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The article reviews and comments on the books, "Hoffa," by William Sloane, and "Labor Shall Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of Labor," by Steven Fraser.

Le régime québécois de maintien des services essentiels accorde une place prépondérante à la responsabilité des parties. Il est basé d'abord et avant tout sur une recherche de consensus autant dans la détermination et le maintien des services essentiels que dans le règlement des conflits qui peuvent affecter le service au public. L'auteure présente d'abord le mandat et le cadre légal de l'exercice des pouvoirs du Conseil des services essentiels du Québec. Elle explique ensuite comment s'exerce la médiation et, finalement, examine comment la question de la détermination des services essentiels, selon une approche consensuelle, est traitée par d'autres juridictions canadiennes.

The article reviews the book "Lincoln, Land and Labor 1809-1860," by Olivier FrayssÉ.

The shift towards the internal responsibility system and the mandating of Joint Health and Safety Committees in the early 1980s represented a radical departure in terms of how health and safety were regulated in the workplace. This paper examines the effectiveness of this institutional change using firm level data provided by the Worker's Compensation Board on lost time accidents from 1976 to 1989. It finds that where management and labour had some sympathy for the co-management of health and safety through joint committees, the new system significantly reduced lost-time accident rates. At workplaces where either labour or management resisted the spread of co-management the mandating of committees appears to have little effect on lost-time accident rates.

The article reviews the book, "Crossing the Line: Unionized Employee Ownership and Investment Funds," by Jack Quarter.

Transition houses are small feminist organizations, providing emergency shelter to women and children who have been abused. They also are workplaces whose social organization divides women as managers and workers. This research, an institutional ethnographic case-study of nine transition houses in one Canadian province, examines how relations between the state and transition house have led to greater institutional power and control over transition house work, by women who are paid managers. This results in a reconstituted struggle for equality between women inside these settings. Mangerialism in the Canadian transition house movement has not been theorized.The argument advanced here is that conflict between workers and managers in transition houses is an inevitable outcome of the on-going struggle to develop feminist praxis within contradictory relations, shaped and influenced by transition house/state relations, dominant managerial discourses, and the exigencies of transition house work. In an attempt to resist and to limit managerial power and control over the labour process and over feminist praxis, transition house workers look for ways to develop their own collective power. Unionization as a vehicle for collective action is an obvious choice and it is one that transition house workers are pursuing.

Time series data are used to estimate the effects of labor legislation, the political regime, and economic conditions on the proportion of certification applications granted. Applications filed with the British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba Labour Relations Boards (1951-1992) are considered and analyzed separately. Changes in labor legislation have the largest impact on certification application success in all 3 provinces. The political environment is estimated to be important in British Columbia, but not in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. Economic conditions affect certification success in Saskatchewan and to a lesser extent in British Columbia, but not in Manitoba. Large changes in economic conditions are estimated to have only small effects on the proportion of applications granted.

During the 1980s, unions in the US significantly increased their political activity. An important aspect of this effort is contributing money to congressional and presidential candidates through political action committees (PAC). A paper examines the PAC donations among a sample of elected local union officers of the United Steelworkers of America (USW). The descriptive results show significant variation in officers' PAC donations. Regression analyses show that union commitment is a significant predictor of PAC support as is location in a non-right-to-work state. The results have implications for promoting union PAC fundraising efforts, and hence the potential of US unions to rely on political action as a strategy for resurgence.

Ce texte utilise les données de l'Enquête sur l'activité de Statistique Canada pour les années 1988-89 pour examiner la question de la précarité liée au temps partiel dans une perspective longitudinale. Il propose comme indicateur de la précarité liée au temps partiel, la discontinuité dans l'emploi, notamment les risques de sortie hors emploi et les difficultés d'accès ou de retour au temps complet. Il trouve que (i) l'emploi à temps partiel est plus généralement lié aux discontinuités d'emploi que le temps complet, (ii) les risques de sortie d'emploi sont accrus chez les salariés à temps partiel, (iii) les femmes subissent davantage que les hommes la précarité liée au temps partiel. Chez elles, les facteurs susceptibles d'accroître les risques de précarité liée au temps partiel sont la responsabilité d'enfants d'âge préscolaire, une scolarité insuffisante et des horaires de travail qui les éloignent d'une situation de temps complet.

The article reviews the book "Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s," by Scott W. See.

This article examines the history of colonial and national policies towards indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is specifically concerned with the ways in which such legislation affected Aboriginal women. In attempting to provide a comparative assessment of the "statutory subjugation" of Aboriginal women, the article examines the law's definition of identity and band membership; enfranchisement and assimilation; personal autonomy (marriage, divorce, sexuality, motherhood); private and personal property; and political reorganization. It concludes that gender and race were key determinants of government policy in both countries, and that under the Canadian Indian Act and Australian Aboriginal Acts, women, in particular, suffered a great decline in status and severe limitations of autonomy. But the failure of state policies to bring about the complete degradation of Aboriginal women in particular, and Aboriginal peoples in general, suggests that there were forces operating to "destabilize ... hegemonic colonial control." Competing colonial values, collective resistance of Aboriginal societies, and the individual contestations of both colonizer and colonized, in the end, undermined imperial objectives.

