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This article reviews the book, "The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West," by Mark A. Lause.

The article reviews the book, "Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial Relations since the 1970s," by Lucio Baccaro and Chris Howell.

The 1921 Canadian Census is exploited to examine the labour market attainment of Canadian women. Acknowledging the general context of Catholic and Protestant divide and the tensions between francophones and anglophones during the WWI, special attention is paid to the influences of religious affiliation, ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency. Working urban women, overwhelmingly unmarried, are found to earn between 68 and 29% less than their male counterparts, depending on occupation and religio-linguistic group. The gender earnings gap is found to be the largest among francophone Catholics. When the sample is restricted to unmarried urban women, francophone Catholic females are found at a large disadvantage compared with anglophone Catholic and Protestant females. Bilingual Catholic women, mostly of French Canadian ethnicity, were the second lowest earning group in Canada of 1921. Bilingual Protestant women, on the other hand, are found to have had the most favourable labour market outcomes. The cumulative weight of the results indicates that among religious affiliation, ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency, ethnicity had exercised the strongest influence on the labour market attainment of Canadian women at that time.

In the neoliberal academy, professors who disclose any form of impairment risk raising concerns about their fitness to perform their jobs. Academics are expected to deliver highly measurable outcomes from their work in order to build a positive reputation among their peers. But given the negativity that typically characterizes the disability discourse in Western cultures, it is all too easy for the scholarly community to infer that differentness equates to ineptness. Thus, individualist and ableist discourses are central to the discussion of power relations and care of the self in the contemporary academy. The focus of this doctoral thesis is “diversable” professors performing under neoliberal academic regimes. The term “diversability” is used to designate people with disabilities—particularly of an invisible nature—while debunking the fallacious connotation of incompetence habitually attached to their differentness. Combining self-narrative and postmodern-grounded theory, this study derives valuable insights from the stories of 16 professors, both tenured and untenured, who reveal how they navigate disability, as well as the intersecting dimensions of differentness attached to their self-identities. The findings suggest that diversable professors, in spite of an academic environment embedded in disability avoidance—and the usual structural contingencies that can prevent scholars from fully demonstrating their value—can present counter-narratives that include positive constructions of self-identity as good teachers, researchers and advocates for social justice. This research also uncovers inadequacies in the academy itself—but not without a message of hope for remedial change.

The articles reviews the book, "Les peurs au travail," edited by Alain Max Guénette and Sophie Le Garrec.

Over the past few decades, the impact and influence of the media have grown to exceed any other source of public opinion. Union density has steeply declined during this same time period, so the public perception of unions has been increasingly derived from highly selective representations in the media rather than direct experience. This chapter analyzes the increasing influence of the media on the labour movement and provides insight into how unions can ensure that they are represented fairly in the media.

Le Comité d’hygiène, de sécurité et des conditions de travail (CHSCT) s’avère, en France, une pièce maitresse des dispositifs de prévention des risques et d’amélioration des conditions de travail dans les entreprises. Bien que son rôle soit de plus en plus reconnu, il a souvent des difficultés à fonctionner et à trouver sa place dans le paysage des relations professionnelles.

The article reviews the book, "The Daunting Enterprise of the Law -- Essays in Honour of Harry W. Arthurs," edited by Simon Archer, Daniel Drache, and Peer Zumbansen.

The article reviews the book, "After Prison: Navigating Employment and Reintegration," edited by Rose Ricciardelli and Adrienne M.F. Peters.

This article explores the role of race in structuring the movement of seasonal tobacco workers from the Southern United States to Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. Over this period, tens of thousands of southern migrant workers of varying skill levels travelled to Ontario to take up jobs in all aspects of tobacco production. Participation in the movement was limited exclusively to white workers until 1966, when it was integrated at the behest of American officials fearful of contravening the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Methodologically, the article follows Michel-Rolph Trouillot and is an exercise in uncovering silences in the archive, as civil servants in both countries and employer representatives in Ontario were extremely hesitant about mentioning the movement’s racial character on record. Beyond methodology, the findings presented here contribute to a deeper understanding of the uneven nature of the “deracialization” of Canada’s immigration policies in the 1960s and to charting more of Canada’s role in the construction and maintenance of transnational systems of white supremacy.

This article reviews the book, "Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial Relations since the 1970s" by Lucio Baccaro and Chris Howell.

In 1931, eight leaders of the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) were convicted under Section 98 – a federal law that criminalized the advocacy of radical politics – and the party was declared illegal in Canada. The Canadian Labour Defense League (cldl), the party’s ancillary organization responsible for legal matters, conducted an intense campaign directed at securing both the release of the party’s leaders and the repeal of Section 98. This campaign included the distribution of pamphlets, the organization of demonstrations, and even the production of a dramatic play, entitled Eight Men Speak. Canadian state officials, led by Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, responded to the party’s efforts oppressively. Prison guards fired shots into cpc general secretary Tim Buck’s cell in Kingston Penitentiary, and Bennett himself had Eight Men Speak banned from performance in Toronto. Such kneejerk reactions, however, afforded cldl leaders opportunities to conduct meaningful work. This article argues that the cldl skillfully accentuated its own repression, keeping Section 98 relevant to Canada’s voting populace and placing capitalism and the Canadian state on trial in the eyes of the Canadian public.

