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This article focuses on the campaigns of national Canadian unions and other labour organizations against the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). Changes in the strategic orientation of these unions and labour organizations are traced from the period following the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement and contextualized in post–Cold War trends in North American labour more broadly. These developments are viewed through the lens of scale shift and political process models of social movement theory. Though some transnational links were developed before nafta was implemented, these linkages were expanded following the agreement's passage. Additionally, these organizations took advantage of political opportunities originating from the new structures of nafta itself. Canadian unions and associated anti-free-trade coalitions worked alongside their regional counterparts to construct alternatives to neoliberalism and build consensus. Following the failure of domestic political opportunities to prevent the passage of nafta, some Canadian unions and labour organizations used emerging international political opportunities to deepen collaborations with their counterparts in countries experiencing trade liberalization.
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The article reviews the book, "Empty Promises: Why Workplace Pension Law Doesn’t Deliver Pensions," by Elizabeth J. Shilton.
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Domestic and caregiving work have been part of the Canadian fabric since our colonial founding and have long represented one of the most easily accessible routes for migration open to women. Until very recently the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) operated as the primary program in Canada facilitating this labour migration. While the LCP has been replaced by the Caregiver Program (CP), it has yet to be determined how these changes will impact migrant caregivers. We suggest that many lessons can be drawn from our knowledge of migrant caregivers’ experiences under the LCP that can help us understand the dynamics of new immigration policies. Using the global care chain framework, we consider here whether Canada’s caregiver migration policy demonstrates a concern for the wellbeing of migrant caregivers as workers, as family members and as citizens. Our analysis suggests that the CP does not adequately address the concerns raised through the global care chain critique. Rather, the CP continues and deepens the trend of using immigration policy to hold people in substandard employment, with very little care for migrant caregivers whether in terms oftheir labour rights, their family relationships or their sense of belonging and citizenship.
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The article reviews the book, "Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era," by Mark A. Lause.
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Members of the Canadian Armed Forces who are injured in the course of service are treated inequitably on two levels: first, during their military careers, by the operation of a statutory exemption that enables the CAF to sidestep the duty to accommodate disabilities, including widespread mental injuries such as PTSD; and second, following their medical release from service, by the failure to provide adequate compensation. Under the Canadian Human Rights Act, the duty to accommodate is expressly made subject to the principle of "uni- versality of service," whereby CAF members "must at all times and under any circumstances perform any functions that they may be required to perform." Universality (or the "soldier first" rule) thus provides the CAF with an auto- matic bona fide occupational requirement (BFOR) defence to discrimination claims, and permits the CAF to engage in prima facie discriminatory conduct without having to prove that it accommodated a member to the point of undue hardship. The author argues that universality cannot be justified as reasonably necessary to achieve operational objectives, having regard to staffing require- ments and level of risk, and to the fact that the CAF routinely ignores its own risk tolerance mandate by granting medical waivers. Compensation for CAF members post-release is currently provided through the New Veterans Charter. The benefits scheme created by the NVC is, in the author's view, seriously flawed: it is less generous than the predecessor legislation, excessively complex, raises unfair evidentiary burdens, and fails to ensure timely resolution of claims. The author concludes by exploring opportunities for reform, and proposes that a "presumptive" burden of proof be implemented for claimants with PTSD, similar to that which has recently been adopted in several provinces for first responders under workers' compensation legislation.
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This article reviews the book, "Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests," by Erik Loomis.
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The article reviews the book, "Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States," by Sujani Reddy.
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The article reviews the book, "Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland," by Stephen Meyer.
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This article reviews the book, "Farm Workers in Western Canada: Injustices and Activism," edited by Shirley A. McDonald and Bob Barnetson.
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Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of workers in Nova Scotia, a less populated and more economically depressed province. Interview with former SAWP participants demonstrate how the uncertainty characterising the legal, immigration, and employment status of seasonal agricultural workers is socially practised and individually experienced. In particular, we show how specific elements of current migrant labour regulation have everyday effects in organising and delimiting non-work dimensions of migrant workers’ lives. In attending to the spatio-temporal dimensions of migrant workers’ lives we develop the concept social quarantining as a characteristic feature of former workers’ experiences ‘on the contract’.
