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To commemorate the Canadian Industrial Relations Association’s (CIRA-ACRI) 60th anniversary, Relations industrielles-Industrial Relations (RI-IR) and CIRA have agreed to publish a special issue to advance and consolidate knowledge in our field. For more than a century in North America, industrial relations scholars and practitioners have been studying work and employment problems, which remain age-old under capitalist models of production but are becoming more diverse and complex. For instance, while precarious work, occupational health and safety and technological change have always challenged workers, the global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that we have not come as far as we think in creating employment systems or labour policies that facilitate work-life balance, protect worker incomes against social risks, achieve employment equity, retain the people and skills required for effective operation of organizations and respect workers’ exercise of fundamental rights. More and more, practitioners must deal with what some call a “polycrisis”—several crises happening at once (e.g., population aging, inflation, changing worker preferences, remote work and/or a return to face-to-face work, generational demographic shifts). These crises combine with and exacerbate each other, thus making classic labour problems more unpredictable and complex. --Introduction

Bereavement scholarship predominantly explores psychological aspects of grief, which neglects the role of social, economic, and political factors that shape the space allotted to accommodate these experiences. The current Canadian social context offers minimal space to honour bereavement as a part of the human condition. Aiming to respond to calls for enhancing bereavement care, this dissertation explores bereavement accommodation for workers in precarious employment in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on critical qualitative research and feminist ethics, this study employs policy analysis and in-depth interviews to generate multi-scalar knowledge on the everyday experiences of bereaved workers in precarious employment. I argue that there are discrepancies between how bereavement is represented in the social context and the everyday experiences of bereaved workers. The current representation portrays bereavement as a short-term, workplace disruption, neglecting grief and many forms of practical and emotional labour in bereavement. Participants expressed they were uninformed and unprepared for grief and bereavement labour, and that navigating the current context created tension, stress, exhaustion, isolation, and stigma. I argue we need a collective, ontological reckoning with our sense of autonomy, recognizing and honouring our interdependence in life and death. I argue that bereavement is a neglected public health issue driven by socio-political forces that devalue relationality, stigmatize emotions, and render bereavement an individual responsibility. This thesis makes broad recommendations for a public health approach to bereavement care, including enhancing grief literacy, creating more responsive care pathways and strategies for addressing individual and collective grief, and establishing safeguards for precarious workers.

The article reviews the book, "Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers," by Ahmed White.

The article reviews the book, "Medicare’s Histories: Origins, Omissions, and Opportunities in Canada," edited by Esyllt W. Jones, James Hanley, and Delia Gavrus.

The growth of industrial tourism and heritage has both fascinated and frustrated scholars of deindustrialization. Frequently, workers and class conflict are obscured in or expunged from the official narratives of industrial heritage. This article makes an original contribution to research on deindustrialization and industrial heritage through fieldwork in Sudbury, Ontario – a region that has seen a decades-long process of industrial restructuring. The article draws on 26 qualitative interviews with current and retired nickel miners and analyzes workers’ reflections on local mining history. It examines how workers understand the foreign takeover of the mines, job loss, and the transformation of Sudbury’s regional economy away from blue-collar industrial employment. The article then explores the growth of regional tourism based around the mining sector, looking particularly at Dynamic Earth, an attraction that teaches visitors about the history of nickel mining through guided tours of a closed mine. On the one hand, workers critique what they see as an obfuscation of class conflict in industrial heritage, while on the other hand, they experience these sites as confirmation of the historic contributions nickel miners have made to Sudbury and the surrounding region.

This article examines the history of, and legal precedent set by, Four B Manufacturing v. United Garment Workers of America, a 1980 Supreme Court of Canada case involving an Indigenous-owned manufacturing firm that resisted the efforts of its Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers to form a union on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a reserve in southeastern Ontario. The employer, Four B, contested the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and argued, unsuccessfully, that as an "Indian enterprise," its own operations were a matter of federal jurisdiction. We return to the case of Four B for three interrelated reasons. First, we argue that Four B remains relevant because of the ways that the political economy of settler-colonial Canada continues to structure Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment as ongoing sites of tension. Second, as the inaugural case dealing with the "core of Indianness" – a contested legal concept used by the courts to determine federal jurisdiction over Indigenous labour – this case both set the legal precedent and shaped the subsequent political terrain of Indigenous labour relations. Third, the issues addressed in Four B contextualize recent jurisdictional struggles over Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment in what we term the "Indigenous public sector" – namely, health care, social services, and First Nations government administration. The article reviews the case history of Four B, setting this against the backdrop of deindustrialization in southeastern Ontario during the period, before tracing how the case influenced the juridical and political landscape of Indigenous labour relations. We close by considering the potential tensions between Indigenous self-determination and the exercise of collective bargaining rights by Indigenous workers.

The article reviews the book, "Querelle de Roberval," by Kevin Lambert.

On 15 August 1983, 9,500 workers from the Montréal locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union went on strike for the first time in 43 years. The strike became known as “la grève de la fierté” and made clear that the women working in the city’s garment factories were taking a stand against the layoffs and closures prompted by industrial restructuring and deindustrialization. However, the strike’s success was limited, revealing the extent to which the structural inequities in the garment industry had calcified along gendered, classed, and ethnic lines. The union executive had grown increasingly distant from its rank-and-file, and it was immigrant women workers who were left to organize against the flurry of closures and the corresponding decline in their working conditions. The campaign leading up to the 1983 strike, organized by the Comité d’action des travailleurs du vêtement, articulated a series of demands for the improvement of workplace health and safety conditions, better benefits, and more representative union leadership. With original archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that the 1983 “grève de la fierté” illustrates how the historically entrenched gendered structure of labour relations shaped the pathways of deindustrialization in Montréal’s garment industry.

