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The article reviews the book, "Last Night Shift in Savar: The Story of the Spectrum Sweater Factory Collapse," by Doug Miller.

This article reviews the book, "Indigenous Encounters with Neoliberalism: Place, Women, and the Environment in Canada and Mexico," by Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez.

The article reviews the book, "Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era," by Alex Goodall.

This article reviews the book, "Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera," by Rosemary Hennessey.

It appears to me that there is an obligation on any court studying the constitutionality of a provision of law, first, to give a detailed examination of the specific provision of law it is studying, as well as the whole context of the right, before pronouncing on its consti- tutionality. It is the failure of the Supreme Court of Canada majority in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour1 to do so that has given rise to much commentary, with one prominent newspaper questioning the "shoddy reasoning," the "curiously selective research" and the "slapdash approach to precedent."'2 Indeed, it is this failure that gives rise to the question of what the decision actually decides.' The majority judgment can best be understood in light of its misplaced emulation of European law, which is quite different from ours, and its frequent references to the Committee on Freedom of Association of the ILO. Although the Committee is not a judicial body, the majority judgment elevates it to one, though making the interesting proviso that the Committee's decisions are "not strictly binding."'4 The problems with showing such deference to the Committee on Freedom of Association are well known, and I will touch on them only briefly. One has only to read the papers by Brian Langille as well as Sonia Regenbogen, both of whom have gone to great lengths to study the committees of the ILO, to be disabused of the notion that these "committees" are judicial bodies or that their decisions are in any way binding on our courts.5 Indeed, in the Fraser case, I was amazed when, approximately two months after the matter was en delibdri, the Supreme Court received a missive from one of the ILO committees telling the Court its views on how the decision should be rendered.6 I strenuously objected to this document on two grounds: (1) how did the ILO committee know, in a secret delibdri, that one side needed its help? and, (2) by what right was a non-party to the Supreme Court proceedings lobbying the Court after the hear- ing, an action which the Court would properly have forbidden a party from taking? What may be less well known and understood are the basic dif- ferences between European labour law and our own.' The European law is based on a system of "voluntarism," whereby employees are free to join or not to join a union. An article quoted by the Court in B.C. Health makes this clear (though the Court's reliance on the article is unfortunate, given that the article's authors are referring to Convention 98 of the ILO, which Canada has not even ratified):' In view of the fact that the voluntary nature of collective bargaining is a funda- mental aspect of the principles of freedom of association, collective bargaining

The article reviews the book, "America's Assembly Line," by David E. Nye.

Using Hamilton's local history to tell the wider story of the North American working-class, Lunch-Bucket Lives investigates how workers dealt with the profound changes in their lives between the 1890s and the 1930s, as wage-earners, family members, and participants in various social networks. Heron takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods - settlement patterns and housing, marriage, child care, domestic labour, public health, schooling, charity and social work, popular culture, gender identities, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and politics in various forms - presenting a comprehensive view of working-class life in the first half of the twentieth century. --Publisher's description

Working at the mill had been a family affair for generations of Sturgeon Falls’ mill workers, as young men followed their fathers, uncles, older brothers, and occasionally mothers, into the Northern Ontario mill – the town’s largest employer for more than a century. The mill’s workforce was overwhelmingly white and male, with a historic linguistic divide between largely English-speaking managers and mainly French-speaking production workers. This linguistic division of labour and the near total exclusion of Aboriginal people were remnants of industrial colonialism in the region. Within a year of the mill’s December 2002 closure, I began interviewing the former employees about their experiences and these interviews continued for the next two years. During that time, efforts to reopen the mill fizzled out and it was demolished by the departing company. Work-life oral histories offer us a way into the shifting sands of culture and economy in this former mill town. This article explores the shifting sense of temporal and spatial proximity or distance in the plant shutdown stories told by 37 former mill workers. Several dimensions of proximity are explored such as the temporal proximity of the interview to the events being recounted, the perceived social proximity that prevailed before the mill closing, the remembered physical proximity of the mill in the narrated lives of residents, and, now, after the mill’s closure, the spectre of forced relocation or distant daily commutes to new jobs in other towns and cities. For long-service workers, employment mobility or permanent relocation was understood to be a last resort. These interviews make clear that forced employment mobility was a core concern to everyone we interviewed, not just those who actually relocated or commuted to jobs found elsewhere.

