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The Mill - Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest explores the power that a single industry can wield. For fifty years, the pulp mill near Pictou in northern Nova Scotia has buoyed the local economy and found support from governments at all levels. But it has also pulped millions of acres of forests, spewed millions of tonnes of noxious emissions into the air, consumed quadrillions of litres of fresh water and then pumped them out again as toxic effluent into nearby Boat Harbour, and eventually into the Northumberland Strait. From the day it began operation in 1967, the mill has fomented protest and created deep divisions and tensions in northern Nova Scotia. This story is about people whose livelihoods depend on the pulp mill and who are willing to live with the "smell of money." It's about people whose well-being, health, homes, water, air, and businesses have been harmed by the mill's emissions and effluent. It's about the heartache such divisions cause and about people who, for the sake of peace, keep their thoughts about the mill to themselves. But it's also about hope, giving voice to those who led the successive groups that have protested and campaigned for a cleaner mill - First Nations, fishers, doctors, local councillors, tourism operators, artists and musicians, teachers and woodlot owners. Their personal stories are interwoven into a historical arc that traces the mill's origins and the persistent environmental and social problems it causes to this day. Baxter weaves a rich tapestry of storytelling, relevant to everyone who is concerned about how we can start to renegotiate the relationship between economy, jobs, and profits on one hand, and human well-being, health, and the environment on the other. The Mill tells a local story with global relevance and appeal. --Publisher's description

Focusing on the Eastern Townships area of Quebec, this dissertation attends to the complex values that can be assigned to landscape as visual representation, and to landscape as place. The case-studies, beginning at the turn of the 20th-century, consider landscape in relation to a broad network of social relations and cultural meanings. Section I of the thesis starts by examining paintings and illustrations of loggers by F.S. Coburn as a way to address the logging industry in the Eastern Townships, and to consider the presence or absence of labour in landscape representation. Section II concentrates on early 20th-century postcards of towns, sites of leisure and asbestos mines in the region. I approach these postcards as modern material agents that articulate the everydayness of landscape and place through their imagery, as well as through their usage. Section III comes up to the present day through a discussion of an eco-park in Magog that negotiates the tension between ecological activism and eco-tourism, as the Eastern Townships struggles to achieve a post-industrial identity. Organized into three chronological and overlapping sections that span 115 years of one region's history, the thesis develops an approach to landscape that is both art-historical and interdisciplinary. This study builds on recent scholarship within Canadian art history that challenges the association of landscape art with a myth about the country’s uninhabited wilderness; the region's landscapes studied here are inhabited, and imbued with rural, industrial and bilingual histories. The visual culture methodology deployed here means that canonical modes of artistic landscape representations are addressed relative to landscape images circulating on postcards, newspaper and book illustrations, documentary photographs, a labour recruitment booklet and an ecopark's website for example. The theoretical and scholarly foundation of this thesis has been constructed by drawing on discussions of landscape by art historians, but also by sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and philosophers. It is this interdisciplinary breadth that allows landscapes to be regarded as sites of everyday human interactions, that inevitably intersect with collective, commercial and political motives, and with cultural ideals, interests, and values. The writings of Henri Lefebvre on the value of the everyday have been important for this thesis, as has his critique of capitalist practices of labour and leisure. Another key author is Félix Guattari who was also highly critical of capitalism, while turning his attention to the state of the world's post-industrial ecology. Likewise, this thesis calls attention to the role of capitalist initiatives in the production of everyday landscapes. This analysis of diverse landscape images is meant to shed light on the Eastern Townships' complex identity as it transitions from a former industrial modern era to its current post-industrial phase. This thesis asks what the term landscape has come to imply measured against social tensions relating to class differences, or economic and environmental imperatives, and how its range of meanings can encompass territory, property, picture, place, and environment.