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Recent research in the domain of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has underlined the importance of moving away from an institutional perspective of CSR towards research at the micro-level. Such calls have insisted on the necessity of a developing a deeper, and more nuanced understanding of its impacts and mechanisms at the individual level. This paper addresses this issue by focusing on the nexus between how employees judge their companies’ actual CSR performance and how that judgement can affect individual, micro-level outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intentions. We study this by a consideration of how perceived fit between employees and their organization mediates the relationship between perceived corporate social performance (CSP) on the one hand, and job satisfaction and turnover intentions on the other.While there is a notion, commonly embraced in the literature, that corporate social performance can have beneficial effects on individual employee outcomes, there have not been many empirical studies looking into the mechanisms by which this occurs. Through a survey of 317 young employees from differing company sizes and sectors in Europe and Asia, we find that positive assessment of CSP does not have a direct influence on job satisfaction and turnover intention, but is mediated by person-organization fit. The latter, in turn, has a positive effect on job satisfaction and reduced turnover intention.The implications of these findings are that the achievement of efficient and effective performance in social and environmental terms reinforces the perception of employees that their values fit with those of the organization. This process then creates value in terms of increased job satisfaction and reduced employee turnover intentions. We note also that simply improving CSP objectively, without involving and raising awareness among employees, will not necessarily lead to improved perceptions of how the employee fits within the organization and the potential positive knock-on employee outcomes.
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In confronting the filth and decay of the early 20th century city, civic reformers often undertook ambitious programs that sought to not only eliminate the sources of disease from the urban environment but also to civilize urban dwellers, teaching them to live in pure and morally hygienic ways. Historical studies have tended to focus on the consumption side of this process, looking at how sanitary reformers and public health officials worked to establish fundamentally new understandings of household waste and its disposal, laying the foundation for the "throwaway" society of the 1950s and 1960s. However, they have tended to neglect the parallel efforts to fashion a new kind of city worker. Drawing on Toronto as a case study, this paper examines how the rise of a modern, scientifically managed waste regime in the early 20th century contributed to fundamentally new conceptions of civic employment, premised on the "purification" of the worker from the contaminating influence of neighbourhood-based patronage networks and an informal waste economy. I explore how efforts to expunge filth from urban space were paralleled by struggles to disentangle class from community-based solidarities in the labour process. Moreover, I explore how this contributed to the view that public workers somehow stood apart from the community as an anonymous and uniform service. I conclude by discussing the implications in how we think about city workers and their struggles today.
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The article reviews the book, "We're Going to Run This City: Winnipeg's Political Left after the General Strike," by Stefan Epp-Koop.
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The article reviews the book, "Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity," by Kendra Coulter.
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This paper engages with workers’ accounts of a strike in Northern Ontario, Canada to consider the processes through which intra-union tensions develop and to examine their implications for member involvement and mobilization.
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This article reviews the book, "A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada," by Ester Reiter.
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This paper seeks to capture how unions are perceived by young workers in Portugal and to identify different types of perceptions. Our analysis considers both structural factors and subjective experiences and is based on semi-structured interviews with young people working in sectors with a high concentration of youth employment. The fact that young workers are increasingly exposed to the pressures of unemployment and precarious work might suggest that there is homogeneity in their perceptions about trade unions and collective action. However, our results show that young workers’ perceptions are not homogenous and that they interconnect with distinct segments, characterized by different socio-economic conditions, as defined by family status, education level and position in the labour market. Three types of perceptions were identified by content analysis of the interviews: positive, negative and critical perceptions. A final segment of younger and less-skilled workers, of families with low educational and economic resources and having left school prematurely, have neither information nor any understanding about unions. Our findings support the thesis that diversity of educational and early labour market experiences, which characterize transition processes to adulthood, shape the relation between young workers and unions, in particular the motivation to join unions. Capturing the diversity of young workers experiences and perceptions is a challenge to industrial relations research, as well as to trade unionism. It can provide unions with important insights into how to adapt their strategies to recruit new young members and to mobilize the latent interests of young workers in collective action.
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This article reviews the book, "Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik," by Barbara C. Allen.
