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This thesis is an historical examination of the multi-layered processes of deindustrialization in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The history of a steel plant formerly located in the centre of the city is used as a case study through which the mechanisms of deindustrialization are fully explored. In 1967, the provincial government of Nova Scotia nationalized the Sydney Works. This marks a significant divergence from previous studies of deindustrialization, which have traditionally focused on the wave of industrial closures in the North American heartland during the 1970s and 1980s. Framed by oral history accounts of former steelworkers, this dissertation reveals the combined impact of Canadian regionalism, political economy, and working-class cultures of resistance on local experiences of industrial decline. This represents a synthesis between the econo-political historiography of deindustrialization favoured in the 1980s and the cultural/representational approaches of the 1990s and 2000s. The title, “Deindustrialization on the Periphery,” speaks to the specific national and regional contexts that frame the decline of Sydney Steel. The longue durée of economic change on the rural resource frontier has been understudied. In Cape Breton, the devastation wrought by the end of industry has roots that stretch back to the early 20th century. Tracing these through the use of Harold Innis’ “staples trap,” my thesis reveals how deindustrialization stretches from decades before closure to the years after a mine, mill, or factory are shuttered for the last time. Workers and other residents in Sydney continue to face the bodily aftermath of workplace injury, occupational, and environmental illness long after the structures of the plant have been demolished. But so, too, have experiences of working at the mill and living in the neighbourhoods that surrounded its gates created particular forms of culture, solidarity, and identity. My research is more than a eulogy for a defunct steel town. It seeks to expose the tensions between different forms of memory and experience, and to examine how the industrial past remains inextricably connected to the “post-industrial” present.

The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is a transnational labour agreement between Canada, Mexico, and various Caribbean countries that brings thousands of Jamaican migrant workers to Canada each year to work on farms. This thesis explores Jamaican SAWP workers’ experiences of stress in Ontario, and situates these experiences within a system of power and international inequality. When describing their experiences of stress and suffering in Ontario, many Jamaican workers drew analogies between historic and modern slavery under the SAWP. However, stress discourses also inspired workers to emphasise their resilience, and many workers gave equal attention to explaining their inherent strength as “Jamaicans”, which they associate with national independence and the history of slavery. In this way, I suggest stress discourses are sites of flexibility and resilience for Jamaican workers, and this thesis presents the foremost cultural, political, and historical factors that support Jamaican workers’ resilience in Ontario. Moreover, the predominant coping strategies workers employ in Ontario will be explored within the context of their restricted agency under the SAWP. This thesis concludes with a discussion of stress as an expression of subjectivity that is characterised by strength, faith, and the history of slavery.

This paper analyzes the contemporary global anti-trafficking regime and discusses the destructive influence this regime has had on the lives of migrant sex workers. Through the use of public documents and academic literature, I deconstruct the global anti-trafficking discourses and argue in favour of more viable rights-based solutions (e.g., labour rights, immigration rights, and sexual rights) for combating human trafficking. Within this analysis, I explore the Canadian government’s gradual commitment to combat human trafficking through the gradual discontinuation of the exotic dancer visa, and eventual implementation of the migrant sex worker ban. In formalizing its commitment to combating trafficking, the Canadian government has implemented restrictive policy measures terminating migrant women’s ability to legally access the Canadian sex industry. While this type of employment was problematic in many ways, the Canadian government should have addressed these issues through rights-based policy initiatives instead of prohibiting access as part of its anti-trafficking campaign

