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The progressive advancement of technology and the rise of fissured workplaces have led to significant shifts in global employment structures, particularly towards the gig economy. In Canada, however, gig economy workers remain largely excluded from opportunities for unionisation. Historically, unions have demonstrated substantial organisational power, serving as critical institutions for improving workplace conditions through collective bargaining. This study, therefore, aims to examine the impact of unionisation, immigration, human capital, inflation and information and communication technology on wage determination in Canada, situating the analysis within the broader context of a rapidly evolving employment landscape. Using Canadian time series data from 1980 to 2022, the research uses the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag approach to identify both cointegrating relationships and counterfactual effects among the variables. Additionally, the counterfactual analysis examines the effects of ±1% and ±5% shocks on the dependent variables. The robustness of these findings is confirmed through the kernel-based regularised least squares machine learning approach.,The findings reveal that unionisation, inflation, immigration and information and communication technology development significantly influence wages at a 1% level, while human capital at a 5% level in the long term. The robustness of these findings is further confirmed by the kernel regularised least squares machine learning algorithm.,Based on the findings, the study recommends that policymakers should implement targeted strategies to enhance union representation among gig economy workers and strengthen collective bargaining mechanisms. Additionally, addressing broader factors influencing wage dynamics, such as human capital development, immigration policies, information and communication technology advancements and inflation-indexed wage adjustments, can foster equitable and sustainable wage growth across diverse sectors. Exploring the dynamic and cointegrating relationships between unions’ organising power and wage levels within the purview of inflation, immigration, human capital and information and communication technology development is unprecedented. Additionally, applying the kernel regularised least squares machine learning algorithm to check robustness is completely new in a study within the realm of employment relationships.

Given Canada's child care deficit, economic migration remains contingent on the unpaid care work of grandparent migrants, particularly grandmothers or ‘flying grannies’, who arrive through temporary pathways such as the super visa and often juggle multiple transnational caring obligations. However, routine pauses to the parent and grandparent sponsorship program render humanitarian and compassionate applications one of the few options available for grandparents seeking permanent residence. Yet this discretionary tool and grandparents’ multiple caregiving roles continue to be understudied. This socio-legal study, therefore, unpacks narratives of care in 171 humanitarian and compassionate grounds cases involving grandparents who applied to, considered applying, or were referred by judges and immigration officers to apply for the Super Visa. Drawing on Ellermann, we argue that the types of care that are valued and, subsequently, which ‘exceptional’ cases are granted permanent residence, reflect a human-capital citizenship logic and membership status. The subjective criteria used by judges and other ‘gatekeepers’, especially when determining the best interest of any child and hardship, reveal multiple tensions, inconsistencies and a limited notion of care that entrench stereotypes based on race, gender, culture, class and other vectors of social location. Ultimately, family reunification is deemed conditional, and grandparents are rendered temporary.

Homage to the life and work of historian Joy Parr, who wrote widely on labour and gender history, and the history of technology.

Major Canadian cities have seen an overrepresentation of young and immigrant workers delivering meals in their food delivery industries. This type of labour is increasingly done via online digital platforms. The objective of this article is to use interviews to analyze the working conditions and experiences of food delivery workers in Toronto and Montréal, highlighting the elements of precariousness that characterize this type of work. The degree to which customers perform managerial functions through digital platforms is only one of the various forms and aspects of algorithmic control experienced by delivery workers. Through 30 semi-structured interviews with delivery riders, and notes collected through participatory observation, this article presents commonly experienced negative aspects of platform work among young and immigrant delivery drivers.

Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that the article co-authors presented during the annual Contract negotiations between Canada and sending states in 2020. The article then explains why these recommendations were not accepted, situating the negotiation process within the structural context that produces migrant workers' vulnerability, on the one hand, and limits the capacity of representatives of sending and receiving states to expand rights and offer stronger protections to migrant farmworkers, on the other hand. We argue that fundamental changes are required to address the vulnerability of migrant agricultural workers. In the absence of structural changes, it is nevertheless important to seek improvements in the regulation of the programme through any means possible, including strengthening the Contract.

