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Introduces the book's principal themes and comments on the essays contained therein.

In [exploring] the labour movement's engagement with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, [the author] considers the labour movement's pursuit of legal strategies as a method of advancing its strategic interests. ...[The author] argues that labour's judicial-based strategies have produced mixed results for labour, and that ultimately, granting small protections to unions, courts have simultaneously reinforced legal constraints on workers' ability to to organize, associate and challenge the inqualities inherent in the employment relationship. --From editors' introduction

Explores labour's participation in coalition-building on the issue of the environment. ...[The author] argues that social unionism, as a general union commitment, is not enough, gvien the real material conflicts to sort out between different ways of defining and acting on workers' interest. --Editor's introduction

The ubiquity of the immigrant worker in the service sector has come to symbolize the global city, with the taxi industry as a prime example. As participants in a growing number of international conferences, festivals, and business meetings fly into Toronto, they are met and taken to their destination by a taxi driver who himself has journeyed here from some part of the Global South. The trajectories of the taxi drivers greeting visitors in any other “global city,” at least in North America, such as New York or San Francisco or Vancouver, are similar…. From introduction

[The authors] explore the narrow and legalistic form of labour solidarity entrenched and institutionalized in the wake of the Second World War, and argue that the seeds of labour's current political impasse are to be found in that era. --Editor's introduction

[E]xplores the dynamics of labour organizing amongst migrant workers in Canada, focusing on two case studies. First, [the authors] examine recent efforts to unionize migrant farmworkers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. ...[The authors] then turn to the case of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, Québec. ...[Concludes] by assessing the limits and possibilities of [various] strategies, particularly in terms of the implications for labour organizing amongst the growning number of temporary foreign workers in Canada. --From editors' introduction

Analyzes the role played organized labour in advancing women's equity issues in the political arena, with particular focus on the period since the 2006 election of the Conservative [federal] government. --Editor's introduction

This article explores the relationship between precarious employment and precarious migrant legal status. Original research on immigrant workers' employment experiences in Toronto examines the effects of several measures including human capital, network, labor market variables, and a change in legal status variable on job precarity as measured by an eight-indicator Index of Precarious Work (IPW). Precarious legal status has a long-lasting, negative effect on job precarity; both respondents who entered and remained in a precarious migratory status and those who shifted to secure status were more likely to remain in precarious work compared to respondents who entered with and remained in a secure status. This leaves no doubt that migrant-worker insecurity and vulnerability stem not only from having ‘irregular’ status. We introduce the notion of a work–citizenship matrix to capture the ways in which the precariousness of legal status and work intersect in the new economy. People and entire groups transition through intersecting work–citizenship insecurities, where prior locations have the potential to exert long-term effects, transitions continue to occur indefinitely over the life-course, and gains on one front are not always matched on others.

Discusses the growth of precarious work in Canada in the context of labour law, employment law, and union density. Analyzes two organizing initiatives at a community level and at an industry level in which the Service Employees International Union, Local 2 Canada, participated: the Good Jobs for All campaign in Toronto and the Justice for Janitors national campaign. Contents: Development, globalization and decent work: an emerging Southern labour paradigm / Edward Webster -- Beyond the capitalist logic: theoretical debates and social experiences / Melisa Serrano and Edlira Xhafa -- Economy, ecology and the national limits to growth: the global poly-crisis and South Africa responses / Devan Pillay -- Understanding the past to change the present: the social compromise, the corporate theory of society and the future shape of industrial relations / Conor Cradden -- The new economy and labour's decline: questioning their association / Bill Dunn -- Global unions, local labour, and the regulation of international labour standards: mapping ITF labour rights strategies / Mark P. Thomas -- Private equity investment and labour: faceless capital and the challenges to trade unions in Brazil / José Ricardo Barbosa Gonçalves and Maria Alejandra Caporale Madi -- Labour and the locusts: trade unions responses to corporate governance regulation in the European Union / Laura Horn -- Transnational framework agreements: new bargaining tools impacting on corporate governance? / Isabelle Schömann -- Collective actions push trade union reform in China / Lin Yanling and Ju Wenhui -- Creating a functional state: redefining the labour-capital relationship in Nepal / Chandra D. Bhatta -- A rowing boat on the open sea, or in a haven from financial and environmental crises? New Zealand, the global financial crisis and an union response / Bill Rosenberg -- Turkey after 2008: another crisis - the same responses? / Yasemin Özgün and Özgür Müfüoglu -- Addressing competition: strategies for organizing precarious workers: cases from Canada / Maya Bhullar -- Perils and prospects: the US labour movement's response to the economic crisis / Jason Russell -- Meeting the right's attack on public sector unions in the United States: are there effective strategies? / Lee Adler.