Within the broad debates about neoliberalism, neoliberal globalization and the declining power of unions in the Global North, there has been renewed interest in the possibilities of international and transnational labour solidarity, coordination and action. Drawing from Rebecca Johns (1998) distinction between transformative and accommodationist forms of international labour solidarity I argue that we need to critically assess how these practices challenge or reinforce global divisions of labour born of the historical development of capitalism. To this end, this study provides an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the dominant practices of labour internationalism that emerged within the organized labour movement in Canada during the Cold War. I examine both the challenges to and possibilities for building transformative forms of international labour solidarity today. Challenges include the philosophies of social partnership, racism, white supremacy and nationalism that informed the labour imperialism and accommodationist solidarities of the institutionalized internationalism in this period. I argue that the brand of social democratic anti-communism that characterized this institutionalized labour internationalism was shaped by the wars of position over worker justice happening on the national level and internationally between unions, but also by ideas of race and nation. I outline the lessons from these practices by focusing on four cases: Kenya, Southeast Asia, The Caribbean and Palestine. Finally, I assess the grassroots labour solidarity that re-emerged inside the labour movement with the rise of the New Left. I argue that the model of international solidarity they built, called worker-to-worker, arose from the goals and strategies of class struggle unionism and constitutes an example of transformative solidarity that can inform discussions about organizing international soldiarity today. Rooted in anti-racist Marxist feminist theory, my historical sociological analysis draws from both archival research and interviews with union leaders, activists and staff. I make sense of the solidarities that determined these practices by exploring the terrain of class consciousness in which they were formed. Situating my analysis within the social and political contours of class formation in Canada and internationally, I pay particular attention to how these practices of labour internationalism intersect with issues of race, gender, nation and class struggle, and how racialized and gendered class formation in Canada has influenced ideas of worker justice and responses to imperialism, colonialism and national borders.

Depuis le milieu des années 1960, le gouvernement canadien organise la migration temporaire de travailleurs agricoles originaires principalement des Caraïbes et d'Amérique centrale, via deux principaux programmes, soit le Programme des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers (PTAS) et le Volet agricole du Programme des travailleurs étrangers temporaires. Ces programmes ont permis de faire venir au Canada près de 42 530 travailleurs agricoles temporaires en 2013, dont 9760 au Québec seulement. Le PTAS et le Volet agricole soulèvent toutefois les critiques de plusieurs organisations et chercheurs. Une caractéristique commune centrale de ces programmes est particulièrement décriée, à savoir l'assignation des travailleurs à un employeur unique et à un emploi spécifique, puisque celle-ci aurait pour effet de priver les travailleurs de leur mobilité sur le marché du travail. En ce sens, il est notamment reproché à ces programmes de perpétuer des formes de travail non libre, alors que les travailleurs ne peuvent circuler librement sur le marché du travail. Dans la continuité de ces travaux critiques, ce projet de recherche se propose d'examiner le rôle de cette disposition juridique comme mécanisme de privation de la mobilité des travailleurs. Plus précisément, l'objectif de ce mémoire est d'analyser le rôle double du droit, d'une part, dans la production et l'encadrement de ces formes de travail non libre, et d'autre part, dans la possible contestation de celles-ci. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuierons tant sur analyse à la fois théorique et historique, que sur une vaste enquête de terrain. Cette enquête s'inscrit dans un projet de recherche plus large - dirigé par le professeur Martin Gallié - ayant permis de réaliser près de cent entretiens avec des travailleurs du PTAS et du Volet agricole de la région de Saint-Rémi, au Québec.

This thesis conceptualises the job transition as a continuous process in the context of organisational downsizing and restructuring. It argues that the policy and research related to re-employment following job loss, organisational downsizing and relevant labour market interventions remains disconnected from, and hence underemphasises, the sequential and cumulative nature of the transition process while also focussing disproportionately on modifying individual behaviour and action. This study explores the intersection and overlap in factors, actions and decisions made by actors in each part of the transition process to better understand the dynamic nature of job transition and its implications for re-employment and future job quality. This research considers job transition from two forms of displacement – job displacement and worker displacement. It comprises a cross-national comparative study of displacement from public sector work in Ontario, Canada and Scotland, UK. Forty expert and stakeholder interviews were carried out addressing different aspects of job transition, targeting academic and policy experts, employers/senior managers, union representatives and labour market programme service providers. Furthermore, 38 semi-structured work history interviews were conducted with displaced workers along with a follow-up survey. This research argues that downsizing policy and labour market interventions appear to view any job as a better outcome than redundancy. Where organisational policies maintain employment, the emphasis is on maintaining extrinsic features of work. Through practices like salary protection and lateral transfers, good quality work beyond equivalent remuneration is a bi-product rather that a central consideration. The study finds that individuals, faced with particular processes and limited information, modify their behaviour to protect valued aspects of work including, but not limited to, extrinsic job factors. Conceptually, this research contributes to knowledge on job loss and re-employment, organisational downsizing practice and job quality. Empirically, it contributes to debates on public sector restructuring following the Great Recession of 2008.

