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Examines the sharp escalation in incidents of workplace violence over the past decade in Manitoba, the failure of employers to meet their mitigation and hazard elimination obligations, and the lack of enforcement by the provincial government. The evidence is drawn from a variety of sectors, including healthcare and education, as well as interviews with 38 workers. Concludes with 10 policy recommendations.

The “Red Baron” from Local 213 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) was Les McDonald, once a firebrand Communist activist and the youthful leader of the left faction within the Vancouver electrical workers’ union. His fate would be intertwined with the Lenkurt Electric strike of 1966, a wildcat strike that led to the imprisonment of four trade union leaders. Following his involvement as a long-time trade unionist, McDonald went on to be better known for his dedication to the establishment of triathlon as an official sport of the Olympic Games. However, McDonald’s important role in Local 213 and the Lenkurt strike—a watershed moment in Canadian labour history—was, until now, the untold story of the first half of his life. Referencing Local 213’s Minute Books, newspaper articles, collected correspondence, as well as dozens of personal interviews conducted by the author, this book examines the history of IBEW Local 213 in the turbulent years leading up to the Lenkurt strike. In addition to describing these events and their important historical ramifications, author Ian McDonald chronicles how his father helped to rebuild a left faction within the local union. With a focus on the period between 1955 to 1985, this ground-breaking study of a single construction trade union local—its brief post-World War II experience with Communist leadership, well-known work-site militancy, and repeated interventions by the IBEW’s International Office—sheds light on the local’s “red” minority activism and ultimately explains why McDonald returned to the world of sport to finish his career. --Publisher's description

This article reviews the book, "Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988," by David Wight.

This article reviews the book, "Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism," by Shelton Stromquist.

Though working-class literatures poorly fit within the theoretical purview of contemporary literary studies, the absence of scholarship in the Canadian context is particularly acute. Neoliberal readings thrive at the expense of labour-focused readings, with the possible result of insulating against the desired change such readings wish to bring into being. Because Chris Pannell’s poetry is so focused on work, its representations and spiritual qualities amidst a particular post-industrial location (Hamilton, Ontario), it makes for poetry well suited my goal: to create an ambidextrous reading method. In this article, I summarize the work done to date in Canadian literary studies on both labour and neoliberalism. Due to the relatively thin literature in CanLit available over the past few decades, I bring in Lukács and some American literary scholars (Jameson, Christopher and Whitson, Clarke) to round out what a working-class literature might be theorized as, and read as, in Canada while also keeping in view how critiques of neoliberalism are inadequate to the task of serving the working-class. To recalibrate Canadian literary studies, I bring forward Marx’s ideas concerning surplus value and alienation as they pertain to the production of poetry. While acknowledging the contributions of critiques of neoliberalism in Canadian literature, I critique those readings as rooted in Marx.

This article reviews the book, "Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943," by Andy Friend.

Presenting a sociological perspective on globalisation and COVID-19 impacts, this book examines the lasting effects of COVID-19 on the structure of work and unpaid domestic labour.Labour patterns have influenced political, social, and economic spheres that affect organisational practices. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, this book showcases these effects upon household labour, care work, unpaid domestic work, and organisational practices, with attention to systemic inequalities by gender and age, net zero, privacy, and digitisation transitions. It examines the exponential post-pandemic growth of digitisation and what this has meant in encouraging remote, home-working or hybrid work health, and wellbeing. Taking a sociology of work approach with a critical eye for neoliberalism influences, this book explores the first years of the pandemic’s aftermath, analysing both its short-term and potential long-term effects on paid work and unpaid domestic labour.This book will be of interest to academics, students, and practitioners in the areas of sociology, global studies, occupational health, and international relations. In particular, those engaged with the sociology of work and the sociology of family will find this a valuable resource for understanding work in the post-pandemic world. --Publisher's description

This paper critiques the dominant literature on democratic backsliding, arguing that contemporary analyses overemphasize normative decline, populist leadership, and political culture while neglecting the structural role of capitalism. While influential accounts, such as Levitsky and Ziblatt’s focus on eroding norms of mutual toleration and institutional restraint, explain how democratic erosion occurs, they offer limited insight into why the postwar democratic consensus has fractured. Drawing on critiques such as Adam Tooze’s, this study contends that existing scholarship remains analytically thin in its treatment of power. In particular, it highlights the systematic absence of class analysis and the reduction of “the economy” to market fluctuations rather than a set of historically contingent, coercive social relations. Revisiting mid-20th-century critical theorists, including C. Wright Mills, Ralph Miliband, and Göran Therborn, the paper argues for a renewed engagement with the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It suggests that without integrating class dynamics and structural inequalities into analyses of democratic decline, current scholarship risks offering incomplete diagnoses and inadequate remedies for the crisis facing Western democracies.

Elements of a redistributive and working-class agenda are already in demand, but many voters and especially the working class, feel politically alienated and disaffected that their interests are not being pursued.

Caring labour has long been a key part of the labour required of domestic violence shelter workers. Under the weight of public health directives during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature and consequences of this caring labour changed. This paper examines these shifts within the broader context of the enduring invisibility of caring labour and the depoliticization of anti-violence work, both of which began long before the COVID-19 pandemic and has endured after. Drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with shelter staff and residents working and living in domestic violence shelters in Ontario, Canada in 2022, we examine the pandemic-related shifts in shelter work and their wide-reaching consequences for workers, survivors, and anti-violence work.

