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On January 9, 1927, a fire tore through the Laurier Palace, a cinema located in a French-speaking, working-class neighborhood on the east side of Montreal. Seventy-eight children died. This article uses the abundant documentation generated by the fire to explore a number of themes related to working-class childhood in early-twentieth-century Montreal: children’s autonomy versus parental surveillance and authority; the place of commercial leisure and petty consumption in the lives of working-class children; and contemporary understandings of such tragic accidents as the Laurier Palace fire. The article reflects on the promise and perils of what David Lowenthal has termed the “voyeuristic empathy” promoted by historians. Are historians of youth, what one scholar calls “latter-day child savers,” more likely than others to adopt a perspective reliant upon (or vulnerable to) such empathy?

This article reviews the book, "Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973–2010," by Francis Peddie and Royden Leuwen.

The article reviews the book, "The Origins of Right to Work: Anti-labor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago," by Cedric de Leon.

The article reviews the book, "Gender Work: Feminism after Neoliberalism," by Robin Truth Goodman.

The article reviews the book, "Autonomie collective et droit du travail. Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur Pierre Verge," edited by Dominic Roux.

This paper uses the Canadian Labour Force Survey to understand why the level and dispersion of wages have evolved differently across provinces from 1997 to 2013. The faster increase in the level of wages and the decline in wage dispersion in Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Alberta are the starkest interprovincial differences. We find that they are accounted for by the growth in the extractive resources sectors, which benefited less‐educated and younger workers the most. Increases in minimum wages since 2005 are found to be the main reason why wages at the very bottom grew more than those in the middle of the distribution.

Over the past 20 years, the Alberta-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 have revitalized their union through organizing diverse groups of workers in hard-to-organize occupations, increasing involvement in political and community matters and adopting innovative organizing and representation strategies. They have done so with a stable leadership that exhibits autocratic and populist tendencies. The apparent contradictions of autocratic structures and innovative reforms are difficult to explain using existing explanations of union renewal and concepts of union forms. This in-depth study examines Local 401 in an effort to explain the unexpected patterns. Using a variety of methods, including Critical Narrative Analysis, the study reveals that unions may be more fluid and dynamic than the existing literature acknowledges. The study concludes the business union-social union duality common in industrial relations theory needs to be replaced by a more flexible, more multi-layered conceptualization of union behaviour. Unions exhibit elements of both social and business unionism at the same time because they are organizations created at the intersection between structure and action and are always in flux. The study also highlights a possible third path for union renewal, coined “accidental revitalization”, where local-initiated renewal can occur without planned intention and within a context of stable local leadership. Third, the study explores the role narratives play in resolving apparent contradictions in union behaviour by constructing internal logics and how narratives contribute to the production and re-production of power dynamics within unions.

This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government MLAs also asserted that international migrant workers (3) had questionable occupational, linguistic or cultural skills and (4) caused negative social and economic impacts in Canada. Taken individually, these narratives appear contradictory, casting migrant work as good but migrant workers as bad. Viewed together, these narratives comprise an effort to dehumanize temporary and permanent international migrant workers. This (sometimes racialized) “othering” of migrant workers justifies migrant workers’ partial citizenship and suppresses criticism of their poor treatment.

This study examines how five unions in the Canadian province of Alberta responded to a sudden influx of temporary foreign workers (TFWs), as part of Canadian employers’ increased use of migrant workers in the mid-2000s. The authors find three types of response to the new TFW members: resistive, facilitative and active. Furthermore, these responses were dynamic and changing over time. The different responses are best explained not by the unions’ institutional context, but by internal factors shaping each union’s response. Drawing upon the concept of referential unionisms, the study explores how unions’ self-identity shapes their responses to new challenges such as the influx of migrant workers.

This article reviews the book, "Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment," by Gerald Tulchinsky.

This article examines changes in levels of confidence in unions and proposes an intra-national comparison between Quebec and the rest of Canada based on the analysis of the three most recent waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) database, of which Canada is part (i.e. 1990, 2000, 2006). After noting differences in the trends of confidence in unions in these two regions, we applied the same logistic regression model to both regions, based on the 2006 WVS wave, in order to bring out the determinants of the propensity of individuals to express confidence in unions. The results show both similarities and differences between the two regions. As for the similarities between Quebec and the rest of Canada, it should be noted that involvement in politics and the fact of being unionized had a positive effect on the respondents’ propensity to have confidence in unions whereas most of the socio-demographic variables had no significant effects. As for the differences, the fact of reporting a higher income had a significant negative impact in Quebec, but was not significant in the rest of Canada. The fact of supporting the NDP in the rest of Canada had a more structuring effect on the propensity of individuals to have confidence in unions than the fact of supporting the BQ in Quebec. Moreover, the greater the extent to which citizens in Quebec identified with left-leaning ideological positions, the more likely they were to have confidence in unions. Finally, the respondent’s level of education was not significant in the rest of Canada but, cetiris paribus, was highly significant and positively related to confidence in unions in Quebec.

The article reviews the book, "Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike That Shook London and Helped Launch the Labor Movement," by John Tully.

This article reviews the book, "A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain," by Owen Hatherley.

