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Technologies in the first half of 21st century are developing new abilities to perform autonomously and compete with humans directly in more and more tasks, opening up the future possibility of increasing labour substitution. Using the theory of Cognitive Capitalism to examine advanced economies as the most recent form of capitalism shows that in the modern economy work is increasingly central to the lives of individuals due to new cognitive labour which requires more worker engagement than industrial labour. This requirement has strengthened the direct coercive mechanisms of the increasingly precarious wage relationship and weakened alternate income sources. This dissertation argues that automation in this context could be harmful to individuals required to depend on work to survive and evaluates three policy options against the goal of freeing individuals from this institutional constraint to work so that they can continue to fully and freely participate in society if widespread automation occurs.

The fluctuating expansion of oil sands development in northern Alberta, Canada has led to employers hiring a large number of mobile workers. The working conditions for some of these mobile workers are modulated in part by unions through their role in negotiating of collective bargaining agreements. Using a social reproductive framework, this study has two main findings: through collective agreements mobile workers are treated as a distinct category of worker, and there is a simultaneous expansion of workplace rules and regulations alongside a divide of the workplace from the home. The resulting expansion of the union regulated space in contrast to the divide of workplace from the home challenges union revitalization efforts, while also reaffirming traditional gendered experiences of mobility.

Research has consistently demonstrated that the long-term residential care (LTRC) frontline workforce encounters a range of serious health and safety hazards and risks that result in physical and psychological injury, illness, absenteeism, and related costs. Using the lens of feminist political economy, this dissertation explores the risks workers encounter on the frontlines of LTRC, how these workplace risks are shaped by broader social, economic, political, and historical factors, as well as the ways frontline workers resist, challenge, or shape the conditions of their work in this setting. My analysis of primary data is informed by interviews with 17 frontline workers working within for-profit, non-profit, and municipal LTRC facilities within Ontario and 2 key informants. Restructuring and reform of health and social care services under neoliberalism have profoundly transformed the character, funding, organization, and delivery of LTRC. These changes have serious implications for workforce configurations, the conditions of work and care, workplace health and safety, worker control over their labour, and capacities for worker resistance to the conditions of their work. Within the LTRC organizational hierarchy, frontline workers are of marginal status. The frontline workforce is composed predominately of women and increasingly marginalized immigrants and racialized groups, whose care labour on the frontlines is often naturalized, undervalued, and treated as unskilled and safe. This research provides evidence that restructuring and work reorganization processes, policies, and practices constitute a form of structural violence, which contribute to, intensify, and/or give rise to new sources of struggle, inequity, risk, violence, alienation, and exploitation on the everyday/everynight frontlines of LTRC.

Now in its seventh edition, Rethinking Canada presents compelling essays on the fascinating lives, struggles, and contributions of women in Canadian history. Reflecting an interdisciplinary approach, this comprehensive and engaging resources stresses the diversity of women's history and demonstrates the analytical richness of ongoing research in the field. Featuring insightful chapter introductions that provide scholarly and historical context for each reading, [the book] helps students gain a more nuanced understanding of women's experiences across Canads's history. --Publisher's description

Sarah Carter's "Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies" examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own. Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the "spade-work" of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its surplus women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts. Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains, to the land army women of the First World War. --Publisher's description

Over the past decade, Canada has experienced considerable growth in labour migration. Moreover, temporary labour migration has replaced permanent immigration as the primary means by which people enter Canada. Utilizing the rhetoric of maintaining competitiveness, Canadian employers and the state have ushered in an era of neoliberal migration alongside an agenda of austerity flowing from capitalist crisis. Labour markets have been restructured to render labour more flexible and precarious, and in Canada as in other high-income capitalist labour markets, employers are relying on migrant and immigrant workers as "unfree labour." This book explores labour migration to Canada and how public policies of temporary and guest worker programs function in the global context of work and capitalist restructuring. Contributors are directly engaged with the issues emerging from the influx of temporary foreign workers and Canada's "creeping economic apartheid." --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora," by Junaid Rana.

The article reviews the book, "Leverage of the Weak: Labor and Environmental Movements in Taiwan and South Korea," by Hwa-Jen Liu.

The article reviews the book, "Building the Golden Gate Bridge," by Harvey Schwartz.

