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This paper examines one possible, but understudied, institution that might have an impact on health: unionization. We outline four distinct, although complementary, pathways through which unions might influence population health outcomes based on two axes: the levers that unions can potentially pull to influence any policy environment (collective bargaining and political action) and the manner in which health can be influenced in a society (the Social Determinants of Health and health care). We test whether unionization rates have an impact on total, preventable, and treatable mortality using panel data on Canadian provinces between 2000 and 2020. We find that unionization rates are negatively associated with all three measures of mortality.

Life in Canada is shaped by the seasons – marked, celebrated, enjoyed, and sometimes dreaded in ways that respond directly to the changing cycles in nature. Sociological thinking encourages us to question the aspects of everyday life that we may otherwise take for granted. Seasonal Sociology takes a sociological approach to thinking about the seasons, providing a unique perspective for understanding social life. Each chapter in this collection explores key issues of sociological interest through the passage of time and seasonal change. The authors wield seasonality as a powerful tool that can bridge small-scale interpersonal interactions with large-scale institutional structures. This collection of contemporary Canadian case studies is wide-ranging and analyses topics such as pumpkin spice lattes, policing in schools, law and colonialism, summer cottages, seasonal affective disorder, Vaisakhi celebrations, and more. The second edition introduces new chapters on Labour Day and organized labour, disability and online dating, maple sugar shacks, seasonal agricultural work, wildfires, and social movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter. Seasonal Sociology ultimately offers fresh, provocative ways of thinking about the nature of our collective lives. -- Publisher's description

In the American and Canadian warehouses of the e-commerce giant Amazon, electronic workplace surveillance (“EWS”) technologies permit the unprecedented quantification and datafication of worker activity, enabling the setting and enforcing of unsafe productivity ‘quotas’ that lead to serious occupational injuries for warehouse workers. In this paper, I consider the role of Canadian law – namely, the employment, privacy, and occupational health and safety legal regimes in the province of Ontario – in enabling, and in potentially constraining, this phenomenon in Ontario’s Amazon warehouses. In doing so, I identify the ‘legal silence’ that shapes the lived experiences of Amazon warehouse workers in Ontario; contribute to the emerging theorization, particularly from a legal perspective, of EWS as a factor impacting workers’ physical health; and propose legal reforms that would improve the safety and well-being of Amazon warehouse workers – and other similarly-situated workers – across the province.

This thesis undertook an interpretivist historical analysis of the publicly available Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) meeting minutes from 1936 to 1952. A Foucauldian lens of disciplinary power was used to answer the research question: how was the National Hockey League (NHL) able to develop a professional sponsorship system within the CAHA following World War II, and what effects did this have on Canadian minor hockey. The results found that following the signing of the CAHA/NHL agreement, the NHL exercised its disciplinary power over the CAHA members to instill in them what Foucault termed ‘docility.’ The birth of the professional sponsorship system following WWII was a result of this disciplining and docility. Through this system, the NHL brought its disciplinary technologies directly to bear on Canadian minor hockey and gained the ability to control players' rights from ages as young as twelve years old.

À son apogée entre 1945 et 1975, le Moulin-à-Fleur ou la paroisse Saint-Jean-de-Brébeuf se vantait d'être le quartier francophone de Sudbury et de l'Ontario. Il représentait en effet la pierre angulaire pour les autres communautés francophones ainsi que le fondement de la vie culturelle, économique et politique des Franco-Ontariens. Mais l'histoire n'a jamais été racontée de façon détaillée. Des années de recherches approfondies ont incité les auteurs à se plonger dans de nombreux écrits, articles scientifiques, archives personnelles, articles de journaux et témoignages afin de livrer cette première étude globale. Divisé en deux volets qui se complètent, ce récit retrace à la fois l'héritage des familles qui se sont battues pour offrir un quotidien et un avenir brillants à leur descendance et la lutte féroce menée par des pionniers, notamment Omer Thériault, Gaétan Gervais et Hélène Gravel, pour la défense culturelle et patrimoniale. Mais tous ces souvenirs dorment dans les rues de l'ancien quartier ou comme Mme Tregonning-Whissell le disait, "à l'ombre des silos". Ce livre témoigne des origines d'une communauté marquée par le dur labeur des mineurs de l'International Nickel, tout en évoquant le rôle des enseignants qui éveillaient les jeunes générations à un monde de possibilités. Le Moulin-à-Fleur de Sudbury rend hommage aux valeurs de charité et d'entraide qu'incarnait ce quartier qui célèbre au-delà de 120 ans de vie communautaire et culturelle. -- Résumé de l'éditeur

