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In 2013, the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) research group released the report, "It's More than Poverty: Employment Precarity and Household Wellbeing." Based on 4,165 surveys collected in late 2011 and early 2012, and 83 interviews conducted in 2011 with workers in different forms of precarious employment, It's More than Poverty examined the characteristics of employment in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA). It documented the range of employment experiences and it revealed the extent of insecurity associated with insecure employment relationships. Equally important, it showed the impact of insecure employment relationships on individual and household well-being and community participation.... --From Executive Summary.

The article reviews the book, "Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada," by Ian Milligan.

This article reviews the book, "The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario," by Ryan O’Connor.

The article reviews the book, "Revolutionizing Retail: Workers, Political Action, and Social Change," by Kendra Coulter.

The article reviews the book, "According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury's Ukrainian Community," by Stacey Zembrzycki.

This article reviews the book, "The Match Girl and the Heiress," by Seth Koven.

Indigenous North Americans continue to be overrepresented among those who are poor, unemployed, and with low levels of education. This has long been an issue of concern for Indigenous people and their allies and is now drawing the attention of government, business leaders, and others who know that this fast-growing population is a critical source of future labour. Shauna MacKinnon's Decolonizing Employment: Aboriginal Inclusion in Canada's Labour Market is a case study with lessons applicable to communities throughout North America. Her examination of Aboriginal labour market participation outlines the deeply damaging, intergenerational effects of colonial policies and describes how a neoliberal political economy serves to further exclude Indigenous North Americans. MacKinnon's work demonstrates that a fundamental shift in policy is required. Long-term financial support for comprehensive, holistic education and training programs that integrate cultural reclamation and small supportive learning environments is needed if we are to improve social and economic outcomes and support the spiritual and emotional healing that Aboriginal learners tell us is of primary importance. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- Social exclusion, poverty, inequality, and policy in the neo-liberal age -- The labour market, policy, and Canada's aboriginal population -- The Manitoba labour force and the policy environment -- Decolonization: confronting the elephant in the room -- Assessing the impact of neo-liberal training policy -- A continuum of training responses -- Voices from the front lines -- Lessons learned: implications for policy -- Conclusion. Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-204) and index.

Workplace mental health is becoming of increasing importance, in part due to the rising social and economic costs of mental health issues in the workplace. Little is known about how the experience of workers with mental health issues is actively produced through their participation in workplace procedures and associated supports. The purpose of this research is to better understand how employees actively engage in institutional practices and associated social relations that ultimately coordinate and produce their workplace experience. Using institutional ethnography, I take up the standpoint of the employee living with mental health issues to explore the coordinating relations associated with workplace mental health. This approach sheds light on how employees' experiences are socially produced and coordinated across and between institutional processes and practices. Data collection included over 140 hours of ethnographic observations, the analysis of associated texts and documents, and interviews that were conducted with 17 informants. This research details some of the challenges experienced by one novice health science researcher while conducting ethnographic research, and provides techniques for addressing personal and professional boundaries, negotiating ethical dilemmas, and reconciling the emotional experience of transitioning back and forth between being an `outsider' and `insider'. In addition to these insights, the findings explicate the social relations and institutional processes that coordinate sick time utilization for workers experiencing mental health issues. We revealed that employee's work of managing workplace absence management programs while negotiating episodes of mental ill health was perceived as overwhelming, unfair, and even punitive. Employees would require formal and informal respite from work, and would often utilized vacation time when unwell in order to avoid institutional processes all together. The biomedical focus of the absence management program created uncertainty about what constitutes a bona fide illness, and caused managers to come to know their work activities as distinctively separate from the work of healthcare practitioners. This research contributes to the literature by highlighting how tensions are created through textually coordinated work activities within and between the corporate and healthcare sector. These insights are important in establishing where and how to enact change from the standpoint of the worker.

The article reviews the book, "Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities," by Glenda Tibe Bonifacio.

