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In Ontario, hours of work and overtime standards are regulated by the Employment Standards Act (ESA). This legislation covers most employers and employees in the province. As part of an ESA reforms process designed to promote workplace flexibility and enhance competitiveness, the Ontario ESA (2000) allowed for the extension of weekly maximum hours from 48 to 60, and the calculation of overtime pay entitlements to be based on an averaging of hours of work over up to a four-week period. Situated in the context of shifts towards greater working time flexibility, this paper examines the dynamics of working time regulation in the Ontario ESA, with a specific focus on the regulation of excess and overtime hours. The paper considers these processes in relation to general trends towards forms of labour market regulation that support employer-oriented flexibility and that download the regulation of employment standards to privatized negotiations between individual employees and their employers, tendencies present in the ESA that were sustained through further reforms introduced in 2018 and 2019. The paper draws its analysis from interviews with both workers in precarious jobs and Employment Standards Officers from the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL), as well as administrative data from the MOL and archival records. In the general context of the rise of precarious employment, the paper argues that ESA hours of work and overtime provisions premised upon creating working time flexibility enhance employer control over time, exacerbate time pressures and uncertainty experienced by workers in precarious jobs, and thereby intensify conditions of precariousness. The article situates the working time provisions of Ontario’s ESA in the context of an ongoing fragmentation of the regulation of working time as legislated standards are eroded in ways that make workers in precarious jobs more vulnerable to employer exploitation.

A champion of impoverished women, children, immigrants, and the unemployed, Edith Hancox’s chosen family were capital’s dispossessed. Rosemary Hennessy’s material feminist theory of affect-culture and Antonio Gramsci’s articulation of the impassioned organic intellectual offer a conceptual framework for the emotive role Hancox played in nurturing and sustaining working-class resistance in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike. A partial biography is gleaned from contemporary newspaper reports, Hancox’s journalism, government records, family correspondence, and other archival sources. What emerges is a glimpse into the actions, thoughts, and lived experiences of a profoundly significant, yet neglected, socialist feminist. An illegitimate birth, servitude, marriage, motherhood, immigration, and a critical engagement with organized religion formed the basis of Hancox’s radical leadership during the Winnipeg revolt. As secretary of the first national unemployment association in Canada, Hancox mobilized thousands of the nation’s workless and presented a devastating gender, race, and class critique of liberal capitalism. Through her writing and activism, she also challenged the most important leftist organizations of her era – the Labor Church, the Women’s Labor League, the One Big Union, and the Communist Party of Canada – to build a more expansive and inclusive revolutionary movement.

The article reviews the book, "Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission," by Herb Childress.

Analyzes the historical and legal framework of restrictive labour laws that constrain the right to strike. Argues that, although the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutional freedom to strike in 2015, the impact of the SCC ruling should be assessed within this broader context.

Most people tend to join mainstream trade unions for instrumental motives and not so much for ideological reasons. This instrumentalism, together with the passivity of most union members, endangers members’ union loyalty and their willingness to act collectively. One possible way to de-emphasize the traditional model of service-oriented unionism and strengthen union commitment is to involve members in small union tasks. By partially assigning day-to-day union work to lay members, it is believed that over-stretched union representatives will be able to assign more time to implementing union policies of strategic importance. The article examines to what extent new union members are willing to voluntarily engage in union tasks inspired by organizing unionism. To test this empirically, an e-survey was conducted among first-time members of a Belgian union. Predominantly young, the respondents had been members of the union for maximum of seven years. Belgium is an interesting case for exploring how member-union ties can be boosted, as it is a quintessential example of a country with a high union density characterized by instrumental and passive membership. Following the deletion of cases with missing data, 518 observations are available for analysis. The dependent variable measures the organizing-oriented activism intent based on union tasks reflecting one-on-one organizing tactics for reaching out to potential members. A critical mass of 41.3% new members is (greatly) interested in at least one task. The regression results show that two variables derived from the planned behaviour theory significantly influence organizing-based union tasks: the pro-union context and behavioural self-control, with the latter in particular a very strong antecedent. Apart from the finding that a larger membership base is interested in performing organizing-oriented tasks, the results also, support a developmental view on union activism, i.e. a step-by-step approach to stimulating union activism via introducing various levels of union participation.

