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This article explores the impact of union endorsements on the voting intentions of union members in Canada. Through a survey of union members, the study reveals that while union endorsements generally do not significantly influence voting behaviour, satisfaction with one’s union enhances the likelihood of supporting union-endorsed candidates in federal, provincial, and local elections. This correlation underscores that having strongly supported unions in the workplace helps to build strong unions in the political arena with improved capacity to deliver union members’ votes. The findings also provide a basis for further research on the potential electoral significance of union endorsements.

Return to work (RTW) after injury requires strong stakeholder coordination. Seafaring work is associated with high injury rates, but seafarers’ RTW is understudied. As federally regulated workers, Canadian seafarers are protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability. Following a work-related injury or illness, seafarers are eligible for provincial workers’ compensation benefits and RTW; however, RTW is also subject to federal regulations, including the requirement to have a valid marine medical certificate (MMC). This complex regulatory landscape may negatively influence seafarer RTW. Drawing upon a sociolegal study, we find that MMC-related human rights complaints against the federal government highlight the legal challenges seafarers face in the RTW process. Interview findings suggest that to ensure a valid MMC and employment eligibility, injured seafarers might avoid filing compensation claims or RTW before recovery. We recommend the federal-provincial agencies adopt more efficient coordination policies to support seafarers’ RTW.

This article critically assesses the systems that structure unpaid care work for people with intellectual disabilities, with a focus on the role of siblings. We provide a preliminary analysis of this current trend in unpaid care work in the province of Ontario, Canada, addressing practices that are a) built upon a devaluation of people with intellectual disabilities, and that b) deny them choice in who provides them care. We combine existing evidence with relevant survey data to assess the risks associated with what we characterize as coercive care, as well as the many tensions that arise between self-advocacy and family-led advocacy initiatives. We interrogate the assumption that the role of siblings, and women in particular, is to take over unpaid care roles from parents. We also suggest how the current socioeconomic context of many individuals and families can limit opportunities for adopting potential solutions and propose practical avenues for future research. Throughout our analysis, we centre questions of agency and self-direction, pointing to the clash of values and inequitable outcomes that makes dominant support arrangements untenable. We conclude by drawing an ideal scenario of the publicly funded supports and services to which people with intellectual disabilities should be entitled and outline the many implications attached to this proposed model.

The relationship between differential inclusion of workers migrating for employment internationally and the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous people and lands is a growing area of study within critical migration studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to how (im)migration policies that foster migrant worker precariousness also extend settler colonial practices. Scholars situated in the transdisciplinary fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies have long theorized nation-state building as exclusionary to Black and Indigenous life, and reliant on limited mobilities and dispossession of Black and Indigenous peoples. Bridging this scholarship with critical migration studies, in this article we explore how policies regulating international migration for employment to Canada on temporary bases reflect and sustain the settler-colonial context in which they operate. We outline three logics of settler colonialism that underpin policies governing temporary migration for employment to Canada: (1) the racialized hierarchization of life and knowledge; (2) the reliance on technologies of governing, which foster unequal administrative burdens; and (3) the disruption of people’s relationships to land and livelihoods. Analyzing Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy, we illustrate how migration policies reinforce and replicate settler colonial practices.

The evolution of the protection of collective bargaining rights in Canada has been marked by a tension between freedom of association (section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “the Charter”) and equality (section 15(1) of the Charter). In most cases before the Supreme Court of Canada (“the SCC”), the SCC has examined both rights separately. More recently, the SCC has treated equality as a value (rather than a right), using the value of equality to inform its interpretation of freedom of association. Both these approaches (the “Siloed Approach” and the “Charter Values” approach) fail to fully examine how equality and freedom of association exist bidirectionally. This article uses a 2008 case from the Quebec Superior Court as a case study of how equality can inform our understanding of association and how association can remedy inequality.

