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In this lecture, I will, however, focus on one of the legacies of slavery, that is, the largely untold story of racial segregation in the world of work in Canada. We have come so effectively, and rightly, to focus on the effects of discrimination, that we may have inadvertently walked past the history. Reclaiming this history will comprise the first part of my talk. The second part of my talk will reference the emergence of the duty of fair representation. I will seek to illustrate the weight of the erasure of anti-Black racism through this duty. In other words, far from representing a peculiarity of US law that failed to travel well,8 Steele v Louisville & Nashville Railway Co’s9 foundation in racial discrimination needs to be acknowledged and engaged for an inherent tension to be addressed. So third and finally, I will posit the paradox of unresolved “choice” at the heart of the majoritarian frame of the Wagner Act, not to try somehow to resolve it, but by refusing to allow us to all too quickly individualize it, and instead to steer us closer to a related, necessary justification for a proactive commitment that we have already, if incompletely, made— the commitment to embracing the societal transformation entailed by achieving and sustaining substantive equality through employment equity

In this first part of our two-part report on Canadian modern slavery law, we introduce Canada’s Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act and situate it in its international legal and doctrinal context.

We draw upon the commentaries introduced in the first part of this two-part report to analyze current Canadian modern slavery law and then continue by evaluating the potential legislative and jurisprudential avenues through which Canadian law on this subject could further develop.ention.

À l’aube du 21e siècle, l’arrivée des multinationales change à tout jamais la dynamique entre les travailleurs et le patronat dans l’industrie forestière à Hearst en Ontario. Cet article examine le déroulement des événements et les principales transformations apportées aux conventions collectives signées entre les travailleurs hearstois et l’entreprise américaine Columbia Forest Products, un producteur de contreplaqué, pendant environ une décennie. Lorsque des scieries familiales sont vendues à des géants de l’industrie, le processus de négociation des ententes se métamorphose. La conjoncture économique joue également un rôle déterminant dans l’articulation des conventions collectives à un moment où l’industrie forestière nord-ontarienne traverse une série de crises, notamment le conflit canado-américain du bois d’œuvre. À maintes reprises, les travailleurs syndiqués doivent consentir une partie de leurs gains historiques pour tenter de sauver leurs emplois.

In this paper, we reflect on our experiences in the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association and our efforts to prioritize decolonizing, indigenizing, and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EDIA) in the collective bargaining process. We examine the performative nature of EDIA efforts in negotiations by university administrators and the Board of Governors, outlining our employer’s active resistance to proposals pertaining to EDIA, their lack of explicit Indigenous and EDIA expertise on their bargaining team, their sidelining and exclusion of university Indigenous and EDIA experts, as well as the absence of transparency and accountability in decision-making. We suggest that three actions — strengthening internal and external solidarity, democratizing governance, and pursuing legislative reform — offer a pathway to rethinking equity-based bargaining, challenging the instrumentalization of EDIA, and achieving genuine structural change.

Efforts to improve inclusion of workers with disabilities have often focused on providing accommodations. While this is useful and necessary, the need for an accommodation signals that a barrier exists. What if fewer barriers existed in the first place? The inclusive design movement seeks to create tools, policies, and practices that are inherently barrier-free. This paper reviews how to apply inclusive design principles to HR policies and procedures, enabling the creation of more inherently equitable practices. Bargaining teams have an important role to play in ensuring that collective agreement clauses related to HR comply with inclusive design principles. Specific recommendations are made, with particular attention to recruitment, selection, tenure and promotion, attendance management, scheduling, and enforcement of respectful communication policies.

This paper explores the transnational practices of migrant workers who access short-term employment in Atlantic Canada’s food production sector via two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP): the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the low-waged stream. Based on interviews with migrant workers—SAWP farmworkers from Jamaica and Mexico and low-waged fish plant workers from the Philippines—we explore their differential rights in Canada corresponding to the different parameters of each immigration stream. Reflecting the livelihood strategies and reproductive efforts of our interviewees and the extent to which these have been transformed in response to the conditions and limited opportunities afforded by Canadian immigration policy, we advance the concepts of “agricultural care chains” and “citizenship care chains”. In doing so, we suggest that the consideration of work and outcomes not conventionally understood as “care” reflects an important analytical and political contribution to the care chain scholarship as well as draws attention to how care scholarship and social reproduction theory can be more closely aligned. Central to our efforts is Tungohan’s argument (2019) that in considering transnational circuits of care, we must recognize the asymmetry that characterizes peoples’ relationships and the social locations they occupy—asymmetry that, in the context of our participants’ lives, is reinforced through the differential rights and opportunities afforded to migrant workers by Canadian immigration policy.