The article reviews the book, "The Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919–30," edited by Barbara C. Allen.

In late December 2019, a new and emerging coronavirus came out of Wuhan, China. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, widely known as “COVID-19” (WHO, 2022), significantly impacted nearly every aspect of human life on Earth. This study, referred to throughout the thesis as a “project,” examined the intersection of collective bargaining agreements and COVID-19 in unionised environments in the public sector of Canada. --From Executive Summary

The Oshawa 1937 strike against General Motors was a major turning point in Canadian labour history. This thesis explores the factors that led to its success, including the historical background of working class struggle; the economic and political context of the times; prior organizing by Communists; the engagement of rank-and-file GM workers and the remarkable stewards’ body they established; and the support and leadership of the UAW International union. The influence of Communists meant that the strike incorporated many features of what might now be called rank-and-file unionism: industrial unionism, democratic engagement of rank-and-file workers, militancy on the shop floor, building solidarity within the workforce and in the community, international solidarity, and rejecting cooperation with corporations. The contending forces of workers, corporations, and rabidly anti-union governments that clashed in Oshawa in 1937 are largely the same ones we see in the battles going on in North America today. Thus, understanding the factors that led to the success of the Oshawa strikers can provide valuable lessons to those seeking to revive today’s labour movement.

The article reviews the book, "The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives," by Adolph L. Reed, Jr., with a foreword by Barbara J. Fields.

Although mine closures are an inherent feature of extractive industry, they tend to receive less attention in the literature on deindustrialization than the closures of manufacturing and other heavy industries. Until recently, the settler-colonial context of hinterland mineral development and its impact on northern Indigenous lands and communities in Canada have also remained largely unexplored within this literature. Mineral development is historically associated with the introduction of a colonial-capitalist industrial modernity across Canada’s northern regions. Yet the boom-and-bust nature and ultimate ephemerality of mineral development has meant that resource-extractive regions have also been subject to intensive “cyclonic” periods of closure and deindustrialization. This article examines the experience of deindustrialization on the part of the Inuit community of Arctic Bay, who were largely “left behind” by the closure of Nanisivik, Canada’s first High Arctic mine. Through documentary sources and oral history interviews we illustrate how, for Arctic Bay Inuit who were engaged in the cyclonic economies of Nanisivik’s development and closure, there were myriad dimensions of social loss, displacement, and resentment associated with the failure of this industrial enterprise to deliver promised benefits to Inuit, beyond more commonly understood socioeconomic impacts such as job loss.

The article reviews the book, "1972. Répression et dépossession politique," by Olivier Ducharme.

The aim: to rejuvenate study and understanding of class relations in advanced capitalism. The book is an original synthesis of theorizing about class grounded in the production process, revealing a distinct tripartite class structure of owners, managers and non-managerial workers. Changes since the 1980s are traced and significant increases of non-managerial professional employees and middle managers are documented beyond any prior empirical research. Higher levels of oppositional and revolutionary class consciousness are conceptualized in terms of support for rights of capital and labour, and the extent of their expression in employed labour forces is estimated in terms only previously attempted briefly in the wake of 1960s protest movements. Connections between objective class positions and levels of class consciousness are analyzed in unprecedented depth; the solidary hegemonic consciousness of corporate capitalists, declining pro-capital oppositional consciousness among other employers and upper managers, and the pro-labour oppositional consciousness of pluralities of non-managerial workers (including professional employees) are all documented more fully than in prior studies. Strategic connections between class, class consciousness and issues of poverty and global warming are identified. Contending class forces’ engagement in actions toward an imminent system tipping point are uniquely traced. Main sources of evidence are all the national surveys in G7 and Nordic countries in the 1980s that provide relevant data, and the author’s unique Canadian national surveys in 2004, 2010 and 2016, supplemented by interviews with class leaders. A website encourages further class-based studies of advanced capitalism with similar measures to aid ecological sustainability and economic democracy. --Publisher's description (WorldCat record)

This article is about recent changes in the union strategy of Spanish platform workers. Using a socio-spatial approach to labour processes and disputes, we first describe the context of union organizing: how the business model of delivery platforms has evolved and how it is regulated in Spain. We then analyze the first initiatives to organize couriers in Spain. These initiatives can be classified under the heading of community unionism and have focused on specific spaces of union activism (state regulation and community support). Next, we explore how their newly won employee status has caused couriers to adopt more conventional forms of union organizing and focus on other spaces. Finally, we discuss the main challenges of reconciling union models with the working world of delivery platforms.

Employees living with disabilities often experience negative social attitudes about disability from employers and co-workers in their workplaces, as well as both overt and subtle forms of violence, discrimination, and harassment.... Our findings show that ableism often shows up in the context of employees needing accommodations to best do their job and is also present in the daily experiences of existing as a person living with a disability in a workplace. --From Introduction

Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts toward state-led economic development. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale industrial planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. State corporate entities, such as Industrial Estates Limited, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province’s efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This article examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia’s “new industries” that emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this Stellarton-based firm reveals how structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within sectors that were completely distinct from the province’s cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This case includes a reflection on the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia and represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies.

Introduces the theme of deindustrialization in Canada including history, gender, regions, technology, and resistance Summarizes the various contributions to this special issue of the journal.

The article reviews the book, "The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program," by Pallavi Banerjee.