This essay explores why the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (and later the United Steelworkers of America) in mining towns on both sides of the [US-Canada] border remained so resistant to female employment and activism from 1940 to 1980. By looking closely at how ideas about gender influenced union politics, we see how working-class women and men in mining communities both embraced and contested these ideologies. --Excerpt from author's essay

This chapter focuses on women employed in labour-intensive agriculture in the global North, specifically women from rural Mexico who take up waged work as migrant workers in Canadian agriculture. It uses the term 'migrant worker' to refer to people employed in Canada under temporary visas who do not hold Canadian citizenship or permanent residency. Global restructuring of agrifood markets has resulted in rising levels of female employment in high value agriculture in the global South. Women tend to form a smaller percentage of the permanent workforce employed in commercial agriculture, often constituting the majority of the temporary, seasonal, and casual workforce that provides the greater portion of labour. The chapter shows the systems of labour control and forms of work organization made possible through these programs rely on multiple, reinforcing and contextual systems of oppression, particularly the power relations based on gender, race, and class, among others. --Introduction Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations in which global processes that reconstitute gender and class interconnect with and take shape in a particular form of locality - the rural. The book is innovative in that it: - responds to calls for more critical work on the rural 'other' - contributes to scholarship on gender and rurality, but does so through the lens of class. This book places the question of gender, rurality and difference at its centre through its focus on class - addresses the urban bias of much class scholarship as well as the lack of gender analysis in much rural and class academic work - focuses on the ways that class mediates the construction and practices of rural men/masculinities and rural women/femininities - challenges prevalent (and divergent) assumptions with chapters utilising contemporary theorisations of class With the empirical strongly grounded in theory, this book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.

In Chapter 9, Andrea Doucet describes patterns of paid and unpaid work in families, first by looking at what has been an important topic in sociology: the relationship between gender and paid work. She considers how paid work has been dominated by a male model of employment and then discusses the changes to that model in recent years. Historically and even today, paid work, like unpaid work, has been and is gendered. Doucet examines the gender division of labour with respect to the connections between paid and unpaid work, the relationship between paid and unpaid work and state policies, and the differences and inequalities in paid and unpaid work. --Editor's summary

Black Canadians provides an authoritative reference for teachers, students and the general public who seek to know more about the Black Diaspora in North America. Arguments made in this book may be unpleasant for those with little appetite for pointed, provocative views and analysis from the standpoint of Black people. For those with a genuine interest in venturing beyond established orthodoxies and simplistic solutions to the contentious ethno-racial problems in Canada, this book will be insightful and worthy of close attention. This new edition expands the regional coverage of Black history, updates all the statistics with the 2006 census data, and adds important new material on multiculturalism and employment equity. --Publisher's description

A survey of the global trajectory of labour history. Specially commissioned essays by labour historians of international repute consider: early labour history traditions, new conceptions of class, gender, ethnicity, culture, community and power. Whether the 1960s can be regarded as turning point in labour history the general historiographical climate in the mid-twentieth century the institutional context (e.g. the evolution of labour history societies, historical associations and journals) links between labour history and the labour movement Many authors are connected with the British Society for the Study of Labour History; all are experts in the labour history of particular countries. They analyse key debates, question dominant paradigms, acknowledge minority critiques and consider future directions. --Publisher's description.

This collection of original essays investigates the social, political, and economic transformations associated with the emergence of the so-called new economy, and their impact on the organization of work within Canada. Essays in the book discuss the ways in which new management strategies, new communication technologies, and efforts to revitalize the labour movement have transformed the Canadian workplace. Focusing on changes in work organization, individuals' expectations regarding work, and the institutional support provided for workers and their families, the text constructs a critical analysis of the "new economy" in order to identify both the potential for quality work experiences and the ways in which the organization of work remains a profound social problem. --Publisher's description

J.S. Woodsworth was a prominent Canadian socialist who was a member of the Canadian Parliament from 1921 to 1942 and a founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of the present New Democratic Party (NDP). This paper uses a Gramscian framework to explore his promotion of labour rights in the inter-war years, which I argue was an interregnum, a period when the hegemony of the old order was weakened. In this period, counter-hegemonic projects were launched to challenge the old order but, at the same time, so too were liberal passive revolutionary projects that aimed to restore the hegemony of capitalist relation by accommodating some of the demands of disgruntled workers, as well as coercive ones to restore order by force. J.S. Woodsworth strenuously fought against rising coercion and attempted to pursue a politics of amelioration in the hopes it would eventually lead toward socialism, but in the end it was the liberal counter-hegemonic project that was successful. I then examine the Woodsworth legacy for our time, a moment that I argue is also an interregnum, when the hegemony of the post-war order has been weakened, but because subordinated classes are weak, a counter-hegemonic project is not in the offing. Instead, we are witnessing an increase in coercion, on the one hand, and a weak politics of amelioration on the other.