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Due to their status, it is difficult for temporary foreign workers to report grievances related to instances of discrimination, exploitation, harassment, abuse, and health and safety violations. While the subject of temporary migrant work and legal action has been studied before, available research focuses on the impacts of high-profile cases at the Supreme Court. As such, there is limited research about the tribunals that handle the grievances of TFWs most often. This thesis fills that gap by presenting a comparative analysis of the fortunes of temporary foreign workers in human rights tribunals and labour tribunals in Ontario and Alberta. This analysis shows the nature and outcome of these hearings have important differences that depend on the tribunal type. More specifically, human rights tribunals seem to be better equipped to assess the grievances of TFWs despite there being a higher volume of TFWs using labour tribunals.

This study traces the mid-twentieth century history of the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union (NSTU), with particular focus on the union’s democratic, professional, and bargaining structures. Traditionally underrepresented in labour union histories, teachers’ unions are a keystone public occupation with extremely high industrial density and a complex relationship with numerous levels of government. In the period studied, teachers were paid both by provincial and local governments but were technically only allowed to bargain with the former; this relationship was instrumental in keeping teachers’ demands depressed but was too unstable to contain teacher militancy effectively. Following an interrogation of the union’s restrictive legislative and organizational foundation, the thesis analyzes the adoption of professionalism as a status-raising strategy, but with severe exclusionary tendencies. The thesis continues with a chronological recounting of provincial and local-level negotiations, the contention of which forced the union and the provincial government to renegotiate their bargaining mechanisms.

This Handbook addresses the changing nature of academic labour markets, as they respond to moving university goals and developments in the measurement of research and teaching. Experts examine case studies from across the Global North and South and consider key issues such as equity, diversity, cross-border employment, and the precarity of academic labour. The Research Handbook on Academic Labour Markets highlights how national university systems interact with international policies. Chapters include in-depth research on the decline in permanent, tenured employment and the increase in temporary, insecure work, culminating in uncertain or non-existent career paths for many academics. Contributing authors discuss intersectional initiatives to increase the gender and ethnic diversity of academic staff, as well as complex topics such as third space work, for-profit institutions, online education, entrepreneurial gig research, work-life balance and the role of trade unions. Ultimately, this Handbook argues for new approaches to organising academic work, reinforcing the priority of serving the public good. Comprehensive and innovative, this Research Handbook is a crucial read for scholars of higher education leadership and management, education policy, labour policy, and sociology of work. It will also benefit university staff and researchers considering and reflecting on their own careers. --Publisher's description

Amid the proliferating scholarship and often sensational public campaigns, Trafficking Harms offers fresh insights and critical analyses. The collection’s four thematic areas — Discourses and Representations; Law and Prosecutions; Policing and Surveillance; Migrant Labour Exploitation — examine an array of issues, including the contested definitions of human trafficking, the application of trafficking law and policy, the conflation of sex work and trafficking, the impacts of anti-trafficking frameworks on racialized communities, questions around “victims” and “traffickers” and much more. Showcasing a mix of scholarly research, public advocacy and first-person narratives, this book is the first of its kind in Canada. The authors include a diverse group of academics, legal advocates, frontline activists who work with migrant and sex-working communities, individuals who have been charged and/or convicted of trafficking offences and those who are directly impacted by trafficking law and policing, such as domestic and migrant sex workers. --Publisher's description

In this book, independent experts analyze the performance of Justin Trudeau's years in power in over 20 important areas of government policy. The record of what has been done-and what hasn't-will surprise even well-informed readers. The focus is on six policy areas: Indigenous rights, governance and housing; the environment and energy; taxes and spending; healthcare and social benefits; foreign policy, immigration, and trade; and social policy including drug reform, labour rights, and racism. Editors Katherine Scott, Laura Macdonald, and Stuart Trew of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have recruited Canada's most knowledgeable experts in their areas to contribute to this volume. --Publisher's description

