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Although the service work occupies on increasingly central position in the Canadian labour market, its legacy of activism has largely been forgotten by scholars. This paper begins a reclamation of that legacy by analysing the bitter 1961-1962 strike at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Canada's most luxurious lodgings. The unsuccessful battle of mostly immigrant workers against a powerful corporation anticipates the multinational consolidation of and asymmetrical struggle in the industry over the next four decades. The paper evaluates strategies used by service workers, explores the different historical dynamics of service-work trade unionism, analyses the cultural contests which sprang up around such a powerful symbolic action, and seeks to explain what lessons have been learned by current Toronto hotel activists. It represents one starting point in the important work of understanding service work activism, and the economic, political, and cultural battles around class, gender, ethnicity, and consumption in Canada.

This study examines employment segregation by gender and by Aboriginal ancestry within Canada's forest sector in 2001. Results show that while gender segregation was principally by occupation, segregation by Aboriginal ancestry was principally by industry sub-sector. White women were over represented in clerical occupations and Aboriginal men were over represented in woods based industries. Patterns of employment for Aboriginal women differed from those of both Aboriginal men and white women.

The article reviews the book, "L’entrevue structurée pour améliorer la sélection du personnel," by Normand Pettersen and André Durivage.

The article reviews the book, "Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)," edited by Robert Graham.

L’industrie du travail intérimaire a connu une expansion remarquable au cours des dernières décennies. Le présent article a pour but de comparer la situation des travailleurs intérimaires au Québec et en France et d’expliquer les causes de leur très faible taux de syndicalisation. Pour ce faire, nous ferons les portraits schématiques de l’industrie de l’intérim, décrirons les cadres réglementaires qui régissent le travail intérimaire, examinerons certaines caractéristiques des régimes de représentation collective et analyserons les conditions dans lesquelles s’exerce le syndicalisme des intérimaires dans chacun de ces pays. Si les caractéristiques propres au travail intérimaire rendent difficiles l’organisation et la mobilisation syndicale de cette catégorie de travailleurs en raison de leur dispersion au sein d’une multitude d’entreprises utilisatrices, le très faible taux de présence syndicale dans cette industrie découle également d’autres facteurs spécifiques à chacun de ces pays et que nous tâcherons d’identifier.

This paper examines the diversity and complexities of nonstandard work. Two types of nonstandard workers are studied: workers employed by temporary help agencies (THAs) and contract company workers, both of which are involved in a triadic employment relationship. The analyses are based on interviews with managers in three service-sector companies in Norway. The paper discusses the dilemmas managers in client-organizations face when agency temporaries and contract company workers are integrated and do work similar to what is done by the regular workers in the firm. Managers in client-organizations require loyalty from nonstandard workers, and under certain conditions, nonstandard workers are able to form pressure groups. The findings are discussed in relation to the highly regulated labour market in Norway, in a period of labour shortage.

The article reviews the book, "Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care," by Suzanne Gordon.

The editor pays tribute to managing editor Irene Whitfield, who retired after 25 years' service. Josephine Thompson has succeeded her in various capacities.

Compared to Canada, Australian trade union membership grew dramatically in the period from 1900 to 1914. Through a comparative analysis of two iron and steel plants in Canada and Australia, this article broadens the debate about union growth in this particular period as well as generally. One plant was located at Lithgow, New South Wales, and the other at Sydney, Nova Scotia. While workers at both plants unionized in September-October 1902, the union at the Sydney plant collapsed following a major strike in 1904. Iron and steel unionism did not revive at the Sydney plant until during World War I. With the exception of a brief period, iron and steel unionism continued at the Lithgow plant for the period under examination. This article attempts to explain why iron and steel unionism persisted at Lithgow rather than Sydney and focuses on the factors of the state, the ethnic diversity of the workforce, management, and community or locality.

This article studies trade unions' response to transnational change in a large multinational corporation within the motor industry in Europe. We show how the use of the European Works Councils (EWCs) as a forum for European negotiation did not counter the management's effort to whipsaw trade unions, such as to play off workers against each other in local negotiations. This seems to suggest that the effort to network and coordinate between employee representatives, and to negotiate with management through 'active' EWCs is ineffective at controlling inter-union competition in cases of transnational restructuring. Hence, research outcomes illustrate that an analysis of the impact of European-level agreements on plant level is requested in order to assess the effectiveness of 'active' EWCs in forging cross-national links.

In the late nineteenth century, thousands of Indigenous women journeyed hundreds of miles annually along the Pacific Northwest coast and converged around Puget Sound. They came to pick hops in the fields of farmers who occupied lands in western Washington. These migrants did not look like modern factory workers, yet they were laborers in a late-nineteenth-century incarnation of industrial agriculture. They came en masse to harvest a cash crop destined for sale on the global market, a crop internationally sought as a preservative and fl avoring for beer, a crop that could provide no sustenance to them or their families. Field workers were paid in cash wages, not in kind. This was no shop floor, but a labor hierarchy (both racialized and gendered) structured the conditions of their work all the same. --Introduction

The article reviews the book, "Le travailleur forestier québécois : transformations technologiques, socioéconomiques et organisationnelles," by Camille Legendre,.

Les nouvelles relations industrielles en Europe centrale sont en partie le résultat du rejet du système communiste et des structures qui lui étaient associées. Mais la trajectoire empruntée par ces pays est également la conséquence de l’influence exercée par les firmes multinationales. Pour continuer à attirer des flux significatifs d’investissements étrangers, les pays d’Europe centrale ont défini des législations sur la protection de l’emploi moins contraignantes pour les employeurs qu’en Europe de l’Ouest et ont favorisé l’émergence de relations du travail et d’un gouvernement d’entreprise marqués par la liberté contractuelle. Les firmes multinationales, acteurs centraux dans ces pays, privilégient des relations industrielles décentralisées et « désintermédiées ». Les firmes multinationales qui se sont implantées en Europe centrale contribuent à engager ces pays sur une trajectoire qui fait la part belle à la liberté de négociation entre acteurs individuels.

The article reviews the book, "What's Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-first Century," edited by Michael Zweig.

Nous posons dans le cas d’une monographie française (les syndicats Sud) la question de la régénérescence démocratique du syndicalisme bureaucratique. Malgré des référents politiques communs, notamment le souci de rénovation « démocratique » via la recherche de proximité avec la base, le réveil de l’action revendicative met aux prises des logiques d’action et des porteparole opposés au nom du réveil de sensibilités politiques divergentes, mais tous héritiers d’une même culture politique soixante-huitarde. Dimensions collectives et individuelles se mêlent donc à des problèmes de structure du syndicalisme, partagé entre deux conceptions contradictoires du contrôle (salarial ou social) ou de la démocratie (directe et indirecte). Le procès d’institutionnalisation contredit la réactivation des référentiels politiques du syndicalisme français, tandis que le procès d’individuation sociale accentue le rôle des individus dans un contexte de rareté de l’action collective.

In 1971, the word "Texpack" became a flashpoint of political attention, debate, and anger for labour activists across Canada. Many mobilized to support strikers at Texpack's small textile firm in Brantford, Ontario, though some trade unionists from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) turned their backs on the independent Canadian union, the Canadian Textile and Chemical Workers Union (CTCU), leading the strike. The significance of Texpack lay not simply in this stark manifestation of schisms within the house of labour, but rather in the strike's central role as a touchstone for political debates concerning economic and Left nationalism, and what kind of unions best served Canadian workers. This article explores the strike as a microcosm of broader political struggles of the period, particularly questions of nationalism and internationalism of unions. --From introduction