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The number of people with less than permanent migration status in Canada has increased in recent decades. While such people often have social and economic ties to Canada, and live and work within its territory, they do not have legal permanent membership by way of permanent residence or citizenship, and experience differential access to legal rights and entitlements. This dissertation examines the role of migration status in the lives of people who identify themselves as having “uncertain” migration status. In this study, I draw on interviews with migrants and representatives of migrant-serving agencies as well as legal and policy texts, deploying Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography as a methodology to ground the dissertation both analytically and structurally in the interview data. This study enlarges the understanding of the nature and effects of migration status as it is enacted in local institutional sites. Using the construct of “precarious migration status” as a theoretical frame, I focus specifically on the nature and effects of precarious migration status. I explore the effect of precarious migration status on working life and on migrants’ interactions with state institutions governing health care, education, and income security. I conclude that precarious migration status has a deleterious effect on the employment relationship itself as well as access to worker protections, even though the law creates no formal barrier to such protections on the basis of status. With regard to social state, individuals with precarious status are often formally excluded in the text of the law as well as through various exclusionary policies and practices within local institutional sites. I conclude that institutional sites in which precarious migration status functions to exclude should be understood as forms of enforcement. I further conclude that human rights and anti-discrimination strategies through Charter and provincial human rights statutes, while valuable, are unlikely to improve inclusion for precarious migrants, while contestation of membership at the level of local institutions has greater potential to do so.

The article reviews the book, "Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism and the Making of Chinese Canadians," by Timothy J. Stanley.

The article reviews the book, "Pierre Laporte," by Jean-Charles Panneton.

The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics," by Scott Hamilton.

On 25 February 1932 some 6000 protestors descended on Vancouver for a “Hunger March” organized by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to demonstrate for better conditions for workers, both employed and unemployed, across the nation. Although Hunger Marches were organized throughout Canada, Vancouver’s march was by far the largest and certainly the most successful. This study presents a thorough examination of the circumstances surrounding the Hunger March and explains what made the event such a unique success in this city. The event’s success derives from the Vancouver CPC ‘s ability to take advantage of the large mass of transients who came into the city in the early part of the Great Depression and then to funnel their discontent into mass agitation. The following study shows how the Hunger March is symbolic of the Vancouver CPC’s revolutionary pragmatism during the Third Period,

[Examines] the trade challenges to Ontario's Green Energy Act, exploring both the obstacles that international agreements pose to building an integrated economic strategy around the transition to cleaner energy and the opportunities. --Editor's introduction

When dealing with Indigenous women’s history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singular story of decline and loss. In Indigenous Women, Work, and History, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum rejects both of these long-standing conventions by presenting case studies of Indigenous domestic servants, hairdressers, community health representatives, and nurses working in “modern Native ways” between 1940 and 1980. Based on a range of sources including the records of the Departments of Indian Affairs and National Health and Welfare, interviews, and print and audio-visual media, McCallum shows how state-run education and placement programs were part of Canada’s larger vision of assimilation and extinguishment of treaty obligations. Conversely, she also shows how Indigenous women link these same programs to their social and cultural responsibilities of community building and state resistance. By placing the history of these modern workers within a broader historical context of Aboriginal education and health, federal labour programs, post-war Aboriginal economic and political developments, and Aboriginal professional organizations, McCallum challenges us to think about Indigenous women’s history in entirely new ways. --Publisher's description. Contents: Sweeping the Nation: Indigenous women and domestic labour in mid-twentieth-century Canada -- Permanent solution: the placement and relocation program, hairdressers, and beauty culture -- Early labour history of community health representatives, 1960-1970 -- Gaining recognition: labour as activism among Indigenous nurses -- Wages of whiteness and the Indigenous historian.

The article focuses on the Canadian political party the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in British Columbia (BC) and how it promoted populism and socialism within the province during the 1930s. The author explores the role of party founder Lyle Telford in the CCF movement, discusses how the CCF won the provincial vote in 1933, and examines the CCF's successor party the New Democratic Party (NDP).

The article reviews the book, "Beyond Blood: Rethinking Indigenous Identity," by Pamela D. Palmater.

The article reviews the book, "The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers," by Michael Perelman.

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post-secondary education through Aboriginal-directed programs and policies in non-Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775-1807," by Audra A. Diptee, "Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor Along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860," by Max Grivno, and "Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston," by Amrita Chakrabarti Myers.

The article reviews the book, "A Life in Balance? Reopening the Family-Work Debate," edited by Catherine Krull and Justyna Sempruch.

The article reviews the book. "A Bridge of Ships: Canadian Shipbuilding during the Second World War," by James Pritchard.

The article reviews the book, "Babies for the Nation: The Medicalization of Motherhood in Quebec, 1910-1970," by Denyse Baillargeon, translated by W. Donald Wilson.

“The relation between an employer and an isolated employee or worker is typically a relation between a bearer of power and one who is not a bearer of power. In its inception it is an act of submission, in its operation it is a condition of subordination, however much the submission and the subordination may be concealed by the indispensable figment of the legal mind known as the 'contract of employment'.” Otto Kahn-Freund , Labour and the Law (London: Stevens, 1977) This study examines the legal evolution of the common law of employment contracts in Ontario between the 1890s and the 1970s. It focuses on the changing relationship between notions of property and contract in employment, as visible through the judicial discourse of reported common law cases. I argue that between the 1890s and the end of the 1970s Ontario saw the emergence and consolidation of two different conceptual paradigms for regulating work at common law. The common law of employment contracts was framed and reframed over different eras of the 20th century through what the courts understood of the nature of the exchange between the parties, the property interests involved and the legal tools necessary to manage that exchange. Contrary to the traditional narrative in the field, the courts of Ontario first conceptualized employment as an exchange as of the turn of the 20th century. This first paradigm emerged in tandem with the province’s second industrial revolution, and sought to regulate the discretionary nature of white collar professional work. The second paradigm was entrenched in the 1960s and 1970s. It is over these years that workers in Standard Employment Relationships (SER) first began to bring employment-related claims to the common law courts, a few decades after it emerged as the paradigmatic form of work around which Ontario’s labour market and employment laws were fashioned over the mid-century. The basic premises of the SER, of long-term employment, job security and internal career advancement, fundamentally changed the psychosical and economic terms of employment. But faced with workers’ claims for recognition of these new terms in law, the courts instead chose to entrench a limited legal framework which denied job security as an enforceable contract term.

Workplace representatives (shop stewards) provide insight into union transformations. This article explores the renewed research interest in terms of the representativeness of unionism and of workplace representatives, the complexity of the sites of representation and employer strategies, the search for new references and the centrality of workplace representatives in union renewal strategies.

Improving Organizational Interventions for Stress and Well-being, edited by Caroline Biron, Maria Karanika-Murray and Cary L. Cooper, is reviewed.

An initial observation by the work safety research community of the Quebec Occupational Health and Safety Research Network (QOHSRN) reveals that occupational safety, an aspect affecting all industrial sectors, requires international exchanges to meet the objectives and expand the knowledge gained within the network. This historical review is also meant to show the diversity of the work safety research community goals and the need to develop intersectoral research projects. The growing and essential involvement of student members within the research community ensures a solid future in that regard.

The article reviews the book, "In the Interest of Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Early Cold War Alliance Between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency," by Quenby Olmsted Hughes.