À l’aube du 21e siècle, l’arrivée des multinationales change à tout jamais la dynamique entre les travailleurs et le patronat dans l’industrie forestière à Hearst en Ontario. Cet article examine le déroulement des événements et les principales transformations apportées aux conventions collectives signées entre les travailleurs hearstois et l’entreprise américaine Columbia Forest Products, un producteur de contreplaqué, pendant environ une décennie. Lorsque des scieries familiales sont vendues à des géants de l’industrie, le processus de négociation des ententes se métamorphose. La conjoncture économique joue également un rôle déterminant dans l’articulation des conventions collectives à un moment où l’industrie forestière nord-ontarienne traverse une série de crises, notamment le conflit canado-américain du bois d’œuvre. À maintes reprises, les travailleurs syndiqués doivent consentir une partie de leurs gains historiques pour tenter de sauver leurs emplois.

In this paper, we reflect on our experiences in the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association and our efforts to prioritize decolonizing, indigenizing, and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EDIA) in the collective bargaining process. We examine the performative nature of EDIA efforts in negotiations by university administrators and the Board of Governors, outlining our employer’s active resistance to proposals pertaining to EDIA, their lack of explicit Indigenous and EDIA expertise on their bargaining team, their sidelining and exclusion of university Indigenous and EDIA experts, as well as the absence of transparency and accountability in decision-making. We suggest that three actions — strengthening internal and external solidarity, democratizing governance, and pursuing legislative reform — offer a pathway to rethinking equity-based bargaining, challenging the instrumentalization of EDIA, and achieving genuine structural change.

Efforts to improve inclusion of workers with disabilities have often focused on providing accommodations. While this is useful and necessary, the need for an accommodation signals that a barrier exists. What if fewer barriers existed in the first place? The inclusive design movement seeks to create tools, policies, and practices that are inherently barrier-free. This paper reviews how to apply inclusive design principles to HR policies and procedures, enabling the creation of more inherently equitable practices. Bargaining teams have an important role to play in ensuring that collective agreement clauses related to HR comply with inclusive design principles. Specific recommendations are made, with particular attention to recruitment, selection, tenure and promotion, attendance management, scheduling, and enforcement of respectful communication policies.

This paper explores the transnational practices of migrant workers who access short-term employment in Atlantic Canada’s food production sector via two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP): the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the low-waged stream. Based on interviews with migrant workers—SAWP farmworkers from Jamaica and Mexico and low-waged fish plant workers from the Philippines—we explore their differential rights in Canada corresponding to the different parameters of each immigration stream. Reflecting the livelihood strategies and reproductive efforts of our interviewees and the extent to which these have been transformed in response to the conditions and limited opportunities afforded by Canadian immigration policy, we advance the concepts of “agricultural care chains” and “citizenship care chains”. In doing so, we suggest that the consideration of work and outcomes not conventionally understood as “care” reflects an important analytical and political contribution to the care chain scholarship as well as draws attention to how care scholarship and social reproduction theory can be more closely aligned. Central to our efforts is Tungohan’s argument (2019) that in considering transnational circuits of care, we must recognize the asymmetry that characterizes peoples’ relationships and the social locations they occupy—asymmetry that, in the context of our participants’ lives, is reinforced through the differential rights and opportunities afforded to migrant workers by Canadian immigration policy.

The article reviews the book, "Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change," by Stefania Barca.

This paper examines one possible, but understudied, institution that might have an impact on health: unionization. We outline four distinct, although complementary, pathways through which unions might influence population health outcomes based on two axes: the levers that unions can potentially pull to influence any policy environment (collective bargaining and political action) and the manner in which health can be influenced in a society (the Social Determinants of Health and health care). We test whether unionization rates have an impact on total, preventable, and treatable mortality using panel data on Canadian provinces between 2000 and 2020. We find that unionization rates are negatively associated with all three measures of mortality.

