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Among the 40,000 workers in Canada’s largest workplace, Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto, a small but significant group of worker-organizers has created the Toronto Airport Workers’ Council (TAWC), a nonunion organization open to all Pearson workers. In this paper, we discuss the capitalist context of Canadian labor relations and the neoliberal restructuring that has attacked working conditions and workers’ solidarity across the airline industry. Then, after examining the insufficient responses by the twelve Pearson unions, we explain how workers formed the TAWC, whose participatory structures, direct action strategy, and broader class focus have achieved considerable successes, despite tensions with union leaders wary of potential “dual unionism.” We also discuss how the TAWC provides a space for socialist-led workplace organizing training and political education by the Toronto Labour Committee. Finally, we explore the possible roles of this council model in labor movement renewal and labor education in socialist movement renewal.

Saskatchewan's migrant workers rights regime has been characterized as a "positive national standard" for the rest of the country. Introducing the legislation in 2012, then-Minister of the Economy Bill Boyd argued it would "position Saskatchewan as having the most comprehensive protection for newcomers of any province in Canada." In Safe Passage: Migrant Worker Rights in Saskatchewan, Dr. Andrew Stevens reviews the impact of Saskatchewan's Foreign Worker Recruitment and Immigration Services Act (FWRISA) since its implementation. Using cases of employers and recruiters investigated under the FWRISA, this report explores how the government has addressed the exploitation of migrant workers in Saskatchewan. Dr. Stevens argues that the FWRISA deserves recognition as an important piece of legislation that has strengthened migrant worker protections and explicitly recognizes foreign labour’s unique vulnerabilities in the workplace. However, despite the strengths of the legisltion, Dr. Stevens argues that enforcement still remains a problem, with the complaints-based system too often putting the onus on precariously employed workers to self-report violations. Moreover, there is no requirement for employers to demonstrate comprehension of the province’s migrant labour regime in advance of accessing workers from abroad, resulting in employers that are ill-informed or ignorant of their responsibilities. Dr. Stevens concludes that Saskatchewan's existing migrant worker rights regime could be further improved by investing in a more rigorous audit and inspectorate system and through an expansion of community supports for newcomers.

[This six-part] research project on 'work-related mobility' examines how our jobs affect 21st century life. Some people now find it desirable – or even necessary – to work from home. Others are expected to spend more time travelling to and from the workplace than they actually spend doing their job. How do changes in the way we work affect every other aspect of 21st century life? Seven years ago, a large group of interdisciplinary scholars from all parts of Canada (and beyond) began researching 'work-related mobility' with a project called the On the Move Partnership. Paul Kennedy was there from the beginning creating documentaries based on the research. As the project nears completion, Paul speaks to the participants about their conclusions in this final episode of On The Move. --Website description. Contents: On the move: Commuting, work, life (Paul Kennedy, with support from Angèle Smith, Tracey Friedel, Sara Dorow, Emma Jackson, Dalia Gesualdi-Fecteau, Shiva Nourpanah and Nicole Power. (Feb. 27, 2019)) (53:59) -- On the move: Montreal's Little Burgundy (Paul Kennedy, with support from Steven High. (May 25, 2018)) (53:59) -- Commute from hell [Toronto] (Paul Kennedy, with support from Stephanie Premji. (Jan. 9, 2017) (53:59) -- On the move from Bell Island [Newfoundland]: Crossing the tickle (Paul Kennedy, with support from Sharon Roseman and Diane Royal (Dec. 4, 2015)) (54:00) -- On the move with truckers [Prince Edward Island] (Paul Kennedy, with support from Natasha Hanson. (Oct. 9, 2014)) (54:00) -- On the move to Fort MacMurray (Paul Kennedy, with support from Sara Dorow (Nov. 22, 2013) (53:59).

Describes labour unrest of internees in Fort Henry and Kaspuskasing during the First World War.

