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In this profoundly troubling and incisive look at the state of work and welfare in Canada, Jason Foster reveals the long, often-hidden process that has left our jobs less secure, our livelihoods more uncertain, and the pockets of Canada’s wealthy fatter than ever. This phenomenon, the rise of “precarious work,” touches the entire economy and contributes to levels of income inequality unseen since the early 20th century. Our world is less secure than it has been in generations. Gigs, Hustles, and Temps describes how we got here, and why. Jobs across the economy are increasingly more precarious, and they share similar characteristics: impermanence, little to no benefits, and no union representation. Uber, Starbucks and Amazon have led the way. Governments are contracting out more labour than ever before. Tech companies hire workers on “flexible” contracts without the prospect of long-term employment. Migrant workers, too, are working without a safety net, figuratively and literally. No matter where you fall on the socio-economic ladder, your life is probably more precarious than your parents’ once was. Foster offers insights into the many consequences of our increasingly precarious world. He also details some of the less obvious repercussions of precarious work, including its contribution to the crisis of mental and public health across Canada. Foster argues that the rise of precarious work is more a “return to normal” for capitalist economies. But there is a flip side: advances in worker welfare have come through solidarity, struggle, and negotiation with the forces currently promoting precarious work across Canada's economy. Things don’t have to be the way they are. Gigs, Hustles, and Temps is a comprehensive, accessible, and essential guidebook on the road to a better world. --Publisher's description

« La grève d’Amoco de 1980, lors de laquelle s’est soulevée la population ouvrière de Hawkesbury, marque un temps fort de revendication franco-ontarienne, aujourd’hui pratiquement tombé dans l’oubli. Trois personnes qui ont, chacune à sa façon, pris part à la grève – Serge Denis, politologue, Richard Hudon, animateur social, et Jean Marc Dalpé, dramaturge et écrivain – replongent ici dans leurs souvenirs pour mettre en lumière la conjoncture sociopolitique qui a mené à la mobilisation des travailleurs et travailleuses de la région.Fruit d’un travail de terrain engagé, cet ouvrage, nourri par les témoignages et par de nombreux documents d’archives, démontre que la grève d’Amoco n’était pas une grève comme les autres. Microcosme du contexte sociohistorique dans lequel il s’inscrit, et bien qu’il consiste avant tout en une lutte ouvrière, le mouvement a permis à une communauté minoritaire doublement défavorisée, économiquement et politiquement, de s’affirmer en s’appropriant une nouvelle plateforme pour s’exprimer : le syndicalisme.Les combats de l’Ontario français pour la défense de ses droits se sont depuis déplacés vers les tribunaux, mais cette étude rappelle que sa culture politique s’est d’abord construite dans la rue et qu’il faut, à ce titre, assurer la transmission de ce pan de l’histoire populaire. »-- Résumé de l'éditeur

Recent years have seen massive waves of migration from the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa to Europe and North America and a corresponding rise in anti-immigrant, far-right populism in host countries, placing the question of migration at the forefront of politics and social movements. Henaway seeks to understand these patterns through contextualizing global migration within a history of global capitalism, class formation, and the financialization of migration. As globalization intensifies, a neoliberal labour market forces workers around an unevenly developed world to compete for wages--not through foreign investment and outsourcing, but through an increasingly mobile working class. Henaway rejects the right-wing response of restricting or "managing" immigration through temporary worker programs and instead suggests that stopping a race to the bottom for all working people involves building solidarity with the struggles of these migrants for decent work and justice. Through examining the organizing strategies of migrant workers at giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart as well as discount retailers like Dollarama and Sports Direct, the immense power and agency of precarious workers in global companies like UBER or Airbnb, the successful resistance of taxi drivers or fast food workers around the world, and the contemporary mass labour movement organized by new unions and workers' centres, Henaway shows how migrant demands and strategies can help shape radical working class politics in North America and Europe. --Publisher's description

Four working-class Vancouver sisters, still reeling from the impact of World War I and the pandemic that stole their only brother, are scraping by but attempting to make the most of the exciting 1920s. Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue is a love story — but like all love stories, it’s complicated … Morag is pregnant; she loves her husband. Georgina can’t bear hers and dreams of getting an education. Harriet-Jean, still at home with her opium-addicted mother, is in love with a woman. Isla’s pregnant too — and in love with her sister’s husband. Only one soul knows about Isla’s pregnancy, and it isn’t the father. When Isla resorts to a back-street abortion and nearly dies, Llewellyn becomes hellbent on revenge. But can revenge lead to anything but disaster for a man like Llew — a policeman tangled up in running rum to Prohibition America? Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue is immersed in the complex political and social realities of the 1920s and, not-so ironically, of the 2020s: love, sex, desire, police corruption, abortion, addiction, and women wanting more. Beautifully written, with a loveable cast of characters, this novel is a tender account of love that cannot be acknowledged, of loss and regret, risk and defiance, abiding friendship, and the powerful bonds of chosen family. --Publisher's description