Drawing on interviews with seasonal agricultural workers employed in Canada from Jamaica and Mexico, this paper focuses in on the experiences of a Jamaican farmworker who remits funds to pay a neighbour to farm his land (or the land he leases) while in Canada, and who participates in regular long-distance discussions with family members and neighbours back home about the upkeep of the farm. The concept of a “transnational agricultural care chain” is proposed here to capture a series of personal links between people, located, at least temporarily, in different countries, who tend to the crops and farmland as a practice that entails asymmetrical relations of obligation to care for others. Agricultural care chains form part of a strategy to get by and possibly even advance the economic and social standing of one’s family under difficult economic conditions. Land access, as a co-constitutive sphere of production and reproduction, is another important factor in the livelihood strategies of rurally-rooted migrants, but the significance placed on land must be understood in connection to the uneven processes of global capitalism, histories of colonialism and, in the case of Jamaica, plantation slavery. The paper concludes with a reflection on how transnational agricultural care chains as paradigmatic of the contemporary food system are relevant to political and conceptual discussions around food sovereignty.

One adaptation required by the Covid-19 pandemic was a shift to virtual meetings. Collective bargaining has traditionally been conducted in person, but covid forced union and employer negotiators to adopt virtual forms of bargaining. This article examines union negotiators’ experiences with virtual bargaining in this period – first, to document the nature of the adaptations made during a historical public health event, and second, to determine whether either the shift to virtual bargaining or other covid restrictions undermined union bargaining power. It finds that the technical aspects of virtual bargaining did not significantly impact bargaining power, but broader challenges caused by covid did negatively impact union bargaining power at and away from the table.

The article reviews the book, "Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain," by Heather Meek.

The article reviews the book, "Résister et fleurir," by Jean-Félix Chénier and Yoakim Bélanger.

In collective bargaining, General Wage Increases (GWI) are most normally framed and implemented as percentages, with each eligible member seeing a salary rise of X% on top of pre-existing salary. While this approach is not remarkable where salary grids are in place and union members start at the same rate, it can have significant effects where starting salaries vary, as is common in the university sector. Under these conditions, percentage increases over time contribute to the widening of intra-member salary inequity, exacerbating structurally gendered and racialized inequities of the academic labour market. This paper explores the impact of a flat rate increase approach to salary bargaining. Beginning with the context of collective bargaining in British Columbia, it examines how percentage-based and flat-rate increases would impact real salaries of faculty members at Simon Fraser University in order to better understand how faculty associations and unions could use flat rate approaches to begin to counteract the impact of differential starting salaries on the career earnings of faculty members. The paper finds that flat rate increases could be an effective tool against pay inequity even where that inequity is driven by forces outside the university.

Since the establishment of the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants’ Association (CALFAA) in 1948 and the Airline Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in 1984, flight attendant unions have advocated for duty time limits, sufficient rest periods, and fair wages. Recently, CUPE’s Airline Division has focused their efforts on unpaid ground time – a vital but overlooked element of flight attendant labor. Despite the union’s efforts, the persistence of unpaid ground time illustrates a trend of systemic prioritization of corporate profit over workplace equity. Through an overview of academic and grey literature (e.g. news articles, government documents), this review details the history of Canadian flight attendant unions before and after neoliberal reforms in the 1980s to trace trends in labor relations. We argue that increased governmental intervention and corporate exemptions in employee-employer labor relations prioritize the industry’s financial stability, forming structural barriers that dilute unions’ change-making capacity. Ultimately, we contextualize unpaid ground time within these trends – where systemic prioritization of corporate interests trump unions’ labor concerns, leaving attendants’ workplace inequity unaddressed.

We illustrate the exploitation in the relationship between Uber and its drivers by aligning their work with the characteristics of neo-villeiny. Two different legal developments in response to irregulation (or the lack of effective regulation) in similar institutional contexts emerge. While Uber drivers in the United Kingdom now have worker status, dysregulation (by which we mean regulation that exacerbates the problem it seeks to resolve) in Ontario has established neo-villeiny in law.

Using post-structural theories, this paper explores the public discourses of several Canadian teacher unions and grassroots teacher activist groups around the issue of school reopening plans in Canada amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper aims to highlight the ways in which these two forces of teacher activism can influence and impress upon each other to create a different possible future for collective resistance to neoliberalism in education – an assemblage of union and grassroots activism intra-acting, shaping, and impressing upon one another.

The article reviews the book, "The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor," by Hamilton Nolan.