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This article reviews the book, "Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream," by Gregg Shotwell.

The 2008 financial crisis had a tremendous impact on the Greek economy and society. Since 2010, widespread popular mobilizations have emerged against the austerity measures that were part of the bail-out package proposed to the Greek governments by the Troika of creditors (EU-ECB-IMF). Yet the institutional trade unions have failed to impede the reduction of wage earners’ income, which, by 2013, had dropped by 50% compared to 2008 levels. These unions have also been largely unable to confirm their leading role in mobilizing the working population. This article examines the reasons for the failure of the institutional trade unions to adequately address the austerity challenge. We consider that the explanation of their shortcomings lies in the generic challenges and problems contemporary trade unions are facing, as documented in the relevant international literature, as well as the specific particularities and traits of the Greek socio-political context. We also investigate the alternatives proposed by militant, grassroots labour organizations, such as neighbourhood-based workers’ clubs, industry sector or company-based unions populated by precarious workers, and occupied, self-managed companies. After identifying the strong points of the latter’s contributions, as well as the problems and challenges they are facing, we conclude that a diversified and innovative approach is required on the part of the labour movement in order to simultaneously address and exploit all sources of workers’ power. The article concludes that a process of strategic rapprochement between mainstream and radical unions in Greece is necessary.

Quebec's occupational health and safety regime has not kept pace with the far-reaching transformation in work organisation which has occurred in the past several decades. Rights and duties under Quebec legislation continue to be defined in relation to the paradigm of the traditional contract of employment, even though the concept of the employment contract is of diminishing relevance in the face of ever-increasing use of contracting, subcontracting, labour hire agencies, supply chains and other alternative work arrangements. Given the documented link between precarious work and a heightened risk of job-related hazards, and that health and safety at work has long been recognized as a fun- damental human right, the author argues that Quebec law is in need of reform. Such reform, she contends, could be modelled on the harmonised Work Health and Safety Acts recently adopted by most Australian jurisdictions. The most notable innovation in the Australian statutes is the imposition of a broad gen- eral duty of care on any "person conducting a business or undertaking. " That duty applies to all categories of workers, regardless of whether or not there is an employment contract. Furthermore, the Acts stipulate that where multiple persons are involved in the conduct of a business or undertaking, they are obli- gated to consult, cooperate and coordinate in order to ensure the health and safety of workers, all of whom are entitled to participate in the consultations through their elected representatives. While noting that effective enforcement of these provisions continues to present challenges, the author sees the Australian reform as an important step forward in providing occupational health and safety protections for precarious workers.

The present analysis seeks to examine whether the 2008 recession had a differential impact on Aboriginal as compared to non-Aboriginal Canadians as measured by the differences in the probability of unemployment between the two groups. Specifically, the present study tests two hypotheses: 1- Aboriginal people have been disproportionately burdened by the Great Recession as compared to non-Aboriginal people, and as a consequence; 2- Aboriginal people are more likely than non-Aboriginal people to be discouraged workers. The study uses data obtained from the master files of the Canadian Labour Force Survey for the years 2007 to 2012 inclusive to estimate the probability that an individual is unemployed based on a set of observable characteristics for a sample of labour force participants. The methodology begins by estimating a pooled model across all years, which includes controls for Aboriginal identity. Secondly, individual models of the probability of unemployment are estimated for each year for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal labour force participants. The difference in the probability of unemployment from pooled models estimated separately for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples are decomposed to reveal the proportion of the gap that is due to differences in observable characteristics between the two groups and the amount of the gap that is attributable to differential returns to those characteristics. To investigate the second hypothesis, the study estimates the probability that a respondent is a discouraged worker based on the entire sample of both economically active and inactive persons (i.e. labour force participants and well as those not in the labour force). The results of both the pooled and individual models of the probability of unemployment support the first hypothesis, that Aboriginal peoples were disproportionately burdened by the 2008 recession as seen in higher and more enduring probabilities of unemployment. By the 2012, estimated unemployment rates had roughly returned to their pre-recessionary levels for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal respondents with strongest labour force attachments. When individuals with weaker labour force attachments (i.e. those who have been unemployed for more than twelve months) are included in the analysis, the gap between the probability of unemployment for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal persons widens. Furthermore, the second hypothesis, that Aboriginal people are more likely to be discouraged workers, was supported, as Aboriginal people were more likely to be discouraged workers in 2008-2010 and 2012.

This essay argues that union democracy (in the sense of active direct democracy at local levels in combination with highly accountable representative systems at more general levels) can be an important foundation for efforts to build a participatory society. It establishes, through a literature review, that pessimism about the capacity of unions to be functioning democracies is overstated; and then offers corrections for three weaknesses in the classical theory of participatory democracy. The first weakness – failing to analyze how participatory processes are gendered, racialized, and sexualized – is overcome by drawing upon feminist ideas for creating highly inclusive group processes. The second weakness – believing that an exaggerated consensus can be created through participation – is remedied with insights drawn from agonistic pluralism. The third weakness – assuming that participation in workplace governance is the essential, participatory training ground – is corrected with insights drawn from research on deliberative democracy. After enumerating eight reasons to pick unions as a focus for participatory efforts from amongst the various alternatives, the essay concludes with a historical example of how the combination of direct democracy and representative democratic accountability in the five United Mine Workers of America locals in the Crowsnest Pass, Canada, in the mid-20th century “spilled over” into this regional coalfield society, thereby nurturing a fledgling participatory society.