In the decades following the Second World War, autoworkers were at the forefront of the labour movement. Their union urged members to rally in the streets and use the ballot box to effect change for all working-class people. But by the turn of this century, the Canadian Auto Workers union had begun to pursue a more defensive political direction. "Shifting Gears" traces the evolution of CAW strategy from transformational activism to transactional politics. Class-based collective action and social democratic electoral mobilization gave way to transactional partnerships as relationships between the union, employers, and governments were refashioned. This new approach was maintained when the CAW merged with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union in 2013 to create Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union. Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage explain how and why the union shifted its political tactics, offering a critical perspective on the current state of working-class politics. -- Publisher's description

This report provides an assessment of Canada’s progress in meeting the goals for gender equality set out in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Adopted unanimously by 189 countries including Canada in 1995, the Beijing Declaration is the most progressive global blueprint ever for advancing women’s rights. The report examines Canada’s progress over the last 30 years in areas ranging from reproductive health to women’s economic standing and the status of marginalized women in Canada. The report was produced by the Beijing +30 Network which represents more than 70 women’s rights and equality-seeking organizations, trade unions and independent experts representing millions of members from across the country.

The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out 35 years of women’s economic gains in two short months. At the height of the lockdown, women were working 27 per cent fewer hours, in the aggregate, than in February 2020. In total, 2.8 million women lost their job or were working less than half of their regular hours because of the March 2020 economic lockdowns. This report examines what’s happened to women in the workforce since. It finds mixed reviews: many women in higher-paying jobs are now doing better than before the pandemic. However, women in low-paying, pandemic-vulnerable jobs and in the care economy are still having a rough time of things. The COVID-19 crisis illustrated both the shortcomings of existing policies and institutions and what’s possible with strong public leadership. The imperative now is to apply the lessons of COVID-19 in service of a more resilient and inclusive labour market and gender-just future. Institutional reforms and greater awareness of the damaging impacts of gender disparities may yet create opportunities for systemic change. --Website description

In this book, independent experts analyze the performance of Justin Trudeau’s years in power in over 20 important areas of government policy. The record of what has been done–and what hasn’t–will surprise even well-informed readers. The focus is on six policy areas: Indigenous rights, governance and housing; the environment and energy; taxes and spending; healthcare and social benefits; foreign policy, immigration, and trade; and social policy including drug reform, labour rights, and racism. Editors Katherine Scott, Laura Macdonald, and Stuart Trew of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have recruited Canada’s most knowledgeable experts in their areas to contribute to this volume. -- Publisher's description

This article analyzes nail technicians' occupational health experiences using body and hazard mapping – a visual, low-cost, and worker-centred approach. Thirty-seven Toronto-based nail technicians from predominantly Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean communities identified various occupational illnesses, injuries, and symptoms on visual representations of human bodies (body mapping) and linked these to their hazard sources in the nail salon (hazard mapping). The impacts identified include musculoskeletal aches and pains, stress and mental health concerns, various symptoms linked to chemical exposure, and concerns about cancer and reproductive health. Rather than a conventional occupational health approach, this work draws on Vanessa Agard-Jones' expansion of the "body burden" as more than the bioaccumulation of chemical agents. As such, this article asserts that nail technicians' body burden encompasses various types of occupational illnesses and injuries. In addition, nail technicians are exposed to broader "toxic" systemic inequities and structural conditions that allow these workplace exposures to occur and persist. By illustrating the embodied and experiential knowledges of nail technicians and contextualizing this lived experience, the body and hazard maps illuminate vast layers of harm – or multiscalar toxicities – borne by nail technicians. Moreover, as a group-based method, body and hazard mapping allow collective reflection and can spur worker mobilization toward safer and fairer nail salons.

The article reviews the book, "To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci," by Jean-Yves Frétigné.

The story of a people told through the story of a city. Niigaan Sinclair is often accused of being angry in his columns. But how can he not be? In a collection of writing that spans the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential school sites, the murder of young Indigenous girls, and the indifference towards the basic human rights of his family members, this book is inspired by his award-winning columns 'from the centre.' Niigaan examines the state of urban Indigenous life and legacy. At a crucial moment in Canada's reckoning with its crimes against the Indigenous peoples of the land, one of our most essential writers begins at the centre, capturing a web spanning centuries of community, art, and resistance. Based on years' worth of columns in the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC, and elsewhere, Niigaan Sinclair delivers a defining essay collection on the resilience of Indigenous peoples. Here, we meet the creators, leaders, and everyday people preserving the beauty of their heritage one day at a time. But we also meet the ugliest side of settler colonialism, and the communities who suffer most from its atrocities. Sinclair uses the story of Winnipeg to illuminate the reality of Indigenous life all over what is called Canada. This is a book that demands change and celebrates those fighting for it, that reminds us of what must be reconciled and holds accountable those who must do the work. It's a book that reminds us of the power that comes from loving a place, even as that place is violently taken away from you, and the magic of fighting your way back to it. -- Publisher's description