The aim: to rejuvenate study and understanding of class relations in advanced capitalism. The book is an original synthesis of theorizing about class grounded in the production process, revealing a distinct tripartite class structure of owners, managers and non-managerial workers. Changes since the 1980s are traced and significant increases of non-managerial professional employees and middle managers are documented beyond any prior empirical research. Higher levels of oppositional and revolutionary class consciousness are conceptualized in terms of support for rights of capital and labour, and the extent of their expression in employed labour forces is estimated in terms only previously attempted briefly in the wake of 1960s protest movements. Connections between objective class positions and levels of class consciousness are analyzed in unprecedented depth; the solidary hegemonic consciousness of corporate capitalists, declining pro-capital oppositional consciousness among other employers and upper managers, and the pro-labour oppositional consciousness of pluralities of non-managerial workers (including professional employees) are all documented more fully than in prior studies. Strategic connections between class, class consciousness and issues of poverty and global warming are identified. Contending class forces’ engagement in actions toward an imminent system tipping point are uniquely traced. Main sources of evidence are all the national surveys in G7 and Nordic countries in the 1980s that provide relevant data, and the author’s unique Canadian national surveys in 2004, 2010 and 2016, supplemented by interviews with class leaders. A website encourages further class-based studies of advanced capitalism with similar measures to aid ecological sustainability and economic democracy. --Publisher's description (WorldCat record)

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

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

« Est-ce qu’il suffit de travailler moins pour retrouver l’équilibre entre les différentes facettes de nos vies surchargées ? La réduction du temps de travail est une revendication de longue date pour améliorer notre qualité de vie. En passant moins de temps au travail, nous pourrions enfin reprendre notre souffle et consacrer plus de temps à nos relations sociales, aux tâches domestiques ou encore pour s’engager dans la communauté. Mais est-ce que notre travail nous comble et contribue au bien commun ? Julia Posca interroge notre rapport au travail, explore sa nature et envisage les voies à emprunter pour lui redonner un sens. À la dystopie dans laquelle nous nous enfonçons toujours un peu plus, nous pourrions opposer l’utopie du travail « démarchandisé, démocratisé et dépollué ». Une invitation à revoir l’organisation du travail pour qu’il réponde d’abord aux besoins les plus « authentiques » : assurer à tous et toutes une existence digne, entretenir des relations riches, léguer une vie bonne aux futures générations. »--Quatrième de couverture

In the decades following the Second World War, women from all walks of life became increasingly frustrated by the world around them. Drawing on long-standing political traditions, these women bound together to revolutionize social norms and contest gender inequality. In Montreal, women activists inspired by Red power, Black Power, and Quebec liberation, among other social movements, mounted a multifront campaign against social injustice. Countercurrents looks beyond the defining "waves" metaphor to write a new history of feminism that incorporates parallel social movements into the overarching narrative of the women's movement. Case studies compare and reflect on the histories of the Quebec Native Women's Association, the Congress of Black Women, the Front de libération des femmes du Québec, various Haitian women's organizations, and the Collectif des femmes immigrantes du Québec and the political work they did. Bringing to light previously overlooked archival and oral sources, Amanda Ricci introduces a new cast of characters to the history of feminism in Quebec. The book presents a unique portrait of the resurgence of feminist activism, demonstrating its deep roots in Indigenous and Black communities and a transnational scope with wide-ranging inspirations and preoccupations. Advancing cross-cultural perspectives on women's movements, Countercurrents looks to the history of women's activism in Montreal and finds new ways of defining feminist priorities and imagining feminist futures. -- Publisher's description

This fourth edition...offers a comprehensive introductory overview of Canada’s labour movement. The book explores why workers form unions; assesses their organization and democratic potential; examines issues related to collective bargaining, grievances and strike activity; charts the historical development of labour unions; and describes the gains unions have achieved for their members and all working people. This new and expanded edition also analyzes the challenges facing today’s labour movement as a result of COVID-19 and the strategies being developed to overcome them. --Publisher's description

Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society's legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary. --Publisher's description

Bringing together ink artwork and fiction, Denison Avenue by Daniel Innes (illustrations) and Christina Wong (text) follows the elderly Wong Cho Sum, who, living in Toronto’s gentrifying Chinatown–Kensington Market, begins to collect bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband as a way to fill her days and keep grief and loneliness at bay. In her long walks around the city, Cho Sum meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighborhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind. A poignant meditation on loss, aging, gentrification, and the barriers that Chinese Canadian seniors experience in big cities, Denison Avenue beautifully combines visual art, fiction, and the endangered Toisan dialect to create a book that is truly unforgettable. --Publisher's description

The world is desperate for cobalt. It fuels the digital economy and powers everything from cell phones to clean energy. But this 'demon metal,' this 'blood mineral,' has a horrific present and troubled history. Then there is the town in northern Canada, also called Cobalt. It created a model of resource extraction a hundred years ago--theft of Indigenous lands, rape of the earth, exploitation of workers, enormous wealth generation--that has made Toronto the mining capital of the world and given the mining industry a blueprint for resource extraction that has been exported everywhere. Charlie Angus unearths the history of the town and shows how it contributed to Canada's mining dominance. He connects the town to present-day Congo, with its cobalt production and misery, to horrendous mining practices in South America and demonstrates that global mining is as Canadian as hockey. -- Publisher's description

In recent decades an increasing share of Canada’s agricultural workforce has been made up of temporary foreign workers from the Global South. These labourers work difficult and dangerous jobs with limited legal protections and are effectively barred from permanent settlement in Canada. In Harvesting Labour Edward Dunsworth examines the history of farm work in one of Canada’s underrecognized but most important crop sectors — Ontario tobacco. Dunsworth takes aim at the idea that temporary foreign worker programs emerged in response to labour shortages or the unwillingness of Canadians to work in agriculture. To the contrary, Ontario’s tobacco sector was extremely popular with workers for much of the twentieth century, with high wages attracting a diverse workforce and enabling thousands to establish themselves as small farm owners. By the end of the century, however, the sector had become something entirely different: a handful of mega-farms relying on foreign guest workers to produce their crops. Taking readers from the leafy fields of Ontario’s tobacco belt to rural Jamaica, Barbados, and North Carolina and on to the halls of government, Dunsworth demonstrates how the ultimate transformation of tobacco - and Canadian agriculture writ large - was fundamentally a function of the capitalist restructuring of farming. Harvesting Labour brings together the fields of labour, migration, and business history to reinterpret the historical origins of contemporary Canadian agriculture and its workforce. --Publisher's description

Cet ouvrage dresse un portrait des allumettières de la E.B. Eddy de Hull en abordant leurs conditions de vie et de travail entre 1854 et 1928. Cette étude s'appuie principalement sur un portrait démographique basé sur les recensements canadiens, mais aussi sur diverses archives (gouvernementales, privées, paroissiales, journaux scientifiques et à grand tirage, etc.) qui nous permettent de mieux comprendre la vie et le travail de ces ouvrières. En raison du nombre restreint d'études sérieuses sur les allumettières et l'industrie de l'allumette au Canada, cet ouvrage se base largement sur les sources historiques et l'analyse approfondie de ces dernières. Cette monographie présente l'histoire des allumettières par le biais de différents grands thèmes : leur rôle au sein de la classe ouvrière, leur vie au quotidien, leurs différents rôles dans la manufacture, les dangers de l'emploi (principalement ceux associés au phosphore blanc), leurs conditions de travail (salaires et heures) ainsi que leur expérience syndicale qui durera de 1918 au départ de la manufacture en 1928. À travers ses sept chapitres, cette monographie vise à peindre un portait détaillé et nuancé de cette main-d'œuvre anonyme, mais aussi à présenter les filles et les femmes qui ont occupé cet emploi. En somme, cette étude permettra de mieux saisir qui sont celles souvent présentées sous les traits de jeunes filles exploitées ou de militantes syndicales engagées. -- Description de l'éditeur