As climate change accelerates, extreme heat is becoming a critical occupational hazard across Canada. Yet worker protections remain fragmented, reactive, and highly uneven across sectors and provinces. This article offers a socio-legal analysis of how heat stress is governed through regulation, collective bargaining, and emerging private governance mechanisms. Drawing on a review of federal and provincial occupational health and safety statutes, a content analysis of over 50,000 collective bargaining agreements, and an assessment of ESG disclosures, Global Framework Agreements, and Worker-Driven Social Responsibility models, the study maps Canada’s evolving approach to heat protection. It finds that CBA coverage remains minimal and concentrated in a small number of unionized manufacturing settings, particularly in Ontario. While Ontario demonstrates the potential for a more coordinated model—especially if proposed legislation complements negotiated protections—the province’s current framework remains limited in scope and sectoral reach. The article argues that effective heat governance will require hybrid coordination across statutory, contractual, and voluntary domains, supported by technology, institutional linkages, and adaptive worker voice. It concludes by outlining an integrated framework for climate-era labour protection grounded in enforceable rights, dynamic bargaining, and transparent corporate accountability.

Electric micromobilities (EMMs), including electric bikes, standup kick-style electric scooters, and electric unicycles are highly efficient and low impact modes for urban food delivery. However, the mobility they and their associated algorithmic platforms afford is implicated in a set of work practices and relations that reinforce precarious employment outcomes. Our interviews, observational and autoethnographic research in Vancouver, Canada, revealed that food delivery platforms promise flexibility and high earnings while motivating workers to toil for variable and low wages and engage in high-risk behaviour. We focused on food delivery workers using EMMs because barriers to accessing an EMM are lower than for a car, while affording greater mobility on congested city streets, incurring no parking fees, and delivering zero emission operation. However, ostensibly low financial barriers to entry mask the requirement for considerable knowledge of, and navigational skills within, the physical and virtual environments that workers must master to resist the control exercised by platforms (apps) in an intensely competitive playing field. App-based food delivery using EMMs implicates workers in a game that requires upfront investment, skill and the navigation of risk. It is a stacked game, in which mostly the house wins.

The article reviews the book, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade," by Jeff Schuhrke.

North American regimes of industrial legality provide workers with protected rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike. However, they also limit the freedom to strike. Trade unions commonly accept and enforce these limits, but at great cost to solidarity and militancy. This article examines the many ways law works against labour by restricting the freedom to strike and explores the practice of unlawful strikes in North America, including recent examples that resulted in successful outcomes. It concludes with reflections on the revival of unlawful strikes as a tactic forrebuilding and remobilizing the North American labour movement. While the article’s focus is North America, the discussion of unlawful strikes may also be relevant in other countries that limit the freedom to strike.

This paper examines the strategic alliance between the Tenant Solidarity Working Group (TSWG)—a graduate-student tenant union—and CUPE Local 3906, representing Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Situated within Hamilton’s ongoing economic shift from manufacturing, specifically steel production, toward increased real estate speculation, financialization, and intellectual labour, this study investigates whether tenant-labour collaborations provide an effective model for addressing systemic socio-economic inequalities in student housing. Utilizing Nancy Fraser’s analytical triad of recognition, redistribution, and representation, the research evaluates the potential and limitations of this collaboration in achieving tangible socio-economic justice outcomes for graduate tenants. Through the lens of Fraser’s framework, the study identifies how tenant and labour activists mobilize recognition by contesting normative stigmatization of graduate renters; pursue redistribution through collective action that has yielded financial concessions such as rent reductions; and seek representation by demanding political inclusion within university administrative structures and broader public discourse. The analysis underscores that, despite Hamilton’s persistent identity as a major steel producer, the city’s gradual pivot toward real estate investment and intellectual labour exemplifies David Harvey’s concept of a “spatial fix,” redirecting surplus capital and labour into the university sector, thus complicating the intersection of housing affordability and labour precarity.

Introduces and reprints the "Red Haggis" comic strip that ran in 1934 in the Young Worker, the weekly publication of the Young Communist League of Canada. The strip's hero, Red Haggis, is depicted as a pugnacious amalgam of Popeye the Sailor Man and "the hard man" of the Scottish working-class tradition. The artist - signed as "Crawford" in the strip - has not been definitively identified.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

This article explores the challenges facing injured migrant farm workers in the workers’ compensation system in Canada's province of Ontario, with a focus on their fight for return to work justice. Told from the perspective of one of the lawyers who represented the workers, it highlights a recent victory achieved by 4 workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in defending their rights to workers’ compensation support. The workers’ compensation tribunal decided that the workers’ compensation board must evaluate these workers’ ability to return to work, access retraining, and receive compensation based on their labor markets in Jamaica—instead of based on fictional job prospects in Ontario. The tribunal also called out the need to consider systemic anti-Black racism in workers’ compensation law and policy. The article analyzes how this legal victory could reshape workers’ compensation policy in Ontario for injured migrant farm workers. It also discusses the implications of the win for injured workers in other temporary work programs and precarious employment sectors.

