Search

We examine the pivotal role of academic staff associations (ASAs) in advocating and influencing the adoption of vaccination mandates at Canadian universities in the run-up to the fall 2021 term. Through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with ASA leaders and staff, we delve into the factors behind ASA positions on such mandates. We demonstrate that the vast majority of ASAs advocated robust COVID-19 mitigation measures, including vaccination mandates, but their approaches varied because of regional differences and institutional and sectoral dynamics. Many ASAs actively promoted mandatory vaccination, unlike the case with the vast majority of other unions.

This article explores union responses to workplace-based covid-19 vaccine mandates in Canada. Specifically, the authors examine the complex interplay of factors that drove unions to adopt their respective positions on vaccine mandates and to frame those positions in particular ways for the benefit of their members and the wider public. Interviews with key informants, along with analysis of documents and arbitration decisions, reveal a disjuncture between the discursive quality of certain unions’ positions and their actual positions. In particular, media framing of unions as either “for” or “against” vaccine mandates oversimplified or misrepresented the actual positions adopted. In response, the article introduces a typology of union positions that distinguishes between support for mandatory-vaccination policies and support for voluntary-vaccination policies and reveals that the vast majority of unions favoured the latter. The authors further reveal that workplace vaccine mandates were both internally divisive and disorienting for unions, given the central role labour organizations play in managing workplace disputes and representing the interests of workers, both individually and collectively.

This chapter provides an extensive but not exhaustive overview of gender equality indices. Two key concerns emerge: frst, the conflation of measures of gender equality and assessments of women’s rights and status; and second, the focus on individual empowerment used in almost all international indices, the indicator for which is frequently political representation.The chapter proposes an alternative frame of collective agency as a measurable dimension that shifts attention from those institutions that reproduce gender inequality to those that promote gender equality. The second part of this chapter argues that trade unions are a key institutional vehicle for women’s collective agency and voice. Union membership increases women’s income and reduces the gender pay gap, a central dimension in all gender equality indices. It also improves the quality and conditions of working life. Union membership, then, helps progress women’s status, supports gender equality, and offers a valuable measure of women’s collective agency. --Introduction

This paper utilizes the job demands–resources (JD-R) model to examine how the neoliberal governance of Employment Ontario (EO) contributes to worker burnout. The work of Employment Ontario specialists is governed by neoliberal policies, which are an apparatus of austerity politics mechanized through New Public Management (NPM). NPM places a strong emphasis on performance management, quantitative targets and the marketization of public services. This paper demonstrates how these neoliberal policies contribute to worker burnout in public employment services (PES). EO specialists who deliver PES, are tasked with helping vulnerable jobseekers quickly re-enter the paid labour force regardless of systemic barriers, which this study has revealed as a largely unachievable pursuit within a neoliberal market environment. Utilizing data from thirty-two interviews, our analysis indicates that EO workers/specialists experience burnout due to unreasonable job demands and a lack of sufficient resources, which inhibit their ability to meaningfully support vulnerable jobseekers. Having identified time pressures, work overload, lack of training and development opportunities and job insecurity as some of the stressors experienced by EO specialists, we conclude that prolonged exposure to these stressors leads to burnout.

The article reviews the book, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America," by Andrew C. McKevitt.

This thesis explored the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based policing models in law enforcement anti-trafficking initiatives and examined potential impacts of expanding state surveillance through police use of AI-based policing models. Computer scientists aspire to develop AI to identify victims of trafficking through websites that host ads for sexual services. Little research has explored sex workers’ views on the proposed AI-based policing models and their likely impacts. To fill this gap, I conducted 21 semistructured interviews with sex workers, academics, and members of sex worker rights organizations to discuss the effects of AI-based policing models. Participants expressed concern that these models will continue a long history of anti-trafficking initiatives causing harm, particularly against racialized, migrant, and transgender sex workers. Findings also suggest developers should be cautious about creating AI-based policing models without input of sex workers and without a firm knowledge base of the sex industry.

