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The article reviews the book, "The Origin and Dynamics of Inequality: Sex, Politics and Ideology," by Jon Wisman.

Une meilleure pollinisation croisée entre l’économie du travail et les relations industrielles conduirait à des gains mutuels. Le présent article s’articule autour de critiques courantes de l’économie du travail qui sont illustrées par des exemples tirés des relations industrielles. Ces critiques, ainsi que leurs principes sous-jacents, expliquent souvent d’importants concepts des relations industrielles et apportent par le fait- même des connaissances susceptibles d’enrichir les réflexions en économie du travail. L’intention de cet article est d’avoir un regard prospectif pour faire avancer la réflexion théorique et empirique sur les aspects actuels et futurs du travail et de l’emploi.

Mutual gains can be made through greater cross-pollination between labour economics and industrial relations. The paper is organized around common criticisms of labour economics, with examples from industrial relations. Such criticisms, and their underlying principles, often explain important concepts in industrial relations, which can provide insights that may enhance labour economics. The intent here is to apply a forward-looking lens to advance theoretical and empirical reflection on current and future aspects of work and employment.

The article reviews the book, "Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America," by Adam J. Barker.

This article traces the definition and treatment of “vulnerable workers” within the province of Ontario’s regulation of employment standards over a fourteen-year period. An examination of the government’s discourse and its enforcement and legislative history reveals significant shifts and inconsistencies between the government’s claims and its enforcement practices. These shifts and inconsistencies are understood within a political economic analysis of “Third Way” employment policies, competing liberal ideologies, shifting political-economic conditions and institutional legacies. The analysis contributes to a cross-national literature exploring the inadequacies of employment standards enforcement in liberal market economies while at the same time identifying opportunities for change within the different “varieties of liberalism” exhibited within Third Way regimes.

Deindustrialization became a pressing political issue and an object of research almost simultaneously in North America. This article inquires into the intellectual origins and radical roots of the deindustrialization thesis in Canada and the United States. Though the two countries share much in common, their distinctive formulations of the deindustrial problem in the 1970s and 1980s reflected key economic and political differences between them. Radical political economists in Canada and the United States turned to dependency theory and capital flight, respectively, in their theorization of deindustrialization. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison’s 1982 book, The Deindustrialization of America, in particular, is a founding text for the burgeoning field of deindustrialization studies. We can learn much from re-engaging with this early scholarship. In doing so, however, we need to bridge the continuing analytical divide between micro-level labour histories of working-class communities and macro-level studies of political economy and the international division of labour.

The article reviews the book, "Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart," by Adam Reich and Peter Bearman.

Comment les syndicats chinois réagissent-ils à la plateformisation du travail et à la résistance des travailleurs des plateformes ? Centré sur les livreurs de repas, cet article examine les défis que le travail de plateforme pose à la Fédération nationale des syndicats de Chine (Zhonghua quanguo zonggonghui中华全国总工会), la seule organisation syndicale légale en Chine, et la manière dont, dans un premier temps, les livreurs se sont mis en lutte sans l’intervention des syndicats. Dans un deuxième temps, répondant aux injonctions des autorités politiques, la FNSC a cherché à syndiquer les livreurs en développant de nouveaux modes d’organisation. Parallèlement, elle a développé une offre de service à destination de ces travailleurs. Ce n’est que tout récemment qu’elle s’est impliquée dans la négociation de conventions collectives portant sur les conditions d’emploi et de travail des livreurs. Même si le manque de recul ne permet pas de saisir la portée réelle de ces négociations, elle interpelle cependant par rapport à la réalité du syndicalisme en Chine.

The article reviews the book, "The Heart of Toronto: Corporate Power, Civic Activism, and the Remaking of Downtown Yonge Street," by Daniel Ross.

We examined how home-based teleworkers perceived managerial control in an Italian context in order to gain insight into some of the organizational changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on studies of changes to managerial control over the past few decades, we show how workers have experienced the reconfiguration and hybridization of control practices and methods in home telework. Our results cast doubt on the widely held belief that telework is revolutionizing managerial control and work procedures. Organizational and power dynamics at work are key to determining how telework affects employee experiences.

Pour célébrer le 60e anniversaire de l’Association canadienne des relations industrielles (ACRI), Relations industrielles-Industrial Relations (RI-IR) et l’ACRI ont convenu de publier un numéro spécial afin de faire progresser et de consolider les connaissances dans notre domaine. Depuis plus d’un siècle en Amérique du Nord, les chercheurs et les praticiens des relations industrielles étudient les problèmes liés au travail et à l’emploi, qui se perpétuent dans le cadre des modèles de production capitalistes, mais qui deviennent de plus en plus diversifiés et complexes. Par exemple, alors que le travail précaire, la santé et la sécurité au travail et les changements technologiques ont toujours posé des défis aux travailleurs, la pandémie mondiale de COVID-19 a montré que nous n’avons pas fait tout ce que nous pensions pour créer des systèmes d’emploi ou des politiques du travail qui facilitent l’équilibre entre la vie professionnelle et la vie privée, protègent les revenus des travailleurs contre les risques sociaux, permettent d’atteindre l’équité en matière d’emploi, retiennent les personnes et les compétences nécessaires au bon fonctionnement des organisations et respectent l’exercice des droits fondamentaux par les travailleurs. De plus en plus, les praticiens doivent faire face à ce que certains appellent une « polycrise », c’est-à-dire plusieurs crises simultanées (par exemple, le vieillissement de la population, l’inflation, l’évolution des préférences des travailleurs, le travail à distance et/ou le retour au travail en personne, les changements démographiques générationnels). Ces crises se combinent et s’exacerbent les unes les autres, rendant ainsi les problèmes classiques de main-d’oeuvre plus imprévisibles et plus complexes. --Introduction