The article reviews the book, "Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Post War Canada," by Tina Loo.

This paper seeks to explore the history of miners’ struggles to represent their interests in health and safety in coalmines in a range of countries in the period between 1870 and 1925. It has two objectives, the first objective being to examine these struggles both in terms of what determined them and how effective they were. The second objective is to assess the significance of these struggles for current understandings of representative participation in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). Starting with late 19th century Australia, the research method involved search, retrieval and analysis of historical sources including newspaper accounts, recorded testimony to Commissions of Inquiry into mining incidents and disasters, records of the debates of the legislature on relevant regulatory reforms and records of trade union meetings, as well as the accounts of contemporary observers and published analysis. Extending its inquiry to other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Belgium, the methods used for these countries were less focused on newspaper accounts and more reliant on the analysis of published historical records of national and international trade union congresses, and those of the legislatures of these countries, as well as theses and accounts in the research literature. In combination, these sources corroborate one another and provide rich qualitative data, the analysis of which has achieved both research objectives. As well as filling an important gap in the literature on the development of worker involvement in OHS, this paper shows that coalminers’ struggles and strategies for workers to have a say in their health and safety, and the contexts that shaped them are both instructive and important in understanding current experiences.

The article reviews the book, "Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880," by Graham D. Taylor.

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.

In the early years of the Great Depression, the American Socialist Party (sp) attracted left-wing youth and intellectuals at the same time that it faced the challenges of distinguishing itself from the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. By 1936, as its right-wing historic leadership (the “Old Guard”) left the sp and many of the more left-wing members of the sp had decamped, the party dwindled to a shell of its former strength. This article examines the internal struggles within the sp between the Old Guard and the left-wing “Militant” groupings and analyzes how the groups to the left of the sp reacted, particularly the pro-Moscow Communist Party and the supporters of Trotsky and Bukharin who were organized into two smaller groups, the Communist Party (Opposition) and Workers Party.

The article reviews the book, "Divided Province: Ontario Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism," edited by Greg Albo and Bryan Evans.

From 1 to 6 April 1971, over 600 women gathered to attend the Vancouver Indochinese Women’s Conference (viwc), an international women’s antiwar conference organized by women’s liberationists in Vancouver. The conference was intended to bring women together under the banner of an international sisterhood, but this desired goal did not happen. Instead, tensions between American and Canadian women divided conference organizers and attendees, culminating in verbal and physical conflict. The viwc is useful for examining how Canadian women experienced interactions with American feminists and radical activists in attendance at the conference. Several women viewed the actions of American delegates as imperialistic. The experiences of conference organizers and attendees show how the viwc represents a moment in women’s liberation where the limits to international feminism were particularly visible.

The article reviews the film, "Peterloo," directed by Mike Leigh.

In April 2017, more than 100 people gathered at the Halifax North Memorial Library for the official launch of the Lynn Jones African-Canadian and Diaspora Heritage Collection, housed at Saint Mary's University. ...This is a personal archive whose creation was an intentional act. At the tender age of eight, Lynn Jones began cutting out articles from the Truro newspaper, preserving stories pertaining to Black life in Nova Scotia and around the world. One of ten children, Lynn kept busy documenting the many activities of generations of the Jones family, from those who fought with the Black Battalion in World War I to those active today. Along the way, she added numerous documents – many of them not found elsewhere – and correspondence related to organizations such as the Black Working Group and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (psac) and individuals like Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). The result is eighteen boxes, with talk of more to come. While the collection stretches from the 1960s to the 2010s, the bulk of material pertains to the 1980s and 1990s. -- Introduction

Disputes over the meaning of human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery have both provoked and coincided with a reinvigorated debate in academic and policy literatures about how to conceptualise unfree labour. This article traces the contours of the debate over free and unfree labour, identifying its key stakes as the debate has developed and paying particular attention to recent interventions. It begins by identifying a problem common to both canonical liberal and Marxian approaches to the free/unfree labour distinction, which is to fetishise the labour market. It then discusses the consensus that is emerging across disciplines and in leading international organisations that labour unfreedom in contemporary capitalism is best conceptualised as a continuum rather than a binary, highlighting recent disciplinary-specific contributions. It argues that the metaphor of a continuum of labour unfreedom obscures more than it illuminates. Drawing upon the growing body of literature that advocates a multifaceted approach to labour unfreedom, this article argues that a robust concept of local labour control regime does a much better job of capturing the complex mix of consent and coercion involved in extracting value from labour power than the idea of a continuum of labour unfreedom.