This study examines the critical years in which the Canadian industrial relations system assumed many of its lasting characteristics. Specifically, it explores the actions of management, unions, and the federal state under the exceptional conditions of the wartime "command economy" and later, with the transition back to a peacetime footing. Frustrated with the inadequacy of existing collective bargaining legislation, and sensing that this period signalled a realignment in the labour-capital relationship, Canadian workers took advantage of special wartime conditions to press home their demands for basic workplace rights framed by a more equitable labour code. The result of this campaign was the establishment of a new legal framework which defined the respective roles for all three groups over the next thirty years. Of particular importance is an investigation of the ambivalent legacy achieved by the Canadian labour movement with its pursuit of the essential rights of free association and collective bargaining. Building on the intense workplace struggles of the war years, labour pushed federal authorities to support mandatory collective bargaining, compulsory wage deductions of union dues, finally entrenching these reforms under the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act (1948).

This book sets out to present the economic and social writings of Colin McKay, a pioneer Marxian sociologist and economist in Canada (and no relation to the author), and to place McKay in the context of the international socialist tradition. The manuscript takes the form of an extensive biographical essay, five substantive sections that present and examine McKay's thought both thematically and chronologically, and a concluding essay that places McKay's thought in the context of contemporary discussions with regard to the "decline of Marx" in the late 20th century. Colin McKays's life and work determines the scope of the manuscript, but since this "life and work" extended to subjects as varies as the limitations of Kantian philosophy and the design of North Atlantic schooners, the book is rather less narrow than it might appear at first. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book "Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States," Eileen Boris.

The article reviews the book, "Under the Stars: Essays on Labor Relations in Arts and Entertainment," edited by Lois S. Gray and Ronald L. Seeber.

The article reviews the book "The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1843-1943)," by Enzo Traverso.

Dans quelle mesure le Code civil du Québec de 1994 retient-il une nouvelle conception du salarié ? Les treize dispositions (articles 2085 à 2097 C.c.Q.) qui traitent directement du salarié et de l'employeur sont-elles à ce point différentes qu'il nous faudrait reconsidérer les bases juridiques de la relation de travail ? Pour répondre à de telles questions, l'auteur rappelle la conception du salarié retenue au Code civil du Bas-Canada (1866) de manière à mieux saisir l'importance des modifications apportées en 1994. En un deuxième temps, une analyse critique de ces treize dispositions nouvelles lui permet de distinguer ce qui serait vraiment nouveau et aussi ce qui lui apparaît comme de simples mises en forme de l'état du droit au moment de cette codification. En cette période de changements profonds des «modes d'emploi», il importe de saisir la portée réelle ou virtuelle de toutes les modifications effectuées à la définition du salarié, base fondamentale du droit du travail.

An important new critique of Marx's labour theory of value. Using the fishing industry in British Columbia as a case study, Alicja Muszynski explores how Marx's labour theory of value can be applied to a specific industry and the creation of a specific labour force. She reworks Marx's theory in order to incorporate race and gender as principles that not only created a proletarianized labour force but also legitimized the payment of low wages to particular groups. Cheap Wage Labour is the first analysis of shore work and shore-workers in British Columbia from the 1860s to the mid-1980s. Muszynski provides an interpretation of the events that led to the creation of a cheap wage labour force of shoreworkers, shows how they organized within the framework of the fishermen's union (the UFAWU), and explains how as a consequence their numbers steadily shrank until today they represent only a small portion of the labour force. She looks at factors contributing to the destruction of First Nations culture and economy, such as the displacement of aboriginal peoples from key fishing sites and from working in the salmon canneries, and examines the structure and patterns of Chinese and Japanese immigration and the development of the capitalist class and the white working class. Cheap Wage Labour situates the history of B.C. shoreworkers within the much larger and complex historical enterprise of industrialization, patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism and provides keen insights into the current fisheries crisis on the West Coast. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Problematic -- Marx's Labour Theory of Value: A Critique -- Patriarchy and Capitalism -- The First Nations, Property Rights, and Salmon Canning -- The Dialectics of Cheap Wage Labour -- Organized Resistance: The United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union -- -- State, Labour, and Capital -- Conclusion: Marx's Labour Theory of Value Reconsidered -- Appendix: J.H. Todd & Sons Ltd.

The article reviews the book, "Modern Capitalism: Privatization, Employee Ownership and Industrial Democracy," by Nicholas V. Gianaris.

The article reviews the book "The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario 1920-1970," by James Struthers.