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Pays homage to the life and work of the Canadian social historian, Michael Cross (1938-2019). Includes two photos.

The article reviews the book, "Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland During the Second World War," edited by Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw,

This Master’s thesis examines tradeswomen’s experiences of and responses to gendered harassment at camp-based work in resource extraction industries in western Canada. This study predominantly features women working in the Alberta oil sands industry. Gendered harassment at work has been identified as a major issue in recent years (Curtis et al., 2018; Denissen, 2010; Wade & Jones, 2019) and this study aims to better understand tradeswomen’s day-to-day experiences of harassment in work camps. I utilize constructivist grounded theory methodology and critical feminist geography as the theoretical framework for the project. I find that tradeswomen employ a wide range of affective, material, and social strategies to manage harassment. I introduce two concepts, “just go to work” (JGTW) and “me vs. other girls,” to illuminate these strategies for self-preservation in the masculine occupational culture of work. This is labour that tradeswomen must perform in addition to their demanding work duties and schedules. JGTW demonstrates how gendered harassment is embedded into the masculinist culture of work of the trades. This study begins to address this gap in scholarly literature to capture the shifting cultural context of the oil sands industry and identifies new areas for future research.

Work, Industry, and Canadian Society provides a sociological introduction to the history, nature, organization, and management of work in Canada. The eighth edition expands and adds new coverage on the biggest work challenges faced now and in the future, such as Canada’s aging and increasingly diverse workforce, the work experiences of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, the rise of the app-based “gig” economy, and how technology will continue to impact future jobs and work organization. The new edition continues to incorporate recent empirical findings, review new and ongoing theoretical and policy debates, and provide a more international perspective. As the world of work continues to change rapidly, all trends and statistics have been updated. These authors are well regarded for their teaching and research, and their years of experience are evident in this comprehensive volume on the past, present, and future of work in Canada. --Publisher's description. Contents: Historical perspectives on work -- Contemporary debates and issues -- Canadian employment trends -- Good jobs, bad jobs, no jobs -- Labour markets: opportunities and inequality -- Gender and paid employment -- Household, family, and caring work -- Organizing and managing work -- In search of new managerial paradigms -- Conflict and control in workplace -- Unions and industrial relations -- Alternative approaches to organizing work -- Work values and work orientations -- Job satisfaction, alienation, and work-related stress.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Amplify: Graphic Narratives of Feminist Resistance," by Norah Bowman and Meg Braem, art by Dominique Hui; "Direct Action Gets the Goods: A Graphic History of the Strike in Canada," by Graphic History Collective with Althea Balmes, Gord Hill, Orion Keresztesi, and David Lester; "1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike," by Graphic History Collective and David Lester; and "Christie Pitts," by Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau.

Au-delà des importantes questions soulevées quant à la validité constitutionnelle de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État, qui alimenteront sans doute les débats politiques et juridiques au cours de la prochaine décennie, est-il vrai de prétendre que cette loi établit un nouveau régime de séparation du religieux et de l’État au Québec? Le présent article a pour objectif de démontrer que les seuls changements concrets que la Loi sur la laïcité imposera aux règles actuellement applicables au Québec se résument à deux interdictions concernant le port de certains signes religieux. Pour le reste, la Loi sur la laïcité se borne essentiellement à codifier des règles et des principes qui s’appliquaient déjà aux agents et agentes des institutions publiques du Québec et qui continueront de s’appliquer même si la Loi sur la laïcité devait être abrogée ou déclarée inconstitutionnelle par les tribunaux au cours des prochaines années.

Review essay of "The New ndp: Moderation, Modernization, and Political Marketing" (2019) by David McGrane and "Party of Conscience: The CCF, the ndp, and Social Democracy in Canada" (2018) edited by Roberta Lexier, Stephanie Bangarth and Jon Weier.

On November 26, 2018, General Motors announced a number of plant closures in North America, the largest of which was in Oshawa, Ontario. The Oshawa facility, once the largest auto complex on the continent, was to end all its assembly operations by the end of 2019. ...This pamphlet provides background material on Oshawa and joins Green Jobs Oshawa in encouraging workers elsewhere to prepare now for the threats to their jobs and productive capacity that will inevitably come. --From introduction

This thematic issue is an effort to understand how digitalization is disrupting and reordering the regulation of work and employment. It also examines how these concerns may lead to organizational and institutional experimentation.

Ce numéro thématique cherche à comprendre comment le numérique est venu perturber et réorganiser la régulation du travail et de l’emploi et comment il peut conduire à des formes d’expérimentation organisationnelle et institutionnelle.

In 1893 the Keewatin Lumber and Power Company planned the first hydroelectric generating station on the north shore of Lake of the Woods (near present-day Kenora, Ontario). Approximately fifty years later, federal officials seeking employment for Canadian veterans turned to Northwestern Ontario and its underutilized water resources, envisioning a manufacturing hub on the Precambrian Shield. Between 1950 and 1958, the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario remodeled the Winnipeg River drainage basin to produce power for federally-sanctioned peacetime industries, namely pulp and paper production. To redesign the Winnipeg River drainage basin, however, hydro officials needed to encroach on Anishinabek lands: both federally-recognized reserves and unrecognized, but heavily occupied, ancestral territories. This dissertation tells the story of how Anishinabek families used a diverse array of strategies adaptation, cooperation, and passive resistance to manage environmental change caused by Whitedog Falls Generating Station. Anishinabek families worked to stabilize their communities in an era of imposed environmental and economic change. Historians have long argued that hydroelectric development is necessarily at odds with Indigenous culture and subsistence economies. This dissertation provides a counter-narrative, arguing that cultural and economic damage, although linked to environmental damage, correlated more strongly with Anishinabek exclusion from resource negotiations. Moreover, this work complicates historical representations of a uniform Indigenous response to development. Given limited negotiations between the Hydro-Electric Power Commission and local First Nations, Anishinabek families did not respond to industrial incursions with one representative voice. The process of development itself, I argue, prevented a unified community response. As a result, Anishinabek communities fractured in response to hydroelectric development.

