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In this study, we find that 41 percent of jobs in Canada can be performed remotely, with significant variation across provinces, cities, and industries. We complement this finding with labour microdata and document facts on the relationship between the feasibility of remote work and income inequality, gender, age, and other worker characteristics. We then show that workers in occupations for which the possibility of remote work is less likely experienced larger employment losses between March and April. This relationship also holds for employment losses across cities and (in one of the specifications) across industries. Across provinces, there is a negative link in the February–March 2020 variation.

Canada has not been left untouched by a new authoritarian, or ordered, populism that has seen the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union. Based on measurements of public opinion and other means developed to assess the phenomenon, this paper finds that populism in Canada is a significant political force, replacing the traditional left-right political spectrum. Not only has northern populism created a heightened partisan polarization in Canada, but it also proved to be a strong predictor of the outcome of the 2019 federal election. The authors’ research shows that 34 per cent of Canadians maintain a populist outlook. Older, less-educated, working-class Canadians are the most likely to sympathize with ordered populism, and it is more prevalent in Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is also more closely aligned with Canadians whose political sympathies lie with conservative political parties. A number of factors have contributed to the rise of ordered populism. These include economic stagnation, the growing disparity between the wealthy and the middle and working classes, a sense that society is headed in the wrong direction and a backlash against the loss of traditional core values.

Provides brief bios of the contributors to v. 85 (Spring, 2020).

The article reviews the book, "The Case for Economic Democracy," by Andrew Cumbers.

Examines the federal state's interventions in collective bargaining, including the use of back-to-work legislation, during the 1970s and 80s under the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau.

The article reviews the book, "Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism," byAndrew Feffer.

his article examines rank-and-file organizing in Windsor’s automobile factories during the 1970s. In particular, I look at the history of two organizations: Workers’ Unity and the New Tendency’s Auto Worker Group. I demonstrate how these groups were part of the North American New Left’s broader turn toward Marxism and the working class that contributed to the emergence of radical rank-and-file movements that challenged both management and bureaucratized trade union leaders. In Windsor, New Left auto workers embraced forms of autonomist Marxist politics concerned primarily with working-class self-activity at the point of production, and these activists formed connections with influential theorists and organizations in Detroit and Italy. Putting these intellectual exchanges into action, the rank-and-file organizations in Windsor used direct action in an attempt to improve working conditions and develop a radical culture of democracy on the shop floor. Although these groups were relatively short lived, their history tells us much about the trajectory of the New Left in Canada and the ways that former student activists grappled with the radical potential of 1970s working-class militancy.

It is generally accepted that employment regulation offers mechanisms to generate orderly economic growth as well as provide for the protection of workers. Both these efficiency and equity arguments particularly pertain to developing country contexts. The evolution and impact of employment law and industrial relations institutions in large developing countries is of growing interest to western scholars, but small developing countries have been ignored. This lack of research inhibits understanding of the political economy of employment regulation in developing country contexts. This article explores developments in labour regulation in three small developing countries in the South Pacific—Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea—that have been impacted by globalization and international labour regulation in different ways. The comparative research adopts a stakeholder analysis approach based on programs of qualitative interviews and documentary analysis. The paper identifies a number of structural and agency constraints on the development and effective implementation of employment regulatory systems that primarily reflect political factors. These include disorganized employment relations, under-developed civil society institutions, concentration of power networks, the under-resourcing and compartmentalization of state institutions and a broader context of political change and instability. These factors, which are related to country size as well as stage of development, subvert the introduction, implementation and review of employment regulation even where efficiency and equity arguments may be accepted by policymakers. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications and need for future research.

In the mid-1990s, the province of Ontario instituted a new model of “managed competition” to govern a significant portion of home care services delivery. The new model, based on competitive bidding for the delivery of home care services, deepened reliance on private and increasingly for-profit “service provider organizations.” In time, the outcomes of the transition to managed competition – particularly increased employment precarity and turnover – grew increasingly salient and became captured in prior literature. However, a series of subsequent responses to these outcomes also began to emerge, ostensibly aimed at improving work and employment conditions in this sector. This article provides a historical analysis of various responses to the heightened employment precarity wrought by the managed competition regime in Ontario home care, with a focus on personal support workers (psws) insofar as they have historically tended to experience the most precarious conditions among the primary home care occupations. The analysis suggests that the core institutional arrangement of fissured work and organizational relations, coupled with a hyperdecentralized bargaining structure, was a key constraint and mediating factor. The most dramatic policy measure aimed at employment precarity, the 2014 psw Wage Enhancement Initiative, constituted a major, ad hoc overriding of this structure that had until then delivered wage restraint so successfully that it challenged the government’s own health human resources objectives. This reliance on such an extraordinary ad hoc instrument, without addressing the core institutional structure, severely restricts the degree of improvement in psw employment outcomes capable of being produced by collective bargaining in Ontario home care.

The article reviews the book, "Améliorer la gestion du changement dans les organisations," edited by Martin Lauzier and Nathalie Lemieux.

The article reviews the book, "Petit traité de management pour les habitants d’Essos, de Westeros et d’ailleurs," by Marine Agogué, Stéphane Deschaintre, and Cyrille Sardais.

The article reviews the book, "Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668-1786," by Scott P. Stephen.

