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The article reviews the book, "The Future of the International Labour Organization in the Global Economy," by Francis Maupain.

Cette recherche dresse un portrait de la situation de la relève syndicale au Québec et des tentatives des organisations syndicales pour stimuler la participation de leurs membres de moins de 30 ans. Elle brosse d’abord un aperçu des habitudes sociales, des valeurs et des caractéristiques en emploi des jeunes. Elle nuance et recadre ensuite la problématique des jeunes en ce qui concerne l’identité collective qu’ils partagent instinctivement et les modalités de socialisation à l’interne façonnant leur participation. Cette recherche remet en question la fenêtre de recrutement estimée où les jeunes seraient en mesure d’entâmer leur participation dans les structures syndicales. Au demeurant, elle décrit l’ampleur des innovations syndicales destinées à stimuler la participation des jeunes et démystifie le mandat de l’une d’elle, les comités jeunes, qui peuvent agir à la fois comme porte-parole de leur organisation, comme la voix des jeunes membres et comme pépinière de la relève syndicale. Les données empiriques utilisées pour ce mémoire proviennent d’une vingtaine de groupes de discussion et de huit entretiens semi-dirigés (n=228), tenus dans deux organisations syndicales d’importance au Québec, disposant d’un comité jeunes et organisés par les chercheures d’un projet de recherche plus vaste sur la participation syndicale des jeunes. Nos résultats démontrent en premier lieu une identité collective construite autour de la précarité et des injustices perçues par les nouveaux travailleurs. L’âge ne serait pas significatif dans la construction de l’identité des jeunes qui semblent en phase de conquérir leur identité. En second lieu, le cadre strict de plusieurs modalités de socialisation avait un effet inhibiteur sur la participation, favorisait des relations d’échanges instrumentales et ne tenait pas compte de la sensibilité de cette nouvelle génération pour les interactions réciproques avec leurs représentants syndicaux. Nous avons aussi observé une utilisation limitée des nouvelles technologies, qui présentent des potentialités intéressantes en matière de transfert des connaissances de surcroît. Par ailleurs, nos résultats à l’égard de l’identité collective observée et de la durée du processus de socialisation soulèvent des questionnements sur la pertinence même des structures jeunes dans leurs paramètres actuels. Le parcours d’un jeune vers la militance syndicale apparaît plus tardif qu’escompté. Plus encore, la problématique jeunes met en lumière les tensions intrinsèques au mouvement syndical quant à la libre négociation sociale des intérêts défendus et du consensus interne nécessaire à leur légitimité.

The article reviews the book, "The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement," by Stanley Aronowitz.

In 1919, the Canadian state enacted a law that criminalized the advocacy of radical politics. Section 98, as it became, was broad in its terminology, and carried a maximum punishment of twenty years imprisonment. In 1931, the state utilized the law against eight leaders of the Communist Party of Canada in an attempt to declare the organization to be illegal in Canada. The party, however, did not crumble under pressure. At trial, the accused were able to use the courtroom as a forum to protest the legality of the law; after the leaders were convicted, the party campaigned tirelessly for the release of their comrades, and for the repeal of Section 98. The party was successfully able to use its repression to forward its political agenda. This thesis explores how the party navigated Canada’s legal system in order to realize its political goals.

Why are US labor unions so weak? Union decline has had important consequences for politics, inequality, and social policy. Common explanations cite employment shifts, public opinion, labor laws, and differences in working class culture and organization. But comparing the United States with Canada challenges those explanations. After following US unionization rates for decades, Canadian rates diverged in the 1960s, and are now nearly three times higher. This divergence was due to different processes of working class political incorporation. In the United States, labor was incorporated as an interest group into a labor regime governed by a pluralist idea. In Canada, labor was incorporated as a class representative into a labor regime governed by a class idea. This led to a relatively stronger Canadian labor regime that better held employers in check and protected workers’ collective bargaining rights. As a result, union density stabilized in Canada while plummeting in the United States.

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.