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The article reviews the book, " La modernisation sociale des entreprises," edited by Paul R. Bélanger, Michel Grant and Benoît Lévesque.

Cet article traite de l'influence des systèmes nationaux de relations industrielles sur l'action syndicale dans la construction navale en France et au Québec durant la période de crise des années 1970 et 1980. Nos analyses révèlent que malgré la convergence des revendications présentées par les syndicats en France et au Québec pour atténuer les effets de cette crise sur l'emploi, les actions mises en oeuvre par les organisations syndicales dominantes dans les chantiers navals français et québécois sont de nature et de portée substantiellement différente.

The article reviews the book, "L'histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles," by Le Collectif Cleo.

Between 1900 and 1904, rapid growth in population and industrial production transformed Calgary. It was also a period in which those arrested and charged with vagrancy appeared before the local police court in increasing numbers. Previous studies have suggested that the prosecution of vagrants amounted to a form of social control. Reflecting the values of the dominant middle class, local authorities sought to suppress or reform anyone who rejected those same values, especially those connected to the importance of work. This article argues that, in Calgary at least, the criminal justice system lacked the intent or means to reform vagrants. Instead, it punished them as an example to the wider working class of the penalty for rejecting the work ethic.

Using a study of linemen, it is shown how analyzing the subjective experience of linemen can enrich the understanding of work activities. The demonstration is based essentially on the phenomenon of defensive strategies, which allow human beings to maintain their psychic equilibrium despite the harmful effects of work organization. Finally, it is proposed that ergonomics should pay closer attention to the more personal phenomena that inevitably influence work activities. The challenge for ergonomists is to accept that work dynamics cannot be explained using only a production rationality that speaks of loads, capacities and physiological and cognitive limits.

A recent study utilized a stressor-strain framework to understand physician militancy in Canada. Data were collected from 2,584 physicians in 1986 using questionnaires. Four militant attitudes or activities were considered: 1. approval of binding arbitration in the event of deadlocks in fee negotiations with governments, 2. approval of withdrawal of services in the event of inadequate income settlements, 3. approval of the reconstitution of medical associations as labor unions, and 4. whether they had participated in an organized job action involving withdrawal of services.

The article reviews the book, "Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario," by R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar.

The article reviews the book, "Art and Work: A Social History of Labour in the Canadian Graphic Arts Industry to the 1940s," by Angela E. Davis.

The article reviews the book, "The Feminist Challenge to the Canadian Left 1900-1918," by Janice Newton.

Based on extensive study of union organizations and activists in Greater Vancouver, this article offers a two-fold critique of the thesis that "new social movements" have supplanted the labour movement as the key collective agents of change in late-modem societies. In the first section we briefly review the claims of new social movement theory and point to some of the analytic difficulties in positing a sharp distinction between "old" unions and "new" social movements. We then present comparative case studies of two pan-union labour organizations active in the Lower Mainland, followed by findings from in-depth interviews with activists in these groups, and comparisons between the political orientations of labour activists and those of activists in new social movements. We find evidence of a labour movement increasingly open to popular struggles outside its own immediate orbit, sensitive to the needs of diverse and marginalized constituencies, tactically prepared if not psychologically predisposed to yield a leading role in any such coalitions, and capable of grasping the connections between social movement activism and everyday life activities. The future of the labour movement very much depends on putting these political sensibilities into practice through a deepening of solidarity with other progressive movements - whose own futures are themselves implicated in labour's prospects.

The article reviews the book, "Women, work and coping: a multidisciplinary approach to workplace stress," edited by Bonita C. Long and Sharon E. Kahn.

Alors que la médiation la plus souvent utilisée survient dans le cadre de la négociation d'une première convention collective ou d'un renouvellement de convention, des programmes de médiation préventive tels celui des relations par objectifs (RPO) se situent en dehors du contexte de la négociation collective. Après avoir séparer les sujets d'ordre distributif des sujets de relations, les seules différences demeurant entre les parties sont celles des questions de fond. Cet article évalue 24 programmes de RPO menés par la Education Relations Commission d'Ontario entre 1981 et 1991. Nous avons utilisé une méthodologie combinée, quantitative et qualitative, pour mesurer l'impact général des RPO sur les conflits en milieu de travail et pour fournir quelques raisons de leurs échecs. L'approche générale des RPO est de réunir des représentants clefs de l'employeur et du syndicat dans un séminaire de deux ou trois jours dirigé par des animateurs qualifiés, en dehors des heures de travail et pendant une année de non-négociation. Les parties tentent alors d'identifier les problèmes qui affectent leurs relations, développant des plans spécifiques d'action, désignant des responsabilités pour leur implantation. Les parties établissent en outre un processus et un échéancier pour mesurer les progrès réalisés dans l'implantation des différents engagements contenus au plan d'action....

The article reviews the book, "La possession ouvirère. Du taudis à la propriété," by Guy Groux and Catherine Levy.

The article reviews the book,"Shifting Time: Policy and the Future of Work," by Armine Yalnizyan, T. Ran Ide and Arthur J. Cordell.

The article reviews the book, "Alternatives to Lean Production: Work Organization in the Swedish Auto Industry," by Christian Berggren.

The article reviews the book, "Le droit de cuis-sage. France, 1860-1930," by Marie-Victoire Louis.

The article reviews the book, "Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State; Britain and France, 1914-1945," by Susan Pedersen.

For twenty years, labour and working-class history has emphasized the struggle for workplace control between skilled craftsmen and factory owners in Ontario's major industrial cities. This preoccupation not only has left the great majority of the province's working people in the shadows of history, but has isolated labour history from such other 'new histories' as women's history, ethnic history, and the history of mobility. This collaborative volume argues for a more nuanced account of the diversity of working people's experience in the nineteenth century. It presents detailed studies of a broad range of occupations and institutions that figured prominently in workers' lives. These include the more common jobs - farm labour, housework, lumbering - and the more pervasive institutions - the church, the law, the family - as well as new accounts of industrial labour in small-town factories and on the railways. The themes explored include class formation, the nature and meaning of work, labour relations, and the character of economic and social change in nineteenth-century Ontario. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Paul Craven (pages 3-12) -- Rural labour / Terry Crowley (pages 13-104) -- Labour and the law / Jeremy Webber (pages 105-203) -- The Shantymen / Ian Radforth (pages 204-277) -- Religion, leisure, and working-class identity / Lynne Marks (pages 278-334) -- Labour and management on the Great Western Railway / Paul Craven (pages 335-411) -- The home as workplace / Bettina Bradbury (pages 412-478) -- Factory workers (pages 479-589) - Picture credits (page 595) -- Index (pages 597-622).

Years before women were allowed to read the news on television, Grace Hartman was on television making the news. In 1954, to help pay the mortgage on her family’s new suburban home, Grace Hartman took a job with the Township of North York. Hartman soon became active in her union, where she dedicated herself to improve the worker’s lot. Twenty-one years later Hartman was still a worker, but no longer a secretary for North York: she was president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest union in Canada. Hartman was the first woman to lead a major labour organization anywhere in North America. [This book] is the story of a labour activist who served two months in jail at the age of 62 for defying a court order and asserting her members’ right to strike. It is the story of a visionary feminist who helped found the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, who stood up to Pierre Trudeau over wage and price controls because she saw that her sisters would bear their brunt. It is the story of a lifelong and committed social activist who fought tirelessly, both inside and outside the labour movement, for women’s rights and progressive causes. --Author's description

Strikes: Causes, Conduct and Consequences by Douglas Blackmur is reviewed.