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The article reviews the book, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade," by Jeff Schuhrke.

North American regimes of industrial legality provide workers with protected rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike. However, they also limit the freedom to strike. Trade unions commonly accept and enforce these limits, but at great cost to solidarity and militancy. This article examines the many ways law works against labour by restricting the freedom to strike and explores the practice of unlawful strikes in North America, including recent examples that resulted in successful outcomes. It concludes with reflections on the revival of unlawful strikes as a tactic forrebuilding and remobilizing the North American labour movement. While the article’s focus is North America, the discussion of unlawful strikes may also be relevant in other countries that limit the freedom to strike.

This paper examines the strategic alliance between the Tenant Solidarity Working Group (TSWG)—a graduate-student tenant union—and CUPE Local 3906, representing Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Situated within Hamilton’s ongoing economic shift from manufacturing, specifically steel production, toward increased real estate speculation, financialization, and intellectual labour, this study investigates whether tenant-labour collaborations provide an effective model for addressing systemic socio-economic inequalities in student housing. Utilizing Nancy Fraser’s analytical triad of recognition, redistribution, and representation, the research evaluates the potential and limitations of this collaboration in achieving tangible socio-economic justice outcomes for graduate tenants. Through the lens of Fraser’s framework, the study identifies how tenant and labour activists mobilize recognition by contesting normative stigmatization of graduate renters; pursue redistribution through collective action that has yielded financial concessions such as rent reductions; and seek representation by demanding political inclusion within university administrative structures and broader public discourse. The analysis underscores that, despite Hamilton’s persistent identity as a major steel producer, the city’s gradual pivot toward real estate investment and intellectual labour exemplifies David Harvey’s concept of a “spatial fix,” redirecting surplus capital and labour into the university sector, thus complicating the intersection of housing affordability and labour precarity.

Introduces and reprints the "Red Haggis" comic strip that ran in 1934 in the Young Worker, the weekly publication of the Young Communist League of Canada. The strip's hero, Red Haggis, is depicted as a pugnacious amalgam of Popeye and "the hard man" of the Scottish working-class tradition. The artist - signed as "Crawford" in the strip - has not been definitively identified.

An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

The article suggests possible explanations for the variation in the effects of labour shortages on union bargaining power. To this end, a new conceptual model centred on the effectiveness of power is proposed, which lies at the intersection between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’: it therefore combines both the unions' ability to construct collective strategies and use their resources (power to) and their ability to exert a decisive influence on the other party to generate results that are beneficial to them (power over). In an attempt to avoid the determinism often associated with ‘power over’, this model proposes the integration of elements specific to the negotiation process, thus recognising the importance of actors' strategies. By means of interviews with experienced union negotiators, this article demonstrates that the same phenomenon, in this case the labour shortage, produces differentiated effects depending on the subjects of negotiation and the strategies deployed by the players, by affecting both the quality of the strategic leverages, the challenges posed to the unions' organizational capacity and the nature and strength of the employer resistance in negotiation. Furthermore, this theoretical model facilitates an enhanced dialogue between literature focusing on the unions' agentivity and that focused on negotiation strategies and processes, while providing an analytical framework for labor relations practitioners to understand the effects of environmental changes on their bargaining power.

In recent decades, China's rapid economic expansion has been accompanied by a rise in corporate ethical scandals, which have drawn increasing attention to unethical pro-organizational behaviour (UPB)—actions intended to benefit the organization but violating ethical norms. While often justified by employees as organizationally beneficial, UPB carries significant psychological and behavioural consequences. Using cognitive dissonance theory, we examine how UPB leads to time theft through the chain mediation of ego depletion and moral sensitivity, with managerial recognition serving as a key boundary condition. We collected data from 432 randomly selected retail employees through a structured questionnaire, including demographic data and measures of UPB, ego depletion, moral sensitivity, managerial recognition and time theft. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 27.0 for preliminary analyses (e.g., reliability, correlation) and MPLUS 8.3 for path analysis and hypothesis testing, including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and mediation analysis. The results show that UPB increases ego depletion and directly promotes time theft, while also reducing moral sensitivity indirectly through ego depletion. Ego depletion and moral sensitivity sequentially mediate the relationship between UPB and time theft. Importantly, managerial recognition moderates the mediation path by strengthening the positive relationship between ego depletion and time theft. These findings reveal not only the underlying psychological mechanism of UPB but also how organizational feedback can unintentionally reinforce deviant behaviour. We conclude that organizations should carefully evaluate recognition practices and implement ethics-oriented support systems to mitigate the hidden costs of UPB.

