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The article reviews the book, "American Labour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945-1970," by Anthony Carew.

The article reviews the book, "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory," by David Graeber.

The article reviews the book, "Capitalism in America: A History," by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge .

The article reviews the book, "The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory," by Gerald Hanlon.

The article reviews the book, " The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets," by Thomas Philippon.

The article reviews the book, "The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing," by Merve Emre.

The article reviews the book, "Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism," by Andrew Feffer.

To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.

This article analyses past and future work at the International Labour Organization (‘ILO’) with reference to the transformational analysis offered by Karl Polanyi, examining how constitutional statements made through ILO Declarations reflect countermovement to market dominance. These policy shifts at the ILO are also analysed in relation to the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic and social), which arguably map onto Polanyi’s three fictitious commodities (with a focus on labour as emblematic of social concerns). It is argued that the emphasis on social justice and sustainability in the 2019 ILO Global Commission Report, including the proposal for a Universal Labour Guarantee, provides significant resistance to the economic orthodoxy regarding the future of work promoted by the World Bank Group and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (‘OECD’). However, this narrative of ILO countermovement also exposes a lack of balanced regulation which requires more inclusive voice on the global stage.

This dissertation examines Canada’s program to employ prisoners of war (POWs) in Canada during the Second World War as a means of understanding how labour projects and the communities and natural environment in which they occurred shaped the POWs’ wartime experiences. The use of POW labourers, including civilian internees, enemy merchant seamen, and combatant prisoners, occurred in response to a nationwide labour shortage. Between May 1943 and November 1946, there were almost 300 small, isolated labour projects across the country employing, at its peak, over 14,000 POWs. Most prisoners were employed in either logging or agriculture, work that not only provided them with relative freedom, but offered prisoners unprecedented contact with Canada and its people. Work would therefore not only boost production but, it was hoped, instil POWs with Canadian mores and values through interaction with guards, civilians, and the natural environment. Rather than attempt a narrative encompassing almost 300 labour projects, this dissertation examines POW labour through a series of five case studies. The first examines prisoners cutting fuelwood in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park while the second and third examine POWs cutting pulpwood in Northwestern Ontario for the Ontario-Minnesota Pulp & Paper Co. and Abitibi Power & Paper Co., respectively. The fourth case study examines POWs employed by Donnell & Mudge in its tannery in New Toronto, Ontario and the fifth examines the practice of employing POWs in farm work in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Through these case studies, this dissertation examines how how internment officials employed remote parts of Canada as a physical boundary to prevent escape attempts, while also using it as a space to provide POWs with relative freedom as an inducement to work, and how work challenged definitions of who or what was the “enemy”. With significantly more freedom than the typical internee, POWs interacted with civilians and guards on a more familiar level, resulting in illicit fraternizations and relationships between POWs and Canadians. Although such fraternization also triggered considerable protest, these interactions reveal a great deal regarding POWs’ opinions of and attitudes towards Canada and its people as well as Canadian attitudes towards POWs.

The article reviews the book, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.

The article reviews the book, "Les nouvelles sociologies du travail. Introduction à la sociologie de l’activité," par Pascal Ughetto.

Dans la tourmente d’une récente intervention législative au Québec qui restreint le port de signes religieux pour certains agents et agentes de l’État occupant une fonction d’autorité, une volonté d’étendre cette nouvelle conception de la neutralité au sein d’espaces privés, comme l’entreprise, pourrait émerger. La validité d’une politique interdisant le port de signes religieux en milieu de travail doit, toutefois, être analysée à l’aune de la liberté de religion et du droit à l’égalité des travailleurs, ce qui sollicitera inévitablement l’interprétation du juge. À cet égard, la France dispose de précédents très précis sur cette question, alors que le Québec fait l’objet d’une riche jurisprudence en matière d’accommodement raisonnable pour motifs religieux, qui permet aussi d’y répondre. Or, en présence d’une problématique identique dans l’entreprise, qui mobilise de surcroît les mêmes droits fondamentaux des travailleurs, un regard croisé entre la France et le Québec révèle les chemins diamétralement opposés empruntés par les juges de chacun de ces espaces nationaux. Ces divergences s’observent aussi bien à l’occasion du contrôle de la légitimité de l’interdiction de signes religieux adoptée par l’employeur qu’au moment de circonscrire les mesures qu’il devra prendre afin d’éviter le congédiement du salarié. Plus encore, le fardeau financier que l’entreprise aura à supporter, au terme de cet exercice, se situe aux antipodes. Dans l’ensemble, cette analyse comparative met en évidence l’impact décisif du travail interprétatif du juge sur la protection de l’emploi, en ne manquant pas de discuter des possibilités que la logique française se transporte en droit québécois.

The article reviews the book, "Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy," by Alvin Finkel.

The article reviews the book, "The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age," by Zachary J. Violette.

The article reviews the book, "Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work," by Alex Rosenblat.

In this inductive, qualitative study, we observe how Uber, a company often hailed as being the poster-child of the sharing economy facilitated through a digital platform may also at times represent and reinforce postcapitalist hyper-exploitation. Drawing on the motivations and lived experiences of 31 Uber drivers in Toronto, Canada, we provide insights into three groups of Uber drivers: (1) those that are driving part-time to earn extra money in conjunction with studying or doing other jobs, (2) those that are unemployed and for whom driving for Uber is the only source of income, and (3) professional drivers, who are trying to keep pace with the durable digital landscape and competitive marketplace. We emphasize the ways in which each driver group simultaneously acknowledges and rejects their own precarious employment by distancing techniques such as minimizing the risks and accentuating the advantages of the driver role. We relate these findings to a broader discussion about how driving for Uber fuels the traditional capitalist narrative that working hard and having a dream will lead to advancement, security and success. We conclude by discussing other alternative economies within the sharing economy.

The following is an exchange sparked by Jim Selby’s presentation piece in Labour/Le Travail vol. 83. Since debates about the labour movement’s strategies – past, present and future – raise important questions, we have printed Marion Pollack’s response to Selby’s article and, in keeping with journal protocol, his final response. —Eds.

The article reviews the books, "Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation," by Jack Reid, and "Thumbing a Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada," by Linda Mahood.

The article reviews the book, "Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada," by Esyllt W. Jones.