Prenant conscience des effets délétères des stratégies traditionnelles de mise à l’écart des travailleurs âgés, les pouvoirs publics promeuvent aujourd’hui leur maintien en emploi. Afin de comprendre comment et dans quelles conditions cet objectif politique se traduit ou non en pratiques concrètes dans les milieux de travail, l’article propose une grille d’analyse, inspirée de l’analyse sociétale, permettant de comprendre les attitudes des entreprises et des travailleurs vis-à-vis le maintien en emploi des séniors. L’article met ensuite cette grille à l’épreuve en étudiant les pratiques de deux entreprises de commerce de détail, l’une en France et l’autre au Québec, autour de quatre espaces d’interprétation : institutionnel, du dialogue social, marchand et organisationnel.

The article reviews the book, "Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives and Why We Don’t Talk about It," by Elizabeth Anderson.

The purpose of this research was to describe oilfield workers in the Moose Mountain Provincial Park area in southeastern Saskatchewan views on climate change. This qualitative study, inspired by Grounded Theory, utilized fifteen, semi-structured interviews to analyze participants’ perspectives and experiences. For this research, climate change means, “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity and which is in addition to natural climate variability” (IPCC, 2014). This study has three main findings. First, participants have robust “sense of place” attachment that fosters environmental stewardship toward the Moose Mountain area. Second, participants hold conflicted understandings of climate change that alternate between the adoption of climate skepticism and acceptance of scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change. Finally, this study demonstrates the importance of engaging in conversations with oil workers to facilitate a pluralistic narrative and navigate multiple worldviews to create understanding of a controversial topic in Saskatchewan.

Des travaux récents en analyse institutionnelle ont souligné le rôle charnière des acteurs dans le changement institutionnel, notamment le pouvoir de l’acteur syndical à renouveler les institutions du travail. Ces recherches ont fait ressortir les trois aspects suivants : 1-l’agentivité, en réponse à la question de lareprésentation des syndiqués, notamment la construction d’une identité des travailleurs au-delà du milieu de travail; 2- la formation d’une large coalition au-delà des acteurs tripartites des relations de travail; et, enfin, 3-l’élargissement des répertoires d’action au-delà des frontières des entreprises et des contextes nationaux. Toutefois, contrairement à cette perspective sur l’agentivité qui dépendait autrefois des mécanismes de la démocratie industrielle, cet article montre que des contraintes structurelles peuvent restreindre, voire empêcher, la capacité stratégique des acteurs locaux à renouveler la règle en cet ère néolibéral de mondialisation de l’économie. À partir de deux études de cas menées dans deux usines de première transformation au Québec —l’une appartenant à une entreprise multinationalecanadienne, l’autre étant américaine —, cet article analyse comment les acteurs locaux, dans un contexte néolibéral de changement institutionnel, négocient la flexibilisation de l’emploi et la sécurité des travailleurs. Les résultats des négociations entreprises par les acteurs locaux, dans un cas, une négociation menée « le dos au mur », et, dans l’autre, « le fusil sur la tempe », montrent que l’issue du processus est tributaire de facteurs externes hors de la portée des acteurs locaux. L’agentivité a buté contre les impératifs économiques du marché, les politiques étatiques de dérégulation de l’emploi et l’intransigeance des maisons-mères concernant l’avantage compétitif des filiales. Dans l’usine américaine, ils ont déplacé l’ancienne règle des accords collectifs pour y substituer une nouvelle entente davantage axée sur les exigences du marché libéral. Dans l’usine canadienne, ils ont stratifié les accords collectifs, ajoutant une nouvelle entente (de facture inférieure à l’ancienne) basée sur le statut d’emploi et qui oppose les permanents aux contractuels. Dans les deux cas, des conditions structurelles ont limité la marge de manoeuvre desacteurs locaux, avec des conséquences néfastes sur les travailleurs périphériques de l’entreprise flexible.

The article reviews the book, "Power, Politics, and Principle: Mackenzie King and Labour, 1935–1948," by Taylor Hollander.

The most important primary document from the Winnipeg General Strike now back in print with a new introduction on the occasion of the strike's 100th anniversary On May 15, 1919 workers from across Winnipeg, ranging from metal workers to telephone operators, united to spark the largest worker revolt in Canadian history. Even the Winnipeg police voted to join the strike, although they remained on duty at the request of the strike committee in order to prevent martial law. Approximately 30,000 workers walked off the job over the next six weeks, and the city was overtaken by lively demonstrations and marches in what the media, the city's leaders, and the federal government called a "Bolshevik uprising." The clash ended violently when RCMP on horseback charged and shot into a crowd of striking workers resulting in deaths, beatings, and arrests. The strike was called off and workers returned to their jobs without having earned the rights to higher wages and collective bargaining. Following the strike, union leaders published this account of the events leading up to and during the strike. Their volume is the most significant primary source describing the workers' experience of the strike. This book offers the full document in its original format along with an introduction to the 1974 edition by labour historian and activist Norman Penner. His essay has had a major impact on later research. This volume also includes a new introduction by historian Christo Aivalis discussing how the lessons learned in 1919 remain relevant today. Also included in this book are the key documentary photographs of strike events, including a minute-by-minute sequence showing the final RCMP fatal assault on the strikers. --Publisher's description. Contents: Chronology of main events of the Winnipeg general strike -- The Winnipeg general sympathetic strike May-June 1919 prepared by the Defence Committee, Winnipeg, 1920 -- The Heenan disclosures -- Address of Peter Heenan to the House of Commons, June 2, 1926 -- Excerpts from W.A. Pritchard's address to the jury, March 23-24, 1920.

The article reviews the books, "Craft and the Creative Economy ," by Susan Luckman, "The Creativity Hoax: Precarious Work in the Gig Economy," by George Morgan and Pariece Nelligan.

Despite a large body of research exploring the experiences of working mothers today, there is little literature focusing on mothers who take part in stigmatized and unconventional forms of paid labour. Taking up this line of inquiry, my MA thesis project explores both micro and macro-level understandings of the narrated experiences of four women in Canada, who are both mothers and exotic dancers, with the overarching question: ‘how do these women navigate and negotiate their socially constructed identities and practices as both mothers and sex workers?’. This thesis is informed by feminist methodologies and a broad array of literatures on social reproduction, social surveillance of mothering practices, the intensification of mothering, women working in the sex industry, and occupational stigma of exotic dancing. My research consisted of four semi-structured phone interviews with women in Canada (all in the province of Ontario) who have (either currently or in the past) navigated both roles of mothering and stripping simultaneously. Through my interviews, I explored how the women in my study negotiated the work of social reproduction, the forms of support they had access to, and the barriers they have faced. My findings illuminate that due to limited access to affordable services in Canada, the mothers I interviewed rely on informal assistance from their key supports to provide necessary care work that the mothers could not fulfill due to the responsibilities of their paid work. Mothers also stress the necessity of managing their occupational stigma to comply with dominant ideologies of maternal caregiving by constructing personal communities and adopting techniques of secrecy and trust in order to enhance their ability to combine paid work and unpaid care. Overall my MA thesis offers insight into experiences, supports, and constraints that women face as they navigate the demands of paid labour, domestic work and unpaid caregiving in stigmatized and precarious conditions.

Over 35,000,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators, statistically one in three combatants, were taken prisoner during the Second World War. Some 35,000 of these prisoners were members of the German army, navy and air force, imprisoned in twenty-five internment compounds and 300 small, isolated labour camps across Canada. Once on Canadian soil, German POWs were treated with remarkable hospitality in lieu of their status as the “Nazi” enemy. Canada’s excellent treatment of German POWs was a product of many things: a desire to adhere to the Geneva Convention; concern for the well-being of Canadian and other Allied POWs in German hands; and the discovery that German POWs often made valuable workers, for which there was a great need during the war. It was also a product of racism, expressed in numerous actions, suggesting a willingness to perceive German POWs as potential members of society - a willingness not extended to German-Jewish civilian internees or even to Japanese-Canadians who were already citizens.

In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic. By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity. Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.

The article reviews the books, "Filles de Mai. 68 mon Mai à moi : mémoires de femmes," edited by Monique Bauer, "Le scandale de Strasbourg mis à nu par ses célibataires, même ," by André Bertrand and André Schneider, "Le Mai 68 des Caraïbes," by Romain Cruse, and "The Long '68 : Radical Protest and its Enemies," by Richard Vinen.