This article tells the story of the Groupe Action-Alimentation, a workshop created by the Carrefour d’éducation populaire of Pointe-Saint-Charles in the 1970s. It describes how, in a neoliberal context, the participants and their main facilitator advocate for the right to food. They expose the experience of hunger, they affirm the skills of low-income women in matters of dietetics, cooking, and consumption, they use the language of law, they denounce the use of charity, and they criticize the state and private companies. This research illustrates how the participants in this workshop perceive, qualify, and interpret their reality, how they manifest their class consciousness and their convictions about their right to health, dignity, and well-being. We observe that this local resistance to social and economic marginalization had an impact on the positions taken by nutrition professionals and, ultimately, on certain Quebec policies aimed at achieving food security, adopted in the early 2000s. This contribution to the history of economic, social, and cultural rights analyzes the words of women who refused to individualize the problem of food among the most deprived and who instead denounced the commodification of essential goods.

Modern slavery literature has thus far mostly adopted a downstream perspective, in the sense that researchers investigated corporate actors' responses after the enactment of transparency legislation. The common finding is that corporate disclosure is poor and ineffective, contributing to a failure to eradicate modern slavery. Our contribution is to adopt an upstream perspective in which we examine debates before regulation is crafted. We conceive of modern slavery as a public policy issue where multiple actors—NGOs, institutional investors, corporations and policymakers—hold various views about modern slavery and how to act upon it. Drawing on framing theory as used in public policy research, our aim is to uncover how stakeholders comparatively frame the issue of modern slavery, enabling a better understanding of why transparency legislation fails. Focussing on the Canadian context, where regulatory requirements on modern slavery were recently enacted, we examine an extensive set of communications, including testimony before parliamentary committees by four stakeholder groups. We explore stakeholders' rhetorical frames, uncovering how they conceive of modern slavery and their action frames, highlighting how they believe it should be acted upon. We show that stakeholders' rhetorical and action frames are embedded within overarching opposing metacultural frames, namely a community frame held by NGOs and a market frame held by institutional investors, corporations and policymakers. NGOs' community metacultural frame paves the way for approaches focused on eradication because harm to a community implies removing the harm. In opposition, other stakeholders' market metacultural frames pave the way for approaches focused on risk assessment, management and reporting, since the appearance of information on modern slavery and associated risks implies being able to manage it. Although stakeholders talk past each other about the issue of modern slavery, we identify possibilities for reframing, where holders of a market frame could move closer to a community frame.

Québec enacted major solidaristic family and housing policy reforms toward the end of the 1990s, precisely when other countries were moving toward more individualized policies. Against what existing theories would predict, these reforms took place at a moment when labour's power had weakened, the ruling left party had scaled back its progressive commitments, and employers opposed the proposed reforms. Why did Québec expand its social policies in a broader context of retrenchment? We argue that this resulted from a shift in the context of contention that sparked a process of institutional conversion. First, labour-allied progressive movements in the province were able, through their own cycle of mobilization, to fill the gap left by unions' retreat from direct action and mass mobilization from the 1980s onwards. Second, employers remained relatively weak and state-dependent, leading them to accept the government's agenda as long as it did not differ significantly from their priorities of deficit and tax reduction. Third, the idea of the "social economy" served as a floating signifier in the province's public policy debates of the 1990s, providing a framework within which unions, community groups, employers, and the government could operate while assigning it different definitions and aims. The ambiguity of the idea of the social economy helped to forge a disparate coalition of Québec social actors, resulting in solidaristic policy reforms. Our analysis aligns with recent literature calling for a renewed attention to the role played by contention in the development of social policies in Québec.