The article reviews the book, "Comparing Quebec and Ontario: Political Economy and Public Policy at the Turn of the Millennium," by Rodney Haddow.

Based on the life course perspective and the sociology of individuation, this article aims to examine the temporal processes at work in the decision of nurses to leave their jobs and the role played by different life contexts in guiding this decision. Based on a qualitative approach that sought to develop an in-depth understanding of the reasons why so many young nurses want to leave their jobs, we present four job-leaving pathways that account for the social dimensions involved in the nurses' decision to leave their jobs. The findings reveal that the nurses' decision to leave their jobs represents a complex process that involved various dimensions of their lives, and was closely tied to their quest for self-fulfillment through work and in other spheres of their lives. // À partir de l'approche des parcours de vie et de la sociologie de l'individuation, cet article propose d'examiner les processus temporels à l'oeuvre dans la décision de quitter son emploi et le rôle des différents contextes de vie dans l'orientation de ce processus. Une étude qualitative a été menée auprès d'infirmières et d'infirmières auxiliaires afin de comprendre « de l'intérieur », c'est-à-dire à partir de la perspective des acteurs, les raisons motivant autant de jeunes infirmières à vouloir quitter leur emploi. L'approche théorique retenue insiste sur l'importance de considérer l'interaction entre les différents contextes de vie d'un individu, l'environnement social dans lequel il évolue et les choix professionnels qu'il fait. Des entrevues de type récit de vie ont été menées au cours desquelles les infirmières ont été questionnées sur l'ensemble de leur trajectoire professionnelle et les événements de leur vie professionnelle, personnelle et familiale, qui, de leur point de vue, ont contribué à la décision de quitter leur emploi. Au total, 26 infirmières de moins de 35 ans ont été rencontrées. L'analyse des données a permis de dégager une typologie des parcours de départ structurée autour de trois principales dimensions : 1- l'aspect temporel des départs (à court ou à long terme); 2- l'évolution de l'expérience subjective de travail; et 3- la phase de la vie professionnelle ou personnelle au moment de la prise de décision. Les résultats démontrent que la décision de quitter se présente comme un processus qui se construit dans un laps de temps plus ou moins long et qui implique différentes dimensions de la vie des infirmières. Ainsi, deux axes de tensions à la source des départs ont été identifiés : 1- les tensions engendrées par un écart entre les attentes de réalisation de soi au travail et la réalité d'emploi; et 2- les tensions provoquées par un emploi qui limite les possibilités de se réaliser dans les autres domaines de la vie.

Based on focus group interviews of front line staff, this study explored the lived experiences of workers in the developmental services sector in Ontario. The workers were employed at non-profit organizations and provided a range of community and social services to people with developmental disabilities. The impact of government austerity exacerbated chronic problems facing workers in the sector. Common themes in the work experiences included an intensification of workloads, the degradation of services with the return of custodial care, more complex labour relations, and unique forms of solidarity that extended beyond traditional union models. The study demonstrates how workers strive to overcome the barriers to street-level advocacy.

This integrated article dissertation examines some of the new managerial practices that have emerged to handle cognitive capitalism’s ongoing need for creative, flexible labour power. The three articles included in this dissertation offer a glimpse into the widespread processes employed by management to regulate and discipline a workforce that must also be granted a degree of relative flexibility, creativity, and autonomy in order to be effective under post-Fordist conditions of production. The first chapter looks at the emergence of corporate improvisational training at the turn of the twenty-first century as an attempt to cultivate flexible and innovative workers, a move that ultimately succumbs to what Andre Spicer (2013) calls “organizational bullshit”—the deployment of cynical and self-serving discourse that functions to build confidence and legitimacy within workplaces where a clear sense of occupational purpose is lacking. Chapter two explores the recent trend of workplace mindfulness as a specific element of the now-prevalent 'wellness' discourses, which inevitably work to align workers' personal values with those of their employer. The final chapter involves an analysis of the working conditions of voice-over and motion capture actors in the video game industry and the processes of rationalization and neo-taylorization to which they are subjected.

The article reviews the book, "Solitudes of the Workplace: Women in Universities, edited by Elvi Whittaker.

This article reviews the book, "Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization," by Kim Scipes.

