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Throughout Canada, the need for care provision services is on the rise. The number of people willing and able to provide these care services is insufficient to address the growing need for care. Care work is provided by a mix of paid workers and unpaid family members. The majority of both these groups of care workers are women. Care work has long been undervalued as feminized labour, resulting in insufficient government support for family caregivers, and persistent labour issues within paid care sectors. In this thesis, I explore two distinct sets of Canadian federal policies related to care provision – Employment Insurance (EI) benefits for unpaid family caregivers, and the Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker Pilot Programs, which facilitate the immigration of private in-home caregivers to Canada – in order to discover whether they are underpinned by a shared set of similar assumptions about the nature of care work, who is best suited to perform it, and how it should be provided. In examining the assumptions about care that underpin and shape these policies related to care provision in Canada, I identify a number of consistent gendered themes about care and care providers and analyze their impact on policy outcomes.

Politics has often been conceptualized as a conflict between political parties that represent the economic interests of different groups in society. This conception of politics has, however, been considerably weakened by the economic and social transformations of the last decades and by the rise of post-materialist values among newer generations of electors. Indeed, the vote of manual workers for left-wing parties has declined significantly in recent decades as did the impact of left-wing parties on social spending. At the same time, the issue of low-wage work has become prominent in the partisan debates of several countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom following the mobilization of low-paid workers, unions and community associations. Low-wage workers who mainly work in the service sector have often precarious work and living conditions following decades of labor markets deregulation and are highly dependent on governmental policies to insure decent living and work conditions. One of these policies, the minimum wage, has been at the center of the electoral campaigns of many left-wing parties in recent years. However, the issue of low-wage work has rarely been studied in political science. This thesis seeks to explain the partisan dynamics surrounding the issue of low-wage work. My main argument is that low-wage workers tend to vote for left-wing parties in accordance with their economic interests, especially in countries with a weak degree of corporatism such as the United States and the United Kingdom. In those countries, left-wing parties have strong incentives to make pledges related to low-wage work like increasing the minimum wage in their electoral manifesto, because unions are unable to negotiate decent working conditions for the majority of workers. Indeed, in countries with weak corporatism, low-wage workers are very dependent on governmental interventions to ensure minimum working standards and improve their living conditions. In countries with strong corporatism, however, unions negotiate collective agreements that ensure minimum working conditions for the majority of workers, workers with weaker bargaining power are thus less dependent on government policies to insure decent working conditions. Therefore, left-wing parties should be able to consolidate their vote among low-wage workers in countries with a weak degree of corporatism. Once in power, left-wing parties should also increase the minimum wage and the direct cash transfers to low-income families more than governments led by right-wing parties, especially when corporatism is weak. The emphasis on policies targeted to low-wage workers by left-wing parties in countries with a weak degree of corporatism could also limit the capacity of radical parties to attract the vote of low-wage workers. This thesis is composed of 4 articles, one on electoral pledges related to low-wage work, one on the vote of low-wage workers, one on the impact of left-wing parties on minimum wages and one on the impact of left-wing parties on direct cash transfers received by low-income families. These four articles demonstrate the relevance of a materialist conception of politics and the role of institutions regulating the labor market on partisan dynamics.

Partial-load college faculty simultaneously occupy insider/outsider positions in their respective higher education institutions. How do they perceive the relationship between their employment status and their work as educators? In recent scholarship, it has been argued that part-time faculty occupy liminal positions as simultaneous professionals and precarious labourers in higher education. None of the literature attends to how part-time college faculty (a cohort that makes up 70%+ of Ontario’s college faculty) who specifically aspire to full-time teaching positions think about their work and professional identities, much less in the context of the province of Ontario, Canada. Through semi-structured and open-ended interviews with ten partial-load college faculty who aspire to full-time teaching positions across three colleges in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), this study asks faculty to reflect upon the relationship between their conditions of employment and their work as educators. How partial-load college faculty think about their work and professional identities has direct import for what continues to be the foundational mission, purview, and day-to-day activities of colleges – teaching and learning. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) identity theory provides the framework for enabling a nuanced analyses as to how partial-load college faculty think about, make sense of, and narrate their experiences in the liminal space of precarious professionals. The results of this study show that partial-load faculty are largely excluded from the pedagogical communities of their departments and institutions and that every aspect of their work as educators (curriculum development, professional development, and relationships with colleagues) is negotiated and filtered through their precarious status. This research sheds light on the centrality of partial-load college faculty on the enactment of curriculum in colleges as well as explores how various stakeholders can make meaningful change to address the professional goals and curricular inclusion of this significant teaching cohort.