Cet article vise à tester sur longue période l’hypothèse de convergence des relations industrielles dans les pays développés. Prenant acte de la persistance du débat sur ce point, notamment du fait de la crise actuelle, mais aussi de la diversité des conceptions sous-jacentes, il propose de partir d’un objet de comparaison non prédéterminé par une orientation préalable : le « dialogue social ». Ce concept, utilisé notamment dans le cadre du Bureau international du Travail (BIT), reste toutefois assez flou et appelle une réélaboration. Nous ajoutons aux pratiques d’information, concertation et de négociations collectives, des pratiques moins souvent prises en compte : les pratiques du paritarisme de gestion, de la codétermination, ainsi que l’intervention de l’État, cette dernière pouvant renforcer ou, au contraire, contraindre le dialogue social. Se limitant, pour la partie empirique, à l’ensemble formé par les négociations collectives, les pratiques de codétermination et l’intervention de l’État, l’article examine l’évolution de 19 pays de l’OCDE pour six indicateurs de 1985 à 2011. Le choix est fait de ne pas pondérer a priori l’importance de chaque indicateur, et de procéder à une analyse de données en composantes principales suivie d’une classification par nuées dynamiques. Il en résulte cinq groupes de pays, groupes dotés d’une assez forte stabilité, dont on étudie les transformations au cours du temps. Enfin, les groupes de pays sont examinés sous l’angle des performances économiques et sociales, en retenant la croissance du PIB et l’évolution du taux de chômage. On retrouve alors, sur une base non contrainte par une orientation a priori, les groupes classiquement distingués par les analyses comparatives : les groupes « anglo-saxons », « continentaux », « nordiques » et « méditerranéens », ainsi qu’un dernier groupe composé de la Suisse et du Japon. L’article conclut à la persistance de la diversité au regard du « dialogue social », y compris pour la période récente marquée par la crise.

Building on previous research, Workers’ Action Centre members spent the past year identifying key problems workers are facing in the labour market and developing priorities for change. This report brings workers’ voices, experiences and recommendations to this conversation, contributing knowledge that will be essential to updating Ontario’s labour legislation from the ground up. --Website summary

The article reviews the book, "Le temps de travail et travail du temps," edited by Sylvie Monchatre et Bernard Woehl.

This paper takes a concise look at what the future might hold for pension law in Canada, by considering how it has developed in the past and where it stands today. Beginning with an overview of the Supreme Court of Canada's foundational decision in the Schmidt case, the author traces the evolution of what she sees as two distinct approaches to the resolution of pension disputes: the "classical" approach, and the "integrated" approach. The classical approach is both hierarchical and binary, in that if the governing pension legislation applies, its provisions prevail over the common law, while if the legislation does not apply, the court, in deciding the case, must choose whether to apply trust law principles or contract law principles. Under the integrated approach, by contrast, the court does not begin from the premise that a certain, unitary set of principles should be applied to decide the matter. Rather, it recognizes that pension disputes often involve the intersection of pension legislation, trust law and contract law, and that their resolution may properly be informed by a consideration of other areas of law as well as the underlying policy concerns. The author notes that the classical approach and the integrated approach both have advantages and disadvantages, and that both have a basis in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. The paper concludes by setting out the types of novel pension issues which may come before the courts in the coming decade, and illustrates how the determination of those issues may depend on which of the two rival approaches is adopted.

Cet article étudie les stratégies de négociation et de mobilisation des dirigeants confédéraux de la CGT à l’occasion de réformes gouvernementales de la protection sociale qui préfiguraient celles qui ont été engagées depuis 2008 en réponse à la “crise” économique. L’analyse de l’autonomie des syndicats dans la négociation de ces réformes doit être réinscrite dans un examen au plus long cours des transformations des formes et des conditions de possibilité de la lutte syndicale. L’étude des pratiques de ces dirigeants syndicaux permet, en particulier, de s’interroger sur les ressorts de leur enrôlement dans ces processus de négociation, ainsi que sur les effets et les dilemmes qu’implique cette action institutionnelle sur leur manière de contester les projets gouvernementaux. Leur engagement dans ces procédures de concertation n’a rien de mécanique ni de consensuel. Il est, d’abord, le fruit de leur affaiblissement politique et militant. Cette situation modifie leur perception des profits qu’ils peuvent retirer à réinvestir les manières d’être et les outils légitimes dans l’espace de la négociation. Elle les porte notamment à valoriser la production de contre-expertise et de contre-propositions pour justifier leur opposition aux projets gouvernementaux. L’investissement de ces modes d’action institutionnels n’exclut pas le recours à l’arme de l’action collective, mais il contribue à en modifier les usages. D’une part, ces dirigeants syndicaux s’imposent des limites dans leurs stratégies de mobilisation des salariés pour asseoir leur légitimité dans la négociation. D’autre part, ils doivent composer avec de multiples contraintes organisationnelles qui entravent leur capacité à mobiliser leurs adhérents au cours de ces négociations interprofessionnelles. Contre la tendance à opposer l’institutionnalisation des syndicats à leur capacité à entrer en conflit, l’étude des pratiques des dirigeants de la CGT met donc davantage en évidence les contraintes institutionnelles, politiques et organisationnelles qui influencent la manière dont s’articulent et se reconfigurent les usages syndicaux des outils de la négociation et de l’action collective.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider," by Satnam Virdee, "How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts," by Natalia Molina, and "Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy," by David FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin.