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The article reviews the book, "Pour elles toutes : femmes contre la prison," by Gwenola Ricordeau.

Universities commonly engage Employee Assistance Programs to help workers with their problems. In this institutional case study of neoliberalism in action, I analyze the EAP newsletters from one Canadian institution I call “Corporate U” for their impact on full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. I show how their messaging counterproductively amplifies pressures in today’s university to be resilient and perform and be accountable. I take the EAP to be an agent of the university, and as such, their newsletters demonstrate the rise of neoliberal managerialism in academic life. Of particular concern is their individualising tendency to construct “the responsible professor” as an ideal to which all academic workers must now aspire.

This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their non-union counterparts. We then explore whether particular kinds of bargaining unit structures are more conducive to achieving stronger academic freedom provisions. Finally, we consider whether academic freedom can be exercised effectively by sessionals, whether unionized or not. We conclude that unionization does help to produce stronger academic freedom protections for sessional faculty and that faculty association bargaining unit structures are most likely to help deliver this outcome. We further conclude that academic freedom is difficult to exercise for sessional faculty, regardless of union status, but that unionization offers greater protections for sessionals facing repercussions as a result of asserting their academic freedom.

During the depths of COVID-19, Laurentian University, a small Canadian postsecondary institution located in the mid-sized city of Sudbury Canada, declared that it was insolvent and was legally allowed to terminate one-third of its faculty and cut almost one-half of its academic programmes. This historically unprecedented attack on a Canadian public institution utilized a Federal corporate court process, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), a piece of legislation akin to the US Chapter 11 process. The result of the still-ongoing process saw the university Administration and Board of Governors working against the interests of the community, targeting the arts, Indigenous, Francophone and working-class communities. This article poses the question ‘to whom do universities belong, and at what point does a publicly funded university stop being a collective “social good” – responsible to the society that spawned it – and start being a stand-alone organization that serves private interests?’

The article reviews the book, "Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism," by Betsy Wood.

Considers the human and financial cost of the 1918-19 flu pandemic versus the Covid-19 pandemic. Pays tribute to the late Leo Panitch, to whom the volume is dedicated. Comments on articles in the issue and notes that they emphasize the importance of all forms of work and organization. Deplores the rise of market-driven universities and the cuts at Laurentian University. Welcomes Kirk Niergarth as co-editor, which helps pave the way for Joan Sangster's retirement as co-editor.

Introduced by editors Sangster and Smith, this roundtable offers papers by former students of Panitch on his multifaceted legacy. Themes include Panitch as organic intellectual (Warskett), the fall and future of social democracy (Blanc), money and the critique of capitalism between political sociology and political economy (Konings), Panitch and the practice of socialist mentorship (Maher), and Panitch as a transformative teacher (Ross).

This article begins with a broad overview of the scholarly literature on labour politics in Canada before focusing more specifically on the relationship between organized labour and the NDP. The article is organized thematically, focusing on three key features of the party-union relationship: (1) institutional ties between labour and the NDP; (2) the ideological impact of labour on the politics of the NDP: and (3) labour's (in)ability to deliver votes to the party. Each dimension of the party-union relationship reveals factors that contributed to a loosening of ties over time and sets the stage for a final concluding section exploring the implications of a weakened NDP-union link for the future of labour and working-class politics in Canada. --From author's introduction

Demand for home and community care services has continuously increased in Canada and elsewhere in the last few decades due to aging of the population and healthcare policy changes shaped by budgetary limitations. As a result, home and community care organizations are having trouble hiring adequate numbers of healthcare workers to meet the escalating demand, the result being increased workload on these workers. Another stream of literature has shown that care recipients and their family members, frustrated with the limited ability of healthcare workers to provide adequate care because of increased workload, might resort to violence and harassment. Bringing these two streams of literature together, we examined the relationships among three variables : workload ; workplace violence and harassment ; and well-being of personal support workers (PSWs). Using structural equation modeling, we analyzed a 2015 Ontario-wide survey of 1,347 PSWs employed in the home and community care sector. The results indicate that workload is negatively associated with extrinsic and intrinsic job satisfaction, and this relationship is mediated by violence and harassment and by stress. Specifically, workload is positively associated with violence and harassment at work, which in turn is positively associated with stress, which in turn is negatively associated with extrinsic and intrinsic job satisfaction. Our study contributes to the literature by examining the impact of a work environment factor, workload, on the well-being of PSWs. This approach makes it possible to expand the current literature’s focus on psychological processes at the individual level to a more contextual approach. Furthermore, the results have important implications for home and community care organizations as well as for the healthcare sector in general. The well-being of PSWs is critical to retaining them and to ensuring the quality of care they provide their clients. Thus, their workload should be lowered to a more manageable level to help minimize the violence and harassment they experience.