This paper examines the politics surrounding the construction, implementation, and administration of the Saskatchewan Trade Union Act (stua) between 1944 and 1950. The act is important because it reflects the first attempt by a social democratic government in North America to construct a system of labour law that ostensibly aligned socialist ideas with the rights of workers to form trade union freedoms. This makes the stua unique in Canadian labour and political history because the legislation demonstrated the policy priorities of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) and the Canadian Congress of Labour as both organizations were attempting to solidify their places in postwar Canada. This history reflects the fact that the ccf and the unions, like the left in general throughout the 1940s and 1950s, defined the working class narrowly, focusing attention on white and male breadwinners with women and racialized workers very much on the periphery. The history also demonstrates the inherent contradiction within social democratic reform politics, as the act extended numerous rights to workers to organize and collectively bargain but when those same workers pushed back against government decision-making during the province’s first public-sector strike in 1948, political tensions found many of those same social democrats acting in similar manners to their private-sector counterparts. These tensions within social democratic approaches to labour relations – so evident in the Saskatchewan experience – have become a central contradiction of the movement throughout the postwar period and continue today.

Made between 1918 and 1929, these Canadian documentary short films are a useful resource for historical research and teaching. They also complement other primary sources. Widely viewed and popular with the public at the time, they are useful for understanding how perceptions and perspectives were influenced and constructed. This specific Library and Archives Canada film collection is significant, exceeding 1,000 films. Their subjects are diverse and will be of interest to labour and social historians; better farming techniques, celebrations of industrial technology, scenic vacation spots for the leisure class and appropriate workplace behavior, are just some subjects addressed by the films in the collection. --Website description

Discusses the early 20th century films on work that were produced under the auspices of the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments. Provides detail on a select number of films, which are a significant source for labour history. Concludes by noting that the films may be viewed on the website, "The Moving Past."

Pays homage to the feminist social and cultural historian, Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023).

The article reviews the book, "Why Canada Needs Postal Banking ," by John Anderson.

The article reviews the book, "Le marxisme et l'oppression des femmes. Vers une théorie unitaire," by Lise Vogel.

In 2026, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement will be up for review—and the possibility of political shakeups means that governments should start preparing now. This report assesses the functioning of CUSMA to date and suggests ways to expand on the rights-based and worker-centred novelties in the agreement that improved upon the original NAFTA. Though national elections will transform governments in all three countries between now and the 2026 review, the worker-centred trade policy of the current U.S. administration will likely live on. For political, geoeconomic and national security reasons, a bipartisan consensus has emerged on the need to renew North America’s manufacturing base and better protect workers from subsidized—financially or through weaker labour and environmental standards—foreign competition. This report examines how Canada could prepare, and goals to strive towards, starting today.

Debates over worker subordination are central to discussions of the efficacy of protective labour and employment law whose central mission in a capitalist political economy, after all, is to reduce but not eliminate subordination. When protective labour and employment law seems to be fulfilling its mission discussions of worker subordination seem to ebb, but the topic becomes more urgent as the efficacy of the law declines. Not surprisingly, as labour law’s efficacy has been declining over the past several decades, we are in the midst of a revival of debates over worker subordination, the premise of this special issue. While many seek to revive the classic mission of labour and employment law, ameliorating the worst excesses of subordination, while leaving in place labour’s structural dependency on capital, the goal of this article is to revisit and elaborate a marxist political economy perspective to demonstrate that workers’ structural subordination to capital is deepening and that this limits the possibility of achieving much of the reformist agenda. While there are no easy ways of overcoming that structural subordination, a progressive reform agenda must centre that subordination and think about how labour laws might contribute to a transformative project. --Introduction