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The Charter of Quebec Values tabled several years ago by the province's former Parti Qu bicois government threw into sharp relief the divisions among the population as to the appropriate model for managing cultural and religious diversity in Quebec. The Charter, and specifically its proposal to prohibit public employees from wearing "conspicuous" religious symbols in the workplace, was rooted in the French republican model, which generally subordinates individual differences to the principle of equality before the law, and strictly adheres to the principle of state religious neutrality. As the author explains, the appeal of the republican model lay primarily in the fact that it was diametrically opposed to the Canadian model of multiculturalism, widely seen in Quebec as having been imposed on the province without its consent, and to certain controversial human rights decisions in which the right to accommodation of individual religious beliefs came into conflict with another fundamental right, such as gender equal- ity. In the author's view, the resolution of the contest between the republican and the multicultural models is to be found in the creation of a concrete legal framework for implementing Quebec's distinct, consensual model of diversity management - interculturalism. Pluralistic in outlook, interculturalism differs from multiculturalism mainly in that it recognizes key "collective values" - the use of French as a common language, the religious neutrality of the state, and equality between men and women - which could justify a refusal to accommo- date religious convictions in some cases. By incorporating Quebec's collective values into the accommodation analysis, interculturalism holds the promise of reconciling ethnocultural differences with the continuity of Quebec's French- speaking core, and protecting the rights of all residents.
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Cet article s’intéresse au lien entre la stratégie adoptée par l’entreprise et les pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines (GRH) mises en oeuvre, en portant plus spécifiquement son attention sur les entreprises qui ont des stratégies d’innovation. Par innovation, nous entendons, à l’instar de King et Anderson (2002 cités par Lapointe et al., 2003), une nouvelle pratique, une nouvelle procédure ou un nouveau processus introduit sur le plan local dans un milieu de travail afin d’améliorer les performances économiques et sociales des entreprises. Nous intégrons également la notion d’innovation sociale, au sens de Klein et Harrisson (2006), afin de mettre l’accent sur l’aspect fondamentalement multidimensionnel de ce concept.À la suite d’une recension de littérature rigoureuse, nous proposons un modèle de recherche articulé autour de cinq hypothèses majeures relatives au contrôle des salariés, à leur formation, leur rémunération, mais également au climat social et à la négociation sociale. Pour tester ce modèle, nous nous appuyons sur les données 2011 de l’enquête REPONSE (Relations Professionnelles et Négociation d’Entreprise) de la DARES (Direction de l’Animation de la Recherche, des Études et des Statistiques) du ministère du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Santé, ainsi que du ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et de l’Industrie de France.À l’appui d’une étude empirique statistique (3 601 répondants « représentants de la direction »), nous montrons que les entreprises innovantes se distinguent nettement des autres en matière de GRH. Notamment, ces entreprises possèdent des systèmes de rémunération plus individualisés, elles fixent des objectifs plus généraux et effectuent moins de contrôle sur leurs salariés, favorisant donc la délégation dans le travail. Les entreprises innovantes investissent également davantage que les autres dans la formation et, enfin, elles mènent aussi plus de négociations avec les partenaires sociaux. Malgré de telles avancées, notre étude ne permet cependant pas de conclure à une quelconque relation entre stratégie et climat social. // Title in English: Human Resource Management and Innovation Strategies: A French Study based on the REPONSE 2011 Database. This article deals with the relationship between corporate strategy and human resource management (HRM) practices in France. It highlights that firms having innovation strategies differ from other companies, because they have different HRM practices. We adopt King and Anderson’s definition of innovation (2002, as quoted by Lapointe et al., 2003) as meaning the introduction of a new practice, a new procedure, or a new process, at the local level, with the aim of improving the economic and social performance of the firm. We also integrate Klein and Harrisson’s notion of social innovation (2006) in order to focus on the multidimensional aspect of the concept.Based on a rigorous literature review, we put forward a research model based on five major hypotheses concerning employee control/autonomy, training, remuneration, social climate and negotiation with trade unions. To test this model, we rely on the French public database called REPONSE 2011 from the French Ministry of Employment (N= 3,601 respondents).We show that innovative companies are very different from others in terms of HRM. In particular, these companies have more individualized pay systems, more general objectives, and have less control over their employees (they give more autonomy at work). Innovative companies also develop more training and, furthermore, are used to discussing and negotiating more than other firms. Conversely, no significant link is reached between social climate and strategy.