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The article reviews the book, "The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working Class Writing about Economic Restructuring," by Sherry Lee Linkon.
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The article reviews the book, "Travail et emploi des femmes," by Margareth Maruani.
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Partial contents note: Introduction / Mark Leier -- Teaching labour history and organizing skills with movement activists / Mark Leier -- Teaching the present to learn the past / John-Henry Harter -- Teaching labour history to international students / Dale M. McCartney -- Scripted celebration: issues in commemorating modern labour history / Andrea Samoil.
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Proletarianization refers to the subordination of hired labour to the owners of capital. This inquiry assesses the extent of proletarianization of professional employees on the basis of a distinctive series of national surveys of the general labour force in Canada between 1982 and 2016. Non-managerial professional employees are distinguished from professionals in other class positions (i.e. professional employers, self-employed professionals, and professional managers) with whom they have been conflated in much of the prior research. The findings suggest increasing proletarianization of professional employees during this period in terms of declining job autonomy and decreasing participation in organizational decision-making, as well as increasing underemployment and more critical political attitudes. But there is also evidence of increasing qualifications and development of "general intellect" among more traditional working-class employees, as well as even more extensive underemployment. Implications of convergence between the proletarianization of professional employees, as a "new working class," and the qualifications and perceived working conditions of other non-managerial hired labour in emergent "knowledge economies" are discussed. More careful distinctions between non-managerial professional employees and professionals in other class positions in future studies are recommended.
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For Ukrainian Canadian leftists, the 1920s represented a golden age of domestic cultural production. The strict hierarchy that constituted the communist movement in the 1930s was not yet extant, and the realm of possibilities was limited only by the imagination of the organization itself. The material produced in this period was neither crass agitprop nor cheap melodrama. Rather, it was bottom-up expressions of proletarian high culture and organic reflections of the social, economic, and political realities that constituted the experiences of Ukrainian progressives in Canada. As such, in the 1920s, the theatre served as the movement's most effective vehicle for political propaganda and ethnocultural instruction.
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The article reviews the book, "In Defence of Home Places: Environmental Activism in Nova Scotia," by Mark R. Leeming.
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Because of increased market uncertainty, employers today often do not guarantee job security and employees increasingly perceive such a state, often with trepidation. Employees who have relatively insecure jobs tend to feel mistreated by their managers. This study examines the relationship between the work places where jobs are mostly insecure and employee perception of abusive supervision, and the moderating role of a relational mechanism of perceived social worth at work. The conservation of resources (COR) perspective is used to guide analysis. This perspective provides competing rationales for employee acquisition/preservation of resources and ensuing abusive supervision. In a two-wave panel survey, 271 full-time employees with various occupations completed two questionnaires. Results indicate that job insecurity is positively associated with abusive supervision. This association is stronger for employees who perceive higher social worth at work. There is limited research investigating how managerial/leadership effectiveness varies in workplaces where job’s are insecure. Moreover, a relational mechanism of social worth has rarely been used to examine the phenomenon of job insecurity. Although literature shows employees’ perception of job insecurity leads them to increase work input/effort to make themselves more valuable and worthy of remaining in the organization, this does not mean that they will be more likely to notions such as management prerogative on their employer’s authority. Ironically, leadership, in particular, tends to be undermined when jobs are insecure as our findings show that insecure subordinates tend to perceive themselves experiencing supervisory abuse. To address this malaise, practical implications for organizations, supervisors, and subordinates are proposed and complementary practices are discussed to differentiate high social-worth employees from others.
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The article reviews the book, "Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy," by Bridget Kenny.
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Research objective: Through relatively higher unionization rates within the casino industry, casino employment provides a counterexample to the connection between low-skill service work and low wages. The existing literature, however, suggests that casino workers embrace a commodified vision of their labour. It is of interest to understand whether and how unions are successful in decommodifying both ideologically and materially, wage entitlements in this expanding industry as this is a main mechanism through which unions challenge income inequality. This article examines the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) attempt to decommodify wages in the casino industry. Methodology: These findings are based on a case study of Casino Windsor, located in Windsor, Ontario—the automotive capital of Canada and the first city to host a resort casino outside of Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Ninety-one interviews were conducted with Windsor stakeholders (20), and automotive (43) and casino (28) workers. The local newspaper from 1994-2014 is also examined and descriptive statistics are utilized. Results: Casino workers initially did adopt a decommodified vision of wage entitlements; yet, due to political—the New Democratic Party of Ontario—and institutional—low sectoral union density—forces, casino workers during 2014-2015 interviews embrace a service mind where wages are determined by a market-oriented human capital model. Conclusions: CAW union representatives and the casino membership now view the CAW’s attempt to bring an industrial mindset into the casino as a mistake, naturalizing the link between decommodified wages in automotive manufacturing and the market-oriented wage entitlements of the service sector. This case study marks a critical lost opportunity by the CAW to decommodify wage entitlements in the casino industry and the broader service sector.