The Working Centre in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, is a widely recognized and successful model for community development. Begun from scratch in 1982, it is now a vast network of practical supports for the unemployed, the underemployed, the temporarily employed, and the homeless, populations that collectively constitute up to 30 percent of the labour market both locally and across North America. Transition to Common Work is the essential text about The Working Centre--its beginnings thirty years ago, the lessons learned, and the myriad ways in which its strategies and innovations can be adapted by those who share its goals. The Working Centre focuses on creating access-to-tools projects rather than administrative layers of bureaucracy. This book highlights the core philosophy behind the centre's decentralized but integrated structure, which has contributed to the creation of affordable services. Underlying this approach are common-sense innovations such as thinking about virtues rather than values, developing community tools with a social enterprise approach, and implementing a radically equal salary policy. For social workers, activists, bureaucrats, and engaged citizens in third-sector organizations (NGOs, charities, not-for-profits, co-operatives), this practical and inspiring book provides a method for moving beyond the doldrums of "poverty relief" into the exciting world of community building. --Publisher's website. Contents: Part 1: The Working Centre takes root -- Introduction: beyond us and them -- Building community: the Working Centre's roots -- Liberation from overdevelopment -- Part 2: Community engagement -- The Virtues -- St. John's Kitchen: redistribution through cooperation -- Searching for work at the Help Centre -- The nuts and bolts of an alternative organization -- Part 3: Toward a philosophy of work -- Ethical imagination: the Working Centre's approach to salaries -- Community tools -- Small is beautiful: re-embedding reciprocal relationships in daily work -- Conclusion: transition to common work -- Map of the Working Centre buildings and projects -- Map of the Working Centre locations in downtown Kitchener -- A thirty-year chronology of the Working Centre -- People of the Working Centre.

The article reviews the book, "Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba," by Janis Thiessen.

While historians have been increasingly attentive to the politics and culture of social movements since the long sixties, they have engaged much less with the significance of anarchism within these activist currents. As part of an emerging field of anarchist studies, this article demonstrates that anarchist projects were critical in shaping postwar political radicalism in Vancouver and its relationship to a global pattern of cultural transformation, capitalist restructuring, and social movement activism. Specifically, the article investigates how and why Vancouver’s anarchist community created strong political, personal, and cultural connections with an emerging punk scene during the 1970s and early 1980s. It demonstrates that these relationships emerged from anarchism’s conflicting relationship with the city’s New Left and countercultural communities in the long sixties, as well as from anarchists’ specific engagement with punk as a tool for revolutionary struggle in the wake of the sixties. Overall, the article argues that anarchists cultivated connections with punk in this context because they saw it as awash with the potential to bridge generations of political dissent; to support emerging activist projects; and to help usher in new expressions of radical culture in the city. In so doing, the article offers new insights into the political, social, and cultural legacies of the long sixties, in Vancouver and beyond.

The organization of work through production networks undermines the application of labour law to a growing proportion of workers. Protections put in place by labour law, specifically devised to apply within the hierarchical and bilateral structure of the employer/employee relationship, are ill-fitted to tackle the multilateral structure of network production in which market and hierarchical relationships are entangled. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to some as a possible answer to these challenges. The author develops a normative and functional framework to assess the promise and limits of CSR as a regulatory tool. The framework is grounded in human dignity, as concep- tualized by human rights law and political philosophy. A holistic understanding of human dignity highlights the interdependency of labour law's basic func- tions: providing minimum working conditions, ensuring employer accountability for working hazards, and enabling workers' collective action. The author then applies the human dignity framework to codes of conduct, as described and analyzed in current literature on the subject. She concludes that CSR codes and their implementation often fall short of what is required in the workplace by the human dignity principle.

Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that was failing to assume responsibility for isolated and uneducated men on the frontier, as well as working-class men who responded to their poor working conditions by succumbing to moral diseases that left them incapable of governing themselves, leading their families, or functioning as rational citizens. Fitzpatrick developed a double strategy to head off this crisis: he lobbied the state for structural change, and at the same time promoted a home-like environment for reading, as well as particular works of fiction, as a means of reminding male workers of their duty to self, family, and nation. Despite the association’s apparent interest in the cultivation of the liberal individual, its reliance on the reading room and on the fiction of popular authors such as Ralph Connor as surrogates for the absent family demonstrates the centrality of the apparently private sphere to early 20th-century Canada’s industrializing economy.

The article reviews the book, "Solidarités provinciales. Histoire de la Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Nouveau-Brunswick," by David Frank.

