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As has been the case in the U.S., the level of inequality in Canada has been on the rise since the 1980s, though at a slower rate. In new research, Barry Eidlin explores the reasons behind this divergence. He argues that one major factor which has received little attention is the power of Canada’s unions. He writes that because unions have been able to keep their role and legitimacy as defenders of working class interests, they have largely retained their power. He argues that in order to address inequality, we need to talk more about the growing divide between the wealthy and the working class, and the role that unions can play in decreasing that divide.

This article reviews the book, "Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada," by Ian Milligan.

[E]xplores the dynamic political movement that came out of the largest labour protest in Canadian history and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Few have studied the political Left at the municipal level—even though it is at this grassroots level that many people participate in political activity. Winnipeg was a deeply divided city. On one side, the conservative political descendants of the General Strike’s Citizen’s Committee of 1000 advocated for minimal government and low taxes. On the other side were the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Canada, two parties rooted in the city’s working class, though often in conflict with each other. The political strength of the Left would ebb and flow throughout the 1920s and 1930s but peaked in the mid-1930s when the ILP’s John Queen became mayor and the two parties on the Left combined to hold a majority of council seats. Astonishingly, Winnipeg was governed by a mayor who had served jail time for his role in the General Strike. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- The second round --The reign of the furies -- The revolutionary party on the parliamentary map -- A victory for thoseengage in the struggle for better conditions -- For freedom's cause, your bayonet's bright -- A bombshell to many citizens -- Conclusion.

This paper offers some predictions about the impact of the Supreme Court of Canada's landmark ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour on the numerous limitations on the right to strike currently in effect in every Canadian jurisdiction. In the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour case the Court - strongly affirming its earlier decision in B.C. Health, in which it held that freedom of association under section 2(d) of the Charter encompasses the right to a "meaningful process of collective bargaining," and that "substantial interference" with that right will give rise to an infringement - declared that the right to strike is an essential component of a meaningful process of collect- ive bargaining, and as such is protected under the Charter. The author (who points out that this is not his first attempt at "reading constitutional tea leaves ") expresses surprise at the breadth of the majority's interpretation of what will constitute "substantial interference," as it is likely to result in many of the exist- ing schemes for regulation of strikes in essential services being held to violate section 2(d) and therefore to require justification under section 1 as a reason- able limit. Equally surprising, in the author's view, is the Court's section 1 analysis itself which suggests that the Court is prepared to undertake a detailed, searching review of "controlled strike" and "no-strike" schemes for designation of essential services and essential employees and the adequacy of any alterna- tive dispute resolution mechanism provided under such schemes as a substitute for the right to strike. Based on the Court's reasons in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, the author posits that numerous Charter challenges can be expected in the coming years against legislated restrictions on collective bargaining and strike activity, including the ad hoc "instant" back-to-work model to which the federal government has repeatedly resorted. Nevertheless, he cautions, given the considerable uneveness of the jurisprudential road which led from B.C. Health to Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, one should be wary of trying to predict the course of the Supreme Court's pronouncements.

On January 9, 1927, a fire tore through the Laurier Palace, a cinema located in a French-speaking, working-class neighborhood on the east side of Montreal. Seventy-eight children died. This article uses the abundant documentation generated by the fire to explore a number of themes related to working-class childhood in early-twentieth-century Montreal: children’s autonomy versus parental surveillance and authority; the place of commercial leisure and petty consumption in the lives of working-class children; and contemporary understandings of such tragic accidents as the Laurier Palace fire. The article reflects on the promise and perils of what David Lowenthal has termed the “voyeuristic empathy” promoted by historians. Are historians of youth, what one scholar calls “latter-day child savers,” more likely than others to adopt a perspective reliant upon (or vulnerable to) such empathy?

This article reviews the book, "Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973–2010," by Francis Peddie and Royden Leuwen.

The article reviews the book, "The Origins of Right to Work: Anti-labor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago," by Cedric de Leon.

The article reviews the book, "Gender Work: Feminism after Neoliberalism," by Robin Truth Goodman.

For a purportedly democratic country such as Canada, it is strange that so many of us seem to accept, unquestioningly, the absolute right of the employer to arbitrarily dictate the terms and conditions of our workplaces. This is just one example of what Ralph Nader is talking about when he says that, "When all is said and done, democracy is widely liked and widely unpracticed."

The article reviews the book, "Autonomie collective et droit du travail. Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur Pierre Verge," edited by Dominic Roux.

This paper uses the Canadian Labour Force Survey to understand why the level and dispersion of wages have evolved differently across provinces from 1997 to 2013. The faster increase in the level of wages and the decline in wage dispersion in Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Alberta are the starkest interprovincial differences. We find that they are accounted for by the growth in the extractive resources sectors, which benefited less‐educated and younger workers the most. Increases in minimum wages since 2005 are found to be the main reason why wages at the very bottom grew more than those in the middle of the distribution.