Work motivation has been associated with work productivity. In health care, low motivation levels are associated with low productivity and linked to poor performance, decreased patient safety, and overall poor quality care. Hence the importance, ascribed in the literature, to clearly identifying the relationships between and among factors associated with work motivation, including work attitudes, and behaviours linked to work performance such as extra-role behaviours. Despite their importance to performance in health care, these relationships are understudied and poorly understood. The purpose of this study is to better understand work attitudes and their relationships to one another and to extra-role behaviours amongst nurses working in hospitals, the community, and long-term care settings in Ontario. This study comprises two stages: first, a scoping review focused on identifying individual-, unit-level, and organization-level characteristics that influence work motivation in health service organizations. The findings from the scoping review, augmented by a more in-depth review of the literature, aided in the development of a conceptual framework that guided the second stage of the study, to examine relationships amongst a specific set of nurses’ work attitudes - including perceptions of organizational justice, perceived organizational support, and affective commitment - and extra-role behaviours – specifically, organizational citizenship behaviours - in Ontario health care settings. In the second stage of the study, a survey was developed and administered to frontline nurses actively working in hospitals, the community, and long-term care settings in Ontario. Relationships amongst the constructs of interest were examined using structural equation modeling and path analysis. Examining the relationships of these concepts in a single model is novel, and offers insights regarding their complexity. The analyses further suggest that prior studies may be under-nuanced, and approaches to conceptualizing the concepts of perceived organizational justice and affective commitment in particular may have led to erroneous conclusions regarding their associations with perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship behaviours. This study further addresses four significant gaps previously identified in the work motivation and work behaviour literature: (1) how affective commitment relates to behavioural efforts, specifically organizational citizenship behaviours; (2) utilization of reliable and validated instruments to study work motivation; (3) use of a sufficiently large sample to have empirical support for generalizability; and (4) examination of these phenomena, among nurses, across diverse health care settings.

This project provides a coalitional reading of Chinese Canadian literature, film, and history based on an allegorical framework of Asian-Indigenous relationalities. It tracks how Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion can not only leverage national belonging for Chinese settlers but also be reread for a different sense of belonging that remains attentive to other exclusions made natural by settler colonial discourses and institutional structures, that is, the disavowal of Indigenous presence and claims to sovereignty and autochthony. It contributes to important discussions about the experiences of racism and oppression that typically privilege the relations and tensions of diasporic and Indigenous communities but hardly with each other. What is more, this study aligns with a recent surge of interest in investigating Asian-Indigenous relations in Asian Canadian, Asian American, and Asian diaspora studies. The political investments driving this project show a deep commitment to anti-racist and decolonial advocacy. By examining how Chinese cultural workers in Canada have tried to do justice to the Head Tax generation’s experiences of racial exclusion and intersectional oppressions in fiction, non-fiction, graphic non-fiction, and documentaries, it asks whether there are ways to ethically assert an excluded and marginalized Chinese presence in the context of the settler colonial state. By doing justice to the exclusion of Chinese settlers in the national imaginary, do Chinese cultural workers as a result perform an injustice to the originary presence of Indigenous peoples? This thesis re-examines the anti-racist imperative that frames Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion in Canada: by exploring whether social justice projects by racially marginalized communities can simultaneously re-assert an excluded racialized presence and honour their treaty rights and responsibilities, it works to apprehend the colonial positionality of the Chinese diaspora within the Canadian settler state.

The political and economic processes of neoliberalization have led to the intensification of worker exploitation. In Canada, Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) who enter through the Low-waged Streams of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) are amongst the most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This thesis uses theories on unfree labour, state transformation, and anti-racism, along with data generated through qualitative research, to examine the state legislated exploitation of TFWs in British Columbia. I argue that the unscrupulous recruitment of TFWs into British Columbia is the functional process through which labour flexibility and unfreedom is achieved within the larger project of neoliberalization. I conclude by considering how regulatory reform of labour markets can be used in conjunction with anti-racist and anti-imperialist political demands that aim to challenge the functional processes of neoliberalization.