To commemorate the Canadian Industrial Relations Association’s (CIRA-ACRI) 60th anniversary, Relations industrielles-Industrial Relations (RI-IR) and CIRA have agreed to publish a special issue to advance and consolidate knowledge in our field. For more than a century in North America, industrial relations scholars and practitioners have been studying work and employment problems, which remain age-old under capitalist models of production but are becoming more diverse and complex. For instance, while precarious work, occupational health and safety and technological change have always challenged workers, the global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that we have not come as far as we think in creating employment systems or labour policies that facilitate work-life balance, protect worker incomes against social risks, achieve employment equity, retain the people and skills required for effective operation of organizations and respect workers’ exercise of fundamental rights. More and more, practitioners must deal with what some call a “polycrisis”—several crises happening at once (e.g., population aging, inflation, changing worker preferences, remote work and/or a return to face-to-face work, generational demographic shifts). These crises combine with and exacerbate each other, thus making classic labour problems more unpredictable and complex. --Introduction

The article reviews the book, "Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers," by Ahmed White.

The article reviews the book, "Medicare’s Histories: Origins, Omissions, and Opportunities in Canada," edited by Esyllt W. Jones, James Hanley, and Delia Gavrus.

The growth of industrial tourism and heritage has both fascinated and frustrated scholars of deindustrialization. Frequently, workers and class conflict are obscured in or expunged from the official narratives of industrial heritage. This article makes an original contribution to research on deindustrialization and industrial heritage through fieldwork in Sudbury, Ontario – a region that has seen a decades-long process of industrial restructuring. The article draws on 26 qualitative interviews with current and retired nickel miners and analyzes workers’ reflections on local mining history. It examines how workers understand the foreign takeover of the mines, job loss, and the transformation of Sudbury’s regional economy away from blue-collar industrial employment. The article then explores the growth of regional tourism based around the mining sector, looking particularly at Dynamic Earth, an attraction that teaches visitors about the history of nickel mining through guided tours of a closed mine. On the one hand, workers critique what they see as an obfuscation of class conflict in industrial heritage, while on the other hand, they experience these sites as confirmation of the historic contributions nickel miners have made to Sudbury and the surrounding region.

This article examines the history of, and legal precedent set by, Four B Manufacturing v. United Garment Workers of America, a 1980 Supreme Court of Canada case involving an Indigenous-owned manufacturing firm that resisted the efforts of its Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers to form a union on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a reserve in southeastern Ontario. The employer, Four B, contested the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and argued, unsuccessfully, that as an "Indian enterprise," its own operations were a matter of federal jurisdiction. We return to the case of Four B for three interrelated reasons. First, we argue that Four B remains relevant because of the ways that the political economy of settler-colonial Canada continues to structure Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment as ongoing sites of tension. Second, as the inaugural case dealing with the "core of Indianness" – a contested legal concept used by the courts to determine federal jurisdiction over Indigenous labour – this case both set the legal precedent and shaped the subsequent political terrain of Indigenous labour relations. Third, the issues addressed in Four B contextualize recent jurisdictional struggles over Indigenous enterprises, labour, and employment in what we term the "Indigenous public sector" – namely, health care, social services, and First Nations government administration. The article reviews the case history of Four B, setting this against the backdrop of deindustrialization in southeastern Ontario during the period, before tracing how the case influenced the juridical and political landscape of Indigenous labour relations. We close by considering the potential tensions between Indigenous self-determination and the exercise of collective bargaining rights by Indigenous workers.

The article reviews the book, "Querelle de Roberval," by Kevin Lambert.

On 15 August 1983, 9,500 workers from the Montréal locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union went on strike for the first time in 43 years. The strike became known as “la grève de la fierté” and made clear that the women working in the city’s garment factories were taking a stand against the layoffs and closures prompted by industrial restructuring and deindustrialization. However, the strike’s success was limited, revealing the extent to which the structural inequities in the garment industry had calcified along gendered, classed, and ethnic lines. The union executive had grown increasingly distant from its rank-and-file, and it was immigrant women workers who were left to organize against the flurry of closures and the corresponding decline in their working conditions. The campaign leading up to the 1983 strike, organized by the Comité d’action des travailleurs du vêtement, articulated a series of demands for the improvement of workplace health and safety conditions, better benefits, and more representative union leadership. With original archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that the 1983 “grève de la fierté” illustrates how the historically entrenched gendered structure of labour relations shaped the pathways of deindustrialization in Montréal’s garment industry.

The article reviews the book, "The Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919–30," edited by Barbara C. Allen.

The article reviews the book, "The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives," by Adolph L. Reed, Jr., with a foreword by Barbara J. Fields.