Over the past 20 years, the Alberta-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 have revitalized their union through organizing diverse groups of workers in hard-to-organize occupations, increasing involvement in political and community matters and adopting innovative organizing and representation strategies. They have done so with a stable leadership that exhibits autocratic and populist tendencies. The apparent contradictions of autocratic structures and innovative reforms are difficult to explain using existing explanations of union renewal and concepts of union forms. This in-depth study examines Local 401 in an effort to explain the unexpected patterns. Using a variety of methods, including Critical Narrative Analysis, the study reveals that unions may be more fluid and dynamic than the existing literature acknowledges. The study concludes the business union-social union duality common in industrial relations theory needs to be replaced by a more flexible, more multi-layered conceptualization of union behaviour. Unions exhibit elements of both social and business unionism at the same time because they are organizations created at the intersection between structure and action and are always in flux. The study also highlights a possible third path for union renewal, coined “accidental revitalization”, where local-initiated renewal can occur without planned intention and within a context of stable local leadership. Third, the study explores the role narratives play in resolving apparent contradictions in union behaviour by constructing internal logics and how narratives contribute to the production and re-production of power dynamics within unions.

This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government MLAs also asserted that international migrant workers (3) had questionable occupational, linguistic or cultural skills and (4) caused negative social and economic impacts in Canada. Taken individually, these narratives appear contradictory, casting migrant work as good but migrant workers as bad. Viewed together, these narratives comprise an effort to dehumanize temporary and permanent international migrant workers. This (sometimes racialized) “othering” of migrant workers justifies migrant workers’ partial citizenship and suppresses criticism of their poor treatment.

This study examines how five unions in the Canadian province of Alberta responded to a sudden influx of temporary foreign workers (TFWs), as part of Canadian employers’ increased use of migrant workers in the mid-2000s. The authors find three types of response to the new TFW members: resistive, facilitative and active. Furthermore, these responses were dynamic and changing over time. The different responses are best explained not by the unions’ institutional context, but by internal factors shaping each union’s response. Drawing upon the concept of referential unionisms, the study explores how unions’ self-identity shapes their responses to new challenges such as the influx of migrant workers.

This article reviews the book, "Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment," by Gerald Tulchinsky.

This article examines changes in levels of confidence in unions and proposes an intra-national comparison between Quebec and the rest of Canada based on the analysis of the three most recent waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) database, of which Canada is part (i.e. 1990, 2000, 2006). After noting differences in the trends of confidence in unions in these two regions, we applied the same logistic regression model to both regions, based on the 2006 WVS wave, in order to bring out the determinants of the propensity of individuals to express confidence in unions. The results show both similarities and differences between the two regions. As for the similarities between Quebec and the rest of Canada, it should be noted that involvement in politics and the fact of being unionized had a positive effect on the respondents’ propensity to have confidence in unions whereas most of the socio-demographic variables had no significant effects. As for the differences, the fact of reporting a higher income had a significant negative impact in Quebec, but was not significant in the rest of Canada. The fact of supporting the NDP in the rest of Canada had a more structuring effect on the propensity of individuals to have confidence in unions than the fact of supporting the BQ in Quebec. Moreover, the greater the extent to which citizens in Quebec identified with left-leaning ideological positions, the more likely they were to have confidence in unions. Finally, the respondent’s level of education was not significant in the rest of Canada but, cetiris paribus, was highly significant and positively related to confidence in unions in Quebec.

The article reviews the book, "Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike That Shook London and Helped Launch the Labor Movement," by John Tully.

This article reviews the book, "A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain," by Owen Hatherley.

Cet article vise à tester sur longue période l’hypothèse de convergence des relations industrielles dans les pays développés. Prenant acte de la persistance du débat sur ce point, notamment du fait de la crise actuelle, mais aussi de la diversité des conceptions sous-jacentes, il propose de partir d’un objet de comparaison non prédéterminé par une orientation préalable : le « dialogue social ». Ce concept, utilisé notamment dans le cadre du Bureau international du Travail (BIT), reste toutefois assez flou et appelle une réélaboration. Nous ajoutons aux pratiques d’information, concertation et de négociations collectives, des pratiques moins souvent prises en compte : les pratiques du paritarisme de gestion, de la codétermination, ainsi que l’intervention de l’État, cette dernière pouvant renforcer ou, au contraire, contraindre le dialogue social. Se limitant, pour la partie empirique, à l’ensemble formé par les négociations collectives, les pratiques de codétermination et l’intervention de l’État, l’article examine l’évolution de 19 pays de l’OCDE pour six indicateurs de 1985 à 2011. Le choix est fait de ne pas pondérer a priori l’importance de chaque indicateur, et de procéder à une analyse de données en composantes principales suivie d’une classification par nuées dynamiques. Il en résulte cinq groupes de pays, groupes dotés d’une assez forte stabilité, dont on étudie les transformations au cours du temps. Enfin, les groupes de pays sont examinés sous l’angle des performances économiques et sociales, en retenant la croissance du PIB et l’évolution du taux de chômage. On retrouve alors, sur une base non contrainte par une orientation a priori, les groupes classiquement distingués par les analyses comparatives : les groupes « anglo-saxons », « continentaux », « nordiques » et « méditerranéens », ainsi qu’un dernier groupe composé de la Suisse et du Japon. L’article conclut à la persistance de la diversité au regard du « dialogue social », y compris pour la période récente marquée par la crise.

Building on previous research, Workers’ Action Centre members spent the past year identifying key problems workers are facing in the labour market and developing priorities for change. This report brings workers’ voices, experiences and recommendations to this conversation, contributing knowledge that will be essential to updating Ontario’s labour legislation from the ground up. --Website summary