Using the more inclusive terminology of "alter-globalization" [i.e., the various names for radical protest against globalization], this article investigates the political predilections of this movement during its heyday around the turn of the millennium and seeks to understand why a force leading the charge against neoliberal global capitalism ostensibly owed little to Marxism compared with its other avowed sources for inspiration. It finds that although Marxian analysis was being substantied by the remorseless spread of capitalism around the world, there was a practical political problem related to the very salience of this Classical Marxian approach: that is, the Marxism of the Second International - in short, the Marxism expressed in the [Communist] Manifesto. --From introduction

This article reviews the book, "Resisting Eviction: Domicide and the Financialization of Rental Housing," by Andrew Crosby.

The radical immigrant in the title of this book, Edo Jardas, was a young Croatian who arrived in Canada in May 1926 and worked for several years as a lumberjack in the hinterland of British Columbia. He was a loyal member of the Communist Party of Canada, a newspaper editor, and a militant trade union activist in the Canadian Croatian community. He fought in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and returned to Canada as a war veteran. Jardas left Canada for Yugoslavia in 1948 where he assumed several prominent political functions, including the post of mayor of the largest harbour in the country-his hometown of Rijeka-from 1952 to 1955. Rather than being a simple biography, this book describes the circumstances that shaped the Croatian immigrant community in the hostile social and natural environment of Canada. The community was deeply engaged in the political debates concerning the Croatian status in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later renamed as Yugoslavia) since its foundation in 1919. The question of national identity and its affirmation at home and in the diaspora therefore figured pre-eminently in the Croatian immigrant press.The book is also very much a study in Canadian history. It is an account of the political radicalization of the Canadian working class, inspired by the international communist movement at a time of major economic and political upheaval in the post-WWI decades. --Publisher's description

What does a cash-strapped government do when the collective agreements for almost a quarter million of its unionized employees expire simultaneously while wishing to maintain a respectful relationship with its labour supporters? In 1997, the Premier of British Columbia (BC), Canada, Glen Clark, thought of an imaginative solution. It was to offer unions an opportunity to participate with the government in developing policies on issues affecting their members and the services they provide. This was BC’s public sector policy Accord process. The goal was to establish a different, more collaborative relationship with unions, one in which they had a voice in shaping policy solutions. This parallel process – entirely separate from collective bargaining - would also avoid the adversarial relationship that so often characterizes a government’s relations with its unions, by recognizing the positive role unions and their members could play in contributing to improving BC’s public programs and services. The authors, who worked on the Accord process with Premier Clark, provide an insider’s story of the intensive three-year period, during which the parties negotiated 35 policy accords across the entire provincial public sector. The Accords covered a wide range of issues, including pension trusteeship and portability, early retirement, provincial school class size, benefits trusts, government procurement policy, hospital laboratory services, workforce training, pay equity, creation of a health and safety agency and numerous smaller policy fixes. The accord process demonstrated that it was possible for a government to initiate a new and more collaborative relationship with its unions by inviting them into the policy process. The accords definitely improved relations with the government and contributed to collective bargaining settlements within the government’s money mandate. --Publisher's description

This article reviews the journal issue. "Long-Haul Issue No. 1 (Winter 2025)" edited by Dylan Davis and Stefan Yong.

This paper employs a four-fold ideological schema – business liberalism, welfare liberalism, social democracy, and hard-left socialism or communism – to examine the dynamics of the history of labour disruptions at York University. It sets the strikes in the context of a long-term decline of funding for postsecondary education in the social sciences and humanities, with the current rounds of restructuring at York representing a new local point of crisis. The problem of blame as a mode of explaining and resolving conflicts is discussed, along with a view of how contrasting and overlapping pragmatic or principled, individualistic or group-oriented ideas account for the prevalence of labour action.

As Canada sought to protect its borders and aid its allies during the Cold War, many people were recruited to build the emerging security state: as construction and maintenance workers, engineers, members of the armed forces, medical researchers, and research subjects. Security work transformed the lives of individuals, families, and communities in ways that were both predictable and surprising, and both beneficial and harmful; the militarization and colonization of Indigenous lives and lands was especially disruptive. The opening essays of Cold War Workers intimately portray the complicated effects of Cold War labour upon Indigenous lives. Elmer Sinclair, a residential school survivor and member of the Canadian armed forces, achieved equality with white men through his militarized masculinity. His more positive professional experience contrasts with those of Indigenous workers on northern radar lines, many of whom lost languages, connections to the land, and other elements of traditional cultures as they sought new skills and better employment. Diverse Indigenous experiences of Cold War security work set the scene for the second set of essays, which explore the impact of security preoccupations on marginalized groups – the study of extreme isolation through scientific experimentation on human subjects; the targeting of gay men with psychiatric labelling to enforce an idealized masculinity; and the restriction of gender mobility in the Canadian military, and the pushback from servicewomen. Cold War Workers raises questions about the influence of settler-colonial masculine institutional values on those who laboured for the Cold War state and society. By comparing the experiences of different types of workers, families, and communities, this volume reveals how race, gender, and privilege affected people in varied and sometimes unexpected ways. -- Publisher's description