Recent debates on ‘socio-ecological fixes’ explore how the reproduction of capital is pursued through the appropriation of land and resources and/or by means of fixing capital within the materiality of ‘Nature’. This chapter questions how the formal and real subsumption of Nature shapes the lives of workers and the politics of labour. These arguments are grounded through investigating two ‘fixes’ in the forests of British Columbia (BC), Canada. First, I examine how the labour of unemployed men in Depression-era BC was enrolled into relief camps in order to establish infrastructure aimed at accelerating the growth of timber production in the 1930s. Second, I explore how the financial acquisition of private forest lands on Vancouver Island in the early 2000s resulted in heavy job losses. Through profiling these two fixes against one another, the chapter explores how the formal and real subsumption of Nature shapes the lives, organisation, and politics of labour.

An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Canada’s immigration policy has undergone a major shift in recent decades, from an approach centered on permanent immigration to a system increasingly focused on temporary migration. Temporary migrants face highly unequal power relations in the workplace, making them particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Drawing on fieldwork at the Immigrant Workers Center (IWC), a Quebec-based activist organization, this paper examines how migrant workers come to engage in political action despite this adverse context, and how they experience such action. The analysis is informed by the concept of political subjectivation, defined as the process by which individuals contest their subordinate position within a political order and seek to redefine it on more egalitarian terms. I argue that migrant workers’ political subjectivation is supported by the IWC’s participatory and collective approach to casework. In workers centers, casework refers to the practice of providing individual assistance to workers. While it is often described as an individualized and depoliticized approach to social change, my research shows how the practice of casework at the IWC fosters individual and collective transformations conducive to political subjectivation. Thus, it contributes to recent literature on radical approaches to casework and literature at the intersection of social movement and popular education scholarship.

The shift to telework has significantly transformed traditional work environments, introducing new dynamics in employee relationships and organizational structures. Telework is now mainstream, but it also presents new challenges for employee engagement. To address these challenges, effective management requires processes aimed at improving employees’ sense of engagement. This study compares the effects of three variables, organizational fairness, trust in/by managers, and trust in/by colleagues, on teleworkers’ psychological engagement in Canada and France. Based on a PLS-SEM analysis on two samples of 196 participants in France and 454 in Canada, findings show that organizational fairness is a key common antecedent of teleworkers' engagement in both countries. They also revealed strong cultural differences: trust in and by managers is crucial in Canada, while trust in and by colleagues is significant in France.

This dissertation examines the lives and work of American and Canadian telegraph operators from 1870 to 1929. While historians have studied the telegraph as a technology and a business, few have integrated telegraphy with histories of class, gender, or the human body. Integrating the bodily turn means recognizing the physicality of telegraph work. This dissertation centres the bodies of telegraph operators and seeks to contextualize those bodies within the larger technological and corporate systems in which they were embedded. Operators’ class identities have often been ambiguous or misunderstood. I argue that telegraph work was real, physical work, in a way that has too often been elided, and that it is important to see operators as part of the working class. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which human bodies and human labour can be erased within large technological networks. I explore the historical significance of that erasure and its relevance for understanding the precarity of labour in high-tech industries today.

Drawing on interviews with seasonal agricultural workers employed in Canada from Jamaica and Mexico, this paper focuses in on the experiences of a Jamaican farmworker who remits funds to pay a neighbour to farm his land (or the land he leases) while in Canada, and who participates in regular long-distance discussions with family members and neighbours back home about the upkeep of the farm. The concept of a “transnational agricultural care chain” is proposed here to capture a series of personal links between people, located, at least temporarily, in different countries, who tend to the crops and farmland as a practice that entails asymmetrical relations of obligation to care for others. Agricultural care chains form part of a strategy to get by and possibly even advance the economic and social standing of one’s family under difficult economic conditions. Land access, as a co-constitutive sphere of production and reproduction, is another important factor in the livelihood strategies of rurally-rooted migrants, but the significance placed on land must be understood in connection to the uneven processes of global capitalism, histories of colonialism and, in the case of Jamaica, plantation slavery. The paper concludes with a reflection on how transnational agricultural care chains as paradigmatic of the contemporary food system are relevant to political and conceptual discussions around food sovereignty.

