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David Chariandy's Brother is his intensely beautiful, searingly powerful, and tightly constructed second novel, exploring questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991. With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home. Coming of age in The Park, a cluster of town houses and leaning concrete towers in the disparaged outskirts of a sprawling city, Michael and Francis battle against the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry--teachers stream them into general classes; shopkeepers see them only as thieves; and strangers quicken their pace when the brothers are behind them. Always Michael and Francis escape into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness that cuts through their neighbourhood, where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the pulsing beats and styles of hip hop, Francis, the older of the two brothers, dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. With devastating emotional force David Chariandy, a unique and exciting voice in Canadian literature, crafts a heartbreaking and timely story about the profound love that exists between brothers and the senseless loss of lives cut short with the shot of a gun. --Publisher's description

La reconnaissance du travail ménager occupe les féministes depuis des décennies. Mais qu’ont à dire celles qui en ont fait leur gagne-pain, les travailleuses de l’ombre par excellence? Dans ce livre, Catherine Charron examine le travail domestique rémunéré au Québec entre les années 1950 et 2000. Elle expose les parcours d’une trentaine de femmes de la région de Québec et leur donne la parole. Dans un contexte où le marché du travail subit de profondes transformations, les boulots domestiques, loin de disparaître, se reconfigurent et continuent d’occuper une part non négligeable de la main-d’œuvre féminine. Tandis qu’une proportion croissante de femmes ont un meilleur accès à la scolarisation et au salariat, de nombreuses autres se trouvent refoulées dans diverses filières d’emplois domestiques: la garde d’enfants, l’aide à domicile pour les personnes âgées, les travaux d’entretien ménager. Les trajectoires des femmes interrogées par Catherine Charron, nées entre 1914 et 1958, illustrent le rapport changeant des femmes à l’emploi et à la famille à partir des années d’après-guerre ainsi que leurs réalités hétérogènes. À l’intersection du public et du privé, le travail domestique rémunéré s’exerce dans la continuité du travail gratuit assigné aux femmes au sein de la famille et de la communauté, ce qui contribue à le rendre invisible. Aux marges de l’emploi révèle cette face cachée de l’économie marchande et domestique, incontournable dans toute réflexion sur le travail, et rend justice à celles qui l’incarnent. -- Publisher's description

This article reviews the book, "Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80" by Jeremy Milloy.

This poem describes the conditions that lead to the Great October Socialist Revolution that took place in Russia in the year 1917. The Russian Revolution was foundational to the labour and social reforms that took place in Canada in the same era (Winnipeg general strike) and over the course of the next 100 years (healthcare, unions, and credit unions).

This article reviews the book, "The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities" by Frances Henry, et al.

In 2016, nearly 7,000 Mexican men and women arrived in BC under the federally-administered Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). While all farmworkers face similar workplace hazards, women farmworkers face unique barriers to their reproductive health and wellbeing such as intense surveillance, sexual harassment, and unwanted pregnancies. The reproductive health of women in the SAWP is under-researched. Even less is known about women’s experiences in the interior of British Columbia. Based on insights gained in the field and through community-based research and advocacy efforts, this paper outlines what is currently known about women SAWP workers’ struggles to attain full reproductive justice. We discuss the unique factors that affect the reproductive health and sexual experiences of SAWP workers in particular. Ultimately, we argue that women SAWP workers face disproportionate barriers when accessing reproductive healthcare and that their sexual behaviour is heavily controlled through a variety of legal and extra-legal mechanisms. We conclude with a discussion on how migrant women creatively resist restrictions imposed upon them, and we make recommendations aimed at improving the experiences of women SAWP workers attempting to achieve reproductive justice in BC.

This chapter examines the campaign to unionize one workplace within [an] organizing wave: VICE Canada, a subset of VICE media, a privately held business who’s youth oriented properties spend a range of news and culture websites a magazine and advertising agency to TV channels and a record label. --Authors

This chapter explores the consequences of a particular set of management strategies deployed at John Deere Welland Works plant between 1998 and 2009. This chapter examines the interplay of tiered pay systems with team bonus incentives in the context of seniority-based bidding for jobs. This case study demonstrates how these management strategies foster divisions and dissension among the workers creating a legacy of inequality and strong undercurrent of anti-union sentiment among unionize workers at the plant. --Authors

The articles reviews the book, "Performants… et licenciés – Enquête sur la banalisation des licenciements," by Mélanie Guyonvarc’h.

This chapter draws upon research conducted on retail work from 2009 to 2016 and it highlights the most significant patterns and findings about union avoidance and how anti-unionism is manifested in retail stores on an ongoing basis and in organizing attempts. --Author

The article reviews the book, "Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres," by Jamie Woodcock.

This article reviews the book, "Defying Expectations: The Case of UFCW Local 401," by Jason Foster.

The article reviews the book, "Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia," edited by Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist.

The articles reviews the book, "Hard Labor: The Battle that Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA," by Sam Smith.

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.