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For governments concerned with enhancing labour market efficiency, employer-sponsored temporary labour migration schemes have become increasingly popular. However, the equity implications of these arrangements, which constrain the mobility of migrant workers, have largely been ignored. This paper assesses the factors affecting the vulnerability of employer-sponsored migrant workers and addresses the question of whether these schemes comply with ethical principles relating to fair treatment. It draws upon migration ethics, political economy and socio-legal perspectives to evaluate visa schemes in Australia, Canada and Sweden. The paper argues that there is an ethically justifiable case for selectively restricting certain rights of migrant workers within clearly defined parameters. However, policies facilitating worker mobility, restricting sponsorship to higher-skilled occupations, promoting enforcement and worker representation, and providing accessible opportunities for permanent residency and citizenship help to ensure that employer-sponsored temporary labour migration schemes comply with ethical principles relating to the fair treatment of workers.

Cet article présente un cas de mobilisation contre les discriminations systémiques envers des travailleuses procurant des services d’assistance aux personnes (en anglais, care-workers), en grande majorité Noires et Haïtiennes, qui occupent des emplois aux normes dégradées dans des agences de placement fournissant du personnel pour un seul organisme parapublic. À l’intersection des mutations en cours dans la gestion de la main-d’oeuvre et de la réorganisation de la prise en charge des services d’assistance aux personnes, ce cas est représentatif de la façon dont se redessinent les frontières de la relation d’emploi. Les travailleuses mobilisées étant syndiquées, il permet aussi d’explorer un éventail d’attitudes syndicales. Une stratégie syndicale prédomine : elle consiste à défendre ou gérer la négociation collective institutionnalisée. Elle est encouragée par un ensemble d’institutions qui produisent des constructions contradictoires des enjeux d’égalité et du problème des discriminations. Si ces arrangements institutionnels ouvrent une brèche aux « innovations » patronales et confortent l’adoption de stratégies syndicales visant à préserver la relation bilatérale d’emploi, cet article soutient que cette stratégie est aussi symptomatique de la vision moniste avec laquelle les syndicats abordent l’effritement du modèle dominant de la relation d’emploi, en le réduisant aux conflits d’intérêts entre employeurs et travailleurs. Or, cet effritement est aussi le résultat des réorganisations mutuelles et réciproques des différentes formes sociales de division du travail entre classes, sexes et races. Mais en ne s’interrogeant pas sur ce qui a fondé le compromis de la société salariale, soit la minoration ou l’exclusion de groupes de populations de la norme d’emploi à temps plein et permanent, les syndicats accordent la priorité à des stratégies qui participent, comme l’illustre le cas choisi, si ce n’est à la création de normes discriminatoires, du moins, à la légitimation de frontières entre ceux qui ont accès à des emplois de qualité et les autres.

In its groundbreaking decision in Dunsmuir, issued in 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada reduced the number of judicial review standards to two - correctness and reasonableness - and directed courts to afford a high degree of deference to administrative decisions dealing with findings of fact, matters of inextricably intertwined law and fact, and exercises of discretion. Nonetheless, since Dunsmuir, there has been growing concern that the courts' intervention in labour board and labour arbitration decisions has increased. This empirical study examines the frequency and outcomes of judicial review applications from decisions of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and Ontario labour arbitra- tors, and concludes that the courts' interference in those decisions has in fact increased in the post-Dunsmuir period as compared to the pre-Dunsmuir period. Based on a total of 249 judicial review decisions for the period from 2003 to 2013, the research results reveal that the number of OLRB decisions quashed on judicial review increased from 7% in the pre-Dunsmuir period to 21% in the post-Dunsmuir period, while the number of labour arbitration awards quashed on review increased from 18% to 30%. In the majority of those decisions, the courts conducted an intrusive analysis of the tribunal's reasoning, reconsidered the weight accorded to evidence, and made their own findings of fact. Furthermore, there is a high degree of inconsistency among courts in the selection of the stan- dard of review applicable to decisions involving an award of damages or the interpretation of "external" legislation or common law doctrines.

This article reviews the book, "Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State," by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein.

This article argues that misalignment between the realities of work in the new economy and the regulations is having negative health and social implications at all levels of Canadian society. Remedying this requires drastic reshaping of policy approaches, but current laws and employment norms presume the labour market is a static entity. Policymakers should focus on improving how labour market data is collected for producing evidence‐based recommendations, and on re‐evaluating neoclassical economic assumptions underpinning this outdated framework. We argue the expansion of precarious work is reshaping the Canadian economy and society, and provide recommendations for data, policy and administration to address this trend.

The University of Manitoba strike showed that worker power isn't all about money -- it's also about collective self-governance.