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The article reviews the book, "Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada," by Barry Eidlin.
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The article reviews the book, "The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics," by Jefferson Cowie.
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The article reviews the book, "Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom," by Daniel J. Clark.
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This paper explores the spatial politics of racism and inter-worker competition through a case study of Indigenous employment during the construction of the Voisey’s Bay mine in northern Labrador. Over the course of construction, the building and construction trades unions (BCTUs) sought to restrict the hiring of local Inuit and Innu workers by challenging the legitimacy of place-based entitlements to work. Inuit and Innu workers had preferential access to employment as a result of unresolved land claims and the ensuing Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBA) between the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company and both the Innu Nation and the Labrador Inuit Association. IBA provisions that local Inuit and Innu be hired preferentially ran counter to the unions’ organizational structures and cultures, which privileged worker mobility and skill. The BCTUs used the geographic incompatibility between the scale of Indigenous claims and that of construction worker organization to justify a competitive approach to unionism and to veil racist portrayals of Innu and Inuit workers. By drawing out the relation between skill, racism and beliefs about entitlements to work, this paper explores how workers selectively use place-based and mobile identities to participate in inter-worker competition, reifying colonial patterns of labour mobility and labour market segmentation.
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The article reviews the book, "One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada," by Joan Sangster.
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The article reviews the book, "Marxism and Criminology: A History of Criminal Selectivity," by Valeria Vegh Weis.
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Introduction and text of a speech that was to be given in 1970 at the University of Winnipeg by socialist politician and publicist William "Bill" Pritchard (1888-1981), who was a leading defendant at the sedition trial held in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.
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This study examines workplace corruption from the perspective of individual psychological processes. Existing literature has shown how corrupt behaviours can emerge from various kinds of motivations, including manipulation, retaliation, and conformity. This research suggests yet another path, where corruption stems from a motivation to preserve resources that individuals perceive to be threatened by their professional environment. As such, the study is grounded in conservation of resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001). We put forward an original model that introduces the notion of resource signals. An enrichment of original COR theory, resource signals correspond to individuals’ perceptions that the work environment is supportive, or, otherwise, of their need for resource development and preservation. Specifically, the study tests a moderated mediation model where a sense of mastery, a personal resource, moderates the impact of resource signals, including distributive justice, procedural justice, and interpersonal trust, on occupational corruption. Results are drawn from a sample of French public sector employees (n = 575). They validate the hypothesized mediating role of trust between both facets of organizational justice and measures of corruption, including bribery and property deviance. An indirect negative effect, however, is strongest between procedural justice and workplace corruption. As hypothesized, a sense of mastery significantly moderates the link between trust and both corruption types. This research contributes to both theory and practice. By integrating resource signals within a COR framework, it shows that corrupt behaviours are to be gauged against interacting motivations for preserving psychological resources. Consequently, this study also suggests that organizations should go beyond ethics and procedures, and to consider workplace corruption as a potential symptom of organizational signals perceived as threats to individuals’ valued resources.
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The article reviews the book, "Arkansas's Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest," by Matthew Hild.
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The article reviews the book, "Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross," by Neville Kirk.
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My research explores the labour conditions experienced by foreign nurses employed in health care in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, on temporary permits. I draw on ethnographic interviews to understand the nuanced ways in which foreign nurses feel welcomed in their local communities and work-places, yet simultaneously remain subject to hostile racialized scrutiny. Nova Scotia is one of the least ethnically diverse provinces in Canada and one of the most economically impoverished. It faces a shortage of healthcare workers, exacerbated by the ongoing restructuring of the healthcare sector. These contextual factors contribute to the complicated push-pull matrix discussed by the temporary foreign nurses, who feel needed, but not wanted. This matrix cannot be dismissed as simply the racism and "backwardness" of local communities. Rather, it must be understood through a political economy focus on temporary foreign workers, restructured health care, and the normalization of a precarious labour landscape in which racialized foreign and local workers are pitted against each other.