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Whether a rest home for deserving pioneers or a poorhouse, the Provincial Home for Old Men was a startling innovation in social welfare.Over 100 years ago, when the trappers and miners who built British Columbia could no longer work, they often ended up destitute and homeless in Victoria and Vancouver. Before pensions, assisted living and universal health care, there was the Provincial Home for the Aged and Infirm in Kamloops, BC. The "Home" would prove to be a safe place for elderly indigent men to live out their lives, but it was always susceptible to accusations of political favouritism, unsanitary conditions, and overcrowding.Through extensive research and empathetic prose, Pioneers and Paupers brings to life the story of an institution, the men and women who worked there and the more than 2500 men who lived there over the course of eight decades. The "inmates," as they were called, had to surrender any wealth they possessed and they lost the right to vote upon being admitted.Ostensibly far removed from modern debates surrounding poverty and homelessness, there is much to learn from the difficulties and accomplishments of the Provincial Home that are relevant to discussions of contemporary social welfare policies. --Publisher's description

“‘neither boy nor man’: Transnational Trade Identity in Canada’s Typographical Trade Press, 1860-1900” is situated at the intersection of literary, periodical, print historical, and labour studies. Examining the eight printing trade journals produced in central and eastern Canada during the later nineteenth century (Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick), this project contributes a Canadian dimension to extant scholarship on printing trade journals, which has mostly attended to British and American publications. This study of Canadian printers’ trade journals offers important insights for understanding how the Canadian trade was situated as a node within the printing trade’s transnational network. Journeymen hand typesetters working in the Canadian newspaper trade of the later nineteenth century identified various threats to their aristocratic trade identity: apprentices, amateur labourers, and tramp printers; rising literacy rates and the middle-class worker; women; the work of Black, Indigenous, and Chinese compositors; and the introduction of machines in typesetting. Situating these perceived threats within the context of local and transnational/transatlantic histories of printing, I demonstrate how journeymen used narrative, poetry, correspondence, humour, and visual devices as defensive tools to reinforce and protect the trade’s aristocratic labour identity and to associate the work of typesetting with masculinity, skill, superior intelligence, and whiteness. Due to Canada’s position within the British Empire and its proximity to the United States, the exclusionary discourses that Canadian journeymen compositors cultivated and circulated were shaped by both national and transatlantic labour discourses. Further, I argue that these representational strategies were largely misplaced, given that the actual threats of deskilling and technological unemployment resided not with half-trained compositors, women, and other apparent dangers to the trade, but in the structural conditions of print capitalism and of waged labour more generally. The textual and historical analysis of the labour discourses found within Canadian printing trade journals that I present in this dissertation demonstrates that Canadian journeymen were ultimately concerned about what changes to the economic and technological landscape of their trade at the end of the century would mean for their status as men whose identities were intrinsically tied to waged work, skill, and craftsmanship.

Presenting a sociological perspective on globalisation and COVID-19 impacts, this book examines the lasting effects of COVID-19 on the structure of work and unpaid domestic labour.Labour patterns have influenced political, social, and economic spheres that affect organisational practices. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, this book showcases these effects upon household labour, care work, unpaid domestic work, and organisational practices, with attention to systemic inequalities by gender and age, net zero, privacy, and digitisation transitions. It examines the exponential post-pandemic growth of digitisation and what this has meant in encouraging remote, home-working or hybrid work health, and wellbeing. Taking a sociology of work approach with a critical eye for neoliberalism influences, this book explores the first years of the pandemic’s aftermath, analysing both its short-term and potential long-term effects on paid work and unpaid domestic labour.This book will be of interest to academics, students, and practitioners in the areas of sociology, global studies, occupational health, and international relations. In particular, those engaged with the sociology of work and the sociology of family will find this a valuable resource for understanding work in the post-pandemic world. --Publisher's description

This paper critiques the dominant literature on democratic backsliding, arguing that contemporary analyses overemphasize normative decline, populist leadership, and political culture while neglecting the structural role of capitalism. While influential accounts, such as Levitsky and Ziblatt’s focus on eroding norms of mutual toleration and institutional restraint, explain how democratic erosion occurs, they offer limited insight into why the postwar democratic consensus has fractured. Drawing on critiques such as Adam Tooze’s, this study contends that existing scholarship remains analytically thin in its treatment of power. In particular, it highlights the systematic absence of class analysis and the reduction of “the economy” to market fluctuations rather than a set of historically contingent, coercive social relations. Revisiting mid-20th-century critical theorists, including C. Wright Mills, Ralph Miliband, and Göran Therborn, the paper argues for a renewed engagement with the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It suggests that without integrating class dynamics and structural inequalities into analyses of democratic decline, current scholarship risks offering incomplete diagnoses and inadequate remedies for the crisis facing Western democracies.

