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[Reviews] the history and trends of income inequality in Canada, examining how a growing gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to drive today's political and economic processes, including volatile stock markets, troubled housing markets, and a newly escalated attack on labour that paints unions as yesterday's answer to yesterday's problems. --Introduction

Considers the current regulatory environment for temporary employment workers in Quebec. Concludes that the legislative failure to regulate has resulted in abusive practices that undermine labour law.

Compares the legal regimes of British Columbia and Manitoba for employment agencies that recruit women from the Philippines to work as caregivers in Canadian homes. Concludes that the Manitoba regulatory framework is much more effective in protecting caregivers from the abusive practices of these agencies.

Labour relations statutes across Canada generally use one of three stand- ing models for regulating essential service strikes - the "unfettered strike," "designation" and "no-strike" models. An ad hoc variant of the unfettered strike and designation models - what the author calls the "instant back-to-work" model - has recently been used several times by the federal government to circumvent the designation model in the Canada Labour Code. After reviewing these models, the author moves to the question of whatforms of strike regulation might be held to infringe freedom of association in section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and therefore to need justification under section 1 as a reasonable limit on that freedom. Pierre Verge, like Brian Langille, has argued that a constitutional right to strike should simply require governments to respect the common law freedom of employees to withdraw their services without incurring criminal or tort liability, in the absence of a section 1 justifi- cation for any infringement of that freedom. This approach, the author suggests, would require excessive recourse to section 1, and would be of value mainly to strategically placed employees because it would offer no protection against employer reprisals for strike action. In his view, a right to strike should instead be held to flow from the Charter-based right to collective bargaining adopted in B.C. Health and Fraser. This would leave legislatures with significant discretion to regulate industrial conflict, but would require that employees who are not allowed to strike must have access to a truly independent means of resolving col- lective bargaining disputes. To that end, the Supreme Court of Canada should reinstate the trial judgment in the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour case, which held (1) that the right to collective bargaining includes a limited right to strike; and (2) that this right was unjustifiably breached by a statute which gave the provincial government the unilateral right to designate those public sector employees who could not strike, and also denied those employees access to an alternative independent dispute resolution process.

Considerable evidence points to the diminished significance of ‘labour’ as an industrial and political movement, as a sociological descriptor, and as a distinct field of public policy. This prompts the question: what should labour law be for ‘after labour’? The question is especially timely in the context of what Daniel Rogers has called ‘the intellectual economy of catastrophe’. This Chapter explores three possible responses: that labour law should be viewed as a sub-field of constitutional and human rights law; that it should integrate workers into the structures of capitalism to ensure that they contribute to and benefit from its successes; and that it should maintain its historic function of mobilizing workers to defend their rights and interests, but should also encourage cooperation between workers’ organizations and other social movements. -- From editors' introduction

Portrays nonprofit social services as a largely female, increasingly diverse workforce with a strong care ethic. Concludes that values of social justice and social unionism are integral both to worker engagement and resistance of state austerity and managerialism.

Examines the "politicization of caring" and the contest for the public trust between nurses and the state since 1960. Concludes that nurse militancy demonstrates how the battle against austerity can be fought.

Contrasts business unionism and social unionism with "social movement unionism" as a model of public sector worker engagement.

After painting a general picture of changes in the relationship between women and the job market in the latter half of the twentieth century, I examine the ways in which paid domestic service activities became part of the career and life trajectories of a sample group of working-class women. --From introduction

[Analyzes] the impact of both climate change and climate policy on employment in the energy sector. --Editor's introduction

Analyzes the turbulent history of labour relations between public sector unions and provincial and federal governments since the 1970s. Summarizes the distinctive features of the neoliberal state as employer.

[E]xamines...some competing accounts of labour law, including ones that rely on Sen's idea of enhancing people's 'capabilities' to live the kinds of lives that they value. [The author] sees a number os trengths with this approach, but also a few important limitations. [Fudge] then goes on to suggest a different basis for conceptualizing labour law: the idea that labour is not a commodity but rather a 'fictive commodity'. The unique problems association with seeling labour create 'regulatory dilemmas' - and the role of labour law is to addrss them. In this context, Fudge uses the 'capabilities' approach but supplements it to argue against the exclusion of unpaid care work from the scope of labour law. --From editors' introduction.

[Examines] the relationship between climate and postal work, including mail transport, energy use in postal facilities and paper production. --Authors' introduction

Analyzes from a national perspective the role of teachers in capitalist society, the growth of professionalism, the emergence of unions, and the ongoing battle for collective bargaining rights in the face of neoliberal austerity regimes.

Analyzes the impact of climate change and climate policy on employment in the forest industry. --Editor's introduction

Analyzes the impact of climate change and climate policy on employment and skill requirements in the transportation equipment industry. --Editor's introduction

Labour law does and must have a theory of justice. Without such a theory labour law has no account of the scope of its application or the point of its normative content. Scope and content are answerable to labour law's idea of justice and a change in our thinking about either entails a necessary rethinking of the other. Because labour law's world is changing labour law will have a new theory of justice. This chapter outlines briefly what such a theory might look like. It also discusses two lines of resistance to this way of thinking. --From editors' introduction

As the title - Safety or Profit? - suggests, health and safety at work needs to be understood in the context of the wider political economy. This book brings together contributions informed by this view from internationally recognized scholars. It reviews the governance of health and safety at work, with special reference to Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Three main aspects are discussed. The restructuring of the labor market: this is considered with respect to precarious work and to gender issues and their implications for the health and safety of workers. The neoliberal agenda: this is examined with respect to the diminished power of organized labor, decriminalization, and new governance theory, including an examination of how well the health-and-safety-at-work regimes put in place in many industrial societies about forty years ago have fared and how distinctive the recent emphasis on self-regulation in several countries really is. The role of evidence: there is a dearth of evidence-based policy. The book examines how policy on health and safety at work is formulated at both company and state levels. Cases considered include the scant regard paid to evidence by an official inquiry into future strategy in Canada; the lack of evidence-based policy and the reluctance to observe the precautionary principle with respect to work-related cancer in the United Kingdom; and the failure to learn from past mistakes in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. --Publisher's description

[D]escribes the international state of play for bringing the world of work into the struggle to green advanced economies, including the EU, Australia, the US, profiling Canada's strategic paralysis. -- Editor's introduction

[Examines] the trade challenges to Ontario's Green Energy Act, exploring both the obstacles that international agreements pose to building an integrated economic strategy around the transition to cleaner energy and the opportunities. --Editor's introduction