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The article reviews the book, "Girls of the Factory: A Year with the Garment Workers of Morocco," by M. Laetitia Cairoli.

The temporary work industry has undergone considerable expansion in Canada and in Quebec in the last decade. Becoming an important mechanism in the functioning of the labour market, it provides not only increased numerical and functional flexibility for companies, but is also a favoured means of access to the labour market for many workers, including young workers. Personnel leasing falls within the framework of tripartite labour relations between the employee, the agency and the client company. This type of relationship is not without its particular difficulties, the solution for which is often hard to find since the personnel leasing activity, as such, is not regulated in Quebec. The question is to determine, considering the precise nature of the tripartite relationship, whether the employees' recognized rights can be exercised, in practice, in such a way as to achieve their specific purpose.

In France, the relative decline of sectoral collective bargaining, as well as changes in the law relating to the employment contract during the late 1980s, have restored some flexibility to the employer and employee in determining contract terms, thus contributing to a process of individualization of the employment relationship. Companies are thereby better able to take account of the constraints imposed by the labour market and, in particular, can attract the most qualified candidates. To do this, they are often dependent on recruitment intermediaries who have a better knowledge of the state of the market. The objective of this paper is to analyze how these various recruitment channels affect the determination of starting salaries, examining in particular to what extent they bring employers and employees to negotiate the terms of their contracts of employment.

Généralement traité par la bande ou scruté à l’aide d’un nombre de documents assez restreint, l’Ordre des Chevaliers du travail au Québec échappe encore et toujours à la compréhension des spécialistes. L’image que les historiens, sociologues et experts en relations industrielles ont pu en livrer a entraîné des appréciations très négatives : l’aile québécoise de la centrale syndicale américaine étant montrée comme un mouvement utopiste, trop éloigné des besoins immédiats des travailleurs et de la réalité du monde industriel. À renfort de nouvelles sources, nous présentons un portrait tout autre de son cheminement organisationnel. Non seulement l’expérience des chevaliers québécois est-elle tout à fait remarquable, mais elle façonnera une génération de travailleurs et probablement davantage. Dans le paysage le plus laborieux et capricieux du Canada, Montréal, ils ont entamé une collaboration intense entre francophones et anglophones. Cherchant à construire un rapport de force sur le terrain, ils ont privilégié le syndicalisme de métier, tout en expérimentant avec le syndicalisme industriel à une échelle insoupçonnée par l’historiographie. Ouverts aussi aux immigrants de l’Europe du Sud et de l’Est, de même qu’aux femmes, les chevaliers dérangèrent donc l’ordre existant. C’est pourquoi, plus que tout autre mouvement syndical québécois avant lui, l’Ordre affronta l’hostilité du clergé catholique. Toutefois, le catholicisme joua également dans le sens contraire lorsque, suite à la diffusion de Rerum Novarum, les ouvriers s’inspirèrent de la légitimité offerte à l’organisation du travail pour relancer le mouvement dans les années 1890.

The article reviews the book, "Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: The Interwar Years," by Françoise Noël.

The article reviews the book, "Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada," by Paulette Regan.

The article reviews the book, "Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960," by Rebecca Sharpless.

Drawing on nurses’ strikes in many countries, this paper explores nurse militancy with reference to professionalism and the commitment to service; patriarchal practices and gendered subordination; and proletarianization and the confrontation with healthcare restructuring. These deeply entangled trajectories have had a significant impact on the work, consciousness and militancy of nurses and have shaped occupation-specific forms of resistance. They have produced a pattern of overlapping solidarities – occupational solidarity, gendered alliances and coalitions around healthcare restructuring – which have supported, indeed promoted, militancy among nurses, despite the multiple forces arrayed against them. The professional commitments of nurses to the provision of care have confronted healthcare restructuring, nursing shortages, intensification of work, precarious employment and gendered hierarchies with a militant discourse around the public interest, and a reconstitution and reclamation of ‘caring’, what I call the politicisation of caring. In fact, nurses’ dedication to caring work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may encourage rather than dissuade them from going on strike. This paper uses a trans-disciplinary methodology, qualitative material in the form of strike narratives constructed from newspaper archives, and references to the popular and scholarly literature on nursing militancy.

The article reviews the book, "La dispersion au travail," by Caroline Datchary.