À partir d’une recherche qualitative auprès de 48 ex-militants syndicaux ayant eu plus de 80% de leur temps de travail pour leur syndicat, de 10 directeurs des Ressources humaines et de trois organisations syndicales, une organisation patronale et un cabinet d’accompagnement, cet article questionne la reconversion des militants syndicaux en dehors de la sphère syndicale. En s’appuyant sur le contexte français et la littérature existante sur la reconversion des militants syndicaux, nos travaux soulignent les stratégies mises en place par les ex-militants afin d’assurer leur employabilité militante externe.Ces stratégies sont influencées par la perception qu’ils ont de leur employabilité. Plusieurs facteurs externes et individuels affectent cette perception. Les facteurs individuels sont le capital social perçu, la nature du départ (subi ou volontaire), le niveau de poste précèdent et le niveau atteint dans l’organisation syndicale. Ces facteurs individuels n’expliquent pas tout. D’autres facteurs externes, tels la stigmatisation dont peut faire l’objet le militant à cause de son engagement syndical, le lien contractuel et l’accompagnement du syndicat, expliquent la perception que le militant a de son employabilité. Celle-ci entraine soit une non mobilisation du capital social, soit une mobilisation offensive du capital social. Dans ce dernier cas, l’ex-permanent peut subir une phase d’observation de la part de l’entreprise d’accueil.En s’intéressant à la reconversion syndicale, cette recherche constitue un renversement de positionnement par rapport aux nombreux travaux analysant la carrière syndicale. Le capital social des militants n’est plus pensé au sein de l’organisation syndicale, mais en dehors de celle-ci, et il permet de proposer le concept d’employabilité militante externe, à savoir la capacité d’un ex-militant syndical d’obtenir un travail et de se maintenir en emploi en dehors du syndicat grâce à la mobilisation de son capital social.

In the twenty years since Quebec introduced its family policy in 1997, with the objective of supporting the parents of young children, the province has implemented a number of measures aimed at promoting work-life balance which are in many respects more generous than those elsewhere in Canada. However, while enhancing rights to maternity, parental and paternity leave upon the arrival of a child, Quebec has done little to address conflicts between work and family life after a parent's return to work, especially conflicts resulting from routine, daily obligations towards children, the elderly, or other family mem- bers. This paper examines the adequacy of existing legal mechanisms available to Quebec workers under human rights and employment standards legislation for reducing work-family conflict. In this regard, the author notes that 'family status" or 'family situation" has not been recognized as a prohibited ground of discrimination under Quebec's Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and the province's courts have consistently resisted expanding the scope of the pro- hibited ground of "civil status" to include parental obligations in the employ- ment context. Furthermore, while the Labour Standards Act provides for various short- and long-term leaves of absence for family responsibilities, the legislation imposes restrictive conditions on entitlement, e.g. the obligation in question must generally be "extraordinary" in nature, and the employee must prove that she took steps to find an alternative solution before seeking leave. Overall, Quebec law has preserved management's prerogative to determine the organization and scheduling of work, maintaining a conception of the "ideal" or "normative" worker as one who has no family responsibilities. Ultimately, the author argues, meaningful reform must take aim at the crux of the matter - employees' ability to control their working time.

In the early twentieth-century, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) initially hesitated to discuss the politics of reproduction as a means of easing material inequity for women and men of the working class. Nevertheless, over five decades, this topic appeared often in the CPCs official and unofficial publications, illustrating a sustained interest in the taboo subject. My thesis draws upon archival materials, communist and mainstream newspapers, and medical periodicals to survey contemporary opinions of birth control, abortion, eugenics, juvenile delinquency, venereal disease, and state medicine. Using the lens of left-politics, these topics are contextualized with reference to the extant literature on the histories of politics, sex, reproduction, labour, and medicine in Canada and beyond. Far from being confined to a few secretive individuals, the militant left engaged a dense network of activists who took stock of the social as well as physical reproduction of the nation. Often their interests appeared indistinguishable from the mainstream, and occasionally overlapped with those of their right-leaning opponents. The CPC unfailingly argued for an understanding of sex and reproduction that reflected its Marxist worldview. Some multi-generational discussions were so durable that they would outlast and outgrow the militant left to emerge within the rhetoric of a multitude of Canadian liberation groups by the late sixties and early seventies. I argue that investigation of the politics underwriting the ideas of the CPC and its ideology of a healthy, socialized body politic, elucidates complexities in the formation of mainstream Canadian approaches to sex, reproduction, and health.

In this article, I argue that graduate employees took on the political identity of precarious workers who face job insecurity and income insecurity, drawing attention to the casualization of work in the academic labor market in Canada, and the cost of undertaking graduate studies in Canadian universities. Their argument appealed to media, faculty, undergraduate students, and supportive media, which was key to building solidarity and public support for graduate employees’ struggle. Building on social movement unionism literature, I show how this identity moved the debate away from the bargaining table and into broader coalition building, suggesting a broader social movement unionism among academic workers.

Union renewal research calls for moving beyond broad terms, like community unionism, to specify how social relations of work shape renewal for different workers, sectors and contexts. Analysis of interviews with union officials and union members in publicly funded, in-home personal support reveal two community dimensions: both caring and racialized relations between workers and service recipients. Scholarship on care workers emphasizes empathy and coalition with service recipients as a key aspect of union renewal, yet says little about racialized tensions. Studies of domestic workers emphasize organizing in response to racialization, but provide little insight into caring social relations at work. This article develops arguments that both positive and negative worker–recipient relations shape union organizing and representation in the service sector by specifying the ways in which racialization contributes to this dynamic. It suggests that anti-racist organizing at work, alongside coalition building and collective bargaining, are important renewal strategies for this sector.

