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Alberta remains the only Canadian province to exclude agricultural workers from the ambit of its occupational health and safety laws. Consequently, farm workers have no right to know about workplace safety hazards and no right to refuse unsafe work, thereby increasing their risk of a workplace injury. This study uses qualitative content analysis to identify three narratives used by government members of the legislative assembly between 2000 and 2010 to justify the continued exclusion of agricultural workers from basic health and safety rights. These narratives are: (1) education is better than regulation, (2) farms cannot be regulated, and (3) farmers don’t want and can’t afford regulation. Analysis of these narratives reveals them to be largely invalid, raising the question of why government members rely upon these narratives. The electoral rewards associated with maintaining this exclusion may comprise part of the explanation.

This study examines the validity of injury statistics used to monitor workplace safety in the Canadian province of Alberta. These indicators were found to significantly under–report the rate of injury and to be vulnerable to gaming by both employers and the workers´compensation board. These threats to the validity of the measures should limit the inferences drawn from the measures. Injury–based statistics were also found to be inadequate proxies for the broader construct of workplace safety. The political feasibility of alternative measures is also discussed.

La conclusion d’accords-cadres internationaux (ACI) est en pleine expansion depuis le début des années 2000. Mais comment s’explique l’hétérogénéité des contenus de ces accords ? En l’absence de tout cadre juridique, certains accords définissent succinctement des principes généraux dont l’application devra être négociée dans chacune des filiales, d’autres détaillent précisément des normes substantives applicables dans toutes les entités du groupe. Dans cet article, nous focalisons notre analyse sur les dispositions portant sur la fonction « ressources humaines », c’est-à-dire sur les règles de GRH définies par la direction générale des ressources humaines (DGRH), notamment en matière de rémunération, de conditions de travail et de formation ainsi que sur les missions qui lui sont imparties. En nous inscrivant dans la lignée des travaux d’Anselm Strauss, nous étudions le lien entre le contenu de l’accord, les objectifs poursuivis par les signataires et négociateurs des ACI (les fédérations syndicales internationales - FSI, et les directions des groupes signataires) et les autres éléments du contexte de la négociation. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que le contenu de l’accord dépend des « positionnements » des négociateurs (logique quantitative ou qualitative pour les FSI; politique d’image ou politique sociale pour les directions) et du contexte de la négociation. Nous justifions cette hypothèse avant de la tester en comparant les dispositions « ressources humaines » d’ACI conclus dans des firmes multinationales françaises. Nous appuyons cette démonstration sur l’exemple de quatre groupes français (Accor, France Télécom, Danone et EDF) ayant fait l’objet d’une étude de cas longitudinale approfondie, dans le cadre d’un vaste programme de recherche financé par l’Agence nationale pour la recherche.

A eulogy is presented for the labour historian of the U.S. working class David Montgomery.

Temporary help agency employment is a peculiar and often precarious employment form that has become increasingly salient in Canada in recent decades. This article examines the effects of the expansion of this employment form upon labour unions, as well as union responses to this phenomenon. Using a qualitative exploratory method, various effects upon union organizing and representation activities are outlined, as are a range of union responses to the phenomenon.

The article reviews the book, "Making Up the State: Women in 20th Century Atlantic Canada," edited by Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton.

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.