Search

The article reviews the book, "Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans," by Samira Saramo.

Thousands of children and youth across the country took to the streets for two weeks in spring 1947 to protest a three-cent increase in the price of chocolate bars. The protest initially generated enthusiastic press coverage and had widespread popular support, but when the National Federation of Labor Youth (nfly), the Communist Party's youth organization, announced its support, anti-communists in the press and the community red-baited the protesters. The campaign quickly lost momentum, which anti-communists attributed to the presence of Communists but was more likely due to their own red-baiting attacks in the press. Some of these protests were spontaneous reactions to a 40 per cent increase in the price of candy bars, while others were led or inspired by nfly. Either way, the countrywide mobilization of thousands of children and youth marks a turning point in the history of Canada's left. Erupting in tandem with a nationwide strike of industrial workers and protests of activist consumers demanding greater economic security and a more responsive state, the children's chocolate bar protest provides a window on this critical moment in the class struggle. The attacks on this popular protest at the moment that the long run of community-based militancy was about to be demonized, delegitimated, and silenced by red-baiting marks a significant milestone in Canada's Cold War. In addition to adding the youngsters' challenge to capital and the state to the history of the popular left, the event contributes to the growing literature on children and youth engaged in political protest, while their creative protest strategies offer a youthful dimension to the study of performance activism.

This book deals with the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act and the Public Service Act, the statutes that primarily govern unionized and non-unionized employment and labour relations in the Ontario Public Service and Crown Agencies. This updated edition provides a full review of all sections, and all judicial and arbitral consideration, of both acts. It also discusses the unique treatment of the Crown and its employees in the Public Sector Labour Relations Transition Act and the Employment Standards Act. -- Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Le Québec en mouvements : Continuité et renouvellement des pratiques militantes," by Pascale Dufour, Laurence Bherer, and Geneviève Pagé.

The Progressive Labour Agenda is intended to provide Manitoba policy makers with a set of clear policy measures to improve the conditions of work for Manitobans while promoting overall well-being in our province. These policy measures respond directly to issues in labour and employment such as the proliferation of low-wage work, gaps in employment standards and health and safety enforcement, declining private sector union coverage, and inequities experienced by women and migrant workers, among other issues. The policy options outlined in the Progressive Labour Agenda cover three major themes: 1) ensure access to unions and fair collective bargaining; 2) modernize labour legislation to close gaps in employment standards and improve conditions for non-unionized workers; and 3) improve workplace health and safety. These are ideas that are well supported by public policy research and that are actionable at the provincial level. --Website description

Indigenous doulas in Canada carry added responsibilities as they juggle with cultural and societal expectations to appropriately support their communities and extended relations. They not only face socioeconomic challenges as a result of doula care being excluded from the universal healthcare system, but also deal with the affective costs of caregiving. Through an Indigenous-centred intersectional lens, the idea of Indigenous doula work as exploitative labour is examined under four key areas: (1) the historical role of doulas in Indigenous communities; (2) colonial policies and processes that devalued Indigenous women; (3) colonial policies and processes that devalued birth workers, and; (4) challenges that Indigenous doulas face today. This study aims to provide context to the challenges faced by Indigenous doulas working within the dominant, Western medical system and confines of capitalism. The study concludes that the policies and processes that derived from these systems have led to the hardships imposed on Indigenous doulas, which reveal a need for policy solutions that recognize the value of Indigenous doulas in the healthcare system.

This dissertation establishes that work injury and injured workers are relatively neglected in Critical Disability Studies (CDS). A further observation is that CDS tends to avoid a class analysis of disability politics in favour of identitarian approaches. This research focuses on income security. Through a Marxist critical policy historiography, I compare workers’ compensation benefits and state-sponsored benefits for disabled people whose disabilities originated outside of the workplace in Ontario. I argue that the workers’ compensation program is superior to the state-sponsored program because of the class location and politics of the respective groups of people with disabilities seeking income security. The discussion also highlights some of the reasons for the missing injured worker in CDS. Specifically, injured workers experience disability as a loss worthy of compensation rather than a positive identity. Further, rather than viewing prevention measures as the erasure of disabled people, injured workers support the prevention of disability through occupational health and safety laws and workplace practices. By focusing on the political economy of each program, the historical narrative suggests that disability benefit programs in Ontario were developed less by moral suasion and more because of their role in capital accumulation. Although the argument holds for the early history of the two programs in their early history. the negative impact of neoliberalism on both workers’ compensation and the current benefits program in Ontario (the Ontario Disability Support Program) has created a convergence of interests between permanently impaired injured workers and other disabled people, underscoring the importance of including injured workers’ perspectives in CDS.

The article reviews the book, "Solidarity Beyond Bars: Unionizing Prison Labour," by Jordan House and Asaf Rashid.