One adaptation required by the Covid-19 pandemic was a shift to virtual meetings. Collective bargaining has traditionally been conducted in person, but covid forced union and employer negotiators to adopt virtual forms of bargaining. This article examines union negotiators’ experiences with virtual bargaining in this period – first, to document the nature of the adaptations made during a historical public health event, and second, to determine whether either the shift to virtual bargaining or other covid restrictions undermined union bargaining power. It finds that the technical aspects of virtual bargaining did not significantly impact bargaining power, but broader challenges caused by covid did negatively impact union bargaining power at and away from the table.

Industrial Relations in Canada, Fifth Edition, offers students a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the Canadian industrial relations system. Designed for learners with minimal knowledge of the subject, this market-leading textbook blends theory, practice, and process in a clear and engaging way. Student-friendly chapters walk through key topics such as unionization, collective bargaining, dispute resolution, and evolving legal frameworks, while minimizing jargon and legalistic language. Throughout the book, timely coverage of controversial and complex issues fosters critical thinking and real-world problem-solving skills. Integrating a process-oriented approach developed through years of classroom experience, Industrial Relations in Canada, Fifth Edition, is ideal for university and college students in introductory labour relations courses, as well as adult learners in business, human resource management, and labour studies programs. With its strong foundation in both academic theory and practical application, it is also an excellent springboard for more advanced studies in industrial relations. New to this edition: new chapter-opening vignettes featuring Canadian labour relations practitioners; new discussions of social media’s role in union organizing and labour activism, and the effects of technological change on labour-management dynamics; new coverage of current research on union and workplace issues; updated news stories in every chapter reflecting current events in Canadian workplaces; discussions of the impacts of COVID-19 and climate change on labour relations; enhanced analysis of recent court decisions affecting collective bargaining; and updated statistics and demographic data on unionization, strikes, and lockouts across Canada. --Publisher's description

An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Modern slavery laws are a response to global capitalism, which undermines the distinction between free and unfree labour and poses intense challenges to state sovereignty. Instead of being a solution, Constructing Modern Slavery argues that modern slavery laws divert attention from the underlying structures and processes that generate exploitation. Focusing on unfree labour associated with international immigration and global supply chains, it provides a novel socio-legal genealogy of the concept 'modern slavery' through a series of linked case studies of influential actors associated with key legal instruments: the United Nations, the United States, the International Labour Organization, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Walk Free Foundation. Constructing Modern Slavery demonstrates that despite the best efforts of academics, advocates, and policymakers to develop a truly multifaceted approach to modern slavery, it is difficult to uncouple antislavery initiatives from the conservative moral and economic agendas with which they are aligned. --Publisher's description

The right to strike is a key feature of freedom of association and effective collective bargaining. We consider how the legal regulation of strikes and boycotts affects the power resources available to workers and unions to improve working conditions and workers’ voice in firms, such as global supply chains and platform giants, that utilize network-of-contracts business models. We begin by bringing the literatures on power resources theory and supply chain and platform capitalism into conversation. Treating law as a form of institutional power influencing workers’ ability to exercise other power resources in network-of-contracts business models, we then examine how the laws regulating strikes influence workers’ ability to mobilize their other power resources to affect the terms and conditions of work. We investigate the Make Amazon Pay campaign and related strikes to gauge how the legal regulation of strikes affects workers’ power to disrupt supply and production under network-of-contracts business models. We conclude by highlighting the need to revise the law of strikes to fit the power relations under supply and platform capitalism.