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AbstractThis dissertation explores the points of tension between dominant histories of neighbourhood activism in Toronto and Montreal between 1963-1989 and the lived experiences of locally embedded activists who organized for access to safe jobs, homes, and the right to exist in their neighbourhoods. It demonstrates how material conditions, determined by the overlapping processes of deindustrialization, post-industrial development, and the movement of capital from Montreal to Toronto, shaped how neighbourhood activists organized, who they organized with, what they organized for, and how they recorded what they were doing. Dominant narratives of neighbourhood activism during this period over-emphasize the perspectives white, middle-class, and cis-gendered male activists who benefitted from the world the sixties made. Their upward mobility, made possible through the expansion of public spending and their involvement in gentrification, gave them the time and resources to document what they were doing, elevating their perspectives in the historical record. At the same time, embedded poor and working-class, racialized, disabled, and trans activists who continued to experience the ongoing structural violence of the capitalist city also continued to collectively resist that violence. Unfortunately, their ongoing precarity denied them of the resources necessary to produce historical records to the same degree as their upwardly mobile contemporaries. By historicizing how uneven material conditions shaped what activists were doing and how they recorded what they were doing, this thesis demonstrates how power shaped the production of neighbourhood activism history. It also presents opportunities to contest this power in the historical record.

Since the mid-1950s, the Canadian government has increasingly relied on precarious and/or temporary migrant workers to meet a growing demand for care work. Restrictive immigration policies and programs that promise a pathway to permanent residency but place limitations on workers’ rights and freedoms have led to the creation of a highly vulnerable workforce that is subject to working in low-wage and undervalued sectors with few protections. This report argues that, in addition to immediate reforms to current caregiver pilot programs to help protect vulnerable migrant care workers, Canada should work toward granting permanent resident status to all migrants upon arrival. Granting migrants permanent resident status and equal access to available supports and services is key to ensuring basic human rights for all. The report ends with recommendations to achieve this goal.

Questions the commitment of organized labour to equity, inclusion and diversity, which in practice has been treated as a side show to the bread-and-butter issues. Argues that organized labour must make major internal structural changes to confront the problems of EDI that exist both internally and externally.

Research Objective and Questions: We aimed to examine court rulings on disputes between network platforms and labour providers in order to understand the nature of the employment relations and the broader consequences for society as a whole. We addressed two questions: What is the attitude and role of the courts in resolving disputes between Internet network platforms and labour providers in China within a civil law system? What are the prospects that legal innovations will improve protection for platform labour providers who fall outside the scope of labour law, in order to counter the unregulated expansion of digital capitalism at the expense of the under-/unprotected? Methodology: We primarily used secondary data, namely 102 publicly available Court decisions from 2014 to 2019. The case decision reports were downloaded from the Supreme People’s Court “Network of Court Decision Papers.” Results: Disputes occurred mainly in cities that have the most developed platforms and an independent worker model of employment. They mainly involved network platforms that provide such services as driving, food delivery and courier services. All of the disputes involved road accidents, and over half occurred in Beijing and Shanghai—two leading cities in China that have dense populations. Dispute cases rose sharply, peaked in 2017, started to drop in 2018 and fell even more in 2019. The disputes seem to have educated people on both sides, with the result that more precautions are being taken. Contributions: Our study makes three contributions. First, we identified three types of platform employment in China, the motives of the platforms in their choice of labour utilization and the legal implications in terms of labour and third-party protection. Second, we examined the attitude and role of the courts in judging disputes between network platforms and labour providers within legal constraints. Third, we propose that socialization of contract service should be central to platform employment.

The article reviews the book, "The Chronology of Revolution: Communism, Culture, and Civil Society in Twentieth-Century Britain," by Ben Harker.

Pays homage to Panitch's life and work as an activist, academic, and writer. Discusses Panitch's origins in Winnipeg's left-wing Jewish community, his tutelage as a graduate student under Ralph Miliband in England, and his wide-ranging engagement as a Marxist political scientist. The author also reflects on his near half-century friendship with Panitch that began in London, England, in 1972.

The article reviews the book, "The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland," by Toni Gilpin.

Employee voice in China remains an under-researched topic from an industrial relations perspective. We investigated the relationship between family dependents (children and elderly) and migrant worker silence, with town-fellow organizations as a moderator, based on the data of the 2014 Guangdong Migrant Workers Survey. The findings reveal that migrant workers with dependent children are more likely to keep silent when their labour rights and interests are violated at the workplace, while family responsibilities for dependent elderly family members do not have significant impacts on migrant workers’ silence. In addition, town-fellow organizations weaken the association between family responsibilities for elderly dependents and silence. Our study contributes to the existing literature on employee voice and provides evidence on the role of town-fellow organizations in China as an informal, emerging institutional actor that regulates labour relations through their involvement in dispute resolution.

The article reviews the book, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution," by Toby Green.

Over the past two decades, the use of private security agencies has become a common fixture of academic labour disputes.

Unifor President Jerry Dias called it “a home run.” The media headlines were all about “reopening the Oshawa plant.” Unifor, the union that represents workers at the Detroit Three auto companies in Canada, announced a tentative agreement with General Motors Canada on November 5 that included a $1.3 billion investment to “restart” the Oshawa Assembly Plant. GM had ended vehicle assembly there last year, eliminating the jobs of 5,000 assembly and supplier workers. The prospect of jobs returning is very welcome. What’s missing from the news coverage, though, is the reality that GM is not really reopening the old plant. Instead the new operation will be a “pop-up” assembly plant—designed to meet the short-term need for additional production of hugely profitable pickup trucks. The company is making no long-term commitments to the workers it will hire, nor to the community where its pickups and profits will be made. In effect, GM will open a brand new plant inside the shell of the old plant—with an almost entirely new workforce, an inferior wage scale, fewer benefits, and no job security.

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

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'.

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.

In this study, we find that 41 percent of jobs in Canada can be performed remotely, with significant variation across provinces, cities, and industries. We complement this finding with labour microdata and document facts on the relationship between the feasibility of remote work and income inequality, gender, age, and other worker characteristics. We then show that workers in occupations for which the possibility of remote work is less likely experienced larger employment losses between March and April. This relationship also holds for employment losses across cities and (in one of the specifications) across industries. Across provinces, there is a negative link in the February–March 2020 variation.

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