En marge du modèle dominant de monopole de l’association majoritaire dans les rapports collectifs du travail, le pluralisme syndical s’est exprimé de longue date au Québec et nécessite un aménagement normatif approprié. Le présent article vise à identifier les enjeux d’un tel aménagement à partir d’une étude comparative de trois cas, soit : 1- la participation des associations accréditées aux comités d’équité salariale; 2- le traitement des plaintes relatives au maintien de l’équité salariale dans des entreprises où plus d’une association accréditée représente des salariés; et, 3- la participation des associations syndicales à la négociation des conventions collectives sectorielles de l’industrie québécoise de la construction. L’analyse des solutions retenues par le législateur dans ces trois cas permet de mettre au jour une tension entre efficacité et participation des salariés, ainsi que de discuter des conséquences de celles-ci pour la démocratie au travail.

The article reviews the book, "Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics," by Eric Blanc.

The article reviews the book, "Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930–1985," by Valerie Korinek .

Discusses back-to-work legislation, including the definition of essential services, with respect to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Supreme Court of Canada's 2015 decision that upheld the right to strike. Concludes that back-to-work legislation will continue to be the Canadian state's go-to option, although recent case law also supports "meaningful" alternative dispute resolutions.

Cet article s’intéresse au cheminement de carrière des agentes de services correctionnels, particulièrement aux facteurs qui ont une influence sur leur rétention et leur progression. Alors que les études antérieures réalisées sur la réalité des femmes qui exercent ce métier montraient de nombreux obstacles et révélait le fait que les établissements de détention véhiculaient une culture masculine et des stéréotypes bien ancrés vis-à-vis des rôles qui sont joués dans ce milieu, la progression de la situation des agentes de services correctionnels québécoises a été très importante depuis le début des années 1990 et leur taux de rétention en emploi est, de nos jours, excellent. Nous avons donc cherché à comprendre cette progression et cette rétention, tout comme quelles en furent les conséquences au plan organisationnel. Sur la base d’approches théoriques mobilisées de manière convergente, soit les approches sur la mixité au travail, les théories féministes, la théorie institutionnelle et la théorie du changement, des entretiens semi-dirigés ont été menés auprès d’agentes et d’agents de services correctionnels et de gestionnaires oeuvrant dans des établissements de détention québécois. Les résultats de notre collecte de données révèlent que la progression des femmes au sein des services correctionnels a pris la forme d’une réelle mixité au travail et a eu un impact significatif sur le milieu de travail. Le fait que les équipes de travail soient composés d’hommes et de femmes et que les tâches confiées aux membres du personnel, à l’exception des fouilles à nu, soient identiques et non tributaire du genre, ont permis aux femmes d’être perçues comme des membres à part entière de l’organisation. Nous avons également constaté des transformations et des changements importants dans tous les piliers de l’organisation, ainsi qu’une évolution de la culture organisationnelle. Enfin, notre recherche a aussi permis d’identifier quelques enjeux qui représentent toujours des obstacles à la progression et à la rétention des agentes de services correctionnels.

The article reviews the book, "Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s," by Steven King.

This paper examines the effects of grid compression on gender-based salary gaps. In this case, the workplace setting is a large Canadian research university previously found to have both a positionally segregated cohort of academic staff and a persistent gender-based differential in their salaries. The annual salary grids at this institution underwent seemingly subtle compressions over the course of two decades, with within-rank compression largely confined to the first decade and across-rank compression confined to the second decade. We employ a simulation methodology to check whether the two types of compression reduce the salary gap to varying degrees. After deflating staff salaries back to the start of each decade, we project the salaries forward using the historical annual increases and grids in place in each year at the university. We compute the gap present in the salary distribution at the start and end of each decade in the simulation, and check whether the gap decreased more across one decade than the other. We find that across-rank compression of the institution’s salary grid during the second decade narrows the salary gap to a greater extent than the within-rank compression of the earlier decade. Our work demonstrates that employers using stated salary grids could use simulation to monitor the equity effects of their pay policies and shows that they could accelerate the closure of gaps through consciously altering relationships among pay levels at different points in the grid’s hierarchy.

Cet article propose d’établir des liens entre le sens du travail chez les salariés et les contextes économique et organisationnel dans lequel ils travaillent. Cet environnement économique est marqué, notamment, par la montée des relations donneurs d’ordre/sous-traitants, une gestion plus flexible de la production ou de l’emploi et la financiarisation des entreprises. Selon nos hypothèses, ces transformations agissent sur les conditions de travail et, de ce fait, sur le sens que les individus peuvent accorder à leurs tâches. Ce sens peut varier à la hausse comme à la baisse. Cette étude exploite deux bases de données françaises : tout d’abord, l’Enquête Conditions de travail 2013 réalisée auprès de 6724 salariés, rattachés à 5496 établissements. Ensuite, chaque établissement a été apparié à des données macro-sectorielles de l’Insee (Base ESANE-FARE, en évolution entre 2008 et 2012), afin de disposer d’informations sur l’évolution de ratios qui caractérisent les dynamiques productives actuelles, comme le taux de marge ou la financiarisation du capital des entreprises. À l’aide de questionnaires auprès des salariés, quatre conditions du sens du travail ont été identifiées et, ensuite, mesurées par quatre scores. Il s’agit de l’utilité, l’autonomie, la pression temporelle et les relations dans le collectif de travail. Ce sont les variations de ces scores que nous cherchons à expliquer. Par une analyse multiniveau, nous pouvons mesurer l’impact du contexte organisationnel (niveau 2) et du contexte macro-sectoriel des entreprises (niveau 3) sur ces quatre conditions du sens du travail. Les résultats montrent comment l’organisation du travail dans les établissements et la financiarisation des entreprises influencent le sens du travail chez les salariés. De plus, nous avons observé que le sens de cet impact dépend beaucoup de la position de l’établissement dans la chaîne de valeur.