The article reviews the book, "Sports and Labor in the United States," by Michael Schiavone.

This paper examines the tension between macro level regulation and the rule breaking and rule following that happens at the workplace level. Using a comparative study of Canada, Norway, and Germany, the paper documents how long-term residential care work is regulated and organized differently depending on country, regional, and organizational contexts. We ask where each jurisdiction’s staffing regulations fall on a prescription-interpretation continuum; we define prescription as a regulatory tendency to identify what to do and when and how to do it, and interpretation as a tendency to delineate what to do but not when and how to do it. In examining frontline care workers’ strategies for accomplishing everyday social, health, and dining care tasks we explore how a policy-level prescriptive or interpretive regulatory approach affects the potential for promising practices to emerge on the frontlines of care work. Overall, we note the following associations: prescriptive regulatory environments tend to be accompanied by a lower ratio of professional to non-professional staff, a higher concentration of for-profit providers, a lower ratio of staff to residents and a sharper division of labour. Interpretive regulatory environments tend to have higher numbers of professionals relative to non-professionals, more limited for-profit provision, a higher ratio of staff to residents, and a more relational division of labour that enables the work to be more fluid and responsive. The implication of a prescriptive environment, such as is found in Ontario, Canada, is that frontline care workers possess less autonomy to be creative in meeting residents’ needs, a tendency towards more task-oriented care and less job autonomy. The paper reveals that what matters is the type of regulation as well as the regulatory tendency towards controlling frontline care workers decision-making and decision-latitude.

Farm workers were central to the development of Canada's prairie West. From 1878, when the first shipment of prairie grain went to international markets, to 1929, when the Great Depression signalled the end of the wheat boom, the role of hired hands changed dramatically. Prior to World War One, hired hands viewed themselves and were treated in the rural community as equals to their farmer employers. Many were farmers in training, informal apprentices who worked for wages so they could accumulate the capital and experience needed to secure their own free 160-acre parcels of land. In later years, as free lands were taken, hired hands increasingly faced the hkehhood of remaining waged labourers on the farms of others. They became agricultural proletarians. In this first full-length study of labour in Canadian prairie agriculture during the period of settlement and expansion, Cecilia Danysk examines the changing work and the growing rural community of the West through the eyes of the workers themselves. World War One was a catalyst in bringing into focus the conflicting nature of labour-capital relations and the divergent aims of workers and their employers. Yet, attempts at union organization were unsuccessful because most hired hands worked alone and because governments assisted farmers by stifling such attempts. The workers' greatest form of workplace control was to walk off one job and find another. --Publisher's description. Previously published in 1995 by McClelland & Stewart. Contents: Introduction -- Labour-Capital Relations in Prairie Agriculture -- Part 1. Beginnings, 1870s-1900. Recruiting the Agricultural Labour Force. Part 2. Expansion, 1900-1918. Agricultural Labour as Apprenticeship -- Class, Culture, and Community -- The Nature of Work --Part 3. Consolidation, 1918-1930. Proletarianization -- The Dialectic of Consent and Resistance -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Index.

In [this book] Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities. --Publisher's description

The so-called “gig-economy” has been growing exponentially in numbers and importance in recent years but its impact on labour rights has been largely overlooked. Forms of work in the “gig-economy” include “crowdwork”, and “work-on-demand via apps”, under which the demand and supply of working activities is matched online or via mobile apps. These forms of work can provide a good match of job opportunities and allow flexible working schedules. However, they can also pave the way to a severe commodification of work. This paper discusses the implications of this commodification and advocates the full recognition of activities in the gig-economy as “work”. It shows how the gig-economy is not a separate silo of the economy and that is part of broader phenomena such as casualization and informalisation of work and the spread of non-standard forms of employment. It then analyses the risks associated to these activities with regard to Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, as they are defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and addresses the issue of misclassification of the employment status of workers in the gig economy. Current relevant trends are thus examined, such as the emergence of forms of self-organisation of workers. Finally, some policy proposals are critically analysed, such as the possibility of creating an intermediate category of worker between “employee” and “independent contractor” to classify work in the gig-economy, and other tentative proposals are put forward such extension of fundamental labour rights to all workers irrespective of employment status, and recognition of the role of social partners in this respect, whilst avoiding temptations of hastened deregulation.