The article reviews the book, "L’art du sens dans les organisations," edited by Jean-Luc Moriceau, Hugo Letiche and Marie-Astrid Letheule.

Against a tense socio-political backdrop of white supremacy, intensifying pressures of neoliberal fiscal austerity, and queer necropolitics, this thesis addresses performance-based activist forms of place-making for urban-based queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of colour. Using participant observation and qualitative interviews with pioneering members of Montréal's Kiki scene and Ottawa's emerging Waacking community and interpreting my findings through the theoretical lens of queer of colour theory, critical whiteness studies, queer Latinx performance studies and Chicana feminism, I argue that Kiki subculture, which is maintained by pedagogical processes of 'each one, teach one', is instrumental in facilitating i) life-affirming queer kinship bonds, (ii) alternative ways to simultaneously embody and celebrate non-normative gender expression with Black, Asian, and Latinx identity, iii) non-capitalist economies of sharing, and iv) hopeful strategies of everyday community activism and resilience to appropriative processes during economic insecurity and necropolitical turmoil.

The article reviews the book, "Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle," by Jamie Woodcock.

This book is a history of deindustrialization and working-class resistance in the Cape Breton steel industry between 1945 and 2001. The Sydney Steel Works is at the heart of this study - having existed in tandem with Cape Breton's larger coal operations since the early twentieth century. Chapters explore the multi-faceted nature of deindustrialization, the internal politics of the steelworkers' union, successful efforts to nationalize the mill in 1967, the years in transition under public ownership, and confrontations over health, safety, and environmental degradation in the 1990s and 2000s. The book moves beyond the moment of closure to trace the cultural, historical, and political ramifications of deindustrialization as they continue to play out in post-industrial Cape Breton Island. This represents a significant intervention into the international literature on deindustrialization, pushing scholarship beyond the bounds of political economy and cultural change to begin tackling issues of bodily health, environment, and historical memory in post-industrial places. -- Publisher's description

In 2012, unions representing teachers and education workers in Ontario, Canada, were faced with Bill 115, legislation used by the provincial government to impose a collective agreement upon education workers and remove their right to strike. With a specific focus on the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, this paper is an insider view of how Bill 115 and the external political contexts of the time affected Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation’s internal democratic practices at the height of the struggle. It employs theories of union democracy in order to consider how external forces can shape teacher unions’ internal democracy, and how the competing pressures faced by union leaders can impact their actions and decisions. This paper takes the view that internal union democracy is an important consideration in teacher unions’ resistance to government austerity agendas.

Although ample research shows that people with disabilities face significant labor market barriers, questions remain about whether and how disadvantages in employment and earnings contribute to economic insecurity. We use 1999 to 2012 Canadian Survey of Financial Security data to study disparities in nonhousing assets, which include household savings, stocks, and pensions, across households with and without disabilities. We find that households where the respondent or their spouse reported a disability held 25 percent less in nonhousing assets after accounting for key employment, education, and demographic factors. Demonstrating the more complicated relationship between disability, employment, and assets, these direct effects were further strengthened by disability's indirect effects on assets through its relationship with employment income.

Although Canada’s migrant labour program is seen by some as a model of best practices, rights shortfalls and exploitation of workers are well documented. Through migration policy, federal authorities determine who can hire migrant workers, and the conditions under which they are employed, through the provision of work permits. Despite its authority over work permits, the federal government has historically had little to do with the regulation of working conditions. In 2015, the federal government introduced a new regulatory enforcement system - unique internationally for its attempt to enforce migrants’ workplace rights through federal migration policy - under which employers must comply with contractual employment terms, uphold provincial workplace standards, and make efforts to maintain a workplace free of abuse. Drawing on enforcement data, and frontline law and policy documents, we critically assess the new enforcement system, concluding that it holds both promise and peril for migrant workers.

Through two-part intergenerational oral histories, this thesis explores the intersections of labour, gender, and lived religion in the lives of twelve Southern Alberta, Dutch Reformed women from family farms from the 1950s to 2019. By focusing on the broader lived experience of the women interviewed, and not just their physical labour on the farm, this thesis argues that women’s roles on the family farm were crucial, while complicating the narrative of farm women’s roles to show their multiple and often conflicting identities.

Economically depressed communities across North America have opened casinos based on the promise of creating “good jobs.” Some scholars find that workers benefit from casinos via employment and wage growth, while others find that casinos exploit host communities, including their workers. Yet, little research addresses whom casinos employ and how workers experience the quality of employment. Existing research is based on geographic areas that house multiple casinos where workers have the mobility to move between different casino operators. Across North America, however, casinos are being adopted in economically depressed areas and in limited-licence states with large distances between casinos. Using the case study of Casino Windsor – located in Canada’s economically struggling automotive capital, Windsor, Ontario – this article speaks to whether casinos offer “good jobs” when a single casino exists in an economically struggling area. Based on 48 interviews with Windsor stakeholders and casino workers, media coverage, and descriptive statistics, these findings provide an alternative story of the employment implications of casino development when casino workers are immobile. The immobility of Casino Windsor workers results from a high unemployment rate, the absence of other employment offering comparable remuneration, and an international border. This scenario allows management to rule through disciplinary actions while still reaping the benefits of worker “loyalty” and effort. With states/provinces justifying casino developments to economically devitalized host communities by promising the creation of “good jobs,” researchers and policymakers must consider whether such developments will create and potentially exploit a captive labour supply, leading to the development of not-so-good casino jobs.