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The article reviews the book, "Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria 1890–1918," by Jakub S. Beneš.

The legalization of marijuana in Canada is expected to have a significant impact on workplaces, requiring the development or updating of company drug-related policies and procedures. To help employment relations stakeholders with this change, recommendations are made based on an analysis of 93 past arbitration/tribunal/court cases involving marijuana-related policy violations, drawn from the Labour Source database. Issues addressed include language and communication of the work rule, reasonableness of drug tests, standard of proof, duty to accommodate, and mitigating factors. Based on the study of those 93 court cases, some recommendations can be formulated. First, employers need to clearly state their drug-related policies, taking into consideration safety-sensitivity and any substance abuse culture. This may include prohibition of possession, use, and distribution of drugs at the workplace or working under the influence, and the need to report any medical drug use that requires accommodation. Drug tests should only be done when there is a bona fide occupational requirement or where safety is a concern, such as post-incident or when there is reasonable suspicion of drug impairment. Also, it is important to understand that positive drug test results can only show past drug use but not the level of impairment or whether the drug was used while on a work shift. Therefore, to support an offence violation and discipline, corroborating evidence from multiple witnesses and sources are often necessary. Supervisors should be trained to identify the characteristics related to marijuana and drug impairment and the procedures to follow when an incident occurs. Employers must be cognizant of the duty to accommodate medical marijuana users or recreational users who are addicted, under human rights protection for disability. Such accommodation may include work reassignment or a leave of absence. In deciding on a penalty, other than past performance and disciplinary records and personal extenuating circumstances, arbitrators may consider rehabilitation situations to assess the prognosis and viability of the employment relationship. Employers and unions are advised to stay abreast of latest developments in the laws, drug test technologies and medical research related to marijuana use.

The article reviews the book, "The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working Class Writing about Economic Restructuring," by Sherry Lee Linkon.

The article reviews the book, "Travail et emploi des femmes," by Margareth Maruani.

Debut collection of poetry from Thomas Leduc, City of Greater Sudbury's past Poet Laureate and the fourth generation of a mining family. Stagflower captures a city struggling to grow beyond its past and become more than just a mining town, while reflecting the internal human conflict to be more than family history, more than a past. --Publisher's description. "At one time, this city / had a single plan / for every young man; / a straight, well-worn path / from their front doors / to an open rock face / at the end of a mine shaft. / A path chiselled out of stone, / a path paved in nickel. / Every young man / wanted his millwright ticket, / studied the ticking of gears, / the composition of rock; / had the culture of mining / drilled into him. / Plans were passed down / from lunch pail / to lunch pail. / Fathers and sons dug the same holes / fought the same fights. / How many boys / has this rock hardened / into men." -- Chiselled Out of Stone, poem by Thomas Leduc. Table of contents: Birthmark -- Rite of passage -- Buffalo souls -- The taste of sulfur -- Slagflower.

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.

In May 1919, 30,000 Winnipeg workers walked away from their jobs, shutting down large factories, forcing businesses to close and bringing major industries to a halt. Mounted police and hired security, at the behest of the ruling class, violently ended the protest after six weeks. Two men were killed. What started as trade union revolt, the Winnipeg General Strike became a mass protest and was branded as a revolution. In Magnificent Fight, Dennis Lewycky lays out the history of this iconic event, which remains the biggest and longest strike in Canadian history. He analyzes the social, political and economic conditions leading up to the strike. He also illustrates the effects the strike had on workers, unions and all three levels of government in the following decades. Far from a simple retelling of the General Strike, Magnificent Fight speaks to the power of workers' solidarity and social organization. And Lewycky reveals the length the capitalist class and the state went to in protecting the status quo. By retelling the story of the Strike through the eyes of those who witnessed it, Lewycky's account is both educational and entertaining. --Publisher's description

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.

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.

The article reviews the book, "In Defence of Home Places: Environmental Activism in Nova Scotia," by Mark R. Leeming.

This study explores how teacher unions in British Columbia and Ontario attempted to influence public opinion during periods of labour conflict between 2001 and 2016. A comparative case analysis was conducted based on eight interviews with members of the British Columbia Teachers Federation, six interviews with members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, as well as documents from each union. In addition, newspaper items published in each province during the conflict period were collected. The unions’ efforts were analyzed through the framework of Habermas’ concepts of the public sphere and validity claims. Findings indicate that both unions had active public relations strategies designed to influence media coverage and discourse in the public sphere. However, most of their efforts were focused on influencing the public sphere indirectly, by using tactics that are not traditionally considered part of public relations strategies. While the unions’ efforts were similar in nature, the impact that these efforts had on influencing public opinion and producing policy change varied substantially. I argue that a combination of historical and political differences, mediated through a validity claims framework, helps explain this variation.