The Penthouse is rumoured to be the oldest continuously operating nightclub in the land we now know as Canada and is without a doubt the oldest exotic nightclub. Owned and operated by an Italian family who emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, The Penthouse has survived numerous waves of moral crackdown in the city as well as many offers to buy the prime location in the face of aggressive development. A staggering number of nightclubs in Vancouver, exotic or otherwise, have not shared the same fate. Through conducting an institutional history of The Penthouse I locate it within changing local politics related to feminist activism, policing, and the sex industry as well as larger shifts in cultural attitudes towards sexual labour and sex workers' bodies. Further I assemble a social history of the dancers, looking at their experiences in the club and their perception of the intersections between feminism, identity, performance, and sex. Feminist theory, women's and gender history, and performance studies inform this multi-method project, which includes results and analysis from archival research and oral history interviews conducted with dancers employed at the club from 1978-2012. Overwhelmingly, the narrators reflected on their time as dancers as valuable to their lives in a myriad of ways, including helping to foster healthy relationships with their bodies and sexualities. Nevertheless most felt that the stigma they faced as sexual labourers impacted their lives in a negative way and was in conflict with the way they experienced their work themselves. This ongoing stigma was often a driving force for abandoning striptease for more 'square' or respectable work. Others continue to work in the sex industry. Eleven dancers shared their stories for this project, as did one member of the serving staff at The Penthouse, booking agent Randy Knowlan, and current owner/operator Danny Filippone. These stories offer a history of the Penthouse which places it as a central part of Vancouver's history. At a time when conventional striptease seems to be in decline and other facets of the sex industry seem to be under attack by new forms of criminal regulation, the interviews with dancers, staff, and the owner/operator suggest that future possibilities for Vancouver's contemporary striptease communities might lie in the evolving local neo-burlesque scene.

In this dissertation, I examine union organizing in the Canadian banking industry between 1940 and 1980. By demonstrating that bank workers consistently sought to unionize throughout the twentieth century, I challenge claims that bank employees and other private sector white-collar workers have low rates of unionization because they are not interested in unions or suffer from false consciousness. This research also suggests, however, that many bank workers saw themselves as different from blue-collar industrial workers; the lived reality of bank work as precarious, poorly paid, and rife with gender inequality intersected with ideas about professionalism and aspirations of advancing up the career ladder. Banks, unions, and workers drew on these ideas and experiences in their arguments for and against unionization. I also look at why previous organizing efforts did not establish a strong union presence in the banking industry. Most of these attempts failed, I argue, due to several key issues, including the banks’ anti-union activity, federal and provincial labour board decisions, and labour movement disputes over ideology, jurisdiction, and strategy. The banks consistently opposed unionization and used a variety of tactics to thwart union organizing, both overtly and covertly. The state, in the form of labour legislation and labour boards, provided unions and workers with some means by which to compel the banks to recognize unions, negotiate contracts, and deal with employee grievances; however, state action and inaction more often worked to undermine union organizing. The attitudes and strategies of high-ranking labour movement officials also shaped the outcome of union drives in the banks. Between 1940 and 1980, the mostly male labour leadership repeatedly used top-down organizing strategies and appointed male organizers with no experience of bank work to oversee union drives in a sector with an increasingly feminized workforce; labour leaders’ inability or unwillingness to reflect on this approach and to support grassroots campaigns and alternative strategies hindered bank union organizing. I thus highlight the intersection of gender and class and reveal how these factors have historically shaped the labour movement bureaucracy, union organizing, and the relationship between labour and the state. Author Keywords: banks, gender, labour bureaucracy, trade unions, union organizing, white-collar workers.