La France se caractérise aujourd’hui par une forte proportion de salariés ayant des contraintes familiales et par un nombre élevé d’entreprises qui flexibilisent la durée et les horaires de travail : comment la diffusion de ces nouvelles contraintes temporelles affectent-elles les femmes, et plus particulièrement les mères ? Une typologie des conditions temporelles d’emploi des salariés français intégrant la durée du travail, la souplesse horaire dont bénéficie le salarié et la « localisation » de son temps de travail, construite à partir de l’enquête « Familles et employeurs » (Ined-Insee, 2004-2005), fait apparaître une surreprésentation des femmes dans les emplois les plus souples, mais aussi les plus contraignants temporellement, alors que l’effet de la présence d’enfant semble assez mineur.Trois hypothèses sont testées pour expliquer les conditions temporelles d’emploi : la préférence des salariés pour des horaires de travail commodes, les caractéristiques productives des emplois et le rapport de force salarié-employeur. Les résultats montrent que le fait d’avoir de jeunes enfants n’est pas corrélé aux conditions temporelles d’emploi. Être une femme accroît la probabilité d’avoir des horaires hyper-souples (plutôt que standards contraints) et diminue la probabilité d’avoir des horaires longs souples et non standards contraints. L’hypothèse d’une sélection en fonction des préférences n’est pas confirmée par l’analyse alors que les exigences productives des emplois et des employeurs ainsi que le pouvoir de négociation des salariés exercent des effets significatifs et expliquent la surreprésentation des femmes dans les horaires fragmentés contraints.

The article reviews the book, "Strike! The Radical Insurrections of Ellen Dawson," by David Lee McMullen.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, anti-union conservatives have been hammering out an arguably bogus yet politically potent argument: collective bargaining with government workers is unaffordable as their wages, health benefits, and pensions are driving states into deficits. What is going on in Wisconsin and other states ought to be seen for what it is: an attempt to exploit the economic crisis to win an eminently political victory over organized labour and allied Democrats. Even in their weakened state, US unions can mobilize opposition to the anti-government, anti-labour agenda of a Tea Party-shaped Republican Party. It is this capability that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and other conservative Republicans are determined to undermine by taking away public-sector workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "Solidarity Transformed: Labor Responses to Globalization and Crisis in Latin America," by Mark S. Anner, "The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Country," by Elizabeth Fitting, and "Global Maya: Work and Ideology in Rural Guatemala," by Liliana R. Goldín.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there are differences in satisfaction with pay and benefits between Canadian-born and immigrant workers, and if differences exist, to examine the factors associated with immigrants' pay and benefits satisfaction. Using Statistics Canada's 2005 Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), immigrants are examined both as a single group, and in four cohorts based on the year of arrival. Results show significantly lower pay and benefits satisfaction for immigrant cohorts, with the exception of the pre-1965 cohort, compared to Canadian-born workers. Our findings also suggest that existing theories and conceptual models on pay and benefits satisfaction may not be appropriate when examining them as they relate to immigrants.

In a context of changing demographics and workplace transformations, a number of authors are concerned about the issues related to knowledge transmission in organizations. The vast experiential knowledge and diverse skills developed by workers to cope with the numerous situations encountered in the course of their work constitute part of the intangible assets vital to the sustainability of expertise, if not to the survival of the organization itself. Based on three case studies, this article describes the impact of precarious employment, flexible management practices and work intensification on knowledge transmission in real work situations. Possible avenues for research are proposed with a view to ensuring better support for the transmission of experiential knowledge in organizations.

The aim of this study is to conceptualize and empirically validate the "perceived fairness in the context of collective bargaining", which refers to employees' justice perceptions formed during the collective bargaining process. Using confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and hierarchical regressions, we find support for discriminant, convergent, and predictive validity. Overall, the results show that this concept includes eight distinct dimensions, combining the two sources of (in)justice (employer and union) and the four types of justice perceptions: procedural, distributive, relational (interpersonal) and informational justice. Employees clearly distinguish eight justice dimensions, which have a differential effect on their attitudes: trust in the employer and satisfaction with the union. Adding to the structural model (Leventhal, 1980) and the process control model (Thibaut and Walker, 1975), this study highlights new bases of justice: usefulness and profitability (cost-benefits ratio).

The article reviews the book, "Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women's History," by Joan Sangster.

Written from a neo-institutionalist standpoint, this paper focuses on the influence of employers' networks on the dissemination of managerial practices through the example of skill management in French companies. Previous studies suggest that employers' organizations can be perceived as social networks that affect Human Resources policies. Studying the development of skill management confirms the idea that this type of management becomes institutionalized under the influence of such networks. We evaluate this influence through the use of a quantitative methodology that shows the correlation between the dissemination of skill management techniques and the number of chief executives belonging to employers' networks in a given company. We use data that were collected from 3,000 companies by the French Ministry of Labour for the Reponse survey. Our approach led us to formulate a brief--but new--account of employers' networks in France. But mostly, it allowed us to measure the impact that belonging to these networks has on the implementation of skill management. Though almost three quarters of all 3,000 companies belong or are related to employers' networks, the reality behind this fact is complex and concerns a limited number of the companies considered. We then show that a connection with an employers' network -- especially with clubs of heads of human resources or with entrepreneurs' organizations -- is one of the reasons why a skill management-oriented human resources policy is adopted. The most influential employers' networks are therefore those that rely on voluntary subscription, the research of legitimacy and the exchange of tools and ideas.

The article reviews the book, "Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada," edited by Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson and Marian Bredin.