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This dissertation examines the experiences of Indigenous women engaged in precarious and seasonal salmon cannery work. The dissertation argues that to grasp the nature of the women's work, which is exceedingly precarious, it is necessary to consider how it is shaped by a host of social, political, environmental and economic forces. In particular, the dissertation illustrates how provincial and Canadian neoliberal policies that developed during the past few decades have amplified the vulnerable status of Indigenous women cannery workers. Neoliberal discourses of active (worthy) and passive (unworthy) citizens embedded in social policies powerfully shape qualification requirements to programs such as Employment Insurance and Income Assistance while individualizing social inequalities experienced by Indigenous women. The dissertation employs both decolonizing and feminist methodologies to examine the everyday experiences of Indigenous women and to map out the social relations that shape their experience as precarious workers. Overall the dissertation contributes to making Indigenous women worker's lives more visible, to showing their significance in the salmon canning industry, to highlighting how their precarious labour undermines their well being and that of their families, and to demonstrating their resilience in the face of major obstacles.

This article reviews the book, "Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism," by Karen M. Paget

The argument of this paper is that a contractual framework obscures more than the inequality of bargaining power between the parties – it also obscures the proprietary basis of the exchange. The employment contract is a legal mechanism designed to transfer wages and rights of control over workers’ capacity to labour. Conceived of in this way, the employment relationship is fundamentally a contest for control over property (labour power) waged through contract. For this reason, analysing the property parameters of the employment relationship opens up another window for examining the strengths and weaknesses of regulating employment through contract. -- From author's introduction

The article reviews the book, "The Employee: A Political History," by Jean-Christian Vinel

The article reviews the book, "Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work," by Matt Stahl.

This article reviews the book, "The Great Depression in Latin America," edited by Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight.

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

This article reviews the book, "Smart Globalization: The Canadian Business and Economic History Experience," edited by Andrew Smith and Dimitry Anastakis.

This article reviews the book, "Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946," by David Lucander.

This paper considers the potential of Quebec's unique "decree system" as a measure that could be used to combat the rapid growth of precarious work in Canada. Under this system, which is also known as "juridical extensions," the province's government may order that a collective agreement covering a certain type of work be "extended" so as to be binding on all employers and employees in the sector, regardless of whether or not they are parties to a collective bar- gaining relationship. There are several reasons why precarious workers may benefit from an expansion and renewal of the decree system. First, the fact that decree coverage is broadly linked to the nature of the work performed avoids many of the regulatory problems that arise from labour market segmentation based on employment status or the form of the relationship. Thus, individuals who are in a disguised employment arrangement or in an agency or triangular work relationship (and who therefore may be excluded from labour relations, employment standards and other protective legislation) are entitled to the wages and benefits prescribed by an extended agreement. Second, parity committees - historically responsible for the administration and enforcement of extended agreements - could serve as the preferred platform for delivery of harmonized, sector-based pension, benefit and training programs. Third, those committees could be reconceived so as to facilitate workers'participation in decision-making at the enterprise level and thereby to promote industrial democracy. The author argues that while a comprehensive response to precariousness would likely require afar-ranging reevaluation of Canada's approach to labour market regu- lation, the decree system could provide at least a partial or intermediate solution.

The article reviews the book, "Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century," edited by Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth.

“The Dignity of Every Human Being” studies the vibrant New Brunswick artistic community which challenged “the tyranny of the Group of Seven” with socially-engaged realism in the 1930s and 40s. Using extensive archival and documentary research, Kirk Niergarth follows the work of regional artists such as Jack Humphrey and Miller Brittain, writers such as P.K. Page, and crafts workers such as Kjeld and Erica Deichmann. The book charts the rise and fall of “social modernism” in the Maritimes and the style’s deep engagement with the social and economic issues of the Great Depression and the Popular Front. Connecting local, national, and international cultural developments, Niergarth’s study documents the attempts of Depression-era artists to question conventional ideas about the nature of art, the social function of artists, and the institutions of Canadian culture. “The Dignity of Every Human Being” records an important and previously unexplored moment in Canadian cultural history. --Publisher's description

For many workers in Ontario, the Employment Standards Act (ESA) provides the only formal measures of workplace protection. The complaints-based monitoring system utilized by the Ontario Ministry of Labour, however, makes it difficult to assess the overall prevalence of employment standards (ES) compliance in the labour force. In addition to outright ESA violations, prevailing research highlights the significance of the erosion, evasion, and outright abandonment of ES for workers’ access to protection through practices such as the misclassification of workers and types of work. In this article, we report on efforts to develop a telephone-survey questionnaire that measures the overall prevalence of ES violations, as well as evasion and erosion in low-wage jobs in Ontario, without requiring respondents to have any pre-existing legal knowledge. Key methodological challenges included developing strategies for identifying ‘misclassified’ independent contractors, establishing measures for determining whether workers were exempt from the ESA, and translating the regulatory nuances embedded in the legislation into easyto- answer questions. The result is a survey questionnaire unique in the Canadian context. Our questionnaire reflects the concerns of both academic researchers and workers’ rights activists. Pilot survey results show that Ontario workers do not necessarily distinguish between ES violations and other workplace grievances and complaints. With careful questionnaire design, it is nevertheless possible to measure the prevalence of ES violations, evasion and erosion. In order to track the effects of ES policies, particularly those on enforcement, we conclude by calling for the establishment of baseline measures and standardized reporting tools.

The article reviews the book, "Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual," by Lauren Coodley.