This dissertation examines the impact of precarious work on women in Montreal. Precariousness is increasingly common in Quebec, where women are overrepresented in part-time, temporary, and self-employed work. Based on three years of fieldwork, the thesis argues that while many women experience precariousness in the labour market, they do not experience it in the same ways. The neighbourhoods in which women live significantly shape their lives at work and home. Building critically on the literature on precariousness and social class, my research theorizes precarious workers as members of the working class, not as a marginalized social class outside it. Specifically, the dissertation asks how urban space influences precarious work and how time pressures impact experiences of work and home. First, while noting that precarious workers across industries (e.g. art, teaching, service) face housing pressures similar to those experienced by other members of the working class, the research shows that precarious women workers living in central neighbourhoods are especially at risk of being displaced by the middle-class. Second, the project brings important attention to paid and unpaid domestic work. Most research in the field of “time-use” at work focuses on sectors outside the home, even though women have long performed unwaged housework and many women continue to undertake paid employment or self-employment in the home. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which women’s workloads have increased in the sphere of the home, diminishing their physical health and rendering them more precarious. Third, with reference to women who continue to perform large amounts of unpaid work, the research considers the relevance of historical and contemporary debates around the relationship between paid and unpaid labour, illustrating how women’s wages are negatively impacted by this unpaid work. This dissertation brings together the social dimensions of gender, race, social class, and urban space. In so doing, the project contributes a multi-scalar analysis to antiracist feminist political economy and reaffirms the importance of social class within feminist geography. Bridging these two broader traditions – political economy and economic geography – the project provides a critical framework for understanding the specificities of precarious work for women in Montreal.

Using local primary sources, this work answers two questions. Firstly, is there a transnational political connection, reflected ideologically or materially, between the readership of Robitnytsia in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928? Secondly, what are the interests of the readership of Robitnytsia, as reflected in the Letters section? The answers to these questions are relevant to social historians because their focus is on content generated by the female readership of the journal, not the content generated by the male activists and political leaders who both contributed to and edited it. This work also highlights the value of Robitnytsia as a historical source of Canada, labour, gender, women's, and transnational 1 2 3 Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada: A History (Toronto, 1975), 7. Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada [...], 7. Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada [...], 9. histories; one that has been under-utilized to date and is readily available to researchers in Winnipeg and other cities across Canada. To evaluate and provide an analysis of Robitnytsia as a source of primary evidence, a brief introduction to the ULFTA, Robitnytsia, and the Soviet Cultural Revolution is helpful to the reader. After addressing the relevant historiography, the three chapters that follow provide analysis and the relevant context for the source work, including photographs and illustrations from the journal. Photographs featured on the covers of Robitnytsia provide insight into the imagery of the journal, as well as to the rhetoric associated with well-known images and icons within the working class Ukrainian community in Winnipeg. Discovering the answer to the second question posed in this work was straightforward, as the priorities and interests of the working women in Winnipeg were highly localized and specific, including recognizable and accessible priorities to even those readers who are not familiar with the work of the ULFTA. These interests included basic literacy, education, labour organization, and participation in political and social activities. The evidence regarding a transnational link to the Soviet Union, the first question of this work, was even more clear: at the grassroots level, there was no such transnational link between the Ukrainian Left in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928.

This thesis examines contemporary popular and news media representation of motherhood and labour in Canada and the United States. I explore what texts about motherhood and maternal labour suggest about gendered responsibilities to citizenship in neoliberal conditions. Building on important feminist research in the fields of citizenship, care, and the welfare state, I ask how are mothers being socially responsibilized toward multiple forms of labour simultaneously and to what effect? By engaging feminist theories of citizenship and bridging this field with feminist theories of science, media, and affect, I demonstrate how, under neoliberal conditions and in precarious circumstances, the ways in which women appear to juggle their commitments to paid and unpaid labour, determines how mainstream discourses reflect their value as citizens. This dissertation uses feminist critical discourse analysis to assess how, as women are responsibilized toward unpaid intimate work in newly empirical ways at the same time that they are encouraged to pursue career success in full-time paid employment, contemporary women in Canada and the United States are encouraged to rise above welfare retrenchment and inadequate provision by juggling “it all.” My thesis is an intersectional feminist project that interrogates questions of gendered citizenship and maternal affect, and I join feminist political theorists in applying pressure to the field of citizenship studies to centre reproduction in discussion of gendered welfare.