Community unionism is still contested in the literature, and its presence across various industries and union formations is often not concretely described. This thesis engages in an examination of community unionism within the literature and assesses its potential presence in Toronto’s Labour Community Services, an organization which provides administrative and organizational support to labour unions and community groups in the Greater Toronto Area. Interviews with LCS organizers and staff members and other Toronto labour activists are assessed against common depictions of community unionism within the literature to determine if LCS is engaged in community unionism, or perhaps some other organizational strategies or philosophies. Interviews demonstrated a clear commitment to community building and deepened ties between the labour movement and various formations of community across Toronto and surrounding regions. Interviews also reveal the state of union-community resources, the barriers commonly experienced in this form of organizing, and how organizers and staff members perceive their role in the broader labour movement. Interviews with key informants reveal a series of strategies and choices which shape how Labour Community Services operates. Ultimately, Labour Community Services does not engage in community unionism as a whole practice, but rather utilizes several strategies and operative choices that share common ground with community unionism. A byproduct of these strategic choices is the creation of forms of community unionism between both the labour unions and community groups that LCS frequently works with.

Since its founding as a province, Saskatchewan has been depicted by the academic literature as possessing a political culture that was distinctly collectivist, dirigiste, protectionist, and polarized, largely owed to the historical political dominance of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the province. Such narratives have outlived the political fortunes of both the CCF and NDP, and have, until this point, persisted despite the rise of the right-wing Saskatchewan Party. This thesis aims to fill a scholarly gap, through considering the influence of prolonged Saskatchewan Party governance on the province’s politics and assessing the current state of Saskatchewan’s political culture. Specifically, I ask the following question: what is the dominant political culture strand in Saskatchewan Party-era Saskatchewan? Through a series of online focus group activities involving people from across the province, I assess and substantiate the influence of political culture pillars, such as collectivism, laissez-faire, heartland, and adversarialism, in shaping Saskatchewan’s provincial identity and contemporary political culture. This study demonstrates that Saskatchewan’s political culture has changed. Specifically, this thesis finds Saskatchewan’s contemporary political culture to be ‘blended’, containing components of both traditional and alternative political culture strands, although displaying a slight preference for the neoliberal and conservative alternative political culture. The findings suggest that the current Saskatchewan political culture has departed from its collectivist and hinterland traditions in favour of individualism and heartland. Meanwhile, the political orientations towards the provincial government’s role in the society and the economy (dirigisme or laissez-faire) or the attitudes Saskatchewanians possess towards political actors and the political system (adversarialism or pragmatism) are considerably more varied and lack ideological consistence. Ultimately, this study highlights the influence of political party shifts in serving as mechanisms and reflections of political culture change and provides an overview of Saskatchewan’s contemporary political culture under prolonged Saskatchewan Party governance. A concluding discussion highlights the value and significance of this research and suggests area of future exploration about Saskatchewan provincial politics and political culture.