Elements of a redistributive and working-class agenda are already in demand, but many voters and especially the working class, feel politically alienated and disaffected that their interests are not being pursued.

Caring labour has long been a key part of the labour required of domestic violence shelter workers. Under the weight of public health directives during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature and consequences of this caring labour changed. This paper examines these shifts within the broader context of the enduring invisibility of caring labour and the depoliticization of anti-violence work, both of which began long before the COVID-19 pandemic and has endured after. Drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with shelter staff and residents working and living in domestic violence shelters in Ontario, Canada in 2022, we examine the pandemic-related shifts in shelter work and their wide-reaching consequences for workers, survivors, and anti-violence work.

This article analyzes a contemporary online exhibit from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives that explores feminist perspectives on labour, trade, and free trade in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s, situating these struggles within broader debates over capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Drawing on archival materials documenting organizing by socialist, Marxist, and labour feminists, unions, and community groups, it highlights how critiques of unpaid domestic work, precarious wage labour, and the Canada–US free trade agreement were intertwined with concerns about sovereignty, social programs, immigration, and human rights in the Global South. The article argues that the exhibit’s explicitly political curatorial stance illustrates the importance of “outsider” and community-linked archives for preserving and interpreting the histories of labour, feminism, and the Left, while tracing how earlier feminist economies prefigure later critiques of global trade bodies such as the WTO and IMF.

The NDP’s ability to credibly advance this alternative vision depends largely on whether the labour movement is itself willing and able to engage in such political and economic education.

This article reviews the book, "The Working Class and Politics in Canada," edited by Jacob Robbins-Kanter, Royce Koop, and Daniel Troup.

Over the past 50 years, women in Canada have made substantial gains in employment and earnings, supported by greater participation in full-time work, higher education levels, and movement into professional and unionized jobs. Despite this progress, major gender inequalities persist. Women—especially mothers of young children, caregivers, women with fewer years of formal schooling, and those facing overlapping forms of discrimination—remain concentrated in lower-paid occupations rooted in traditional gender roles. Persistent occupational segregation is a key contributor to Canada’s large gender pay gap and to rising inequality among women themselves. The employment recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic opened the door to change for some female workers, but as this study finds, not for Canada’s largely female and racialized low-waged workforce.

Migrant domestic workers have formed the backbone of Canada's care economy, filling gaps in care and performing this undervalued work since the inception of the settler-colonial state. Premilla Nadasen (2023) argues that the care economy is not only subject to the sexist devaluation of women's reproductive work but is rooted in slavery and the racist extraction of work that makes all other work possible. Nadasen also points to the history of resistance, noting that care work has not only been a site of oppression but also a site of resistance. In Canada, stories of exploitation and activist-led change in the care sector have unfolded over two centuries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British women were brought to Canada as nannies. Fitting the image of the white nation brazenly embodied in immigration policies, these white women were provided permanent status on arrival. When the post-World War II period brought larger gaps in care, the Canadian state initiated the West Indian Domestic Scheme in 1955.... --Introduction

This article examines the conditions and struggles of Punjabi farmworkers in Canada during the 1980s, highlighting their resistance to exploitation within a racialized agrarian capitalist system. Focusing on the systemic challenges faced by these workers, the analysis underscores how exploitative practices perpetuated through the capitalist–contractor–corporate food regime shaped the economic and social realities of Punjabi farmworkers. The article also explores the pivotal role of the Canadian Farmworkers Union in mobilizing grassroots action, advocating for workers’ rights, and addressing systemic inequalities. By situating these efforts within broader labor movements, the study sheds light on the intersections of migration, labor, and racial capitalism in Canadian agriculture that still continue in the form of the seasonal agricultural worker program.

This article reviews the book, "Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada," by Gregory P. Marchildon.