Why are unions weaker in the US than in Canada, two otherwise similar countries? This difference has shaped politics, policy, and levels of inequality. Conventional wisdom points to differences in political cultures, party systems, and labor laws. But Barry Eidlin’s systematic analysis of archival and statistical data shows the limits of conventional wisdom, and presents a novel explanation for the cross-border difference. He shows that it resulted from different ruling party responses to worker upsurge during the Great Depression and World War II. Paradoxically, US labor’s long-term decline resulted from what was initially a more pro-labor ruling party response, while Canadian labor’s relative long-term strength resulted from a more hostile ruling party response. These struggles embedded ‘the class idea’ more deeply in policies, institutions, and practices than in the US. In an age of growing economic inequality and broken systems of political representation, Eidlin’s analysis offers insight for those seeking to understand these trends, as well as those seeking to change them. --Publisher's description. Contents: Part I. Explaining Union Density Divergence: 1. Structural and individual explanations; 2. Policy explanations; 3. Working class power in the United States and Canada; Part II. Political Articulation and the Class Idea: 4. Party-class alliances in the United States and Canada, 1932-1948; 5. Repression and rebirth: red scares and labor's postwar identity, 1946-1972; 6. Class versus special interest: labor regimes and density divergence, 1911-2016; Appendix A: Data; Appendix B: Archival sources; Appendix C: Permissions.

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Canada appeared to escape the austerity implemented elsewhere, but this was spin hiding the reality. A closer look reveals that the provinces--responsible for delivering essential public and social services such as education and healthcare--shouldered the burden. The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity examines public-sector austerity in the provinces and territories, specifically addressing how austerity was implemented, what forms austerity agendas took (from regressive taxes and new user fees to public-sector layoffs and privatization schemes), and what, if any, political responses resulted. Contributors focus on the period from 2007 to 2015, the global financial crisis and the period of fiscal consolidation that followed, while also providing a longer historical context--austerity is not a new phenomenon. A granular examination of each jurisdiction identifies how changing fiscal conditions have affected the delivery of public services and restructured public finances, highlighting the consequences such changes have had for public-sector workers and users of public services. The first book of its kind in Canada, The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity challenges conventional wisdom by showing that Canada did not escape post-crisis austerity, and that its recovery has been vastly overstated. -- Publisher's description

This dissertation sits at the intersection of critical international political economy and a decolonizing, anti-racist approach to empirical political science. Specifically, I examine how liberal state forms are presupposed by and premised upon illiberal practices of sorting, policing, and defining populations. Rather than view such practices as anomalous to the modern state form, I view them as productive. I depart from the dominant literature in this field of study (postcolonial theory) with a typical focus on discursive and local practices, and instead advance a defense of Marxism rooted in an examination of the material practices of states responding to global political-economic pressures. This analytical and methodological focus stems from an engagement with the theoretical and empirical work conducted through Political Marxism, and through an engagement with the concept of uneven and combined development. I compare instances of racialized nation-building from the nineteenth century, focusing on the ways in which the creation of racialized hierarchies of belonging were seminal to the production of liberal state capacity and legitimacy. I examine the cases of Canada and Argentina to explore how the dispossession and management of indigenous peoples served to foment vast networks of bureaucratic, fiduciary, and coercive state capacities. Such capacities were necessary in the project of constructing competitive liberal economies to respond to pressures generated by an emergent global market in agricultural goods. This work sheds new light on the role of race and racialization in the formation of the nation-state system, while responding to and contesting common assumptions about the legal equality assumed to underpin Western nationalism(s).

The articles reviews the book, "Technology and the Future of Work: The Impact on Labour Markets and Welfare States," by Bent Greve.

Have Indigenous people in Canada been active as wage labourers and union members? If so, what have been the circumstances? When and where and for what reasons have Indigenous people worked for wages and been union members and how have they fared in these roles? In this short paper we examine a wide range of recent studies that have looked at various aspects of these questions.

Indigenous people have worked for wages for more than 150 years in Canada, and before that in what was to become Canada. They have often been members of unions and in some cases actively. They have been known to engage in strike actions even when not represented by a union. However, relations between Indigenous people and unions have often been difficult. In many cases unions have failed to serve the interests of Indigenous wage workers. --Introduction

This article examines the effect of transformational and laisser‐faire leadership on the part of local union leaders and immediate supervisors on the dual commitment of unionised workers. Building on the social information processing perspective, it is suggested that these leadership styles are linked to commitment through the workplace relations climate (WRC). Based on a sample of 834 unionised workers, our results suggest that WRC represents an important mechanism explaining the effect of the immediate supervisor's leadership in unionised settings. Results also show that transformational leadership on the part of union representatives is positively linked to union and organisational commitment. This article contributes to the WRC and dual commitment literatures by going beyond structural and institutional explanations and considering relational and actor‐related variables, such as leadership styles.

In October 2005, Jason Foster, then a staff member of the Alberta Federation of Labour, was walking a picket line outside Lakeside Packers in Brooks, Alberta with the members of local 401. It was a first contract strike. And although the employees of the meat-packing plant—many of whom were immigrants and refugees—had chosen an unlikely partner in the United Food and Commercial Workers local, the newly formed alliance allowed the workers to stand their ground for a three-week strike that ended in the defeat of the notoriously anti-union company, Tyson Foods. It was but one example of a wide range of industries and occupations that local 401 organized over the last twenty years. In this study of UFCW 401, Foster investigates a union that has had remarkable success organizing a group of workers that North American unions often struggle to reach: immigrants, women, and youth. By examining not only the actions and behaviour of the local’s leadership and its members but also the narrative that accompanied the renewal of the union, Foster shows that both were essential components to legitimizing the leadership’s exercise of power and its unconventional organizing forces. -- Publisher's description