Bereavement scholarship predominantly explores psychological aspects of grief, which neglects the role of social, economic, and political factors that shape the space allotted to accommodate these experiences. The current Canadian social context offers minimal space to honour bereavement as a part of the human condition. Aiming to respond to calls for enhancing bereavement care, this dissertation explores bereavement accommodation for workers in precarious employment in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on critical qualitative research and feminist ethics, this study employs policy analysis and in-depth interviews to generate multi-scalar knowledge on the everyday experiences of bereaved workers in precarious employment. I argue that there are discrepancies between how bereavement is represented in the social context and the everyday experiences of bereaved workers. The current representation portrays bereavement as a short-term, workplace disruption, neglecting grief and many forms of practical and emotional labour in bereavement. Participants expressed they were uninformed and unprepared for grief and bereavement labour, and that navigating the current context created tension, stress, exhaustion, isolation, and stigma. I argue we need a collective, ontological reckoning with our sense of autonomy, recognizing and honouring our interdependence in life and death. I argue that bereavement is a neglected public health issue driven by socio-political forces that devalue relationality, stigmatize emotions, and render bereavement an individual responsibility. This thesis makes broad recommendations for a public health approach to bereavement care, including enhancing grief literacy, creating more responsive care pathways and strategies for addressing individual and collective grief, and establishing safeguards for precarious workers.

In late December 2019, a new and emerging coronavirus came out of Wuhan, China. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, widely known as “COVID-19” (WHO, 2022), significantly impacted nearly every aspect of human life on Earth. This study, referred to throughout the thesis as a “project,” examined the intersection of collective bargaining agreements and COVID-19 in unionised environments in the public sector of Canada. --From Executive Summary

The Oshawa 1937 strike against General Motors was a major turning point in Canadian labour history. This thesis explores the factors that led to its success, including the historical background of working class struggle; the economic and political context of the times; prior organizing by Communists; the engagement of rank-and-file GM workers and the remarkable stewards’ body they established; and the support and leadership of the UAW International union. The influence of Communists meant that the strike incorporated many features of what might now be called rank-and-file unionism: industrial unionism, democratic engagement of rank-and-file workers, militancy on the shop floor, building solidarity within the workforce and in the community, international solidarity, and rejecting cooperation with corporations. The contending forces of workers, corporations, and rabidly anti-union governments that clashed in Oshawa in 1937 are largely the same ones we see in the battles going on in North America today. Thus, understanding the factors that led to the success of the Oshawa strikers can provide valuable lessons to those seeking to revive today’s labour movement.

This thesis explores the impact of the centralization of bargaining in Ontario’s education sector on the internal democracy of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), the province’s second-largest teacher union and self-described defender of public education. Using multiple theoretical lenses of union democracy, public sector unionism, labour geography and teacher professionalism, this thesis examines OSSTF’s history and the evolution of its internal processes and structures, with a focus on the union’s response to the gradual shift to a centralized bargaining regime. Initially formed in 1919 as a conservative organization committed to raising the professional status of teachers, OSSTF expanded into a union that represents both teachers and support staff, bargaining contracts for members with local employers. Positioned within a public sector context of austerity and neoliberal governments looking to contain the costs of public education, OSSTF found itself subjected to legislation intended to upscale education funding and bargaining, beginning in the late 1990s. This thesis finds that the external context of centralization of bargaining has been the most important factor in shaping the internal democratic life of OSSTF, shifting scales of power from the local to the provincial level of the union, exacerbating tensions between provincial and local actors, increasing the overall bureaucracy of the organization, and reducing democratic participation by the rank-and-file. These findings lead to the greater question of whether these internal changes have enhanced or limited the ability of OSSTF to effectively further their members’ interests and resist the neoliberalization of the school system, with a view to considering the role of teacher unions within the future of public education in Ontario.

