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This chapter initiates the conversation between theory, method, evidence, and practice that is the focus of this book. It conceptualizes precarious employment, probes its dynamics in Canada, and identifies avenues for fostering understanding in the service of positive social change by way of several linked arguments set in the three major sections that follow. --Author's introduction

[S]ynthesizes the central findings of the volume ...[and] explores the implications of precarious employment for workers, households, and communities as well as its larger public costs and identifies several avenues for improving knowledge in an attempt to better workers' conditions of work and qaulity of health. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 39.

[A]dvances a new methodological approach to understanding precarious wage work.... This approach considers how race and gender, as they intersect with occupation, shape and, in turn, are shaped by precarious employment. Its main empirical finding is that a "racialized gendering of jobs" characterizes the contemporary Canadian labour market. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 34).

[Discusses] the concept and practice of community unionism and demonstrates the potential for building a union-community alliance for labour movement renewal through an analysis...of the Workers' Action Centre (WAC) in Toronto. --Editors' introduction

[Examines] forms of self-employment by select dimensions of precarious employment and finds a gendered continuum of precarious self-employment. The chapter also illustrates that many dimensions of precarious employment characterize key forms of self-employment, such as part-time and full-time solo self-employment. The conclusion...supports challenges to contemporary definitions of "entrepreneurship"...yet the adoption of a gender lens allows them to interrogate and challenge the notion of "choice" underpinning prevailing understandings of main reasons for self-employment. --From editor's introductory chapter (p. 34).

[E]valuation of the B.C. Organizing Institute, an initiative of the British Columbia Federation of Labour.... [P]rovides valuable insights into the problems that have to be overcome in developing coordinated education and training programs for leadership development, promoting inter-union cooperation, and creating a culture of organizing. --Editors' introduction

[E]xamines the Paid Education leave (PEL) program, a negotiated employer-funded worker education program administered by the Canadian Auto Workers. The primary purpose of the study is to evaluate the ability of the PEL to develop membership knowledge, activism and leadership to facilitate union renewal. [The author's] paper, based on survey research and interviews, maintains that the PEL program does contribute to leadership development and to the union renewal process by serving to alter the perceptions and attitudes of its participants. --Editors' introduction

[E]xamines the ways in which union organizing gender-baised and highlights possible union strategies to overcome the bias and improve organizing success. ...The paper draws on the survey of union organizers in Ontario and British Columbia conducted by the authors in 2000 and 2001. --Editors' introduction

Describes the strikes in the textile mills of Montreal, Valleyfield and Lachute that were led by Madeleine Parent and Kent Rowley in the post-World War II period, and the anti-communist purge of US-based unions that resulted in their dismissal from the United Textile Workers of America in 1952.

Chronicles the Ontario years of Madeleine Parent and Kent Rowley, including the founding of the Council of Canadian Unions (later the Confederation of Canadian Unions) in Sudbury in 1969.

Portrays Madeleine Parent's life and times.

Annotated reproductions of photographs of Parent as well as pertinent news clippings.

Discusses Parent's education at McGill University in the late 1930s, including professors who influenced her and student associations to which she belonged.

Describes Parent's contributions to the Canadian women's movement from 1970 to 2000, including the "equal pay for work of equal value" campaign and the defence of the rights of immigrant and Indigenous women.

Homage to Parent's work in defence of immigrant and minority women in Quebec in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Labour organizer John St. Amand describes his mentorship by Madeleine Parent and his work in Nova Scotia to build Canadian unions.

The systemic reproduction of migrant domestics as non-citizens within the countries where they work and reside renders them in a meaningful sense stateless, as far as access to state protection of their rights is concerned. This is despite the formal retention of legal citizenship status accorded by their home country, and, often, the legal entry as non-citizen migrant workers in the host country. In previous chapters, we have identified how the construction of non-citizenship is central to maintaining the vulnerability of foreign domestic workers in Canada. In this chapter, we consider the lived experiences of domestic workers themselves, based largely on a survey of foreign domestic workers living in Toronto. This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the experiences of two groups of women of colour, those of West Indian and Filipino origin, working in the homes of upper-middle- and upper-class Canadian families resident in Toronto, Ontario in the mid-1990s.

[Excerpt] In this chapter we seek to answer the following questions: Why has it been so difficult for unions to turn the organizing efforts and initiatives of the last six years into any significant gains in union density? Why have a small number of unions been able to make major gains through organizing? And most importantly, which organizing strategies will be most effective in reversing the tide of the labor movement's organizing decline? What our findings will show is that while the political, legal, and economic climate for organizing continues to deteriorate, and private sector employers continue to mount aggressive opposition to organizing efforts, some unions are winning. Our findings also show that the unions that are most successful at organizing run fundamentally different campaigns, in both quality and intensity, than those that are less successful, and that those differences hold true across a wide range of organizing environments, company characteristics, bargaining unit demographics, and employer campaign variables.

Master and servant has a paradoxical history in Canada. There was a great deal of penal legislation. ...Indeed, new legislation to punish workers for disobedience and desertion was enacted after 1875, the year of final repeal in Britain, and even after the Canadian Parliament's own Breaches of Contract Act two years later. But compared with Britain and the other white dominions, let alone other parts of the empire, enforcement was sporadic, convictions relatively few, and punishments rarely harsh. It is easy enough to construct an explanation for inconsiderable enforcement out of the structure of the economy and the characteristics of the labour force, but these at the same time cannot account for the variety and persistence of penal legislation. The answer seems to lie as much in the symbolic as the instrumental uses of employment law in this part of the empire. --Introduction

Draws on survey data collected in Canada, Britain and Japan in an attempt to assess the claim that lean production represents a positive change in the employment relationship in the automobile industry. Concludes that despite the rhetoric of consensual participation, the difficult working environment created by the regime relies on significant degrees of imposition to keep the assembly lines running, which negatively impacts on employees' working lives.