The article reviews the cyberexposition, "Déjouer la fatalité : pauvreté, familles, institutions," by the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (Montréal, 2022).

This case study focuses on the United Nurses of Alberta, the union representing registered nurses in the province of Alberta, Canada; this explores United Nurses of Alberta's communication strategies. Drawing on the collective action frames previously identified in United Nurses of Alberta's social media and newsletters from 2010 to 2015, which frames nurses as unique healthcare providers and advocates, this study leverages insights from 23 interviews conducted with the United Nurses of Alberta staff, highly involved members, and general members from 2016 to 2017. The article explores the motivations and tensions around the framing of nurses and the union. The findings indicate that the United Nurses of Alberta could enhance its communications by better aligning with members’ current struggles through various collective action frame bridging and extensions. The research also suggests the potential benefits of United Nurses of Alberta shifting away from collective action frames rooted in self-sacrifice. Furthermore, this case study provides recommendations for communication strategies that could strengthen member engagement and involvement within their unions.

The article reviews the book, "Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program," by Catherine E. Connelly.

The construction industry accounts for 18 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is extensive evidence that this can be reduced significantly by implementing aggressive net zero building practices. However, the way the industry is organized impedes this achievement because it fails to promote the development of a broadly based, highly qualified, climate-literate workforce. Successful low carbon construction requires enhancement of workers’ knowledge, skills, and competencies because it requires much higher energy performance standards than traditional construction practice. Yet the industry remains wedded to the current system of low-bid, low-quality construction to cut costs. The organization of much construction work reflects a Taylorist approach, with extensive piecework and subcontracting that relies heavily on precarious, unskilled, and semi-skilled workers. Most employers avoid investing in trades training, leaving it to governments, unions, and individual workers to fund workforce development. Committed to a deregulated market with minimal government interference in their profit-making activities, many contractors oppose tougher building and energy regulations while lobbying against higher labour standards, occupational certification requirements, and union organizing. To meet their net zero targets, governments must recognize that market forces are inadequate to create the well-trained, highly skilled workforce needed. Major policy interventions are required to force industry to make the necessary changes in vocational education and training (vet) and employment practices – changes designed to upskill the construction workforce and give workers and unions a greater voice in shaping climate-informed building practice.

The Canadian university system closely parallels the northern European and British systems which were inherited through the process of colonization in the 18th century. Universities are grappling with the legacy of colonialism and continue to make efforts toward reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Fiscal restraint dominates the discourse across publicly funded universities, which rely increasingly on contingent staff. Meanwhile, the increasing number of PhD graduates are finding it difficult to find permanent work in the academy. Labour unrest is on the rise across a fractured labour market. Canada faces a period of uncertainty and potential structural change in its higher education sector as it deals with these challenges.

Dès la fin de la guerre de Sept Ans, un nombre croissant d'Irlandais ont migré au Canada à la recherche d'une vie meilleure. Libérés des contraintes économiques et sociales étouffantes qui les retenaient dans leur pays d'origine, ils ont prospéré, notamment au Québec et en Ontario. Dans cet ouvrage synthèse, Lucille H. Campey dépeint les communautés irlandaises qui se sont formées dans différentes régions de l'Ontario et du Québec aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, à travers un récit informatif et vivant de cette grande saga de l'immigration. L'ouvrage décrit aussi les navires qui les ont transportés, dévoile les nombreuses réalisations de ces pionniers et décons­truit ainsi les interprétations modernes tendant à victimiser cette population. --Publisher's description

This thesis examines shifting masculinities and platform labour, following eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with male Toronto-based Uber and Lyft rideshare workers with dependents (children). Women have commonly done non-standard work, hence the proliferation of non-standard work being contextualized as the ‘feminization of work’ (Zahn, 2019). In contrast, rideshare work is a non-standard form of gig work done predominantly by men, rendering it a relevant form of platform work to examine with its complicated relationship to the historical context of gender and nonstandard work. This thesis argues for a need to organize the worker as a whole, examining how workers’ unpaid social reproductive labour and balancing of rideshare work, and often another form of paid work, impacts the viability of classic organizing methods. I argue that these issues of convoluted boundaries between paid and unpaid work must be incorporated into the potential organizing demands of a rideshare workers’ union and identify areas for further research on organizing rideshare workers accounting for shifting masculinities.