Much has been written on the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), but rarely are conversations regarding the experiences of First Nations and Chinese immigrants on the railway brought together. This thesis will analyze how First Nations and Chinese people in Western Canada experienced the construction of the railway and how, as racialized peoples, they were excluded from the original national mythology centered on the completion of a transcontinental railway. The seemingly benign symbol of a railway representing the nation continues the violence of naturalizing colonial, capitalist structures in the national landscape. A closer look at this history reveals the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the destruction of their ways of life and incorporation of the capitalist economy—all processes that continues today. The history of the railway also reveals the place of Chinese immigrants as a distinct, racialized labour force in late-nineteenth-century Canada that reinforced and that was informed by the racial and economic interests of the national subject at an important time in the development of the nation and its national myths. Drawing on the insights of Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks, this analysis situates the CPR as a tool of colonial, capitalist, countersovereignty.

This study examines the framing of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) within the context of Canadian political discourse. Through a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary speeches spanning from 2006 to 2022, it investigates how TFWs and the TFWP have been framed by members of three federal political parties: Conservatives, Liberals and the NDP. With an aim to understand influences on framing strategies, the analysis considers significant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a change in government. The findings highlight the significance of party ideology in shaping perspectives on TFWs and the TFWP, with all three parties recognizing the necessity of this group and program in achieving Canada’s economic goals. At the same time, despite their increasing significance in the economy, the study highlights the conditional inclusion of TFWs in Canada. Policymakers adapt their frames based on perceived contribution of these workers and their alignment with Canadian interests. This research illuminates the crucial role of framing in shaping policy outcomes regarding TFWs and the TFWP.

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.

This dissertation compares the work and life of secondary public-school teachers in Ontario with different labour contracts during a time of crisis. The COVID public health crisis along with neoliberalism, the defunding of public education, and a climate crisis have all influenced governmental policies and the labour process of public secondary teachers in Ontario. The influences that different contracts can have on the labour process of teachers, how they feel towards their union, and the impacts on their individual health and household wellbeing before and during the first year of the COVID pandemic is the focus of this dissertation. To help explore these contexts and the influences on the life and labour of public secondary teachers in Ontario with different contracts, I have used research from studies in Labour Process Theory, precarious work, and educational labour to inform my analysis. Along with those areas of discourse, I have also used insights from research into Critical Realism and Thematic Analysis to think through and discuss the differences between the teachers I interviewed and connect their experiences with work, their union, and their individual health and household well-being to larger systems, structures, and histories. The interviews conducted revealed three points of interest: that precarious labour contracts can function as a disciplinary device, that larger contexts outside the contract shaped how the contract was experienced, and that teachers’ unions can act as a source of solidarity and security during a crisis and when there are certain associations with its purpose. This exploratory research aims to open up future areas of research into educational labour and differences between the experiences of educators with different contracts.

This thesis considers the connections between the increased migration of racialized women to Canada and the ascendancy of social movements in Toronto from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the mid-1970s, there was a surge of grassroots organizations founded by and for immigrant women in Toronto. They were established to address the distinct needs and experiences of immigrant women where government and preexisting, decidedly hypermasculine, ethnocultural organizations did not. This thesis argues that these organizations, and the individuals associated with them, were fundamentally political. In situating these organizations within the broader progressive political landscape of Toronto, this thesis elucidates the ways in which immigrant women’s political organizing challenged and transformed dominant social movements. In particular, immigrant women’s fraught relationship to the mainstream women’s movement in Toronto is closely examined. I argue that immigrant women organized both within and without the Toronto women’s movement. In their relationship to the women’s movement, immigrant women contested the limited perspective of white feminism by drawing closer attention to class and race. This was most evident within immigrant women’s organizing for reproductive freedom. Additionally, immigrant women organizer’s relationship to the Canadian state is analyzed as a site of struggle which dialectically constrained and sustained their activism. Because immigrant women worked in higher numbers than their Canadian counterparts and often in exploitative sectors, labour became a central issue within their activism. Through their labour organizing, immigrant women forged important alliances with the labour movement. This thesis also attends to the uneven racialization of immigrant women which informed their activism. Immigrant women’s activism offered alternative perspectives and methods of organizing which did not conform to dominant ones. By taking a relational rather than assimilationist or pluralistic approach to the relationship between immigrant women’s organizing and broader social movements, a fuller, more nuanced portrait of the intersections between immigration, gender, race, and social movements can emerge.

