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In recent years, poverty-level minimum wages have been the focus of considerable debate across the various provincial jurisdictions and at the federal level in Canada. Similar interest has been expressed in the United States as evidenced by many successful campaigns to raise the minimum wage. Some economists argue that raising the minimum wage will kill low wage jobs, hurting the very people it was intended to assist by pricing them out of the job market. Still others, primarily concerned with poverty and inequality, see raising the minimum wage as an important policy tool for eliminating poverty and promoting equality. How can the latter group engage with others so as to raise the minimum wage above the poverty line? How can they ensure that a person or family earn a decent living - what is commonly termed a “living wage”? -- Publisher's description

L’auteur livre quelques réflexions personnelles sur la spécificité de la réponse européenne à la question sociale telle qu’elle se pose aujourd’hui. Davantage qu’une émanation de la politique de l’Union européenne, il voit dans le modèle social européen un patrimoine commun aux peuples de l’Europe en matière d’emploi et de travail. Ce concept traduit une triple réalité : une régulation sociale fondée sur la concertation ; un régime élaboré de protection sociale et l’existence de services publics à finalité sociale, ainsi qu’un interventionnisme actif de l’État en matières industrielle, économique et sociale. Si ce modèle doit faire face à des critiques et à des difficultés, l’évolution semble davantage aller dans le sens de son adaptation que dans celui de sa disparition.

Globalization and Labour in the Asia Pacific Region, edited by Chris Rowley and John Benson, is reviewed.

The Quality of Work: A People-Centred Agenda, by Graham S. Lowe, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory," by Soon-Won Park.

Economic Conditions and Welfare Reform, edited by Sheldon H. Danziger, is reviewed.

The article reviews the book, "Capital Moves: RCA's 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor," by Jefferson Cowie.

The article reviews the book, "Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology," by Darin Burney.

The article reviews and comments on several books, including "The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy" by Russell Jacoby, "Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?" by Daniel Singer, and "Utopistics, Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century," by Immanuel Wallerstein.

The article reviews the book, "Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption, and Ecology," by Anders Hayden.

The article reviews the book, "Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939," by Jo Ann E. Argersinger.

Discusses the anti-Chinese racism surrounding the No. 1 Mine disaster of 1887, when Chinese miners were unfairly blamed for the tragedy. A sign and plaque were unveiled in 1999 at the disaster's site in Nanaimo, BC, where 53 of the 150 miners killed were Chinese.

Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women's Professional Work, edited by Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne and Alison Prentice, is reviewed.

In most studies of the automotive industry in Canada, the workforce has been constructed as uniformly white and male. However, a tiny number of Black men have long had a presence in the industry, occupying the dirtiest, most hazardous, and least desirable jobs in the auto foundries of St. Catharines and Windsor, Ontario. This paper attempts to reconstruct the working lives and union involvements of these men. The paper highlights the themes of racialization and gendering within the sphere of capitalist production. In examining multiple oppressions, simultaneously experienced and resisted, the study furthermore demonstrates the ways in which relations of domination are far more complex and historically-contingent than most analyses of industry and "the auto worker" have suggested.

The article reviews the book, "A Young Man's Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860-1929," by George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery.

The 1990s in Canada will probably go down as the most stressful decade for public-sector industrial relations since the inception, 25 years earlier, of collective bargaining in the public service. Government debt and defecits became the rationale for downsizing, outsourcing, privatization, layoffs, buyouts, and early retirement packages at both the federal and provincial levels. When workers' bargaining units did not bend to government demands at the negotating table, and when leaders did not blink at the threat of restrictive legislation, then governments of both the right and the left at times found it convenient to legislate rule changes to suit their fiscal or ideological purposes. The contributors to Public-Sector Labour Relations examine in depth the events of recent years in the public service of six jurisdictions―Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, and the federal government. Trends in the other five Canadian provinces are also considered. Only in BC has there been an essentially co-operative labour relations environment, although even in this province, public service employment has dropped considerably. Overall, from 1991 to 1997, provincial civil service employment fell by 15 per cent, while the federal employment reduction was 14 per cent. (From the employment peak in 1993-4, the overall provincial reduction was over 22 per cent.) Although collective bargaining is still alive, a major conclusion of this study is that collective bargaining in the Canadian public sector is not well. The cases reported here demonstrate that governments have adopted the attitude and policy that they may engage in bargaining or suspend it whenever they find that course of action to be convenient. Viewed from a broader international context, as discussed in the concluding chapter, the casual suspension of bargaining by Canadian governments cannot be justified by the norms and agreements that Canada has shared with the international community. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Public-sector labour relations in an era of restraint and restructuring: an overview / Gene Swimmer -- Provincial government restructuring in Nova Scotia: the freezing and thawing of labour relations / Terry H. Wagar -- From softball to hardball: the transition in labour-management relations in the Ontario public service / Joseph B. Rose -- Fiscal restraint, legislated concessions, and labour relations in the Manitoba civil service, 1988-1997 / Paul Phillips and Carolina Stecher -- The logic of union quiescence: the Alberta case / Yonatan Reshef -- Labour relations in the BC public service: blowing in the political wind / Mark Thompson -- Restructuring federal public-sector human resources / Gene Swimmer and Sandra Bach -- Public-employee relations: Canadian developments in perspective / Roy J. Adams.

The article reviews the book, "Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk History in the Jewish Labor Movement.," by David Shuldiner.

Lowell, Massachusetts, had a substantial French-Canadian community in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The workforce in the mill town was predominantly female. This study focuses on single French Canadian women in Lowell from 1900 to 1920. The author uses federal census schedules to examine their employment, earnings, and living arrangements. One major finding is that most of the workers were daughters living in households headed by fathers. Housework and family care obligations fell on daughters, which added to their economic responsibilities and reduced their marriageability.

Over 100,000 Canadian workers participate annually in educational programs conducted by their union or the broader labour organizations to which their union belongs. Union-based education is the most significant nonvocational education available to working people. This activity has been going on for decades, and Jeffery Taylor's Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education in the Twentieth Century is the first comprehensive history of it. Union Learning chronicles the rise and decline of the Workers' Educational Association, the development of internal union educational programs, the consolidation of the Canadian Labour Congress's educational system after 1956, the origin and growth of the Labour College of Canada, and the patchy history of university and college involvement in labour education. Taylor argues that a new emphasis on broad-based and activist education today promises to rekindle the sense of an educational movement that was present in the labour movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The book includes a number of illustrative sidebars and photographs. The author has developed a website containing images, video and other materials related to the history of labour education in Canada: http://unionlearning.athabascau.ca. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Laboring for Rights: Unions and Sexual Diversity Across Nations," edited by Gerald Hunt.