The article reviews the book, "Balayons les abus : expérience d’organisation syndicale dans le nettoyage," by Marielle Benchehboune.

The article reviews the book, "Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium," edited by Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko.

Obituary for Wayne Roberts (1944-2021), a Labour/Le Travail contributor who wrote on labour, food policy, the environment, and urban issues.

The article reviews the book, "Une histoire politique du tiers-monde," by Vijay Prashad.

The article reviews the book, "The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History," by Carolyn Strange.

The right to strike has been constitutionally protected in Canada since 2015. In other jurisdictions where the right to strike is explicitly recognized in the constitution, protection against strikebreaking is recognized as part of that right. Only two Canadian provinces restrict the use of replacement workers during a strike or a lockout. Quebec’s Labour Code has provisions that prohibit the use of replacement workers at the employer’s establishment. Quebec arbitrators, courts, and boards have interpreted this ill-defined concept as a strictly physical location of production, while ignoring technological advances that make remote work possible. This paper examines how the restrictive interpretation of establishment allows a form of strikebreaking that the Spanish Constitutional Court has described as “technological strikebreaking” (esquirolaje technologico), while also allowing the use of technology already at the employer’s disposal to circumvent restrictions on replacement workers even when such technology is not routinely used. The impact of technology on strikebreaking is examined through two case studies: the successive lockouts at the Journal de Québec and the Journal de Montréal. In both cases, external contributors provided the newspapers with content electronically, thus allowing uninterrupted publication. Using Katz, Kochan and Colvil’s three-tier model of collective bargaining, this paper looks at how technological strikebreaking disrupts not only the balance of bargaining power but also bargaining strategy, and how, in the case of the Journal de Montréal, it led to devastating bargaining outcomes. Though the lockouts led to a call for legislative reform in 2011, legislative change is not necessary to align existing provisions with the goal of shortening labour disputes.

Despite changes to Canadian immigration policy to address declining labour market outcomes, many highly educated immigrants still face challenges when searching for career-related employment. Semi-structured interviews with 38 newcomer professionals in Edmonton, Alberta and Winnipeg, Manitoba illustrate significant obstacles including a lack of credential recognition, racial discrimination and a requirement for Canadian experience. Drawing from intersectional feminism and critical race theory, this study assesses the perspectives of newcomers during their employment search and explores the common desire for return-migration. Findings illustrate how the pre-arrival expectations of immigrants are incongruent with the realities of persistent labour market barriers. Newcomers consider if they should stay in Canada due to the lack of meaningful economic opportunities.

The article reviews the book, "Cabin Crew Conflict: The British Airways Dispute, 2009–11," by Phil Taylor and Sian Moore.

The article examines the evolution of Canadian corvée labour in the late 17th- and early 18th-century French Empire. In New France, tenants, referred to as habitants, rented land from seigneurs in exchange for several taxes. The labour tax, or corvée, required habitants to work on their seigneur’s estate for one to two days a year. Additionally, habitants were responsible for providing corvée for building any public infrastructure that the community required. From the Nine Years’ War (starting in 1688) to the construction of the Chemin du Roy (1732), colonial officials experimented with mass corvée labour mobilization in Canada. A number of factors allowed habitants to challenge authority when they felt the colonial élite had violated their right to subsistence. When drafted annually into forced labour for the construction of Québec and Montréal’s fortifications, groups of habitants refused to show up for work, called upon their superiors to protect them from service, or collectively discussed mutiny if conditions did not improve. During the first three decades of the 18th century, corvée was a negotiated process, with habitants constantly putting forth their own definitions of acceptable labour mobilization.

The article reviews the book, "Promenade sur Marx. Du côté des héroïnes," by Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation," edited by Evelyn Peters and Chris Anderson, "Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax," by Ted Rutland, "Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg," by Owen Toews, and "Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death," by James Tyner.