Your search

Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this paper highlights two distinct but related dynamics of racial differentiation in relation to Amazon in Greater Toronto Area (GTA): at the level of the region’s broader political economy and within Amazon’s warehouses. I outline the ways in which the e-commerce giant both exploits and (re)makes the racialized geography of the GTA. Amazon’s capitalization on neoliberal austerity and corporate welfare perpetuates class and racialized inequalities. These processes adversely affect these suburban localities and negatively impact employment in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this context, I argue that Amazon’s success has been, in no small part, due to its exploitation of Canada’s racially stratified labour market. Within the warehouse, the notion that digital Taylorism produces an undifferentiated workforce and a uniform labour process is interrogated. Instead, workers’ own accounts point to the ways digital technologies enable management to generate racial/ethnic differentiation and further squeeze value from workers. By situating Amazon within this specific socio-historical and political economic context, I demonstrate that the GTA offers a case study through which to examine the racial dynamics of digital capitalism and show that racialized and gendered social relations inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.

We investigated the role of cultural intelligence (CQ) among immigrant workers (IWs) in their professional success within Quebec organizations. Professional success was assessed at two stages of a worker’s career: an intermediate (organizational socialization: OS) and an ultimate stage (objective career success: OCS). Data from a purposive sample of 103 IWs show that CQ predicts OS, but neither CQ nor OS predicts OCS, except for IWs from Global North countries. Thus, intermediate success depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to integrate into the organization’s culture, but this ability will increase objective career success only if the immigrant is from the Global North, and not from the Global South. These findings challenge the hypothesis that socio-economic integration depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to adapt. Finally, we discuss structural factors that may affect the CQ/OCS relationship.

Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective ‘social’ bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure.

The article reviews the book, "The Happiness of the British Working Class," by Jamie L. Bronstein.

The article reviews the book, "Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada's Cultural Diplomacy," by Eric Fillion.

With the advancement of science and technology and the improvement of social attitudes and mentalities, many Canadian women nowadays hold professions that have always been held exclusively by men. They have been able to integrate educational training, academic programs, and professional careers that have always been “masculine”, such as engineering, architecture, accounting, finance, military, trades, construction, and law enforcement, to name a few. Women in Canada have successfully performed and integrated these “masculine” professions. However, this integration was only a one-way street in many circumstances, not appreciated or accepted by men who considered it an invasion of their professional property and territory. Therefore, it unfortunately opens the door to bullying, discrimination, intimidation, and even sexual harassment. Sexual harassment of women in the workplace has always been persistent, especially in male-dominated industries. Not only does it harm women’s health, advancement, and career, but it also harms the organizations and their reputations. This research will investigate the impacts of sexual harassment on the overall health of women working in male-dominated industries in Canada.

The article reviews and comments on two books by John Kelly: "Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain" and "The Twilight of World Trotskyism."

The article reviews the book, "Travailler moins ne suffit pas," by Julia Posca.

Over the last few decades, collegial forms of organization guided by norms of professionalism and shared decision-making have given way in public organizations to more corporate organizational forms that prioritize efficiency and economy. A growing body of research has explored these conflicting institutional logics, and identified the challenges of professional workers as they attempt to reconcile them on the job. At times, however, conflicting logics may create ethical dilemmas for professionals faced with competing imperatives, such as efficiency and public safety, if choosing the ethical imperative threatens their job security or professional standing. Their responses to such dilemmas have been under-explored in the literature. In this paper, we examine such dilemmas, and the responses to them, using qualitative data from public-sector engineers in two Canadian provinces. Public-sector engineers are ideal for such analysis because they work in changing environments where the tension between professional and managerial logics may be keenly felt. We find that these professionals have a range of responses, sometimes resisting and sometimes marginally acceding to workplace pressures. Light is thus shed on the circumstances under which ethical tensions might escalate.

This article explores union responses to workplace-based covid-19 vaccine mandates in Canada. Specifically, the authors examine the complex interplay of factors that drove unions to adopt their respective positions on vaccine mandates and to frame those positions in particular ways for the benefit of their members and the wider public. Interviews with key informants, along with analysis of documents and arbitration decisions, reveal a disjuncture between the discursive quality of certain unions’ positions and their actual positions. In particular, media framing of unions as either “for” or “against” vaccine mandates oversimplified or misrepresented the actual positions adopted. In response, the article introduces a typology of union positions that distinguishes between support for mandatory-vaccination policies and support for voluntary-vaccination policies and reveals that the vast majority of unions favoured the latter. The authors further reveal that workplace vaccine mandates were both internally divisive and disorienting for unions, given the central role labour organizations play in managing workplace disputes and representing the interests of workers, both individually and collectively.

