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The article reviews the book, "Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism," by Andrew Feffer.

To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.

This article analyses past and future work at the International Labour Organization (‘ILO’) with reference to the transformational analysis offered by Karl Polanyi, examining how constitutional statements made through ILO Declarations reflect countermovement to market dominance. These policy shifts at the ILO are also analysed in relation to the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic and social), which arguably map onto Polanyi’s three fictitious commodities (with a focus on labour as emblematic of social concerns). It is argued that the emphasis on social justice and sustainability in the 2019 ILO Global Commission Report, including the proposal for a Universal Labour Guarantee, provides significant resistance to the economic orthodoxy regarding the future of work promoted by the World Bank Group and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (‘OECD’). However, this narrative of ILO countermovement also exposes a lack of balanced regulation which requires more inclusive voice on the global stage.

The article reviews the book, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.

The article reviews the book, "Les nouvelles sociologies du travail. Introduction à la sociologie de l’activité," par Pascal Ughetto.

Dans la tourmente d’une récente intervention législative au Québec qui restreint le port de signes religieux pour certains agents et agentes de l’État occupant une fonction d’autorité, une volonté d’étendre cette nouvelle conception de la neutralité au sein d’espaces privés, comme l’entreprise, pourrait émerger. La validité d’une politique interdisant le port de signes religieux en milieu de travail doit, toutefois, être analysée à l’aune de la liberté de religion et du droit à l’égalité des travailleurs, ce qui sollicitera inévitablement l’interprétation du juge. À cet égard, la France dispose de précédents très précis sur cette question, alors que le Québec fait l’objet d’une riche jurisprudence en matière d’accommodement raisonnable pour motifs religieux, qui permet aussi d’y répondre. Or, en présence d’une problématique identique dans l’entreprise, qui mobilise de surcroît les mêmes droits fondamentaux des travailleurs, un regard croisé entre la France et le Québec révèle les chemins diamétralement opposés empruntés par les juges de chacun de ces espaces nationaux. Ces divergences s’observent aussi bien à l’occasion du contrôle de la légitimité de l’interdiction de signes religieux adoptée par l’employeur qu’au moment de circonscrire les mesures qu’il devra prendre afin d’éviter le congédiement du salarié. Plus encore, le fardeau financier que l’entreprise aura à supporter, au terme de cet exercice, se situe aux antipodes. Dans l’ensemble, cette analyse comparative met en évidence l’impact décisif du travail interprétatif du juge sur la protection de l’emploi, en ne manquant pas de discuter des possibilités que la logique française se transporte en droit québécois.

The article reviews the book, "Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy," by Alvin Finkel.

The article reviews the book, "The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age," by Zachary J. Violette.

The article reviews the book, "Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work," by Alex Rosenblat.

In this inductive, qualitative study, we observe how Uber, a company often hailed as being the poster-child of the sharing economy facilitated through a digital platform may also at times represent and reinforce postcapitalist hyper-exploitation. Drawing on the motivations and lived experiences of 31 Uber drivers in Toronto, Canada, we provide insights into three groups of Uber drivers: (1) those that are driving part-time to earn extra money in conjunction with studying or doing other jobs, (2) those that are unemployed and for whom driving for Uber is the only source of income, and (3) professional drivers, who are trying to keep pace with the durable digital landscape and competitive marketplace. We emphasize the ways in which each driver group simultaneously acknowledges and rejects their own precarious employment by distancing techniques such as minimizing the risks and accentuating the advantages of the driver role. We relate these findings to a broader discussion about how driving for Uber fuels the traditional capitalist narrative that working hard and having a dream will lead to advancement, security and success. We conclude by discussing other alternative economies within the sharing economy.

The following is an exchange sparked by Jim Selby’s presentation piece in Labour/Le Travail vol. 83. Since debates about the labour movement’s strategies – past, present and future – raise important questions, we have printed Marion Pollack’s response to Selby’s article and, in keeping with journal protocol, his final response. —Editors' introduction

The article reviews the books, "Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation," by Jack Reid, and "Thumbing a Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada," by Linda Mahood.

The article reviews the book, "Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada," by Esyllt W. Jones.

The article reviews the book, "Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison," by Ted McCoy.

Many large cities in North America have jurisdiction over licensing rules that shape the employment and health conditions of ride-hail and taxi drivers. Yet there is a lack of research on the role of licensing agencies relating to the occupational health and safety (OHS) of taxi drivers. Most taxi and ride-hail drivers in Canada are self-employed workers and are, by default, exempt from OHS and worker compensation laws. Additionally, municipal licensing regimes in Canada and the US have undergone various changes as a result of pressures from new platform-based ride-hail services, like Uber and Lyft. The analysis is part of a larger study on the health and safety conditions faced by ride-hail drivers. The research approach adopted a multi-level sampling and analysis strategy with the aim of connecting taxi drivers’ everyday work experiences to company and sector practices, and with various regulatory arenas, including municipal licensing, taxation and car insurance. In this paper, the analysis draws from in-depth interviews at these different levels: with taxi and ride-hail drivers, with taxi and ride-hail managers, and with key informants in government, law, insurance, tax and elsewhere. The paper identifies features and impacts of municipal deregulation in the era of on-demand taxi services, focusing on a large Canadian city in a province where municipal authorities regulate the vehicle-for-hire sector. The research identified regulatory changes that included removing centralized taxi vehicle inspections, cancelling mandatory driver training, and instigating rapid changes to competition in the taxi workforce by issuing unlimited numbers of ride-hail licenses. Our analysis indicates that regulatory changes adopted by the city administration have compounded work vulnerabilities and hazards for taxi drivers, while extending hazardous conditions to ride-hail drivers. These hazards suggest the need for interventions at a range of levels, actors and agencies, rather than solely by city licensing officials.

Mental health challenges appear to be extremely prolific and challenging for correctional service employees, affecting persons working in community, institutional, and administrative correctional services. Focusing specifically on correctional workers employed by the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, we shed light on their interpretations of the complexities of their occupational work and of how their work affects staff. Using a qualitative thematic approach to data analyses, we show that participants (n = 67) encounter barriers to treatment seeking, which they describe as tremendous, starting with benefits, wages, and shift work. We let the voices of staff elucidate what is needed to create a healthier correctional workforce. Recommendations include more training opportunities and programs; quarterly, semiannual, or annual appointments with a mental health professional who can assess changes in the mental health status of employees; offsite assessments to ensure confidentiality; and team building opportunities to reduce interpersonal conflict at work and increase moral by improving the work environment.

The article reviews the book, "Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics," by Jorge J. Santos, Jr .

The article reviews the book, "A Primer on American Labor Law," by William Gould IV.

The article reviews the book, "Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History," by Richard J. Evans.

This article explores the role of interunion conflict in the rise and evolution of faculty unionism in Canada. We argue that competition and tension between the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in the early 1970s played a key role in driving professors’ support for the certification of independent faculty associations. Moreover, we contend that a parochial, sectionalist, and craft-like brand of faculty unionism remained dominant in Canada until the 2000s, when external forces and the rise of the neoliberal university convinced CAUT’s leadership to broaden the tent in terms of membership and embrace an enlarged notion of solidarity in an effort to better defend terms and conditions of work for university teachers.