Confidence in the police is fundamental to citizens' willingness to report unlawful behaviour, share intelligence about crime, seek help when victimized, and generally comply with the law. Marginalized groups overwhelmingly report a lack of confidence that police will apply the law fairly. Although sex work research reports a wide range of negative experiences with the police, it is not known how common these experiences are because most research focuses solely on street-based sex workers and does not include quantitative measures. We report on confidence in the police through the analysis of relevant data gathered from in-person interviews with sex workers from six census metropolitan areas of Canada. Under the pre-2014 legal regime, our non-random sample of sex workers had lower confidence in police than estimated for other Canadians by the General Social Survey and were particularly unlikely to see police as treating sex workers fairly. Thematic analysis suggests this is primarily driven by stigma and discrimination. We also found a significant minority who reported the police to be a source of aid, suggesting that appropriate policy and program regimes could be developed to improve sex worker–police relations.

Quebecers are living longer than ever before as a result of better health as well as improved educational attainment and economic well-being. Using a dynamic microsimulation model, we show that an aging workforce will not necessarily mean a decline in Quebec employment levels in the coming years. Because future experienced workers will be more educated and more of them will remain in employment for longer, we project that annual growth rates in employment will stay positive, averaging between 0.2 and 0.3 percent over the next two decades. Between 2035 and 2050, employment could contribute nearly 0.3 percentage points to annual economic growth in Quebec.

The article reviews the book, "Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources," edited by Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood.

The article reviews the book, "New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism," edited by Immanuel Ness.

Drawing on qualitative interview data from case studies in Scotland and Canada in the post 2008 era, this article explores the impact of austerity policies on the conditions and experience of employment in two nonprofit social service agencies and their shifting labour process. Despite differences in context, the article finds a similarity of experience of austerity-compelled precarity at several levels in the agency. This precarity increased management control and evoked little resistance from employees. These findings contribute to our understanding of austerity as articulated differently in different contexts, but experienced similarly at the front lines of care work.

During the 1990s and 2000s, the characteristics of new immigrants to Canada changed significantly across several dimensions, including education, admission class, source region, and pre-landing Canadian work experience, owing at least partly to changes in immigration selection policies. This article examines whether these changes affected earnings trends among immigrants. Among all new immigrants and economic principal applicants, aside from cyclical fluctuations, entry earnings changed little over the 1990s and 2000s. This stability was the result of competing influences, some that tended to increase earnings and some that tended to reduce them. The key changes in immigrant characteristics that put upward pressure on entry earnings were the rising educational attainment in the 1990s and a large increase in the share of immigrants with high pre-landing Canadian earnings during the 2000s. The latter characteristic also accounted for the earnings advantage of provincial nominees over skilled worker immigrants. The policy implications of the results are discussed.

This article presents the findings of a survey of unionized professors and professional librarians at a public university in Southern Ontario to examine their views on the prospect and desirability of “right-to-work” legislation and “paycheck protection” laws. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to assess the level of opposition to such legislative initiatives among unionized faculty, and, second, to determine the extent to which the passage of such laws would undermine the dues base of the faculty union. Based on the findings of a mixed methods survey, we found that a strong majority of the university professors and professional librarians surveyed were opposed to “right-to-work” and “paycheck protection” laws and that their passage would not deter them from paying dues or authorizing expenditures for political action.

This paper examines whether environmental assessments (EAs) influence the ability of Aboriginal peoples to advance community employment aims in resource development projects. Environmental assessment and labour policy and practices have been conventionally understood as distinct processes. Our investigations demonstrate that EAs play a significant, if indirect, role in Aboriginal efforts to regulate resource sector work. While Aboriginal communities increasingly rely upon private negotiations with development proponents to secure resource sector employment, participation in EA processes provides Aboriginal peoples a space to negotiate language around employment commitments and leverage to secure Aboriginal employment provisions in impact benefit agreements with project proponents.

This paper explores worker resistance at the point of production, and how the terrain of workplace control is both different and more ambiguous for workers in precarious employment compared to that of workers in secure employment. For the most part, this is the story of unorganized workers who face their employers without the protection of a formal union. The main focus of this study is the individualized, informal, and under-the-radar strategies that workers employ to shape workplace outcomes, and how these strategies might translate into broader collective action.

Proposals to increase the minimum wage have re-emerged in provinces across the country. For instance, the Alberta government recently pledged to hike the provincial minimum wage from $10.20 to $15 per hour by 2018, already taking the first step with a $1 hike effective October 1, 2015. There has been a similar movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 in various jurisdic- tions in the United States. Popular support for the minimum wage largely derives from the belief that it is a useful tool for boosting the wages of poor workers. However, the evidence paints a much different picture. For starters, the minimum wage does not effectively target workers in low-income households. In fact, 87.5% of Canadians earning minimum wage in 2012 lived in households above the Low Income Cut-Off (LICO), a widely used measure of relative poverty. Moreover, the vast majority of workers (83.4%) from households falling below the LICO threshold earned more than the minimum wage. These counterintuitive results follow from the demographic compos- ition of minimum wage earners. In 2014, 58.4% of those earning minimum wage were youths aged 15 to 24. Furthermore, 56.8% of all minimum wage earners were living with family, while 19.9% were married to a spouse who was also employed. Taken together, the data undercut the popular image of minimum wage earners being single breadwinners supporting a family. In fact, only 2.2% of those earning minimum wage were unmarried heads of household with at least one minor child. The tenuous link between minimum wage earners and poor house- holds makes the minimum wage a very crude method for targeting assistance to those who need it. At the same time, hiking the minimum wage can do considerable harm, most notably by decreasing employment opportunities among low-skilled workers—the very group the policy is designed to help. By making labour artificially more expensive, increasing the minimum wage may significantly reduce employment among teenagers and other groups of low-skilled workers. Besides reducing employment outright, hiking the min- imum wage could lead to a reduction in hours and other benefits (such as on-the-job training) for those workers who keep their jobs.