In the last decade, considerable attention has been paid to the category of craft. Within the disciplines, particularly in sociology and art theory, scholars like Richard Sennett, Susan Luckman, and Glenn Adamson have attempted to define, theorize and delineate the history of craft and its influence in contemporary capitalist culture. Popularly, books and television shows feature the work of makers and craftspeople, their popularity compounded by online crafting communities like Etsy. For all of this attention, considerably less has been paid to the labour that creates the craft products to begin with. This dissertation interrogates the category of craft from a critical labour studies perspective, first by analyzing its labour process, and, second, by amplifying the voices of workers in these industries in order to reflect the conditions they face, their attitudes about craft, and their reflections on class and organizing. In order to accomplish both, the dissertation reports on participant interviews and critically examines cultural artifacts concerning so-called making (typically understood as amateur or semi-professional small-scale production) and craft industrialism (used to define scalable industries that use craft branding and terminology). Its key case studies are making/makerspaces and craft brewing in the Cascadia region of North America, although it also visits the roasteries, bike shops, and bakeries that make up some of the other primary sites of the artisanal economy. This dissertation makes four primary contributions to the critical study of craft. First, it reorients the common approaches to craft, which either prioritize craft objects or individual maker activity. By redirecting attention to the social process of production, it avoids the object-orientation of many approaches as well as the maker-as-virtuoso narratives of popular accounts. By focusing on the social dynamics of craft, the dissertation transcends the singular craftsperson to make its second contribution: the reconceptualization of skill as social category rather than individual attribute. This social approach to skill paves the way toward the dissertation's third contribution: a dialectical consideration of the craftworker as distinct from but intrinsically related to the craftsperson. Analysis of cultural artifacts and discussions with workers highlighted the dependency of craftsmanship and support work. Finally, the dissertation distills maker and worker attitudes into a set of observations regarding the maker movement's narratives of emancipation through self-directed work as well as the potential of solidarity in craft industries.

It is only in the last few decades that Canadian trade unions have expressed labour solidarity with Indigenous peoples by bringing their attention to the distinct concerns of Indigenous workers in the workplace and beyond it. Trade unions have taken important steps to express support for their Indigenous members and their communities, yet little is understood about Indigenous peoples’ experiences in the capitalist labour market shaped by land dispossession, the ongoing manifestations of settler-colonial oppression, and the systemic economic marginalization by Canadian institutions and employers. It is pertinent to identify what unions are doing to support them and where they can strengthen labour solidarity so that they can develop critical sites of resistance against colonial-capitalist power. A closer analysis is needed to understand Indigenous peoples’ relationships to unions, relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous working people, and the challenges for unions to build united struggles with Indigenous peoples. This study examines the spaces of union engagement with Indigenous workers and their communities amongst the challenges presented by the reality of ongoing colonial oppression in Canada. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to examine the roles that trade unions have had with Indigenous peoples in the paid labour market and recent initiatives that they have taken to meet the needs of Indigenous workers and unionists, and 2) to analyze the ways trade unionists understand and approach Indigenous peoples’ concerns and anti-colonial struggles within the broader confines of settler-colonial capitalism, and to determine the challenges to transforming their practices of solidarity with Indigenous peoples. This study draws upon semi-structured, indepth interviews with 22 Indigenous and non-Indigenous key informants who are elected trade union officials, staff, and rank-and-file unionists. The study’s findings reveal emerging activism of Indigenous workers within their workplaces, unions, and beyond, and the complexities between Indigenous peoples’ relationships with paid labour, unions, and struggles for selfdetermination. I argue that unions are turning their attention to support the distinct needs of Indigenous workers and to support anti-colonial struggles, but they are limited to redressing the effects of settler-colonial capitalism. They face difficulty engaging in solidarity due to the structural limitations of settler-colonial capitalism. By reflecting on participant insights into these challenges, this study proposes an anti-colonial framework for unionists to transform their practices of labour solidarity.