This study presents a qualitative cross-case analysis of the discourses of teacher professionalism amongst union active teachers in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario. Data collection included interviews with 11 members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and 13 members from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, which were grounded in a document analysis of various reports, member magazines, news articles, and press releases dating back to the 1990s. The study reveals a triad of influences on the professionalism discourses of union-active teachers: engagement in teacher associations, the larger policy environment, and teacher agency. More specifically, participants’ inner drive to affect change, coupled with the capacity building experiences gained through their teacher association, saw many participants enacting and espousing discourses that positioned teachers as learners, leaders, advocates, and autonomous experts. That being said, member discourses were also impacted by the organizational priorities of their teacher associations and the extent to which the associations had been able to sway discourses within the larger policy environment to be supportive of teachers. These discursive influences are not static, however, nor are they mutually exclusive. Rather, a complex, mutually reinforcing relationship exists between these elements that change over time as teachers, their unions, and governments respond to each other in new and evolving ways. This results in discourses of teacher professionalism “from within” and “from without” that are more akin to two sides of the same coin than they are to the juxtaposed manner which they are often conceived of. In this way the study illustrates the power of teachers and their unions to alter the balance between democratic discourses which position teachers as advocates, agents, and policy actors; and neoliberal portrayals of teachers as the objects of educational reform.

Based on interviews with 200 farmworkers, as well as representatives from industry, advocates and civil servants, this study finds that most BC farm workers are subject to hazardous conditions like unsafe transportation, substandard living conditions, long work hours and dangerous equipment. Employment standards for the agricultural sector are only loosely enforced.

This dissertation is a history of an idea, a retelling of a simple story about an idea as a complicated one, and an explanation of the effects of believing the simple story. From 1869 to 1985, to be an Indian in the eyes of the Canadian state—to be a “status Indian”—a person had to have a status Indian father. The Canadian government registered a population of Indigenous people as status Indians and decided that Indian status passed along the male line. If an Indian man married a non-Indian woman, his wife gained status and their children were status Indians. In contrast, if a status Indian woman married a non-Indian man, she lost her Indian status, and her children were not status Indians. This rule exiled women from their families of birth and tore them from the political fabric of their communities. The Indian status system is a keystone in Canada’s colonizing governance of Indigenous life. The rules in the Indian Act for the transmission of Indian status came under heavy criticism and, in 1985, the federal government amended the law. Because the 1985 amendments perpetuated sex discrimination by conferring an advantage to those who traced Indian status along the male line, the rules for Indian status were the object of decades of subsequent campaigning and litigation. In 2008 and 2015, landmark judgments in McIvor and Descheneaux declared the rules to be in breach of the gender equality guarantees in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In overturning the Indian Act’s status rules, the courts have relied on the government’s explanation of the history of these rules. The legislative history told by the government mirrors commonly held views about the history of the 1985 amendments to the Indian Act. According to this canonical history, the core explanation for the Indian Act amendments is a tension between individual rights to gender equality and collective rights to Indigenous self-governance, embodied in a conflict between Indigenous women and Indigenous communities (often represented by male Indigenous leaders). According to the canonical history, the opposition between these groups yielded an intractable political stalemate—a Gordian political knot that could only be sliced by the equality rights offered in constitutional and international human rights law. This dissertation unseats the canonical history by advancing an alternative account, one with both a wider aperture on the political and social context and a sharper focus on detail, complexity, and contingency. The dissertation asks how individual equality rights and Indigenous self-governance became juxtaposed to one another in a relationship of tension and dichotomous opposition and explains the discursive, political, and social forces that came together to create this idea of opposition. It situates the history of the Indian Act amendments in the context of negotiations for the re-founding of Canadian sovereignty and the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Indigenous demands for recognition as a third order of government in Canada’s federal state, changing understandings of equality in Canadian law, and shifts in the categorization of the problem of Indian women’s loss of status as a political, social, or cultural problem. It traces the role of Indigenous political organizations, Indigenous women’s political organizations, and the white-led women’s movement in shaping the debate. It tracks how an issue transformed from a political problem into a question of fundamental rights. Debates about amending the Indian Act showed a consensus among Indigenous people about the importance of Indigenous self-governance and the need to end sex discrimination in the Indian Act. Conflict among Indigenous groups arose about the mechanisms for recognizing Indigenous self-governance and the definition of self-governing polities. Rather than a pitched battle among Indigenous people, the central threads running throughout the history of reforms to the Indian Act are the federal government’s steadfast refusal to recognize inherent Indigenous self-governance and a desire to limit government spending on status Indians, all in service of a project of constructing and defending Canadian sovereignty. The dissertation exposes the government’s share of responsibility in creating a conflict between gender equality rights and Indigenous self-governance. It reveals the law’s hand in shaping the discourses of rights through which this idea of tension became articulated, labeling those rights as fundamental, pitting those rights against one another as intrinsically opposed, and then balancing them in the name of justice and fairness. In contemporary litigation over the Indian Act, the Canadian government deploys a story about competing interests of Indigenous women and Indigenous communities as a justification for continued discrimination in the Indian Act. (Abridged abstract)

The article reviews and comments on "Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s: A Memoir," volumes 1 and 2, by Ernest Tate.

This study explores employers ’ anti-union strategies in the Niagara Peninsula from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s in order to enhance our understanding of the nature of relations between labour and capital during the period generally described as that of the postwar compromise. Relying on such unexplored archival collections as the papers of the St. Catharines firm, Ontario Editorial Bureau, as well as the collections of the Archives of Ontario and Library and Archives Canada, the study focuses on four main union-avoidance strategies: the establishment of company-dominated unions, anti-union public relations campaigns, corporate welfarism, and company relocation. By illustrating the depth and endurance of Niagara employers’ opposition to unions during the period of supposed compromise between employers, workers and the state the study demonstrates that there was greater continuity than we have supposed between management views of workers’ rights during the period of the postwar compromise and the neoliberalism that characterized subsequent decades.

Documents how discrimination against minorities during WWII was much more prevalent than the selective portrayal in the television series, "Bomb Girls."