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30-year period. Taking a historical, materialist-feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.

This Economic Insights article documents differences in labour market participation observed between immigrant wives and Canadian-born wives over the 2006-to-2014 period. It also assesses the degree to which the lower participation of immigrant wives, as compared with their Canadian-born counterparts, can be accounted for by differences in socioeconomic characteristics, such as family size, weekly wages of husbands, and labour force participation in the source country. The study uses the Labour Force Survey and World Bank indicators on source-country characteristics to examine these issues. Attention is restricted to Canadian-born women and landed immigrant women aged 25 to 54 who are married (or living in common-law relationships) with husbands aged 25 to 54 who are employed as paid workers. For simplicity, the terms ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’ are used to refer to men and women who are married or in common-law relationships.

The article reviews the book, "Queer Mobilizations: Social Movement Activism and Canadian Public Policy," edited by Manon Tremblay.

À contre-courant des approches fonctionnaliste, culturaliste et, dans une moindre mesure, constructiviste sur le transfert transnational des pratiques organisationnelles dans les firmes multinationales (MNC), qui insistent toutes sur le rôle primordial des gestionnaires supposés faire le pont entre la maison-mère et les filiales, cet article recourt aux processus de négociation sociale dudit transfert par les acteurs locaux plutôt intéressés par ce qu’ils y gagnent. Pour mieux comprendre les raisons de la réussite (ou de l’échec) du transfert des pratiques de flexibilisation qu’une MNC nord-américaine cherche à implanter dans sa filiale au Ghana et qu’elle a mises en pratique au Canada, l’article propose un modèle analytique de deux facteurs capables d’en influencer l’issue : les mécanismes de gouvernance locale et l’agence micropolitique.Le premier facteur souligne la finalité économique du transfert et traduit les arrangements institutionnels initiés par les gestionnaires des filiales, notamment avec l’exécutif syndical au Canada et la communauté locale au Ghana. Cette gouvernance locale produit une segmentation à l’intérieur du marché de travail au Canada (les permanents vs les temporaires) et à l’extérieur dans la communauté au Ghana (les travailleurs vs la communauté). Quant au second facteur, le rôle politique des acteurs, il reflète les enjeux locaux en termes de survie de l’usine, dans un cas, et de préservation des traditions socio-ethniques, dans l’autre. Ces acteurs locaux qui contrôlent la segmentation des pratiques de flexibilisation de l’emploi dans leur filiale respective jouent ainsi un rôle charnière dans le processus du transfert dont ils conditionnent la réussite.L’article conclut qu’il y a une négociation sociale nécessaire des pratiques organisationnelles que la maison-mère cherche à transférer aux filiales et que la réussite ou l’échec du transfert est fonction de la portée du consensus négocié avec les acteurs touchés par les enjeux, et pas seulement de la finalité économique recherchée par les politiques d’hybridation. // Title in English: The Transfer of Labour Flexibility Practices in a Multinational Firm: The Pivotal Role of Subsidiaries’ Local Actors. Contrary to the functionalist, culturalist and, to a lesser extent, constructivist approaches, which all focus on the managers’ key role in bridging the gap between the parent company and its subsidiaries, this article takes a different perspective on the transnational transfer of organizational practices in a multinational firm (MNC). It argues that local actors engage in social negotiation of the transfer based on what they might gain. The article offers an analytical model of two factors that impact the transfer outcome. This allows us to better understand the reasons for the success (or failure) of the transfer of labour flexibility practices that a North-American MNC seeks to transfer to its Ghanaian subsidiary and which have already been implemented in its Canadian subsidiary. These factors are local governance mechanisms and micro-political agency.The first factor highlights the economic purpose of the transfer and reflects institutional arrangements initiated by the subsidiaries’ managers, notably with the union executive in Canada and the local community in Ghana. This local governance produces a segmentation inside the labour market in Canada (permanent vs temporary workers) and outside in the community in Ghana (workers vs the community). The second factor concerns the actor’s political role, focusing on local issues in terms of plant survival in the Canadian case and the preservation of socio-ethnic traditions in the Ghanaian case. These local actors, who control the segmentation of labour flexibility practices in their respective subsidiaries, play a pivotal role in the transfer process and its success.The article concludes that there is a required social negotiation of organizational practices a parent company seeks to transfer to its subsidiaries. The transfer success or failure depends on the scope of the negotiated agreement between actors affected by the issues and not just on the economic purpose that the MNC pursues through its hybridization policies.