The article reviews the book, "Nii Ndahlohke: Boys' and Girls' Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.

Environmental racism is a structural, historical and ongoing fact of life for many Indigenous, Black and racially marginalized communities in Canada. Yet climate change discussions, lacking an anti-racism and intersectional lens, have largely ignored how Indigenous, Black and racially marginalized communities are inequitably impacted by the climate emergency. At the same time, policies to promote a just transition to a sustainable economy provide an opportunity for the creation of good green jobs. Such pathways into the green economy will only be inclusive if the voices of Indigenous, Black and racialized people and their communities are heard. Otherwise, the green economic transformation will only further reinforce the structural racial economic inequalities present in Canadian society and the genocidal impacts of the climate emergency will continue. In the end, we believe that worker power guided by a critical race, class, gender and intersectional analysis is an essential component in a strategy to win and secure a just transition to a green, sustainable and inclusive economy. The scale of the engagement must involve the entire movement working in genuine partnership with community coalition partners to ensure that the new green economy does not look like the old White economy.

New research on the workings of the ‘web of empire’ have revealed that the British Empire was not only sustained by raw materials from India but depended significantly on its manpower working as ‘coolies’, or indentured labourers, in distant plantations in Mauritius, Fiji, West Indies, East and South Africa, and the Straits Settlements. The white dominions of Canada, Australia and the United States (US) similarly depended on low-paid labourers from the East for much of their work of opening up and colonising the prairie wastes. Initially, the bulk of migrants from India in North America came from among the strong and hard-working Sikhs of the Punjab province of India, who found it lucrative to work in these places, lured by the comparatively higher wages than they could obtain at home. However, as the market for labour became saturated by the first decade of the twentieth century, these countries began to erect legal barriers to the free entry of these Indian migrants under pressure from domestic workers, unwilling to face competition from migrants. This came as a great shock to migrant Indians, who had until then been thinking of the empire as a vast field of ‘shared opportunities’. In 1908, Canada tried to exclude Indian migrant labour by legislation, which insisted on ‘continuous passage’ for entering into the ports of the country. This would automatically disable Sikh migrants, who had to change ships to reach Canada. Gurdit Singh’s attempt to charter a Japanese ship, Komagata Maru, in June 1914 to ensure continuous passage for the Sikh migrants to Canada was a challenge to this legal barrier against the migrants. The turning back of this ship from Vancouver shattered the belief of the migrants in an equal imperial citizenship, and it became incendiary material for the revolutionary nationalist propaganda of the Ghadr conspirators, based in San Francisco. Student radicals in Canada and America, such as Lala Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, G. D. Kumar and Husain Rahim tried to contact radicals all over the world, in India House in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Egypt, Turkey and Switzerland, and tried to spread their message through journals, like the Ghadr and the Hindustanee from San Francisco and the Al Kasas from Egypt. They even linked their efforts with German imperialist conspirators to gain funding and guidance in their common mission against British imperialism. --Publisher's summary