In recent years, environmental organizations and labour unions have begun to more seriously campaign for the promotion of green jobs as a way to address the twin problems of climate change and economic stagnation, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. They variously suggest that green jobs will be created through increased investment in green sectors; for some, this requires public investment and the adoption of a Green New Deal (GND) policy orientation, while for others this requires only increased private investment in green industries. The former emphasize that since green sectors are more labour-intensive than traditional industries, investment in green infrastructure could thus generate comparatively more employment per dollar invested. At the heart of these proposals is the proposition that capitalist economic growth could be made consistent with social and ecological justice. This dissertation is a critical engagement with the propositions of the green jobs campaign through the concrete examination of two diverse cases of residential (i.e. post-consumer) recycling, a quintessentially green sector, in Buenos Aires and Toronto. Defining recycling as the (global) production of value from waste, the analysis pays particular attention to both the labour process and historical development of recycling. Through a combination of qualitative document analysis, archival research, and qualitative interviews, this thesis argues that purely market-coordinated recycling is not able to simultaneously deliver large-scale employment creation and improved socio-ecological outcomes because of the inherent tension between labour intensiveness and methods of increasing productivity. This tension, in turn, is rooted in the distributive conflict characteristic of capitalist production, the resolution of which requires increased economic growth. From an ecological perspective, then, this is simply a deferment of the problem. In line with proponents of the Green New Deal, this dissertation argues that mediation of this tension in a direction favourable to both ecological and social concerns requires collective intervention. However, going beyond the Green New Deal, it concludes that commitment to social and ecological justice requires moving in the direction of decommodified, cooperative production and collective consumption.

This thesis explores the political experience of men in the Department of National Defence’s work relief camps in British Columbia from 1932 to 1935, when single, homeless, unemployed, and physically fit men accessed government unemployment relief living and working according to the administration’s policies. In these camps the men found a government administration eager to teach them work discipline, a collection of charities and private groups that promoted an ideal of the working class man in troubled economic times, and organizers with the Relief Camp Workers’ Union attempting to shape strikes that challenged government authority. In this thesis I argue that the unemployed vacillated between these different influences to challenge the government’s palliative relief while also ensuring that they maintained access to relief for as long as possible. This was accomplished by shaping multi-faceted relationships with the government, the union, private charities, and fellow campers.

This dissertation examines Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s relationship with labour unions and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation-New Democratic Party of Canada from 1945 to 2000. Trudeau was an extremely influential historical figure, both as prime minister (1968-1984), but also before his entry into formal politics, when he traveled and studied around the world, became deeply influenced by leftist movements and intellectuals, and sought to modernize Quebec, which in his view was falling behind English Canada in terms of technological, social, and democratic development. In essence, Trudeau sought to forge a liberal democracy he thought absent in Quebec, and found his staunchest allies to be trade unionists and socialists. In the end, however, Trudeau largely abandoned those movements because he felt winning liberal freedoms required the shelving of socialist objectives. This would, in turn, be his justification for joining the Liberal Party in 1965. As Prime Minister, Trudeau opposed the objectives and philosophies of his former left allies, even as he maintained his image as a progressive. So while many saw his Just Society, his approach to public and Canadian ownership of energy, his New Society, and his Charter of Rights and Freedoms as left-wing initiatives, I argue that Trudeau’s actions were undertaken not to challenge capitalism, but to strengthen it, primarily through the empowerment of business and the disempowerment of unions and the economically-disenfranchised. Ultimately, this dissertation asserts that Trudeau cannot be classified as a socialist, but must be seen as a liberal preoccupied, not with liberty and equality, but with the continued pre-eminence of capitalist property relations.

