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Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements. - Introduction

The living wage rate for Charlottetown, PEI is $19.30 per hour. This 2020 living wage is calculated to follow the principles and methodology laid out in the Canadian Living Wage Framework. The calculation for Charlottetown follows how the wage has been calculated in our Atlantic Canadian jurisdictions, including the most recent report with wages calculated for various communities in Nova Scotia, as well as Saint John in New Brunswick. In 2019, the living wage was calculated for St. John’s in Newfoundland and Labrador.

After unionizing gig economy workers, Ontario’s courier union Foodsters United found themselves without an employer when Foodora filed for bankruptcy. Now they’re exploring how worker cooperatives could use the efficiency of platform structures to bypass corporate exploitation.

A $30-million settlement of three class actions over the alleged failure to pay junior hockey players the minimum wage has been thrown into jeopardy after three judges refused to sign off on the agreement.

Foodsters United and the campaign to organize gig workers in Ontario – Three months after Foodora couriers won the right to unionize – a historic win for app-based workers – Foodora announced it was leaving Canada. Five worker leaders talk about the highs and lows of the campaign, and what’s next for Foodsters United.

The history of farm labour in Canada has been profoundly shaped by questions of inclusion and exclusion – especially at the border. Drawing on transnational research on Ontario’s tobacco workforce and looking in particular at migrations from the southern United States and the Caribbean, this talk will demonstrate how often-racist immigration policies and labour practices determined not only who could enter the Canadian farm labour market, but also the conditions of workers’ participation and their ability to attain a decent livelihood. Edward Dunsworth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. A historian of migration, labour, and Canada in the world, his current book project uses a case study of Ontario’s tobacco sector to advance a significant reinterpretation of the histories of farm labour and temporary foreign worker programs in Canada. This talk was delivered Sept. 18 [2020] as the first talk in the 2020 Shannon Lecture series; the theme for this year's series is 'Human Rights in the History of Canada'.

The living wage was first calculated in Atlantic Canada in 2015 (Halifax). Antigonish was added in 2016 and Saint John, New Brunswick in 2018. Last year, we calculated the living wage rate for St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. This year we have added two more Nova Scotia communities: Bridgewater and the Cape Breton Regional Municipality.

In 2001, CCPA-Manitoba published a report titled The Minimum Wage and a Tipping Wage: A Survey of People Who Work At or Near the Minimum Wage in Manitoba. Researchers gathered data from 70 workers making minimum wage. The report concluded that minimum wage was insufficient to provide workers with anything more than a ‘subsistence wage’ and did not reflect the cost of living. This current research represents an update of the 2001 study and concludes that little has changed for minimum wage workers in Manitoba. This project utilizes both quantitative and qualitative data to explore the challenges of working for, and living on, minimum wage. Forty-two workers in Winnipeg and Brandon were interviewed to gain a better understanding of their experiences, challenges, and hopes for the future.

Montreal’s garment industry was the largest in Canada until most of its factories closed or relocated in the 1980s and 1990s, but it did not go out quietly. Staring down the barrel of rapid, state-sanctioned deindustrialization, 9,500 members of the Quebec ILGWU, most of them immigrant women, launched an industry-wide strike in August of 1983, the first in 43 years, as well as the last. Using the strike as a springboard, this thesis combines oral history interviews and archival material with historical, geographical, and feminist literatures to understand how women workers experienced and contested garment deindustrialization in 1980s Montreal. The result is a graphic novel about garment work and feminist labour struggle, for public consumption. This thesis adds much-needed female perspective to a growing body of work around deindustrialization and its contestation within history and geography. Conceptually and politically, it seeks to recast the Mile End and Mile-Ex as a site of feminist, working-class struggle, placing gentrification in conversation with deindustrialization while offering a primer on place-based labour organizing during a time of unprecedented capital mobility.

Economic losses due to COVID-19 have fallen heavily on women, and most dramatically on women living on low incomes who experience intersecting inequalities based on race, class, disability, education, migration, and immigration status. The pandemic crisis has revealed the fragility of response systems and the urgent need for structural rethinking and systemic change.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the holes in our social safety net and the failures in our social infrastructure painfully obvious. A horrific example of these failures is the impact of the pandemic in long-term care (LTC) homes. This paper provides a cost estimate for adequately funded caregiving in Ontario long-term care homes, showing that it would cost about $1.8 billion to increase care levels and equalize wage rates across the sector in this fiscal year. This equates to just over 1% of overall provincial program spending in Ontario.

The Canadian Hockey League on May 15 settled three class-action lawsuits filed by current and former junior players seeking back pay for minimum wage.

Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) lawyers provide legal advice and advocate for low-income individuals in the province of Ontario (1990), Canada, who would otherwise be unable to afford legal representation. As workers, LAO lawyers had limited ability to address workplace concerns with their employer, many of which negatively impacted their ability to advocate for their clients, or undermined their professional and ethical obligations. Lawyers as a job classification are excluded from the Ontario Labour Relations Act (OLRA), and are therefore unable to unionize using a defined legal process protected by legislation. Analyzing the example of a successful four-year long campaign led by LAO lawyers and the Society of United Professionals, IFPTE Local 160 (SUP) for voluntary union recognition, this case study examines organizing a union when labour legislation does not facilitate a unionization process; running a comprehensive organizing campaign for professional workers; framing issues to resonate with the public; and what motivates professional workers to unionize. --From introduction

Canada has not been left untouched by a new authoritarian, or ordered, populism that has seen the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union. Based on measurements of public opinion and other means developed to assess the phenomenon, this paper finds that populism in Canada is a significant political force, replacing the traditional left-right political spectrum. Not only has northern populism created a heightened partisan polarization in Canada, but it also proved to be a strong predictor of the outcome of the 2019 federal election. The authors’ research shows that 34 per cent of Canadians maintain a populist outlook. Older, less-educated, working-class Canadians are the most likely to sympathize with ordered populism, and it is more prevalent in Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is also more closely aligned with Canadians whose political sympathies lie with conservative political parties. A number of factors have contributed to the rise of ordered populism. These include economic stagnation, the growing disparity between the wealthy and the middle and working classes, a sense that society is headed in the wrong direction and a backlash against the loss of traditional core values.

This chapter compares the historical development and use of criminal law at work in the United Kingdom and in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it considers the use of the criminal law both in the master and servant regime as an instrument for disciplining the workforce and in factory legislation for protecting workers from unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, including exceedingly long hours work. Master and servant legislation that criminalized servant breaches of contract originated in the United Kingdom where it was widely used in the nineteenth century to discipline industrial workers. These laws were partially replicated in Ontario, where it had shallower roots and was used less aggressively. At the same time as the use of criminal law to enforce master and servant law was contested, legislatures in the United Kingdom and Ontario enacted protective factory acts limiting the length of the working day. However, these factory acts did not treat employer violations crimes; instead, they were treated as lesser ‘regulatory’ offences for which employers were rarely prosecuted.

Over the long term, Canada should collect better health data that looks closely at the intersecting issues of race and immigration. The low-paid and precarious positions in industries that are considered essential during the COVID-19 pandemic (sanitation, health care, and those in the food supply chain) are filled with women, recent immigrants, and racialized Canadians. Many of these workplaces are notoriously plagued with exploitative labour practices that, in many ways, contributed to the spread of the virus in the first place. Recent immigrants and racialized Canadians, notably Filipinos and Sudanese Dinka, who work in these industries, for example, meat-packing plants in Brooks, High River and Balzac, Alberta, are at great risk of negative health outcomes during this pandemic....

The message has been loud and clear: everyone needs to do their part to fight the spread of COVID-19, and that means not leaving our homes unless absolutely necessary. But for tens of thousands of people who work as cleaners across this country, this pandemic has meant having to keep showing up for work — for more demanding shifts, and under potentially hazardous working conditions. You can't telecommute if you're a cleaner or janitor. In Canada, as elsewhere in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed just how essential their work is for public health and safety. And yet, janitorial workers in Canada have for years been among the lowest-paid in the country, and classified as so-called 'low-skilled' labour. Essential, but not commanding a lot of respect. Deena Ladd is the executive director of the Workers' Action Centre, an organization in Toronto that works with people in low-wage and unstable employment. She spoke to The Sunday Edition's Michael Enright about the working conditions of cleaners in Canada. --Website description

This review of the state of labour and distributional struggles in Canada, compared to the experience of other countries, paints a cautiously optimistic picture. Canadian workers have been relatively successful in preserving their organizational and institutional power (including relatively high and stable rates of unionization). Perhaps more importantly, Canadian workers have been active in wielding that power – both through industrial conflict and political advocacy – to defend and even improve their share of the overall economic pie. --From author's conclusion

For socialists, unions are paradoxical organizations. On the one hand, unions are essential for creating a workers' organization that can oppose capital and challenge it for power. But they are also an insufficient vehicle for mobilizing those workers to transform the world. [The article is a reprint of the chapter, "Labor Unions and Movements," in the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (2019), edited by Matthew Vidal, Tomas Rotta, Tony Smith, and Paul Prew.]

Examines the political responses to deindustrialization as well as its historical roots and lived experiences.DéPOT is a partnership of over 35 research centres, industrial museums, labour archives, trade unions and other organizations across Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Canada and the United States. [Funded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Council.]