The article reviews the book, "Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940," by Michael Innis-Jiménez.

The article reviews the book, "Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront," by Penny A. Peterson.

The article reviews the book, "Growing to One World: The Life of J. King Gordon," by Eileen R. Janzen.

Given the difficulty generalizing across countries about industrial relations and human resource management practices, the discussion in this chapter is restricted to the United States and Canada. The chapter focuses on the continuity and change in North American auto industry labour relations. It traces the evolution of the post-war labour relations system in the North American automotive industry prior to 2000. It discusses the development of the archetypal Fordist system in the 1930s and 1940s, which produced a highly uniform pattern of labour relations across the auto industry in the United States and Canada. In the 1980s, Japanese automakers and their key suppliers introduced key elements of Japanese production methods (JPS) to North America. By 2012, not only had differences in bargaining outcomes narrowed between the United States and Canada but there was a new reality in which ‘union and non-union work in the auto industry have been rendered indistinguishable’.

This article reviews the book, "The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, History," by Tara Martin Lopez.

This article reviews the book, "The Left in British Columbia: A History of Struggle," by Gordon Hak.

This article reviews the books, "Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume I: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents," edited by Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell, and "Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume II: Canada – National and Transnational Contexts," edited by Nancy Forestell and Maureen Moynagh.

In this thesis, I study the experiences of eight first-generation Greek immigrant women who moved to Vancouver between 1954 and 1975 by listening to and contextualizing their oral life histories. Looking at their lives before they immigrated, I explore how these women’s gender experiences were very much shaped by religion, class, and rural vis-à=vis urban locations in Greece. I also demonstrate that many exercised agency in this patriarchal culture, and that they were part of the decision-making process that led to immigration in search of a better life. After they immigrated to Vancouver, these women played an active part in supporting their families’ wellbeing, and some also contributed outside the household, offering their assistance to Greek communal organizations. Differences in class and working careers resulted in different narratives about immigration experiences, although the ideal of the kali noikokyra (good housewife) was consistent in their perceptions of proper Greek womanhood. Middle-class and working-class women also had different attitudes towards charitable work, religion, and the Greek community organizations. Both, however, actively contributed to the survival and settlement of Greek immigrant families in Canada. Overall, this thesis examines how gender, class, ethnicity, and religion affected Greek women’s identities before and after they immigrated in postwar period, and how their experiences of immigration altered their perspectives on the place of women in Greek families.

Prominent writers in industrial relations (IR) have concluded the field is in significant decline, partly because of a failed theory base. The theory problem is deepened because other writers conclude developing a theory foundation for industrial relations is neither possible nor desirable. We believe advancing IR theory is both needed and possible, and take up the challenge in this paper. A long-standing problem in theorizing industrial relations has been the lack of agreement on the field’s core analytical construct. However, in the last two decades writers have increasingly agreed the field is centred on the employment relationship. Another long-standing problem is that writers have theorized industrial relations using different theoretical frames of reference, including pluralist and radical-Marxist; different disciplinary perspectives, such as economics, sociology, history, and politics; and from different national traditions, such as British, French, and American. In this paper, we seek to advance IR theory and better integrate paradigms and national traditions. We do this by developing an analytical explanation for four core features of the employment relationship—generation of an economic surplus, cooperation-conflict dialectic, indeterminate nature of the employment contract, and asymmetric authority and power in the firm—using an integrative mix of ideas and concepts from the pluralist and radical-Marxist streams presented in a multi-part diagram constructed with marginalist tools from conventional economics. The diagram includes central IR system components, such as labour market, hierarchical firm, macro-economy, and nation state government. The model is used to explain the four features of the employment relationship and derive implications for IR theory and practice. Examples include the diagrammatic representation of the size and distribution of the economic surplus, a new analytical representation of labour exploitation, identification of labour supply conditions that encourage, respectively, cooperation versus conflict, and demonstration of how inequality of bargaining power in labour markets contributes to macroeconomic stagnation and unemployment.

Announces that the journal is now a joint partnership of the Canadian Committee on Labour History with Athabaska University Press, in affiliation with the Canadian Association of Labour Studies.

This article reviews the book, "The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale and the Second World War in Winnipeg," by Jody Perrun.