This article analyzes a contemporary online exhibit from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives that explores feminist perspectives on labour, trade, and free trade in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s, situating these struggles within broader debates over capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Drawing on archival materials documenting organizing by socialist, Marxist, and labour feminists, unions, and community groups, it highlights how critiques of unpaid domestic work, precarious wage labour, and the Canada–US free trade agreement were intertwined with concerns about sovereignty, social programs, immigration, and human rights in the Global South. The article argues that the exhibit’s explicitly political curatorial stance illustrates the importance of “outsider” and community-linked archives for preserving and interpreting the histories of labour, feminism, and the Left, while tracing how earlier feminist economies prefigure later critiques of global trade bodies such as the WTO and IMF.

The NDP’s ability to credibly advance this alternative vision depends largely on whether the labour movement is itself willing and able to engage in such political and economic education.

This article reviews the book, "The Working Class and Politics in Canada," by Jacob Robbins-Kanter, Royce Koop, and Daniel Troup, eds.

Over the past 50 years, women in Canada have made substantial gains in employment and earnings, supported by greater participation in full-time work, higher education levels, and movement into professional and unionized jobs. Despite this progress, major gender inequalities persist. Women—especially mothers of young children, caregivers, women with fewer years of formal schooling, and those facing overlapping forms of discrimination—remain concentrated in lower-paid occupations rooted in traditional gender roles. Persistent occupational segregation is a key contributor to Canada’s large gender pay gap and to rising inequality among women themselves. The employment recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic opened the door to change for some female workers, but as this study finds, not for Canada’s largely female and racialized low-waged workforce.

Migrant domestic workers have formed the backbone of Canada's care economy, filling gaps in care and performing this undervalued work since the inception of the settler-colonial state. Premilla Nadasen (2023) argues that the care economy is not only subject to the sexist devaluation of women's reproductive work but is rooted in slavery and the racist extraction of work that makes all other work possible. Nadasen also points to the history of resistance, noting that care work has not only been a site of oppression but also a site of resistance. In Canada, stories of exploitation and activist-led change in the care sector have unfolded over two centuries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British women were brought to Canada as nannies. Fitting the image of the white nation brazenly embodied in immigration policies, these white women were provided permanent status on arrival. When the post-World War II period brought larger gaps in care, the Canadian state initiated the West Indian Domestic Scheme in 1955.... --Introduction

This article examines the conditions and struggles of Punjabi farmworkers in Canada during the 1980s, highlighting their resistance to exploitation within a racialized agrarian capitalist system. Focusing on the systemic challenges faced by these workers, the analysis underscores how exploitative practices perpetuated through the capitalist–contractor–corporate food regime shaped the economic and social realities of Punjabi farmworkers. The article also explores the pivotal role of the Canadian Farmworkers Union in mobilizing grassroots action, advocating for workers’ rights, and addressing systemic inequalities. By situating these efforts within broader labor movements, the study sheds light on the intersections of migration, labor, and racial capitalism in Canadian agriculture that still continue in the form of the seasonal agricultural worker program.

This article reviews the book, "Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada," by Gregory P. Marchildon.

This article examines destiny politics in Anand Patwardhan and Jim Munro’s 1981 documentary A Time to Rise (Uthan da Vela), a film that captures the political struggles of Punjabi farm workers as they organized to establish the Canadian Farmworkers Union (cfu). It argues that the film highlights how Punjabi farm workers in British Columbia could not build a life beyond the exploitative and toxic labour conditions of BC farms without first confronting powerful cultural and religious ideas about predestined life. This article demonstrates that the three main figures involved in making the film – Anand Patwardhan (the filmmaker), Pritam Kaur Hayre (the protagonist), and Sant Ram Udasi (the singer) – each sought to dismantle the hold of destiny politics over the future. First, I explain that A Time to Rise marked a first experiment with what was to become Patwardhan’s signature style of documentary filmmaking: talking groups. Through this reconfiguration of the documentary as a tool for collective dialogue and movement building, Patwardhan sought to break the enduring power of destiny within South Asian communities. Second, I discuss the film’s protagonist Pritam Kaur Hayre, who contested the politics of destiny by seeking a better life through the union rather than the Punjabi family. Lastly, I show how upending destiny politics was a central preoccupation in the anti-caste thought of Sant Ram Udasi, the Mazhabi Punjabi farm-worker-turned-activist who visited British Columbia in 1979 and wrote and performed the film’s titular song, “Uthan da Vela.”

This book investigates the growing impact of climate change on Canadian workers, particularly those in outdoor occupations, who face increasing exposure to extreme conditions such as heat domes and wildfires. The book highlights the urgent need for collaboration between labour and corporate law, governments, businesses, and trade unions to address the unique risks encountered by these workers.Focusing on the Canadian context while drawing on global perspectives, the book examines the role of corporations as employers responsible for protecting their workers. It explores how existing legal frameworks can be adapted to address climate-related risks, as well as the potential for creating new tailored legal solutions. The book also highlights the importance of extralegal mechanisms, particularly corporate social responsibility, in enhancing worker safety in the face of climate change. As the nature of all work is made more hazardous at the hands of climate catastrophe, lawyer and pioneering scholar Vanisha H. Sukdeo uncovers the urgency for legal labour reform. By critiquing current legal approaches and proposing innovative solutions, Weather and Work illustrates how labour and corporate law can work together to protect some of the most vulnerable workers from the growing threats posed by global warming. --Publisher's description

The book describes the contemporary sex trade and its causes and consequences as it has manifested in the cities of Canada's prairie provinces. It concludes with recommendations for a realistic public policy and programming framework to guide the future development of a sexual services sector and to regulate its ongoing operations