This article challenges Verity Burgmann’s claim that “Classical Marxism” is fatally enamoured with the dynamism of capital and therefore unable to sustain resistance to globalization. It argues that this charge rests on an overly neat identification of Classical Marxism with Second International orthodoxy and a distorted reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s work, particularly The Accumulation of Capital, which is shown to emphasize the violent incorporation and intensified exploitation of colonized and racialized workers rather than celebrating capitalist advance. The article also contends that Burgmann’s dismissal of Leninism and Third International Marxism erases their formative role in anti‑colonial struggles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America that helped make later anti‑ and alter‑globalization movements possible. In addition, it questions Burgmann’s elevation of anarchism and autonomist Marxism, noting her neglect of feminist organizing and women’s movements, and arguing that many of the qualities she attributes to these currents, above all, an insistence on agency, consciousness, and mass self‑activity, are already present in Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s Marxism. The article concludes that Marxism, understood through Luxemburg and Lenin rather than through Burgmann’s caricature of Classical Marxism, offers a still‑vital framework for confronting contemporary globalization, grounded in working‑class self‑emancipation and internationalist opposition to imperialism.

Seeking to understand why public servants took so long to achieve labour rights—particularly the right to strike—compared to those in the broader economy, this dissertation explores the historical evolution of labour relations within the Ontario Public Service (OPS) from 1867 to 2017. Through an examination of the interplay between institutions and broader socio-economic and political forces, viewed through a critical institutionalist framework, this study argues that the development of OPS labour relations is defined by three distinct eras. The first era, from Confederation until the 1960s, was dominated by the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, which limited the labour rights available to public servants. The second era, from the 1960s to the 1990s, saw the ideology of the governing party as the primary dynamic, with party ideology playing a significant role in the emergence of public servants’ right to strike. Starting in the 1990s, the third era saw the rise of neoliberalism shift the focus of governments of all partisan stripes toward cost containment. As a result, this era was marked by hard bargaining and practical constraints on the feasibility of the strike option. This study demonstrates how these primary factors, along with other influences such as worker militancy and class relations, have shaped the long development of the OPS labour relations regime. The dissertation concludes that, despite significant legislative changes, the government has nevertheless retained considerable control over the material outcomes of the public service labour relations system.

The article reviews the book, "Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change," by Stefania Barca.

This thesis explores the concept of culinary placemaking through the lens of Global Political Economy (GPE), focusing on how foodwork functions as a relational practice that shapes social, cultural, and economic spaces. It examines the relationships among food, labour, and place, emphasizing the ways in which workers transform culinary environments into meaningful places through their physical, emotional, and creative contributions. Drawing on existing literature, the research highlights how neoliberal policies have commodified food and labour, leading to increased precarity and alienation for food workers. Despite these challenges, culinary workers actively resist the pressures of globalization by fostering localized food systems, emphasizing cultural and social engagement, and envisioning alternative economic models such as cooperatives and farm-to-table initiatives. This thesis finds that culinary placemaking not only resists commodification but also offers opportunities for social cohesion, cultural expression, and economic resilience. Furthermore, the research touches upon the gendered dimensions of culinary labour, demonstrating how workers navigate power dynamics within professional kitchens and community food spaces. Future research directions include exploring the evolving role of consumers in culinary placemaking, addressing labour precarity through policy interventions, and investigating how Indigenous economies contribute to decolonial approaches to food sovereignty. By situating foodwork within the broader political and economic context, this thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of the transformative potential of culinary labour in fostering inclusive, sustainable, and culturally resonant food spaces.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention on June 16, 2011, an act deemed in the literature to be an innovation in regulatory measures. This chapter discusses the ILO’s production of a newly visibilized and highly idealized domestic worker, specifically the Asian migrant/immigrant woman domestic worker in the context of Canada’s gendered, racialized, and capitalist management of multiculturalism and citizenship. This chapter asks, how does this paradoxical embodiment of the domestic worker continue to leave her estranged, or in other words, to leave her persistently needed, but not welcomed? And it further asks, in what ways is the woman domestic worker both a ‘useful’ body and a body that refuses its own usefulness?

This dissertation critiques the soldier in capitalist society as a category of social labour that produces the state capacity for political violence. Identifying soldiering labour is essential to historicizing how this social capacity of labouring people is fetishized as the military power of the state. From the perspective of this project, the substance of the labour of the soldier is affected but not resolved by a resolution of form (such as the standing army, or transition from a draft to an all-volunteer army). What is discovered through historical and theoretical analysis and soldiers’ struggles themselves, is that historical class struggles in the military can be read as contests for political sovereignty over the labour of political violence: literal power over cooperative labour, not merely over institutions, or freedom in the ‘spheres’ of politics and economics. It captures the necessity of emancipation in one as a condition of the emancipation of the other; and that of the soldier as a condition for everyone else’s so long as we are to be concerned with the entirety of human life and not the exception of a single nation-state’s population.