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This thesis explores the political experience of men in the Department of National Defence’s work relief camps in British Columbia from 1932 to 1935, when single, homeless, unemployed, and physically fit men accessed government unemployment relief living and working according to the administration’s policies. In these camps the men found a government administration eager to teach them work discipline, a collection of charities and private groups that promoted an ideal of the working class man in troubled economic times, and organizers with the Relief Camp Workers’ Union attempting to shape strikes that challenged government authority. In this thesis I argue that the unemployed vacillated between these different influences to challenge the government’s palliative relief while also ensuring that they maintained access to relief for as long as possible. This was accomplished by shaping multi-faceted relationships with the government, the union, private charities, and fellow campers.

This dissertation examines Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s relationship with labour unions and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation-New Democratic Party of Canada from 1945 to 2000. Trudeau was an extremely influential historical figure, both as prime minister (1968-1984), but also before his entry into formal politics, when he traveled and studied around the world, became deeply influenced by leftist movements and intellectuals, and sought to modernize Quebec, which in his view was falling behind English Canada in terms of technological, social, and democratic development. In essence, Trudeau sought to forge a liberal democracy he thought absent in Quebec, and found his staunchest allies to be trade unionists and socialists. In the end, however, Trudeau largely abandoned those movements because he felt winning liberal freedoms required the shelving of socialist objectives. This would, in turn, be his justification for joining the Liberal Party in 1965. As Prime Minister, Trudeau opposed the objectives and philosophies of his former left allies, even as he maintained his image as a progressive. So while many saw his Just Society, his approach to public and Canadian ownership of energy, his New Society, and his Charter of Rights and Freedoms as left-wing initiatives, I argue that Trudeau’s actions were undertaken not to challenge capitalism, but to strengthen it, primarily through the empowerment of business and the disempowerment of unions and the economically-disenfranchised. Ultimately, this dissertation asserts that Trudeau cannot be classified as a socialist, but must be seen as a liberal preoccupied, not with liberty and equality, but with the continued pre-eminence of capitalist property relations.

Cette thèse porte sur les figures contemporaines du salariat domestique ainsi que les principales évolutions de ce secteur d’activités dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle à Québec. Les récits de vie d’une trentaine de femmes ayant expérimenté diverses formes de travail domestique rémunéré constituent la base empirique de cette étude. Durant cette période historique marquée par l’accroissement spectaculaire de la main-d’œuvre féminine, de même que par le déclin du fordisme et la polarisation du marché du travail, le secteur domestique se diversifie. Les nouvelles formes de service domestique s’inscrivent dans la continuité historique ― notamment en regard de la personnalisation et de la naturalisation du rapport de travail, qui ont maintenu ce secteur à l’écart de la norme salariale depuis le XIXe siècle ―, tout en participant pleinement à la construction de nouveaux régimes d’inégalités de classe, de race et de genre autour de la division du travail dans la société québécoise contemporaine. Les récits de vie témoignent de l’indissociabilité des formes rémunérées et non rémunérées de travail domestique, et de leur caractère structurant dans la construction du rapport des femmes de milieux populaires au travail, à l’emploi et à la famille. De l’apprentissage du service domestique comme mode de socialisation des filles à la permanence domestique assurée par les femmes à toutes les étapes de leur vie familiale, les réseaux féminins familiaux et communautaires tissent la toile de toute une économie des échanges domestiques, sur un continuum entre entraide et emploi. Au cours des dernières décennies du XXe siècle, divers mécanismes se mettent en branle pour créer un bassin de main-d’œuvre domestique, dont certains sont directement liés à l’institution patriarcale du mariage, et concernent les femmes divorcées ou celles qui ont connu une longue absence du marché du travail. L’univers des petits boulots domestiques apparaît comme une sorte d’archipel où sont refoulées des femmes exclues du marché de l’emploi formel. Au sein de cette nébuleuse des emplois domestiques, les dynamiques de professionnalisation, d’institutionnalisation et de segmentation s’articulent autour de la frontière entre service et servitude, laquelle nourrit les pratiques et les représentations dans ces métiers où l’héritage ancillaire fait figure de spectre.

The first of three papers helps resolve the substantial debate about the impact of Honda v. Keays, a 2008 Supreme Court of Canada decision modifying the principles for compensating employees for improper employer conduct during dismissal (called “moral damages”). I performed content analysis on all relevant Canadian cases in the four years after Honda and an equivalent period before Honda and then used a tobit model to test legal scholars’ and lawyers’ predictions. I find that moral damages are less probable after Honda. Furthermore, the size of awards is smaller in those cases where moral damages are granted, partly because certain levels of employer misconduct now produce lower damages. However, I also find that, since Honda, high levels of mental distress are compensated more richly. The second paper is motivated by the absence of recent studies that investigate delay in grievance arbitration, despite increasing concerns being voiced about the issue. I performed content analysis on a random sample of about 400 Ontario arbitration awards, and then used a proportional hazards model to examine the extent of delay and its determinants. Consistent with common perception, the results suggest that delay has become a worse problem over the past two decades. I find that certain legalistic factors and the expanded jurisdiction of arbitrators over specific types of issues are associated with delay. The results also show that certain dispute resolution procedures are related to decreased delay, and this suggests some practical solutions. Prompted by a recent series of Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decisions on freedom of association (FOA) in the labour context, the third paper critically examines the Canadian jurisprudence. The state of this law in Canada has been roundly criticized by various prominent labour law academics. This paper relies on Sheldon Leader’s theory of FOA to argue that the SCC should have interpreted s. 2(d) of the Charter as protecting collective bargaining and striking as independent rights, rather than as rights necessary for the realization of the FOA. Having done so would have yielded jurisprudence that was more consistent and coherent.

