Your search
Results 187 resources
-
This article reviews the book, "The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario," by Ryan O’Connor.
-
The article reviews the book, "Revolutionizing Retail: Workers, Political Action, and Social Change," by Kendra Coulter.
-
The article reviews the book, "According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury's Ukrainian Community," by Stacey Zembrzycki.
-
This article reviews the book, "The Match Girl and the Heiress," by Seth Koven.
-
The article reviews the book, "Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities," by Glenda Tibe Bonifacio.
-
The article reviews the book, "Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba," by Janis Thiessen.
-
While historians have been increasingly attentive to the politics and culture of social movements since the long sixties, they have engaged much less with the significance of anarchism within these activist currents. As part of an emerging field of anarchist studies, this article demonstrates that anarchist projects were critical in shaping postwar political radicalism in Vancouver and its relationship to a global pattern of cultural transformation, capitalist restructuring, and social movement activism. Specifically, the article investigates how and why Vancouver’s anarchist community created strong political, personal, and cultural connections with an emerging punk scene during the 1970s and early 1980s. It demonstrates that these relationships emerged from anarchism’s conflicting relationship with the city’s New Left and countercultural communities in the long sixties, as well as from anarchists’ specific engagement with punk as a tool for revolutionary struggle in the wake of the sixties. Overall, the article argues that anarchists cultivated connections with punk in this context because they saw it as awash with the potential to bridge generations of political dissent; to support emerging activist projects; and to help usher in new expressions of radical culture in the city. In so doing, the article offers new insights into the political, social, and cultural legacies of the long sixties, in Vancouver and beyond.
-
The organization of work through production networks undermines the application of labour law to a growing proportion of workers. Protections put in place by labour law, specifically devised to apply within the hierarchical and bilateral structure of the employer/employee relationship, are ill-fitted to tackle the multilateral structure of network production in which market and hierarchical relationships are entangled. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to some as a possible answer to these challenges. The author develops a normative and functional framework to assess the promise and limits of CSR as a regulatory tool. The framework is grounded in human dignity, as concep- tualized by human rights law and political philosophy. A holistic understanding of human dignity highlights the interdependency of labour law's basic func- tions: providing minimum working conditions, ensuring employer accountability for working hazards, and enabling workers' collective action. The author then applies the human dignity framework to codes of conduct, as described and analyzed in current literature on the subject. She concludes that CSR codes and their implementation often fall short of what is required in the workplace by the human dignity principle.
-
Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that was failing to assume responsibility for isolated and uneducated men on the frontier, as well as working-class men who responded to their poor working conditions by succumbing to moral diseases that left them incapable of governing themselves, leading their families, or functioning as rational citizens. Fitzpatrick developed a double strategy to head off this crisis: he lobbied the state for structural change, and at the same time promoted a home-like environment for reading, as well as particular works of fiction, as a means of reminding male workers of their duty to self, family, and nation. Despite the association’s apparent interest in the cultivation of the liberal individual, its reliance on the reading room and on the fiction of popular authors such as Ralph Connor as surrogates for the absent family demonstrates the centrality of the apparently private sphere to early 20th-century Canada’s industrializing economy.
-
The article reviews the book, "Solidarités provinciales. Histoire de la Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Nouveau-Brunswick," by David Frank.
-
The aging workforce poses perplexing policy challenges, even in Canada, which is demographically young among comparable countries. We ask what the evidence shows about whether there are, or will be, labour or skills shortages as the workforce ages. Highlighting the challenges of measuring labour/skills shortages, we explore peer-reviewed research in the 2000–2013 period. No evidence is found of a national labour shortage in the foreseeable future. In fact, the workforce is predicted to grow for the coming two decades with less shrinkage than in the past as a result of retirements. Regional and occupational shortages occur at times, as well as underutilized skills.
-
This paper engages with the varieties of capitalism literature to investigate the employee representation and consultation approaches of liberal market economy multinational companies (MNCs), specifically Australian, British and US MNCs operating in Australia. While the literature would suggest commonality amongst these MNCs, the paper considers whether the evidence points to similarity or variation amongst liberal market headquartered MNCs. The findings contribute to filling a recognized empirical gap on MNC employment relations practice in Australia and to a better understanding of within category varieties of capitalism similarity and variation. Drawing on survey data from MNCs operating in Australia, the results demonstrated that UK-owned MNCs were the least likely to report collective structures of employee representation. Moreover, it was found that Australian MNCs were the most likely to engage in collective forms of employee representation and made less use of direct consultative mechanisms relative to their British and US counterparts. In spite of the concerted individualization of the employment relations domain over previous decades, Australian MNCs appear to have upheld more long-standing national institutional arrangements with respect to engaging with employees on a collective basis. This varies from British and US MNC approaches which denotes that our results display within category deviation in the variety of capitalism liberal market economy typology. Just as Hall and Soskice described their seminal work on liberal market economy (LME) and coordinated market economy (CME) categories as a “work-in-progress” (2001: 2), we too suggest that Australia’s evolution in the LME category, and more specifically its industrial relations system development, and the consequences for employment relations practices of its domestic MNCs, may be a work-in-progress.
-
This article reviews the book, "The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest," by Stephen Tuck.
-
The article reviews the book, "Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940-1980," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.
-
This article reviews the book, "Canada the Good: A Short History of Vice since 1500," by Marcel Martel.
-
This article reviews the book, "Hurrah Revolutionaries: The Polish Canadian Communist Movement, 1918–1948," by Patryk Polec.
-
This article reviews the book, "Putting the State on Trial: The Policing of Protest during the G20 Summit," edited by Margaret E. Beare, Nathalie Des Rosiers, and Abigail C. Deshman.
-
The article reviews the book, "Le travail de prévention : Les relations professionnelles face aux risques cancérogènes," by Arnaud Mias, et al.
-
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 article reviews the book, "The Employee: A Political History," by Jean-Christian Vinel