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.

In Canada’s liberal dream, the law extends its benefits to everyone. But the law also determines who is included in that “everyone.” Migrant workers, long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education due to their lack of permanent status. Enforcing Exclusion recasts what migration status means to both the state and to non-citizens. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Sarah Marsden shows that migrants face enforcement through law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their interactions with institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards. Canadian immigration laws create a status hierarchy; those at the bottom experience markedly different access to the protections and benefits of law. This book documents the impact of Canada’s system of migration enforcement on people’s lives and questions the adequacy of human-rights-based responses in addressing its exclusionary effects. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- The Creation and Growth of Precarious Migration in Canada: “Illegal” Migration and the Liberal State -- Status, Deportability, and Illegality in Daily Life -- Working Conditions and Barriers to Substantive Remedies -- Exclusion from the Social State: Health, Education, and Income Security -- Multi-Sited Enforcement: Maintaining Subordinate Membership -- Rights and Membership: Toward Inclusion? -- Postscript -- Appendix A: Migrant Participant Profiles -- Appendix B: Sample Interview Script.

The article reviews the book, "Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy," by Bridget Kenny.

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.

The article reviews the book, "Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada," by Barry Eidlin.

The article reviews the book, "The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics," by Jefferson Cowie.

This dissertation turns to recent feminist history of the 1980s to consider feminism’s relationship to class, economics, and labour. Challenging the idea that feminism is an inclusive project, I look at how feminist ideology produces commonsense forms of racism, classism, and sexual normativity. To demonstrate this argument, I evaluate two important moments in 1980s Canadian feminism: the development of feminist political economy and the debates of the feminist sex wars. In tracing the ways in which these histories unfold to value some feminist subjects more than others, I show how feminist narratives appear cohesive through quotidian practices of exclusion. I claim that the resistance of marginalized subjects is integral to these narratives, particularly when this resistance has been made to appear invisible or absent. I first turn to feminist political economy to show how a white feminist discourse about gendered domestic labour emerged while simultaneously omitting analyses of the experiences of women of colour and migrant domestic labourers. This white feminist discourse is imbued with commonsense racism, and imagines migrant domestic workers as located elsewhere to feminism. Subsequently, I examine how the feminist sex wars pursued a line of inquiry into sexuality that privileged a framework of danger. Feminist theorizing of violence against women as intrinsic to prostitution and pornography had dire consequences for understanding sex work and the diverse women employed in the industry. In promoting a white, middle-class perspective on sexuality, feminists appropriated sex workers’ experiences of violence and sought state support for abolishing commercial sexuality, in turn contributing to the heightened state surveillance of sexual minorities. In looking to and for marginalized women’s experiences within an archive of women’s publishing, this project insists on the integral place of sex workers and migrant domestic workers within Canadian feminist labour histories.

This paper examines precarious work, its historical origins and certain social consequences. I use the 2015 Canadian Election Study to analyze the relationship between work-related insecurity and economic anxiety with voting, non-voting political behaviour and attitudes toward equity-seeking groups. I propose a theory of "harmonizing down", in which workers who were once able to access the benefits and status of the standard employment relationship have generally seen their opportunities for stable and secure work decline. This has resulted in economic anxiety for most workers. Results were mixed, suggesting that broad generalizations around economic anxiety are problematic. Insecurity and anxiety may reduce the likelihood of voting but may increase non-voting participation. Some aspects of insecurity and anxiety were related to negative attitudes toward equity-seeking groups, but the relationship is not clear. Gender and political party identity influence these attitudes.

In 2012, journalist Hugo Meunier went undercover as a Walmart employee for three months in St. Leonard, Quebec, just north of Montreal. In great detail, Meunier charts the daily life of an impoverished Walmart worker, referring to his shifts at the box store giant as “somewhere between the army and Walt Disney.” Each shift began with a daily chant before bowing to customer demands and the constant pressure to sell. Meanwhile Meunier and his fellow workers could not afford to shop anywhere else but Walmart, further indenturing them to the multi-billion-dollar corporation. Beyond his time on the shop floor, Meunier documents the extraordinary efforts that Walmart exerts to block unionization campaigns, including their 2005 decision to close their outlet in Jonquiere, QC, where the United Food and Commercial Workers union had successfully gained certification rights. A decade later he charts the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that exposed the dubious legal ground on which Walmart stood in invoking closure and throwing workers out on the street. In Walmart: Diary of an Associate, Meunier reveals the truths behind Walmart’s low prices. It will make you think twice before shopping there. --Publisher's description