This dissertation explores the nature of workers’ self-activity during World War II and the ensuing responses to these actions by the state and capital. A close examination of wartime strikes demonstrates that top-down efforts by unions to operate within normative industrial relations were generally failures. Far more likely to be effective were democratic strikes, generally illegal, called from the shopfloor. The Workers’ War further illustrates that while the government passed incredibly coercive legislation to control labour, such legislation failed to have a significant impact. Even where it was most influential and targeted it was eventually beaten through direct action. Even Japanese Canadian forced labour in work camps with armed guards, undertook effective strikes. Largely interested in institutional and legislative changes, the unions, far from being a militant force, spent much of their energy trying to stop or curtail strikes. This thesis contends that the concretion of industrial legality in Canada was imposed to control effective action. Rather than breaking unions of their militancy, the dearth of a state terror apparatus necessitated the creation of compulsory bargaining legislation. First, it argues that the creation of the modern industrial relations regime that forms the foundation for modern labour law was the result of effective workers’ action rather than militant unions. It further shows that the repressive apparatus of the state was unable to control workers, necessitating a structural adjustment. In a larger sense, this thesis argues that this story is at the centre of the history of capitalism in Canada. The imposition of capitalist social relations on the geographies that become Canada had the transformation of land into capital via labour at the very core of its project. Controlling labour was a central concern, and the manner in which labour relations were consolidated was a reflection of a negotiation between labour, capital, and state- a manifestly unequal negotiation that largely failed to reflect the interests of workers.

The article reviews the book, "Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement," by Premilla Nadasen.

hey are young and highly educated, but many “sharing economy” workers in the GTA are selling their services under precarious working conditions. Read the first comprehensive look at workers who sell “sharing economy” type services and the consumers who buy them in this new report.

In recent years K-12 school systems from New York to Mexico City to Toronto, serving vastly divergent students and communities, have been subject to strikingly similar waves of neoliberal policies by governments. A key manifestation has been the de-professionalization or deskilling of teachers. Organized labours response has been highly uneven geographically. Professional autonomy means a capacity and freedom of teachers to exercise their judgement in interpreting broad curriculum guidelines, into their day to day classroom activities. It is the primary obstacle to the further neoliberalization of education. The expansion of standardized instructional and evaluative techniques and technologies are necessary for opening new markets within schools and for weakening the collective power of teachers and their unions. Their proponents are limited by the existence of the classroom as a space of labour autonomy, run by experienced and highly educated teachers. Recognizing the significant crossover of policy at the North American scale alongside significant economic and political linkages, this dissertation centres on case studies in three cities, New York, Mexico City and Toronto. This dissertation assesses challenges to teachers professional autonomy from 2001 to 2016 across five dimensions of comparison. First are changes in governance, namely the centralization of authority, often legitimized by mobilizing policies from elsewhere. Second are policies which have shifted workplace power relations between principals and teachers, as with School Based Management programs that download budgetary, discipline and dismissal practices to school administrators. Third are the effect of standardized testing of students and teachers on the latters capacity to exercise professional judgement in the classroom through designing unique lesson plans, pedagogy and evaluation. Fourth is the creation of school choice for schools competing for enrolment and thereby funding, which has tended to perpetuate class and racial segregation. Finally, the ability of teachers unions to construct a multi scalar strategy is considered, including alliances with parents, communities and other sectors of labour. This dissertation concludes with recommendations for how teachers unions could respond to the challenge to professional autonomy with a stronger engagement on teacher practice and professional self-regulation.

This article reviews the book, "American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and their Struggle for Social and Political Justice," by Albert J. Raboteau.