Global warming is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the twenty-first century. Environmental polices on the one hand, and economic and labour market polices on the other, often exist in separate silos creating a dilemma that Work in a Warming World confronts. The world of work - goods, services, and resources - produces most of the greenhouse gases created by human activity. In engaging essays, contributors demonstrate how the world of work and the labour movement need to become involved in the struggle to slow global warming, and the ways in which environmental and economic policies need to be linked dynamically in order to effect positive change. Addressing the dichotomy of competing public policies in a Canadian context, Work in a Warming World presents ways of creating an effective response to global warming and key building blocks toward a national climate strategy. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction / Stephen McBride and Carla Lipsig-Mummé -- International constraints on green strategies : Ontario's WTO defeat and public sector remedies / Scott Sinclair and Stuart Trew -- Unions and climate change in Europe : the contrasting experience of Germany and the UK / John Calvert -- Gendered emissions : counting greenhouse gas emissions by gender and why it matters / Marjorie Griffin Cohen -- Canadian labour's climate dilemma / Geoffrey Bickerton and Carla Lipsig-Mummé -- Renewable energy development as industrial strategy / Mark Winfield -- (Re)building sustainable infrastructure : implications for engineers / Kean Birch and Dalton Wudrich -- Construction and climate change : overcoming roadblocks to achieving green workplace competencies / John Calvert -- Labour and the greening of hospitality : raising standards or union greenwashing? / Steven Tufts and Simon Milne -- Cities, climate change, and the green economy / Stephen McBride, John Shields, and Stephanie Tombari -- Renewable energy, sustainable jobs : the case of the Kingston, Ontario Region / Andrea Megan MacCallum, Lindsay Napier, John Holmes, and Warren Edward Mabee.

The aging workforce poses perplexing policy challenges, even in Canada, which is demographically young among comparable countries. We ask what the evidence shows about whether there are, or will be, labour or skills shortages as the workforce ages. Highlighting the challenges of measuring labour/skills shortages, we explore peer-reviewed research in the 2000–2013 period. No evidence is found of a national labour shortage in the foreseeable future. In fact, the workforce is predicted to grow for the coming two decades with less shrinkage than in the past as a result of retirements. Regional and occupational shortages occur at times, as well as underutilized skills.

This paper engages with the varieties of capitalism literature to investigate the employee representation and consultation approaches of liberal market economy multinational companies (MNCs), specifically Australian, British and US MNCs operating in Australia. While the literature would suggest commonality amongst these MNCs, the paper considers whether the evidence points to similarity or variation amongst liberal market headquartered MNCs. The findings contribute to filling a recognized empirical gap on MNC employment relations practice in Australia and to a better understanding of within category varieties of capitalism similarity and variation. Drawing on survey data from MNCs operating in Australia, the results demonstrated that UK-owned MNCs were the least likely to report collective structures of employee representation. Moreover, it was found that Australian MNCs were the most likely to engage in collective forms of employee representation and made less use of direct consultative mechanisms relative to their British and US counterparts. In spite of the concerted individualization of the employment relations domain over previous decades, Australian MNCs appear to have upheld more long-standing national institutional arrangements with respect to engaging with employees on a collective basis. This varies from British and US MNC approaches which denotes that our results display within category deviation in the variety of capitalism liberal market economy typology. Just as Hall and Soskice described their seminal work on liberal market economy (LME) and coordinated market economy (CME) categories as a “work-in-progress” (2001: 2), we too suggest that Australia’s evolution in the LME category, and more specifically its industrial relations system development, and the consequences for employment relations practices of its domestic MNCs, may be a work-in-progress.

This article reviews the book, "The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest," by Stephen Tuck.

It is commonplace today to suggest that gender is socially constructed, that the roles women and men fulfill in their daily lives have been created and defined for them by society and social institutions. But how have men and women negotiated and navigated the gender roles that have been thrust upon them? With Gendered Pasts, Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell have collected eleven engaging essays that seek to answer this question in a wide-ranging exploration of specific gendered dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian history.The contributors cover all manner of topics related to gender and history across Canada, including: female vagrancy; gambling, drinking, and sex; the role of the miner's wife; the portrayal of gay men; and the sharply defined role of nurses. Unusual in its breadth, Gendered Pasts is essential to the understanding of the various threads and themes in Canadian gender history. Previously published by Oxford University Press, . --Publisher's description