Cette thèse porte sur les figures contemporaines du salariat domestique ainsi que les principales évolutions de ce secteur d’activités dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle à Québec. Les récits de vie d’une trentaine de femmes ayant expérimenté diverses formes de travail domestique rémunéré constituent la base empirique de cette étude. Durant cette période historique marquée par l’accroissement spectaculaire de la main-d’œuvre féminine, de même que par le déclin du fordisme et la polarisation du marché du travail, le secteur domestique se diversifie. Les nouvelles formes de service domestique s’inscrivent dans la continuité historique ― notamment en regard de la personnalisation et de la naturalisation du rapport de travail, qui ont maintenu ce secteur à l’écart de la norme salariale depuis le XIXe siècle ―, tout en participant pleinement à la construction de nouveaux régimes d’inégalités de classe, de race et de genre autour de la division du travail dans la société québécoise contemporaine. Les récits de vie témoignent de l’indissociabilité des formes rémunérées et non rémunérées de travail domestique, et de leur caractère structurant dans la construction du rapport des femmes de milieux populaires au travail, à l’emploi et à la famille. De l’apprentissage du service domestique comme mode de socialisation des filles à la permanence domestique assurée par les femmes à toutes les étapes de leur vie familiale, les réseaux féminins familiaux et communautaires tissent la toile de toute une économie des échanges domestiques, sur un continuum entre entraide et emploi. Au cours des dernières décennies du XXe siècle, divers mécanismes se mettent en branle pour créer un bassin de main-d’œuvre domestique, dont certains sont directement liés à l’institution patriarcale du mariage, et concernent les femmes divorcées ou celles qui ont connu une longue absence du marché du travail. L’univers des petits boulots domestiques apparaît comme une sorte d’archipel où sont refoulées des femmes exclues du marché de l’emploi formel. Au sein de cette nébuleuse des emplois domestiques, les dynamiques de professionnalisation, d’institutionnalisation et de segmentation s’articulent autour de la frontière entre service et servitude, laquelle nourrit les pratiques et les représentations dans ces métiers où l’héritage ancillaire fait figure de spectre.

The first of three papers helps resolve the substantial debate about the impact of Honda v. Keays, a 2008 Supreme Court of Canada decision modifying the principles for compensating employees for improper employer conduct during dismissal (called “moral damages”). I performed content analysis on all relevant Canadian cases in the four years after Honda and an equivalent period before Honda and then used a tobit model to test legal scholars’ and lawyers’ predictions. I find that moral damages are less probable after Honda. Furthermore, the size of awards is smaller in those cases where moral damages are granted, partly because certain levels of employer misconduct now produce lower damages. However, I also find that, since Honda, high levels of mental distress are compensated more richly. The second paper is motivated by the absence of recent studies that investigate delay in grievance arbitration, despite increasing concerns being voiced about the issue. I performed content analysis on a random sample of about 400 Ontario arbitration awards, and then used a proportional hazards model to examine the extent of delay and its determinants. Consistent with common perception, the results suggest that delay has become a worse problem over the past two decades. I find that certain legalistic factors and the expanded jurisdiction of arbitrators over specific types of issues are associated with delay. The results also show that certain dispute resolution procedures are related to decreased delay, and this suggests some practical solutions. Prompted by a recent series of Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decisions on freedom of association (FOA) in the labour context, the third paper critically examines the Canadian jurisprudence. The state of this law in Canada has been roundly criticized by various prominent labour law academics. This paper relies on Sheldon Leader’s theory of FOA to argue that the SCC should have interpreted s. 2(d) of the Charter as protecting collective bargaining and striking as independent rights, rather than as rights necessary for the realization of the FOA. Having done so would have yielded jurisprudence that was more consistent and coherent.

This dissertation responds to the question of why people who immigrate to Ontario, Canada frequently choose to use their personal names in altered forms. Between May and December 2010, I engaged in semi-structured interviews with twenty-three people who, while living in Ontario, experienced name challenges ranging from persistent, repetitive misspellings and mispronunciations of their original names to cases of significant name alterations on residency documents, and even to situations of exclusion and discrimination. Drawing on critical perspectives from literature on identity and performativity, science and technology studies, race and immigration, affect, and onomastics (the study of names), I establish that name challenges are a form of "identity labour" required of many people who immigrate to Ontario. I also describe how individuals' identity labour changes over time. In response to name challenges, and the need to balance between their sometimes-simultaneous audiences, participants design their names for life in Ontario--by deciding which audiences to privilege, they choose where they want to belong, and how their names should be.