This paper utilizes the job demands–resources (JD-R) model to examine how the neoliberal governance of Employment Ontario (EO) contributes to worker burnout. The work of Employment Ontario specialists is governed by neoliberal policies, which are an apparatus of austerity politics mechanized through New Public Management (NPM). NPM places a strong emphasis on performance management, quantitative targets and the marketization of public services. This paper demonstrates how these neoliberal policies contribute to worker burnout in public employment services (PES). EO specialists who deliver PES, are tasked with helping vulnerable jobseekers quickly re-enter the paid labour force regardless of systemic barriers, which this study has revealed as a largely unachievable pursuit within a neoliberal market environment. Utilizing data from thirty-two interviews, our analysis indicates that EO workers/specialists experience burnout due to unreasonable job demands and a lack of sufficient resources, which inhibit their ability to meaningfully support vulnerable jobseekers. Having identified time pressures, work overload, lack of training and development opportunities and job insecurity as some of the stressors experienced by EO specialists, we conclude that prolonged exposure to these stressors leads to burnout.

The article reviews the book, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America," by Andrew C. McKevitt.

The article reviews the cyberexposition, "Déjouer la fatalité : pauvreté, familles, institutions," by the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (Montréal, 2022).

This case study focuses on the United Nurses of Alberta, the union representing registered nurses in the province of Alberta, Canada; this explores United Nurses of Alberta's communication strategies. Drawing on the collective action frames previously identified in United Nurses of Alberta's social media and newsletters from 2010 to 2015, which frames nurses as unique healthcare providers and advocates, this study leverages insights from 23 interviews conducted with the United Nurses of Alberta staff, highly involved members, and general members from 2016 to 2017. The article explores the motivations and tensions around the framing of nurses and the union. The findings indicate that the United Nurses of Alberta could enhance its communications by better aligning with members’ current struggles through various collective action frame bridging and extensions. The research also suggests the potential benefits of United Nurses of Alberta shifting away from collective action frames rooted in self-sacrifice. Furthermore, this case study provides recommendations for communication strategies that could strengthen member engagement and involvement within their unions.

The article reviews the book, "Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program," by Catherine E. Connelly.

The construction industry accounts for 18 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is extensive evidence that this can be reduced significantly by implementing aggressive net zero building practices. However, the way the industry is organized impedes this achievement because it fails to promote the development of a broadly based, highly qualified, climate-literate workforce. Successful low carbon construction requires enhancement of workers’ knowledge, skills, and competencies because it requires much higher energy performance standards than traditional construction practice. Yet the industry remains wedded to the current system of low-bid, low-quality construction to cut costs. The organization of much construction work reflects a Taylorist approach, with extensive piecework and subcontracting that relies heavily on precarious, unskilled, and semi-skilled workers. Most employers avoid investing in trades training, leaving it to governments, unions, and individual workers to fund workforce development. Committed to a deregulated market with minimal government interference in their profit-making activities, many contractors oppose tougher building and energy regulations while lobbying against higher labour standards, occupational certification requirements, and union organizing. To meet their net zero targets, governments must recognize that market forces are inadequate to create the well-trained, highly skilled workforce needed. Major policy interventions are required to force industry to make the necessary changes in vocational education and training (vet) and employment practices – changes designed to upskill the construction workforce and give workers and unions a greater voice in shaping climate-informed building practice.

The article reviews the book, "Nii Ndahlohke: Boys' and Girls' Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.

The article reviews the book, "Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty in Britain," by Jim Silver.

Few studies have examined the relationship between dark triad personality traits and behavioral outcomes in healthcare organizations. Recent literature has called for much more extensive research on this issue because the dark triad can negatively affect healthcare organizations. To this end, we examined how dark triad traits relate to counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), as reported by supervisors and nurses. We surveyed Arab nurses in Israel, specifically 267 nurses at Arab hospitals and retirement homes in the North of the country, and obtained a response rate of 57%. We found that CWB (nurse-reported) is positively associated with secondary psychopathy and negatively associated with narcissism. We also found that OCB (nurse-reported) is negatively associated with secondary psychopathy and positively associated with narcissism. Both primary psychopathy and Machiavellianism are weakly associated with CWB and OCB. We conclude that these destructive behaviours are detrimental to organizational effectiveness and might lead to low-quality patient care. They should be addressed by management.

The article reviews the book, "Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law," by Luke Taylor.