Your search

The article reviews the book, "Unruly Masses: The Other Side of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna," by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner,

[F]ocuses on the legal regime that regulates the entry and exit of low-skilled temporary foreign workers and these workers' rights and terms and conditions of employment while in Canada. ...We are also interested in beginning to explore the impact of this program in relation to the Canadian labor market. In order to understand the distinctive features and effects of the low-skilled temporary foreign workers program, we situate the low-skilled TFWP in the context of the emergence and development of Canada's general TFWP.

In 1951, it was obvious to Justice Cornelius O’Halloran, one of the most outspoken members of the British Columbia Court of Appeal (bcca), that picketing was unlawful. According to him, “in a unionized city like Vancouver everybody knows what a picket line means. Many neutral individuals are afraid of patronizing places where labour picketers none too subtly convey by their organized and militant presence and patrol the unspoken threat ‘you better not patronize this place.’” O’Halloran’s statement was made in a judgment that held that two trade unionists who paraded peacefully in front of a restaurant with signs that stated that the restaurant did not have collective agreements with the union were acting illegally. His equation of picketing with coercion was not idiosyncratic. In its first one hundred years, despite several changes in the legal regime governing labour relations in the province and numerous changes in court membership, unions won only eight out of the thirty-eight decisions on the legality of picketing and obtained partial victories in another two. However, the one-sided results obscure the extent of the debate within the bcca, especially in its early years, over whether there was any room at all for lawful picketing as well as over the greater success achieved by unions in cases heard in the post-Charter era. --Introduction

This paper looks at the “deep roots” of striking as a social practice in Canada, by providing an analytic framework for approaching the history of the right to strike, and then sketching the contours of that history. Focusing on the three key worker freedoms — to associate, to bargain collectively, and to strike — the authors trace the jural relations between workers, employers and the state through four successive regimes of industrial legality in Canada: master and servant; liberal voluntarism; industrial voluntarism; and industrial pluralism, the latter marked by the adoption of the Wagner Act model. On the basis of their review of those regimes, the authors argue that long before the modern scheme, workers enjoyed a virtually unlimited freedom to strike for collective bargaining purposes. Although government-imposed restrictions on the freedom have increased significantly, especially under industrial pluralism, legislatures have typically provided workers with compensating trade-offs, including rights enforceable against their employers. However, in contrast to the historical pattern, public-sector workers have with growing frequency been subjected to “exceptionalism,” i.e. the suspension or limitation of freedoms without a grant of compensatory rights. In the authors’ view, it is the imposition of such measures that will likely provide the context for consideration of whether the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right to strike.

As a result of decreased funding from the state, universities rely more and more on user fees, that is, tuition, to cover operation costs. According to Tyler Shipley, this situation has led to a “factory model of education” in which the focus of administrators is to pump as many undergraduates through the system as possible. Classes that once held fifty students now hold 150, those that once held 150 now hold 500. To accommodate this mass influx of students, universities are left scrambling to find cost-efficient means to get these students through the system, which more than often means expanding graduate programs in order to build a workforce (that is, teaching assistants and sessionals) that can teach classes, mark papers, and mediate distance education courses at a fraction of the price it would cost to pay a tenured professor.

Employment Research and State Traditions: A Comparative History of Britain, Germany and the US, by Carola M. Frege, is reviewed.

Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains, by Nicola Yeates, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island," by Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum.

The article reviews the book, "New World Dawning: The Sixties at Regina Campus," by James M. Pitsula.

The article reviews the book, "Criminalizing Race, Criminalizing Poverty: Welfare Fraud Enforcement in Canada," by Kiran Mirchandani and Wendy Chan.

An influential strand of the finance literature focuses on the nature and extent of shareholder rights vis-a-vis employees. Most of the extant literature on the subject relies on a limited number of case studies and/or broad macroeconomic data, whereas this article draws on evidence from a large scale survey of organizations to test the predictions of the theories on the relative strength of workers and managers across the different governance regimes. This evidence highlights the complex relationship between societal institutions, legal traditions, political parties and electoral systems, on corporate governance regimes and the relative strength of unions and collective representation at workplace level, highlighting the limitations of the mainstream finance and economics rational-incentive based literature, and the value of alternative socio-economic approaches.

The article reviews the book, "U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform From Above, the Promise of Revival From Below," by Kim Moody.

The article reviews the book, "Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens," by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone.

Growing Older, Working Longer: The New Face of Retirement, by Monica Townson, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "La face cachée des conditions de travail : les situations d'atteintes à la santé psychologique," by Lucie France Dagenais in collaboration with Sabrina Ruta.

The McDonald's labour management strategy is widespread in the fast food industry. Literature that is critical of the approach often portrays the work as low paid, unchallenging and uninteresting. Others argue that industry jobs provide an enhanced resume, training opportunities, and the possibility of a career. Rather than being inherently disadvantageous or beneficial, it is possible that fast food employment addresses the needs and aspirations of some more than others. This article proposes such a view in relation to teenagers. It poses the question: what are the characteristics of those who are suitable for industry work? Surveys are used to develop a statistical profile of ideal workers. Findings have implications for stakeholder decision making and offer an empirical perspective of a contentious issue that attracts opinion and speculation. Results indicate that developmental change and an overt inclination to choose a fast food career are key considerations in determining employee suitability.

New Employment Actors: Developments from Australia, edited by Grant Michelson, Suzanne Jamieson and John Burgess, is reviewed.

Up in the Air: How Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging their Employees, by Greg J. Bamber, Jody H. Gittell, Thomas A. Kochan and Andrew Von Nordenflycht, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement," by Joseph Gerteis.