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La Cour suprême des États-Unis a récemment décidé, dans l’affaire Janus, que le précompte syndical imposé par la législation de l’Illinois aux employés de l’État viole les libertés d’expression et d’association que leur garantit la constitution américaine. Cette décision met en évidence le statut profondément différent dont bénéficie la Formule Rand au Canada, où elle est considérée comme un élément essentiel du régime de négociation collective de type Wagner qui prévaut à l’échelle national. Non seulement est-elle partout permise, mais la législation l’a rendue obligatoire, d’une façon ou d’une autre, dans une majorité de juridictions canadiennes, notamment au Québec. De plus, la Cour suprême du Canada a reconnu, il y a de cela près de 30 ans, que le précompte syndical obligatoire n’entravait ni la liberté d’association ni la liberté d’expression protégées par la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés.

The United States Supreme Court has recently ruled in the Janus Case that the agency shop (mandatory dues check-off) imposed by Illinois law on state employees violates the freedom of expression and association guaranteed by the US Constitution. This decision underscores the profoundly different status enjoyed by the Rand Formula in Canada, where it is considered an essential element of the nation-wide Wagner-type collective bargaining system. Not only is it permitted everywhere, legislation has made it mandatory, in one way or another, in a majority of Canadian jurisdictions, including Quebec. Furthermore, almost 30 years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that mandatory dues check-off did not interfere with the freedom of association or expression protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This article assesses whether a deterrence gap exists in the enforcement of the Ontario Employment Standards Act (ESA), which sets minimum conditions of employment in areas such as minimum wage, overtime pay and leaves. Drawing on a unique administrative data set, the article measures the use of deterrence in Ontario’s ESA enforcement regime against the role of deterrence within two influential models of enforcement: responsive regulation and strategic enforcement. The article finds that the use of deterrence is below its prescribed role in either model of enforcement. We conclude that there is a deterrence gap in Ontario.

The year 2017 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Health Services case, a precedent-setting decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that ruled collective bargaining is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This article explores the impact and legacy of BC Health Services, and finds that while workers’ constitutional rights have been expanded under the Charter over the past decade, governments nevertheless continue to violate these rights. It concludes that the legacy of the case is not an enhanced level of protection for these rights to be enjoyed fully, but rather that the default option has been and will continue to be a financial penalty for the state in instances in which they violate workers’ rights.

The article reviews the book, "Research Handbook of Employment Relations in Sport," edited by Michael Barry, James Skinner and Terry Engelberg.

The article reviews the book, "Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women's Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada," by Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt.

An index-based approach to indicate the outcome of Occupational Health and Safety management has been commonly used in the implementation of the International Safety Management Code and the operation of Occupational Health and Safety management systems in the international shipping industry. Although the index-based approach is asserted to be a convenient way to measure and quantify the outcome of Occupational Health and Safety management, it is not justified in the wider literature and further empirical research is suggested by various authors. The aim of this study is to explore the role of an index-based approach in managing Occupational Health and Safety in the shipping industry. This article investigates the effectiveness of indicators in Occupational Health and Safety management in two Chinese chemical shipping companies. A qualitative approach is applied to examine the views of seafarers on safety reporting practice. The study reveals that, although the need for reporting is understood by most of the crew members, the reporting practice is significantly affected by different factors such as the crew’s concerns for their own interests, Chinese cultural factors and management’s dominant power over the crew’s performance evaluation. The findings suggest that there is a significant gap between what is required by the rules and what really occurs in terms of safety reporting practice. The study highlights the emerging problems of using Occupational Health and Safety indicators as benchmark for measuring the outcome of Occupational Health and Safety management in Chinese shipping. The conclusion is drawn in a Chinese context, and although the findings may not be similar to other industries or the shipping industry in other countries, they provide valuable indications for re-thinking and re-shaping maritime regulatory strategies.

The article reviews the book, "Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective," edited by Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman and Martha A. Chen.

The article reviews the book, "Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies," by Arne L. Kalleberg.

The article reviews the book, "We Still Demand! Redefining Resistance in Sex and Gender Struggles," edited by Patrizia Gentile, Gary Kinsman, and L. Pauline Rankin.

The article reviews the book, "England's Great Transformation: Law, Labour, and the Industrial Revolution," by Marc Steinberg.

The article reviews the book, "Be Wise! Be Healthy! Morality and Citizenship in Canadian Public Health Campaigns," by Catherine Carstairs, Bethany Philpott, and Sara Wilmshurst.

The article reviews the book, "The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West," by Mark Lause.

The article reviews the book, "Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century," by Matilda Rabinowitz.

The article reviews the book, "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South," by Keri Leigh Merritt.

The article reviews the book, "For Class and Country: The Patriotic Left and the First World War," by David Smith.

The Ontario labour movement is in deep crisis, and has been staggering since the end of the 1990s. Given the labour movement’s historic role in leading and supporting progressive change, its current disorientation should be a matter of alarm to its members of course, but also to anyone concerned with countering the insatiable greed and social destructiveness of capitalism. --Introduction

Using International Social Survey Program data, we explore the relationship between economic context and attitudes with respect to the distribution of incomes in 20 modern societies, including Canada. Our findings demonstrate that economic inequality has an enduring influence on attitudes. Consistent with the economic self-interest thesis, preferences for equality are strongest among those in working-class occu- pations. Moreover, independent of one’s own social class, one’s father’s social class has a similar enduring impact on attitudes later in life. These relationships are relatively similar across the 20 societies we explore. Still, significant differences in attitudes can be explained by national economic context. We find a strong positive relationship between national-level inequality and opinions on how much inequality there ought to be in the income distribution. In contrast to previous research, however, our findings suggest that national-level economic prosperity and equality of opportunity have little influence on public opinion.

The theory and practice of community unionism has been central to discussions of alt-labor, union renewal, and revitalization, particularly in relation to union praxis at the urban or local scale. This comparative case study explores two labor-community campaigns to defend public child care services in the context of neoliberal austerity in urban/suburban space. While labor-community coalitions are a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for success, in urban/suburban contexts in which community allies are weak and municipal administrations hostile, public-sector unions must continue to play a leading role in campaigns despite the risk of being cast as defenders of sectional interests rather than of the public good. In such contexts, union involvement in community organizing is a necessary precursor to successful labor-community campaigns.

We use simulation methods and a detailed tax calculator to analyze the likely effects of two recent pro- posals aimed at reforming the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP): the federal proposal, eventually implemented throughout Canada, and the Quebec government’s December 2016 proposal. Accounting for education- adjusted life expectancy, earnings variability over the course of a career, and their interactions with the tax code and retirement income system, we find that internal rates of return (IRRs) for new QPP contribu- tions are similar under both reforms for individuals with lifetime average annual earnings of more than $40,000. Both reforms yield substantial IRRs for low-income individuals. Although the Quebec proposal offers higher IRRs for individuals earning less than $40,000, the federal proposal yields greater present value benefits for these same individuals. We show that if new QPP benefits were exempted from the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) clawback, and provided that the working income tax benefit and GIS were not enhanced, the two reforms would yield similar IRRs for individuals with average earnings of more than $15,000. The QPP reform would thus better focus on the middle-income earners originally targeted by reform advocates.