on his own and find a way back to his family. In this touching memoir, Terry Burke tells a poignant story of hunger, pain, love, and loss, and the enduring bonds of family. --Publisher's description

Feminism's Fight explores and assesses feminist strategies to advance gender justice through Canadian federal policy from the 1970s to the present. It tells the crucial story of a transformation in how feminism has been treated by governments and asks how new ways of organizing and emerging alliances can advance a feminist agenda of social and economic equality. This timely collection examines the ideas that feminists have put forward in pursuit of the goal of equality and traces the shifting frameworks employed by governments in response. The authors evaluate changing government orientations through the 1970s to 2020, revealing the negative impact on women's lives and the challenges posed for feminists. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the sexism, misogyny, and related systemic inequalities that remain widespread. Yet it has also revived feminist mobilization and animated calls for a new and comprehensive equality agenda for Canada. Feminism's Fight asks two key questions: What are the lessons from feminist engagement with federal government policy over fifty years? And what kinds of transformative policy demands will achieve the feminist goal of social and economic equality?-- Publisher's description