Examines the participation of young workers in unions as well as their place in unions' committee structures. Considers the literature on integration of young workers into unions, the revitalization of unions through institutional change (three key criteria are delineated), and the results of a survey (interviews, focus groups) that was conducted by the authors. Concludes that youth should play a greater role than consultation and education — that they should have a voice rather than a presence in union councils — which in turn would encourage participation by other minority groups in union renewal.

The article reviews the book, "The Communist International and US Communism, 1919–1929," by Jacob A. Zumoff.

This paper seeks to answer two questions: 1- To what extent are negotiators in collective bargaining influenced by different types of external information? 2- How can differences in the influence of external information between negotiators be explained by the characteristics of the negotiators and bargaining units? A standardized questionnaire measuring self-reported influences of different types of external information was developed and administered to a representative sample of union and firm negotiators in the Netherlands. In total, 123 negotiators participated in the survey. Four types of external information were investigated: 1- economic information; 2- information on organizational power; 3- institutional information; and 4- information spillovers. Descriptive analyses show that economic information, particularly when referring to the sector level, was very influential, as was institutional information on national and sectoral collective agreement developments. Information reflecting organizational power, e.g. militancy, carried less weight, while information on other bargaining events, i.e. spillover, was also very important. From extant theory, empirical findings and common assumptions in labour relations literature, the paper developed and tested a number of hypotheses concerning the influence of external information. It was found that the influence of spillovers increased with the proximity of their source. Union negotiators were generally more influenced by external information than firm negotiators. There was some evidence that influence increased with experience, but this effect was rather modest. Evidence that negotiators in sector bargaining were less affected by the economic environment than negotiators in company bargaining was weak, but they were found to be less influenced by spillovers and international collective agreement developments.

The article reviews the book, "L’approche systémique de la gestion des ressources humaines dans les administrations publiques du XXIe siècle," by Louise Lemire, Gaétan Martel and Éric Charest.

The article reviews the book, "Working Men's Bodies: Work Camps in Britain, 1880-1940," by John Field.

The article reviews the book, "Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada," by Ian Milligan.

This article reviews the book, "The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario," by Ryan O’Connor.

The article reviews the book, "Revolutionizing Retail: Workers, Political Action, and Social Change," by Kendra Coulter.

The article reviews the book, "According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury's Ukrainian Community," by Stacey Zembrzycki.

This article reviews the book, "The Match Girl and the Heiress," by Seth Koven.

The article reviews the book, "Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities," by Glenda Tibe Bonifacio.

The article reviews the book, "Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba," by Janis Thiessen.

While historians have been increasingly attentive to the politics and culture of social movements since the long sixties, they have engaged much less with the significance of anarchism within these activist currents. As part of an emerging field of anarchist studies, this article demonstrates that anarchist projects were critical in shaping postwar political radicalism in Vancouver and its relationship to a global pattern of cultural transformation, capitalist restructuring, and social movement activism. Specifically, the article investigates how and why Vancouver’s anarchist community created strong political, personal, and cultural connections with an emerging punk scene during the 1970s and early 1980s. It demonstrates that these relationships emerged from anarchism’s conflicting relationship with the city’s New Left and countercultural communities in the long sixties, as well as from anarchists’ specific engagement with punk as a tool for revolutionary struggle in the wake of the sixties. Overall, the article argues that anarchists cultivated connections with punk in this context because they saw it as awash with the potential to bridge generations of political dissent; to support emerging activist projects; and to help usher in new expressions of radical culture in the city. In so doing, the article offers new insights into the political, social, and cultural legacies of the long sixties, in Vancouver and beyond.

The organization of work through production networks undermines the application of labour law to a growing proportion of workers. Protections put in place by labour law, specifically devised to apply within the hierarchical and bilateral structure of the employer/employee relationship, are ill-fitted to tackle the multilateral structure of network production in which market and hierarchical relationships are entangled. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to some as a possible answer to these challenges. The author develops a normative and functional framework to assess the promise and limits of CSR as a regulatory tool. The framework is grounded in human dignity, as concep- tualized by human rights law and political philosophy. A holistic understanding of human dignity highlights the interdependency of labour law's basic func- tions: providing minimum working conditions, ensuring employer accountability for working hazards, and enabling workers' collective action. The author then applies the human dignity framework to codes of conduct, as described and analyzed in current literature on the subject. She concludes that CSR codes and their implementation often fall short of what is required in the workplace by the human dignity principle.

Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that was failing to assume responsibility for isolated and uneducated men on the frontier, as well as working-class men who responded to their poor working conditions by succumbing to moral diseases that left them incapable of governing themselves, leading their families, or functioning as rational citizens. Fitzpatrick developed a double strategy to head off this crisis: he lobbied the state for structural change, and at the same time promoted a home-like environment for reading, as well as particular works of fiction, as a means of reminding male workers of their duty to self, family, and nation. Despite the association’s apparent interest in the cultivation of the liberal individual, its reliance on the reading room and on the fiction of popular authors such as Ralph Connor as surrogates for the absent family demonstrates the centrality of the apparently private sphere to early 20th-century Canada’s industrializing economy.