We generally take for granted that everyone has the right to a say—and certainly a vote—in what our governments do. But in the workplaces that rule many of our waking hours, these democratic rights are largely absent. In a time of extreme inequality, deteriorating social cohesion and reduced trust in our institutions, why shouldn’t workers have more control over the firms they work in? Enabling employees to take more ownership and control in their working lives is a promising antidote. With advocacy from a broad coalition of supporters—including many business owners—the federal government has tabled legislation to create a new Employee Ownership Trust legal structure that makes it easier for business owners to sell firms to their employees. However, to tap the full potential of employee ownership, a much broader suite of policies is needed. This report examines what an ambitious public policy agenda would look like to unleash the promise of democratic employee ownership in Canada. --Website description

The article reviews the book, "El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico," by Rob McKenzie and Patrick Dunne.

The article reviews the book, "A Field in Flux: Sixty Years of Industrial Relations," by Robert B. McKersie.

Annie Buller makes for an interesting case study of Canada’s World War II security state and how it functioned vis-à-vis the Communist Party of Canada and its allies. Her experiences speak to gender, party history, and broader elements of political policing, community responses, and confinement experiences. Like her life, her wartime encounters with the Canadian security state were concurrently like and different from those of other criminalized female and male activists at the time about whom we know more. Among the apprehended and incarcerated, female or male, Buller was somewhat of an anomaly and warrants special attention. Buller’s particular situation helps to shed light on lesser-understood elements of the Communist wartime carceral experience, including the lack of trust officials had in these processes at times to accomplish the intended repression and important details about efforts to free those incarcerated. Ultimately, Buller’s case and the movement to liberate her and the other incarcerated members of the party illustrate the power of grassroots activism in challenging oppressive systems.

With the advancement of science and technology and the improvement of social attitudes and mentalities, many Canadian women nowadays hold professions that have always been held exclusively by men. They have been able to integrate educational training, academic programs, and professional careers that have always been “masculine”, such as engineering, architecture, accounting, finance, military, trades, construction, and law enforcement, to name a few. Women in Canada have successfully performed and integrated these “masculine” professions. However, this integration was only a one-way street in many circumstances, not appreciated or accepted by men who considered it an invasion of their professional property and territory. Therefore, it unfortunately opens the door to bullying, discrimination, intimidation, and even sexual harassment. Sexual harassment of women in the workplace has always been persistent, especially in male-dominated industries. Not only does it harm women’s health, advancement, and career, but it also harms the organizations and their reputations. This research will investigate the impacts of sexual harassment on the overall health of women working in male-dominated industries in Canada.

This paper explores the perceptions and future imaginaries of a group of union members in Manitoba, Canada, concerning climate change, energy transition, and the roles of unions and workers in climate politics. Based on interviews with 30 rank and file workers carried out through the winter of 2020, the results suggest some starting points for a more active engagement between the labour movement and climate politics—an engagement that is central to climate justice, and that becomes more vital every moment as workers both participate through their waged labour in the production of ecological crisis, and stand to suffer intensely from both climate change and from elite-led energy transitions.

Cet article vise à étudier les conséquences sociales des relations industrielles de la sous-traitance internationale qui, si elle est source de compétitivité pour les grandes entreprises dans les pays développés, peut conduire à des conditions de travail indécentes dans les pays en développement, en particulier dans les industries à forte intensité de main-d'oeuvre. Nous abordons la question peu explorée de la nature de l'engagement des PME du textile au Maroc en matière de responsabilité sociale compte tenu des exigences des grands donneurs d’ordres. Les résultats de notre étude quantitative corroborent l'hypothèse d'une dégradation des conditions de travail des salariés qui accompagne la sous-traitance internationale.

An original history of those who made tattooing their livelihood. In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career. Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Countercurrents: Women's Movements in Postwar Montreal," by Amanda Ricci.

The article reviews the book, "Environmental Activism on the Ground: Small Green and Indigenous Organizing," by Jonathan Clapperton and Liza Piper.

This collection presents critical and action-oriented approaches to addressing food systems inequities across places, spaces, and scales. With case studies from around the globe, Radical Food Geographies explores interconnections between power structures and the social and ecological dynamics that bring food from the land and water to our plates. Through themes of scale, spatial imaginaries, and human and more-than-human relationships, the authors explore ongoing efforts to co-construct more equitable and sustainable food systems for all. Advancing a radical food geographies praxis, the book reveals multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, and offers examples of co-creating food systems transformation through scholarship, action, and geography. --Publisher's description

This paper provides a history of more than a century of efforts to establish and maintain a homegrown Canadian sugar supply – a twentieth century version of what Eric Williams called the ‘war of the two sugars,’ or the global competition between sugar beet and cane. To resolve beet sugar’s so-called ‘labour problem,’ the industry has collaborated with the Canadian state to produce new classes of temporary workers, mobilizing incarcerated Japanese Canadians, migrant indigenous families, and Mexican and Caribbean workers employed through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. At the same time, the sugar industry has sought to refine itself of the racialised workers upon whom it relies by promoting the figure of the white Canadian worker. The Canadian ‘war of the two sugars’ has been fought through the stratification of the labour force along the lines of citizenship, resulting in the production of unique racial forms.