This article examines destiny politics in Anand Patwardhan and Jim Munro’s 1981 documentary A Time to Rise (Uthan da Vela), a film that captures the political struggles of Punjabi farm workers as they organized to establish the Canadian Farmworkers Union (cfu). It argues that the film highlights how Punjabi farm workers in British Columbia could not build a life beyond the exploitative and toxic labour conditions of BC farms without first confronting powerful cultural and religious ideas about predestined life. This article demonstrates that the three main figures involved in making the film – Anand Patwardhan (the filmmaker), Pritam Kaur Hayre (the protagonist), and Sant Ram Udasi (the singer) – each sought to dismantle the hold of destiny politics over the future. First, I explain that A Time to Rise marked a first experiment with what was to become Patwardhan’s signature style of documentary filmmaking: talking groups. Through this reconfiguration of the documentary as a tool for collective dialogue and movement building, Patwardhan sought to break the enduring power of destiny within South Asian communities. Second, I discuss the film’s protagonist Pritam Kaur Hayre, who contested the politics of destiny by seeking a better life through the union rather than the Punjabi family. Lastly, I show how upending destiny politics was a central preoccupation in the anti-caste thought of Sant Ram Udasi, the Mazhabi Punjabi farm-worker-turned-activist who visited British Columbia in 1979 and wrote and performed the film’s titular song, “Uthan da Vela.”

This book investigates the growing impact of climate change on Canadian workers, particularly those in outdoor occupations, who face increasing exposure to extreme conditions such as heat domes and wildfires. The book highlights the urgent need for collaboration between labour and corporate law, governments, businesses, and trade unions to address the unique risks encountered by these workers.Focusing on the Canadian context while drawing on global perspectives, the book examines the role of corporations as employers responsible for protecting their workers. It explores how existing legal frameworks can be adapted to address climate-related risks, as well as the potential for creating new tailored legal solutions. The book also highlights the importance of extralegal mechanisms, particularly corporate social responsibility, in enhancing worker safety in the face of climate change. As the nature of all work is made more hazardous at the hands of climate catastrophe, lawyer and pioneering scholar Vanisha H. Sukdeo uncovers the urgency for legal labour reform. By critiquing current legal approaches and proposing innovative solutions, Weather and Work illustrates how labour and corporate law can work together to protect some of the most vulnerable workers from the growing threats posed by global warming. --Publisher's description

As manufacturing spaces deindustrialize, and are reabsorbed into the urban fabric, there is an opportunity to interrogate and reassess our collective relationship with work and material productivity. Under the expanding powers of automation, global capitalism, and new digital technologies, industrial zones experience a collapse of meaning before they are reappraised and reconstituted around immaterial activities. Rather than bringing us closer to work equity, the reappraisal of these spaces often contributes to gentrification, erases difficult labour histories, and perpetuates unsustainable narratives of continuous economic growth. This project takes the residential rezoning of Montreal’s Garment District on Rue Chabanel as a case study of a global manufacturing site in transition, and explore how a new program of housing can act upon the site as an act of hauntological critical heritage, that which reveals ruptures in time and space as the global north shifts towards an immaterial labour hegemony.

The book describes the contemporary sex trade and its causes and consequences as it has manifested in the cities of Canada's prairie provinces. It concludes with recommendations for a realistic public policy and programming framework to guide the future development of a sexual services sector and to regulate its ongoing operations

Recently the federal government has invoked section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to order the end of otherwise lawful strikes. The government’s claim that the section provides it with this power is in dispute. This research report, adapted from an expert witness report prepared for the law firm representing one of the unions subjected to these orders, investigates the historical understanding of the section and its precursors dating back to its earliest version, enacted in 1918. It finds that the historical understanding of the section was that its purpose was to strengthen statutory conciliation processes, not to empower the government to end otherwise lawful strikes by executive action. This government action not only continues a longer history of exceptionalism in collective bargaining but also marks a rupture by its attempt to enhance the power of the executive.

The Labour of Care is the first national, comparative history of health care work. In this book, historian Peter L. Twohig analyses the responses of governments, employers, professional groups, training programs , and unions to the challenge of staffing Canada’s health care system and the reorganization of care.Through careful archival analysis, Twohig demonstrates the conditions under which employees’ boundaries become more flexible, the paths to health care work expand, and tensions emerge among workers in response to labour shortages, decreased funding, and health care reform. This book is attentive to the various identities of health care workers, as women, professionals, union members, and more. It also situates these developments within broader social, economic, and policy changes that reshaped Canada’s health care landscape in the second half of the twentieth century. Examining health care workers in this way reveals a new history of health care that highlights the experiences and contributions of a wide range of workers whose voices have not yet been heard. --Publisher's description

This article reviews the book, "We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953," by Shaun Richman.