L’externalisation, qui donne lieu à l’intégration indirecte du travail dans l’organisation productive, pose des défis importants pour la représentation collective des travailleuses et des travailleurs. C’est que le droit du travail a été établi en fonction d’un tout autre modèle organisationnel. Afin de mieux comprendre ces défis, nous avons mené trois études de cas sur la représentation collective en contexte d’externalisation des services publics d’aide à domicile au Québec durant la période 2003-2013. Les travailleuses concernées — majoritairement des femmes — occupent des emplois précaires chez trois types de prestataires privés intégrés à des réseaux locaux de services: entreprises d’économie sociale en aide domestique (EESAD), usagers du programme Chèque emploi-service (CES) et agences de location de personnel. Nous avons examiné si des pratiques de représentation collective de ces travailleuses existent et quels acteurs sociaux les portent. Nous avons aussi vérifié si ces pratiques se confinent à l’intérieur des frontières de l’entité identifiée comme l’employeur au sens juridique ou si elles sont « réticulaires », étendant la solidarité à la sphère du pouvoir stratégique (Appay, 1997) exercé par les autorités publiques dans les réseaux. Nos résultats montrent l’absence d’une représentation collective réticulaire dans ces réseaux locaux de services où la dévalorisation sexuée du travail, contrée en partie dans le secteur public, revient en force. Le personnel de 15% des EESAD est syndiqué, mais les pratiques de représentation syndicale n’interpellent que l’employeur reconnu au sens juridique, les EESAD. Dans les agences de location de personnel intégrées à ces réseaux locaux, aucune forme de représentation collective n’existe, ni dans le programme CES. Cependant, une action collective interpellant les autorités publiques au sujet des conditions d’emploi dans le CES a eu un certain succès ponctuel. Portée par une coalition d’associations locales représentant des personnes vivant avec des limitations fonctionnelles, elle ouvre la voie à l’idée d’alliances salariées-usagers autour de la qualité des services et de l’emploi.

This article integrates the employment strain model with the social stress model in order to reveal the mechanisms that explain the relation between precarious employment and mental well-being. This model is applied to the case of temporary agency employment by analysing 41 in-depth interviews with temporary agency workers from Canada. The results show how temporary agency workers perceive employment-related uncertainties and efforts mainly as negative and to a lesser extent as positive experiences, respectively evoking strain or activation. Further, it is revealed how uncertainties and efforts mutually reinforce each other, which increases strain, and how support can serve as a buffer.

This article provides an overview of some key issues related to immigration in Quebec. Quebec stands out from the rest of Canada in terms of the origin of its immigrants, who come mainly from francophone countries. Quebec immigrants are relatively better educated than those elsewhere in Canada, but have higher unemployment rates. Our overview of the research examining the impact of immigration on the economy found that immigration has a relatively small impact. Given the above, we suggest that immigration in Quebec should be maintained at current levels–at least in the short term–but that selection and integration policies should be improved by, among other things, putting more emphasis on the needs of employers. In addition, candidates with Canadian or Quebec experience should be favoured. Finally, the impact of these policies will be limited without more openness to immigrants on the part of employers.

This article reviews the book, "Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada," by Douglas McCalla.

This article reviews the book, "Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia's Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal," by Sharon McConnell-Sidorick.

This article provides a statistical picture of the economic well-being of Canadian children. We discuss changes in families, nationally and by province. We outline how Canadian policy in support of children has changed and how it differs across regions. Changes or differences in median incomes, in income distributions and in child poverty both before and after taxes and transfers, at different points of time, in different kinds of families, and in different provinces constitute the core of the article. Finally, the economic well-being of Canadian children in 2010 is compared with that of children in eight other affluent countries.

This article reviews the book, "The Making of Working-Class Religion," by Matthew Pehl.

While concerns and debates about an increased presence of non-citizen guest workers in agriculture in Canada have only more recently begun to enter the public arena, this dissertation probes how migrant agricultural workers have occupied a longer and more complex place in Canadian history than most Canadians may approximate. It explores the historical precedents of seasonal farm labour in Canada through the lens of the interior or the personal on the one hand, through an oral history approach, and the external or the structural on the other, in dialogue with existing scholarship and through a critical assessment of the archive. Specifically, it considers the evolution of seasonal farm work in Manitoba and British Columbia, and traces the eventual rise of an “offshore” labour scheme as a dominant model for agriculture at a national scale. Taking 1974 as a point of departure for the study of circular farm labour migration between Mexico and Canada, the study revisits questions surrounding Canadian views of what constitutes the ideal or injurious migrant worker, to ask critical questions about how managed farm labour migration schemes evolved in Canadian history. In addition, the dissertation explores how Mexican farm workers’ migration to Canada since 1974 formed a part of a wider and extended world of Mexican migration, and seeks to record and celebrate Mexican contributions to modern Canadian agriculture in historical contexts involving diverse actors. In exploring the contexts that have driven Mexican out-migration and transnational integration, it bridges oral accounts with a broader history that sets Mexican northward migration in hemispheric context. It reads agricultural migration upon various planes, including corporeality, experience, identity, masculinity, legality, “contra-modernity,” and the management of mobilities.