This May, Canada marks the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, when tens of thousands of people walked off their jobs in sympathy and solidarity with building and metal trades workers whose employers were refusing to bargain for fair wages and working conditions.Though the strike failed in its immediate goals, the example it set reverberated across the country and the world, inspiring political upheaval at all levels in Canada, and ultimately transforming the balance of power between workers and the bosses for many generations. In this issue of the Monitor we consider the value of direct action and solidarity strikes in a new era of retrenching labour rights, out-of-control inequality and conservative backlash. “Workers can make great gains by withdrawing their labour power. But they also risk a lot,” writes the Graphic History Collective in their introduction to our special feature on the strike. “The stakes in class struggle are high.” True. But so are the costs of not acting. Today, as it was 100 years ago, we must continually fight for fair pay and good jobs for everyone—or be prepared to live in a world where neither exists for anyone. --Introduction. Contents: Direct Action Gets the Goods! A printable timeline of Canadian strikes from the Graphic History Collective -- 1919: Causes and Consequences: Paul Moist recounts the organizing that went into the strike and its legacy -- 100 years on.Women, rights and work—from 1919 to the #MeToo movement: Molly McCracken interviews Julie Guard on labour's need to organize more female workers  -- The year labour makes history: Learning from failures like the Winnipeg General Strike and Kirkland Lake organization drive can strengthen the movement for true worker democracy, writes Jon Weier -- Work Life: Canada's "yellow vest" movement needs more gilets jaunes, writes Lynne Fernandez in her latest column -- Frontlines of the class: We all win when teachers strike. But, as Erika Shaker argues, parents, children and communities need to see themselves in the struggle -- Striking for survival: The right to strike in Canada is under attack and back-to-work legislation now commonplace Bruno Dobrusin calls on workers to embrace the mass walkout, both legal and illegal, as a tool for social change -- Lessons in South Korean protest culture: President Moon is backsliding on important labour reforms, but workers continue to resist in innovative ways, writes Zaee Desphande.

Among the 40,000 workers in Canada’s largest workplace, Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto, a small but significant group of worker-organizers has created the Toronto Airport Workers’ Council (TAWC), a nonunion organization open to all Pearson workers. In this paper, we discuss the capitalist context of Canadian labor relations and the neoliberal restructuring that has attacked working conditions and workers’ solidarity across the airline industry. Then, after examining the insufficient responses by the twelve Pearson unions, we explain how workers formed the TAWC, whose participatory structures, direct action strategy, and broader class focus have achieved considerable successes, despite tensions with union leaders wary of potential “dual unionism.” We also discuss how the TAWC provides a space for socialist-led workplace organizing training and political education by the Toronto Labour Committee. Finally, we explore the possible roles of this council model in labor movement renewal and labor education in socialist movement renewal.

Prenant conscience des effets délétères des stratégies traditionnelles de mise à l’écart des travailleurs âgés, les pouvoirs publics promeuvent aujourd’hui leur maintien en emploi. Afin de comprendre comment et dans quelles conditions cet objectif politique se traduit ou non en pratiques concrètes dans les milieux de travail, l’article propose une grille d’analyse, inspirée de l’analyse sociétale, permettant de comprendre les attitudes des entreprises et des travailleurs vis-à-vis le maintien en emploi des séniors. L’article met ensuite cette grille à l’épreuve en étudiant les pratiques de deux entreprises de commerce de détail, l’une en France et l’autre au Québec, autour de quatre espaces d’interprétation : institutionnel, du dialogue social, marchand et organisationnel.

The article reviews the book, "Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives and Why We Don’t Talk about It," by Elizabeth Anderson.