This article reflects on the managerial challenges associated with the day-to-day management of subcontractors. Based on a survey of site managers working for large Belgian construction companies, we show how the day-to-day management of subcontractors leads to numerous arbitration situations aimed at ensuring the successful execution of projects. We detail the evolution of everyday management practices, which are increasingly aimed at attracting and retaining subcontractors who have become particularly scarce and indispensable in the context of structural shortages of skilled local labor. This analysis leads us to a discussion highlighting 1) the importance of local management in the management of subcontractor relationships, 2) the interdependences generated by the current state of the labor market, and 3) the risks of these developments for local management professions.

This article explores the challenges facing injured migrant farm workers in the workers’ compensation system in Canada's province of Ontario, with a focus on their fight for return to work justice. Told from the perspective of one of the lawyers who represented the workers, it highlights a recent victory achieved by 4 workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in defending their rights to workers’ compensation support. The workers’ compensation tribunal decided that the workers’ compensation board must evaluate these workers’ ability to return to work, access retraining, and receive compensation based on their labor markets in Jamaica—instead of based on fictional job prospects in Ontario. The tribunal also called out the need to consider systemic anti-Black racism in workers’ compensation law and policy. The article analyzes how this legal victory could reshape workers’ compensation policy in Ontario for injured migrant farm workers. It also discusses the implications of the win for injured workers in other temporary work programs and precarious employment sectors.

Grounded in occupational justice and sociotechnical perspectives, this focused ethnographic study explored how immigrant platform workers construct meaning through diverse forms of occupational engagement—doing, being, becoming, and belonging—within sociotechnical contexts. Drawing on interviews with 30 immigrant platform workers in Vancouver, Canada, the study highlights the heterogeneity of platform labour, moving beyond commonly studied sectors such as ride-hailing and food delivery to challenge conventional narratives that frame platform-mediated employment solely as income-generating activity. The findings, organized into four interrelated themes, provide an in-depth account of how workers engage in, make sense of, and reconfigure their occupations within sociotechnically mediated contexts. The first theme, Doing Within and Beyond Sociotechnical Boundaries, examines how participants’ everyday occupations are shaped by both the technical demands of platforms and the social negotiations required to maintain client relationships, reputations, and relevance. The second theme, Being at the Edge of Visibility, explores how the interplay of social and technical systems renders workers simultaneously visible, through metrics, ratings, and platform profiles; and invisible, through lack of recognition and relational connection. The third theme, Boundless Becoming, reveals the fluid and aspirational nature of participants’ occupational trajectories, shaped by transnational opportunities and sociotechnical structures. Finally, Belonging Beyond the Bubble highlights how these workers cultivate inclusion within platform-specific communities while navigating broader structures of marginalization. This paper contributes to a more inclusive understanding of occupational engagement in platform-mediated labor, emphasizing the importance of supporting diverse occupational needs, rights, and aspirations beyond economic outcomes.

Analyzes the state of trade unionism in France with particular reference to union participation in the pensions movement of 2023 and the formation of a left-wing popular front during the 2024 national election. Argues that this return to the political sphere by unions during a time of crisis is in contrast to their narrow, industrial relations focus (called "démocratie social") that has predominated over the past 30 years. Concludes that political unionism and a class-based focus on the broader representation of work are the strategic challenges. The text is an address originally given by the author at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal, on June 19, 2024.

Digital content creation is a growing area of labour in Canada. Alongside the development of this labour market, it has been reported there are rising issues of harassment, racism, and racial representation. Research germane to this area has provided rich qualitative accounts of how harassment and social oppression impact marginalized content creators. This study builds on this scholarly area to demonstrate quantitatively the ways in which harassment manifests in a Canadian setting. Using data from an online survey targeting Canadian content creators (N = 103), I specifically examine the incidence of harassment and racism among this population. Drawing on critical race theories, I argue that although online harassment is a widespread workplace hazard for content creators – regardless of identity, the consequences of this harassment are qualitatively different for those who have been historically marginalized. I expand on these findings to articulate how these impacts have downstream effects for marginalized creators, which may hinder their ability to sustain their labour in this environment. Finally, I situate these findings in the platformized environment within which these workplace hazards exist and problematize the arms-length approach that platforms take in regulating these hazards.

Labour shortages have become increasingly widespread across Europe and other advanced economies since the post-2008 recovery, due to rising demand and structural labour market transitions—digital, green and demographic. They further worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, through shifts in worker preferences, and again during the post-pandemic economic rebound. While policymakers and academics often attribute the shortages to skill gaps, which may be reduced via training or increased migration, there is growing recognition that unattractive wages and poor working conditions are also hindering recruitment.