Agriculture is at the centre of society’s most pressing sustainability challenges, including food insecurity, climate change, ecological degradation, and social inequity. Organic agriculture, when practiced according to an ethic grounded in ecology, health, fairness, and care, has been proposed as a remedy to these challenges. Building on a movement for an alternative to socially and ecologically exploitative food production, organic agriculture is now a multi-billion-dollar industry with established legal and regulatory frameworks around the world. While this growth could be seen as a success, empirical research has called into question the extent to which organic agriculture and market-oriented third-party certifications can foster sustainability transitions and has found that performance is often context dependent (e.g. depending on which practices are adopted). There remain significant gaps in knowledge about how organic agriculture is practiced in jurisdictions around the world relative to the sustainability-related principles on which it was founded, especially the principle of fairness. To address these gaps, I developed a mixed-method assessment grounded in a critical realist methodological approach to evaluate the contributions of organic agriculture to socio-ecological sustainability in Canada. I utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods—drawing from interviews with farmers, inspectors and organic policymakers, analysis of census data for farms across Canada, surveys of vegetable farmers in British Columbia and organic policy documents—to investigate how organic agriculture is shaped and enacted by organic community members at multiple scales. My analysis of organic standards in North America, along with census and survey data in Canada, provide strong evidence for higher levels of adoption of ecologically sustainable management in organic agriculture relative to all other farms. Yet, despite explicit attention to the principle of fairness in organic standards and among organic community actors, I found little evidence that organic agriculture in Canada is correlated with improved working conditions for farmworkers in practice. Across Mexico, the US and Canada, no organic standards contain any requirements related to social sustainability. At the same time, standards governance and community-led efforts toward integrating the principle of fairness into certification show potential to advance a more just and sustainable agriculture.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent government responses resulted in a shift in the identity of the essential worker that now included low wage essential workers. Using a critical discourse analysis methodology written news media texts were analyzed revealing various discursive strategies were utilized to construct the new essential worker identity. Findings revealed a fluid, complex identity that was politicized to advance other issues. The need to re-frame the definition of the essential worker was discussed along with the implications on the attainment of occupational rights for low wage essential workers.

Historians have generally interpreted the conscription crisis of 1917 as reflective of contending nationalist perspectives in Canada. In contrast this study examines the pivotal role of the labour led anti-conscription movement which developed in British Columbia and throughout Canada in World War One to oppose the threat poses by conscription and other war time acts of repression by the Borden government. A careful study of primary sources and newspapers of the era show that this movement of resistance to conscription also included others threated by conscription: conscientious objectors, Indigenous nations, farmers, and pacifist social gospel activists. The resistance movement had the effect of changing Federal government policy on conscription during the war and changing the political environment after the war and acted as a catalyst in helping to spark the post-war labour revolt.

A part of the labour movement for ninety-five years, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) worked to better the conditions of garment workers across North America. Although they saw gains for workers in the garment industry over fifty years of progress, in the last forty years of the ILGWU’s history, the union faced a dramatic decline. Large membership losses and a weakening of negotiating power in the industry left the ILGWU a shell of their former self. What happened to this union? This declension did not begin with rapid membership decline, but a steady drop in members was a symptom of missed opportunities and misunderstandings on the part of union leadership of the increasingly diverse needs of garment workers across North America. Using the ILGWU in Montréal and New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s, this dissertation highlights the intrinsic difficulties of with transnational unionization efforts in the late 20th century. The ILGWU’s could not maintain a collective identity for garment worker across North America. Shifting identities made it difficult for the union to maintain their membership and motivate nonunionized workers to join the organization. The decline of this powerful and important labour organization offers critical insights into women’s history and labour activism at the end of the 20th century and reveals new elements of the history of capitalism, especially as it relates to ethnicity and gender.