This paper compares Japanese and US multinational corporations (MNCs) on their deployment of human resource management (HRM) and employment relations (ER) practices within four countries. Debate about convergence is used to reconcile findings. The context is the shift from the dominance of the Japanese economy in the 1980s and early 1990s towards the renewed dominance of the US economy in more recent decades. We draw on data from representative, parallel surveys of MNCs operating in Canada, the UK, Spain and Australia to test a set of hypotheses examining similarities and differences between subsidiaries of Japanese and US MNCs in relation to management control across borders, remuneration, representation and worker involvement. The findings demonstrate that, despite the pressures of globalization, and the partial movement away from traditional Japanese management practices in Japan, there are clear country of origin effects for Japanese and American MNCs. Results indicate that Japanese and US MNCs behave differently in terms of the control that they exercise, with Japanese firms exhibiting a greater tendency to use personal forms of control in their foreign subsidiaries and a lower tendency to use procedural forms of control. In terms of HRM practices, Japanese MNCs are distinctive in relation to pay systems. For example, they are less likely than their US counterparts to use performance-related pay and, more likely, to adopt non-union representative structures in subsidiaries. In line with Kaufman (2016), we argue that the study’s findings provide evidence for the ‘converging divergence phenomenon’ in that both Japanese and US MNCs are adopting the most universal aspects of each other’s management practices and integrating them into their own unique systems of management in response to global market forces. We discuss the theoretical implications for the convergence and divergence of HRM and ER systems, and the development of such systems in Japanese and US MNC subsidiaries.

Au Québec comme ailleurs dans le monde, certains groupes demeurent sous-représentés en emploi. Les personnes immigrantes récentes (PIR) font partie de ces groupes qui voient leur participation au marché du travail entravée par différentes barrières, alors qu’ils présentent un taux de chômage nettement plus élevé que les natifs. Cet article s’intéresse au lien entre les perceptions des employeurs à l’égard des PIR et les pratiques de gestion de la diversité contribuant à leur rétention. La démarche méthodologique s’appuie sur un devis exploratoire mixte, alors que 2 376 employeurs ont répondu à un questionnaire et que 87 ont participé à des groupes de discussion. Ces employeurs sont représentés par de propriétaires d’entreprise, des dirigeants, des gestionnaires, des directeurs ou des professionnels en gestion des ressources humaines de divers secteurs d’activité et d’entreprises de taille variée. Les résultats indiquent d’abord un relation positive significative entre les expériences d’embauches des PIR et les perceptions que les employeurs entretiennent à leur égard (r = 0,532, p < 0,01). En groupes de discussion, les participants évoquent l’évolution des perceptions selon la nature de l’expérience d’embauche, positive ou négative. Les résultats témoignent également de relations positives et significatives entre les perceptions et les pratiques de rétention, présentant des coefficients de corrélations de l’ordre de 0,185 à 0,390 (p < 0,01). La phase qualitative permet de constater que lorsque les employeurs perçoivent que les PIR concourent à la performance organisationnelle, ils sont davantage enclins à mettre en place des mesures de gestion de la diversité. Les bénéfices escomptés par les employeurs au regard de l’embauche des PIR modulent leur volonté à mettre en oeuvre diverses mesures de rétention. La gestion réactive de la diversité est alors constatée, quoique certains employeurs procèdent à une réflexion s’orientant vers la proactivité.

Dans le cadre d’une étude menée au sein de services de santé au travail au Québec et en France, nous nous intéressons aux conditions favorables aux pratiques de travail collectif pluridisciplinaire (TCP). Face à des problèmes de santé complexes, tels que les troubles musculosquelettiques (TMS) ou les troubles de santé psychologique (TPS), des professionnels de différents métiers sont amenés à collaborer, notamment pour mener des actions de prévention primaire ayant pour cible les conditions de réalisation du travail. Le contexte dans lequel oeuvrent, d’une part, les équipes de santé au travail (ESAT) au Québec et, d’autre part, les services de santé au travail interentreprises (SSTi) en France diffèrent en raison de leur histoire, leurs cadres juridique et institutionnel, leurs missions et dispositifs.

The article reviews the book, "Les artisans de la lumière. Histoire de la Fraternité interprovinciale des ouvriers en électricité," by Monique Audet.