Analyzes the state of trade unionism in France with particular reference to union participation in the pensions movement of 2023 and the formation of a left-wing popular front during the 2024 national election. Argues that this return to the political sphere by unions during a time of crisis is in contrast to their narrow, industrial relations focus (called "démocratie social") that has predominated over the past 30 years. Concludes that political unionism and a class-based focus on the broader representation of work are the strategic challenges. The text is an address originally given by the author at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal, on June 19, 2024.

Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this paper highlights two distinct but related dynamics of racial differentiation in relation to Amazon in Greater Toronto Area (GTA): at the level of the region’s broader political economy and within Amazon’s warehouses. I outline the ways in which the e-commerce giant both exploits and (re)makes the racialized geography of the GTA. Amazon’s capitalization on neoliberal austerity and corporate welfare perpetuates class and racialized inequalities. These processes adversely affect these suburban localities and negatively impact employment in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this context, I argue that Amazon’s success has been, in no small part, due to its exploitation of Canada’s racially stratified labour market. Within the warehouse, the notion that digital Taylorism produces an undifferentiated workforce and a uniform labour process is interrogated. Instead, workers’ own accounts point to the ways digital technologies enable management to generate racial/ethnic differentiation and further squeeze value from workers. By situating Amazon within this specific socio-historical and political economic context, I demonstrate that the GTA offers a case study through which to examine the racial dynamics of digital capitalism and show that racialized and gendered social relations inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.

We investigated the role of cultural intelligence (CQ) among immigrant workers (IWs) in their professional success within Quebec organizations. Professional success was assessed at two stages of a worker’s career: an intermediate (organizational socialization: OS) and an ultimate stage (objective career success: OCS). Data from a purposive sample of 103 IWs show that CQ predicts OS, but neither CQ nor OS predicts OCS, except for IWs from Global North countries. Thus, intermediate success depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to integrate into the organization’s culture, but this ability will increase objective career success only if the immigrant is from the Global North, and not from the Global South. These findings challenge the hypothesis that socio-economic integration depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to adapt. Finally, we discuss structural factors that may affect the CQ/OCS relationship.

L’objectif de cet article consiste à analyser les spécificités et les enjeux entrepreneuriaux de la relation de travail atypique que constitue la coopération amapienne entretenue entre un petit producteur agricole et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Assimilable à une forme spécifique d’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole, la création d’une association pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne (AMAP) se matérialise par un engagement contractualisé des consommateurs dans l’activité de production agricole et de vente directe de produits alimentaires locaux. L’engagement de ces consommateurs constitue alors une véritable force de travail pour le petit producteur agricole facilitant l’accès à des expertises et compétences complémentaires. Notre recherche vise à comprendre comment la coopération amapienne, en tant que relation de travail atypique, permet de stimuler, au sein d’un territoire, l’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole entre un petit producteur et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Basés sur une méthodologie qualitative, nos résultats montrent que cette relation de travail atypique se caractérise par un système de coproduction, de cogestion et de réciprocité apprenante. Par ailleurs, elle favorise, pour l’entrepreneur agricole, la mise en place d’un environnement capacitant grâce aux principes de suppléance, de soutien, d’éducation et d’accompagnement auxquels obéit la création d’une AMAP et qui renforcent la capacité d’action et d’autonomisation du petit producteur. Ainsi, la finalité de cette relation de travail atypique réside dans un « entreprendre ensemble » pour, in fine, cocréer de la valeur sociale. Cette approche entrepreneuriale et altruiste de la relation de travail atypique enrichit la littérature académique qui l’envisageait, jusqu’à présent, principalement à partir de la situation de vulnérabilité du travailleur. Nous proposons en effet de la considérer aussi à partir de la capacité du travailleur à prendre part à un projet d’entrepreneuriat collectif en mettant à disposition d’une communauté un ensemble d’expertises et de compétences.

Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective ‘social’ bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure.

The article reviews the book, "The Happiness of the British Working Class," by Jamie L. Bronstein.

The article reviews the book, "Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada's Cultural Diplomacy," by Eric Fillion.