A powerful, personal critique of capitalist patriarchy as seen through the eyes of a queer radical. Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our personal, social, economic, and sexual lives. By examining the politics of gender, environment, and sexuality, we can see the ways straight, cis, white, and especially male upper-class people control and subvert the other - queer, non-binary, BIPOC, and female bodies - in order to keep the working lower classes divided. Patriarchy and classism are forms of systemic violence which ensure that the main commodity of capitalism - a large, disposable, cheap, and ideally subjugated work force - is readily available. There is a lot wrong with the ways we live, work, and treat each other. In essays that are both accessible and inspiring, Lori Fox examines their confrontations with the capitalist patriarchy through their experiences as a queer, non-binary, working-class farm hand, labourer, bartender, bush-worker, and road dog, exploring the ugly places where issues of gender, sexuality, class, and the environment intersect. In applying the micro to the macro, demonstrating how the personal is political and vice versa, Fox exposes the flaws in believing that this is the only way our society can or should work. Brash, topical, and passionate, This Has Always Been a War is not only a collection of essays, but a series of dispatches from the combative front lines of our present-day culture. -- Publisher's description

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, diamonds have been lauded as a "glistening" driver of the northern Canadian economy. Canadian diamonds are cast with an imagined purity as though they had emerged by magic. However, these diamonds are mined on Dene land, extracted by people who fly in from afar, separated from their families for long periods of time. Adopting a decolonizing and feminist approach to political economy, Refracted Economies analyses the impact of diamond mining in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. The book centres Indigenous women's social reproduction labour--both at the mine sites and at sites of community, home, and care--as a means of understanding the diffuse impacts of the diamond mines. Grounded in ethnographic work, the narratives of northern Indigenous women's multiple labours offer unique insight into the gendered ways northern land and livelihoods have been restructured by the diamond industry. Rebecca Jane Hall draws on documentary analysis, interviews, and talking circles in order to understand and appreciate the--often unseen--labour performed by Indigenous women. Placing this day-to-day labour at the heart of her analysis, Hall shows that it both reproduces the mixed economy and resists the gendered violence of settler colonialism as exemplified by extractive capitalism. --Publisher's description

For educators seeking to build anti-racism learning into Canadian history classes, this 8-book set of classroom materials is an invaluable resource. Each book addresses a major instance of official racism and discrimination spanning more than 150 years. ...Titles included: Righting Canada's Wrongs: The Komagata Maru; Righting Canada's Wrongs: The Chinese Head Tax; Righting Canada's Wrongs: Anti-Semitism and the MS St. Louis; Righting Canada's Wrongs: The LGBT Purge; Righting Canada's Wrongs: Africville; Righting Canada's Wrongs: Italian Canadian Internment; Righting Canada's Wrongs: Residential Schools; Righting Canada's Wrongs: Japanese Canadian Internment; Righting Canada's Wrongs: Resource Guide. --Publisher's description

Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighbourhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighbourhood that is home to the city's English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal's Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided. Deindustrializing Montreal challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality. Fundamentally, deindustrialization is a process of physical and social ruination as well as part of a wider political project that leaves working-class communities impoverished and demoralized. The structural violence of capitalism occurs gradually and out of sight, but it doesn't play out the same for everyone. Point Saint-Charles was left to rot until it was revalorized by gentrification, whereas Little Burgundy was torn apart by urban renewal and highway construction. This historical divergence had profound consequences in how urban change has been experienced, understood, and remembered. Drawing extensive interviews, a massive and varied archive of imagery, and original photography by David Lewis into a complex chorus, Steven High brings these communities to life, tracing their history from their earliest years to their decline and their current reality. He extends the analysis of deindustrialization, often focused on single-industry towns, to cities that have seemingly made the post-industrial transition. The urban neighbourhood has never been a settled concept, and its apparent innocence masks considerable contestation, divergence, and change over time. Deindustrializing Montreal thinks critically about locality, revealing how heritage becomes an agent of gentrification, investigating how places like Little Burgundy and the Point acquire race and class identities, and questioning what is preserved and for whom. -- Publisher's description

Prisons don’t work, but prisoners do. Prisons are often critiqued as unjust, but we hear little about the daily labour of incarcerated workers — what they do, how they do it, who they do it for and under which conditions. Unions protect workers fighting for better pay and against discrimination and occupational health and safety concerns, but prisoners are denied this protection despite being the lowest paid workers with the least choice in what they do — the most vulnerable among the working class. Starting from the perspective that work during imprisonment is not “rehabilitative,” this book examines the reasons why people should care about prison labour and how prisoners have struggled to organize for labour power in the past. Unionizing incarcerated workers is critical for both the labour movement and struggles for prison justice, this book argues, to negotiate changes to working conditions as well as the power dynamics within prisons themselves. --Publisher's description