Les espaces de coworking sont propices aux interactions sociales, influencées en partie par la configuration de l’environnement. Impliquant le partage des locaux et du mobilier, l’aire ouverte crée une coprésence entre les personnes. Néanmoins, cette coprésence ne suffit pas à stimuler les interactions professionnelles, moins nombreuses que les interactions informelles. De plus, le bruit de parole est la principale contrainte du travail en aire ouverte. Dans ce contexte, cette étude en ergonomie vise à relever les conditions et les caractéristiques des interactions se produisant en aire ouverte. La méthodologie a été déployée auprès de 87 personnes, pendant 44 demi-journées et dans cinq espaces de coworking. Les personnes ont été observées dans l’aire ouverte pendant deux heures : toutes leurs interactions ont été relevées avec une grille d’observation papier et un plan d’observation informatisé. Ensuite, elles ont été interrogées individuellement dans une entrevue basée sur la technique de l’autoconfrontation. D’après les résultats, les interactions sont de courte durée (3 ± 6,55 ; 0,5-52) et se produisent surtout entre des personnes installées à la même table. Les trois quarts des interactions avec un-e collègue ont concerné des travailleur-ses salarié-es alors que les trois quarts des interactions avec un-e autre coworkeur-e ont concerné des travailleur-ses autonomes. Les interactions portant sur le contenu du travail ont été les plus nombreuses, suivies de près par les interactions informelles. L’étude propose plusieurs pistes d’amélioration de la dynamique sociale pour les responsables de la gestion, de l’animation, de l’architecture et de l’aménagement des espaces de coworking : repérer celles et ceux qui souhaitent s’installer en groupe, sélectionner les profils selon les caractéristiques de l’espace, ou organiser le mobilier selon ces profils.

This qualitative research study examines how the Labour Market Integration (LMI) site constitutes a site of ongoing colonial violence and spirit injury, where race plays a central role in legitimizing the politics of credential recognition, in which Foreign Educated Racialized Immigrant Women (FERIW) are evicted from the category “qualified” in Canada. My analysis draws upon concepts of racial capitalism and structural violence to locate the acts of eviction that FERIW are subjected to within the LMI space in Canada and the consequences and impacts of this eviction. I argue that racialized immigration on the move to Canada represents the human face of Canada’s ongoing nation-building and economic policy agenda. The LMI space reinforces and reproduces the colonial racial hierarchical order in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 FERIW, I explore how within the LMI space, racialized immigrant women are stripped of their foreign credentials, discursively framed as unqualified and deficient, and repurposed as a source of cheap labour within the political economy. Delegitimization carries severe material and socio-economic consequences. The intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigrant status results in FERIW becoming “ghettoized” into low-paying, precarious, low-end jobs, and, for many of these women, low income and poverty. This work represents a decolonial work articulated through anti-colonial and feminist anti-racist theory, to present a nuanced historical account of the experiences of gendered racialized immigrant labour within global and local structures that look very similar to the old structures of colonialism.

The article reviews the book, "Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty in Britain," by Jim Silver.

Menée au sein d’une collectivité territoriale, cette recherche-action visait à introduire une démarche Living lab dans un service de 42 agents. Reposant sur des principes de participation, de gouvernance partagée, d’apprenance et d’ateliers co-élaboratifs, la démarche a été impulsée adaptée dans l’objectif de traiter de la qualité de vie et des conditions de travail des agents. À partir de recueils de données effectués à intervalles réguliers au cours de la démarche, les analyses réalisées avec les acteurs témoignent d’une amélioration de la qualité de vie au travail et de leur appropriation de pratiques participatives et consultatives dans leur fonctionnement quotidien. Ces résultats s’expliquent a priori tant par les caractéristiques méthodologiques de la démarche (participation, co-élaboration, volontariat…) que par l’influence de déterminants organisationnels et managériaux propres à l’évolution du service (recrutement, investissements…). Cette étude illustre ainsi l’importance (i) des principes d’expression et de participation des travailleurs et (ii) de développer une recherche centrée sur les méthodes et processus de transformation et de changement organisationnel favorisant la qualité de vie et des conditions de travail. En outre, cette étude ouvre à de nombreux questionnements : à quelles conditions organisationnelles, méthodologiques ou psychosociales de tels processus peuvent-ils se pérenniser et s’inscrire dans la culture organisationnelle ? À quelles conditions une recherche-action en sciences sociales peut-elle être participative, et avec quelles limites ?