This dissertation responds to the question of why people who immigrate to Ontario, Canada frequently choose to use their personal names in altered forms. Between May and December 2010, I engaged in semi-structured interviews with twenty-three people who, while living in Ontario, experienced name challenges ranging from persistent, repetitive misspellings and mispronunciations of their original names to cases of significant name alterations on residency documents, and even to situations of exclusion and discrimination. Drawing on critical perspectives from literature on identity and performativity, science and technology studies, race and immigration, affect, and onomastics (the study of names), I establish that name challenges are a form of "identity labour" required of many people who immigrate to Ontario. I also describe how individuals' identity labour changes over time. In response to name challenges, and the need to balance between their sometimes-simultaneous audiences, participants design their names for life in Ontario--by deciding which audiences to privilege, they choose where they want to belong, and how their names should be.

Cette recherche dresse un portrait de la situation de la relève syndicale au Québec et des tentatives des organisations syndicales pour stimuler la participation de leurs membres de moins de 30 ans. Elle brosse d’abord un aperçu des habitudes sociales, des valeurs et des caractéristiques en emploi des jeunes. Elle nuance et recadre ensuite la problématique des jeunes en ce qui concerne l’identité collective qu’ils partagent instinctivement et les modalités de socialisation à l’interne façonnant leur participation. Cette recherche remet en question la fenêtre de recrutement estimée où les jeunes seraient en mesure d’entâmer leur participation dans les structures syndicales. Au demeurant, elle décrit l’ampleur des innovations syndicales destinées à stimuler la participation des jeunes et démystifie le mandat de l’une d’elle, les comités jeunes, qui peuvent agir à la fois comme porte-parole de leur organisation, comme la voix des jeunes membres et comme pépinière de la relève syndicale. Les données empiriques utilisées pour ce mémoire proviennent d’une vingtaine de groupes de discussion et de huit entretiens semi-dirigés (n=228), tenus dans deux organisations syndicales d’importance au Québec, disposant d’un comité jeunes et organisés par les chercheures d’un projet de recherche plus vaste sur la participation syndicale des jeunes. Nos résultats démontrent en premier lieu une identité collective construite autour de la précarité et des injustices perçues par les nouveaux travailleurs. L’âge ne serait pas significatif dans la construction de l’identité des jeunes qui semblent en phase de conquérir leur identité. En second lieu, le cadre strict de plusieurs modalités de socialisation avait un effet inhibiteur sur la participation, favorisait des relations d’échanges instrumentales et ne tenait pas compte de la sensibilité de cette nouvelle génération pour les interactions réciproques avec leurs représentants syndicaux. Nous avons aussi observé une utilisation limitée des nouvelles technologies, qui présentent des potentialités intéressantes en matière de transfert des connaissances de surcroît. Par ailleurs, nos résultats à l’égard de l’identité collective observée et de la durée du processus de socialisation soulèvent des questionnements sur la pertinence même des structures jeunes dans leurs paramètres actuels. Le parcours d’un jeune vers la militance syndicale apparaît plus tardif qu’escompté. Plus encore, la problématique jeunes met en lumière les tensions intrinsèques au mouvement syndical quant à la libre négociation sociale des intérêts défendus et du consensus interne nécessaire à leur légitimité.

In 1919, the Canadian state enacted a law that criminalized the advocacy of radical politics. Section 98, as it became, was broad in its terminology, and carried a maximum punishment of twenty years imprisonment. In 1931, the state utilized the law against eight leaders of the Communist Party of Canada in an attempt to declare the organization to be illegal in Canada. The party, however, did not crumble under pressure. At trial, the accused were able to use the courtroom as a forum to protest the legality of the law; after the leaders were convicted, the party campaigned tirelessly for the release of their comrades, and for the repeal of Section 98. The party was successfully able to use its repression to forward its political agenda. This thesis explores how the party navigated Canada’s legal system in order to realize its political goals.

Over the past 20 years, the Alberta-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 have revitalized their union through organizing diverse groups of workers in hard-to-organize occupations, increasing involvement in political and community matters and adopting innovative organizing and representation strategies. They have done so with a stable leadership that exhibits autocratic and populist tendencies. The apparent contradictions of autocratic structures and innovative reforms are difficult to explain using existing explanations of union renewal and concepts of union forms. This in-depth study examines Local 401 in an effort to explain the unexpected patterns. Using a variety of methods, including Critical Narrative Analysis, the study reveals that unions may be more fluid and dynamic than the existing literature acknowledges. The study concludes the business union-social union duality common in industrial relations theory needs to be replaced by a more flexible, more multi-layered conceptualization of union behaviour. Unions exhibit elements of both social and business unionism at the same time because they are organizations created at the intersection between structure and action and are always in flux. The study also highlights a possible third path for union renewal, coined “accidental revitalization”, where local-initiated renewal can occur without planned intention and within a context of stable local leadership. Third, the study explores the role narratives play in resolving apparent contradictions in union behaviour by constructing internal logics and how narratives contribute to the production and re-production of power dynamics within unions.

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.

Since Kingston Penitentiary’s opening in 1835, prison labour has been an integral part of Canada’s penal history. With purported goals such as deterrence, rehabilitation, reintegration, and providing sustenance to the state, the practice of coercing or forcing a prisoner to work while serving a sentence of incarceration was further embedded in the penal landscape in 1980 with the inception of CORCAN, the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison labour program. Despite critiques of the prison as “a fiasco in terms of its own purposes” (Mathiesen, 2006, p. 141), prison labour continues as a mechanism of the state’s penal apparatus. Drawing on political economy of punishment and penal abolitionism literature, this study reveals and disrupts official discourses used to justify and perpetuate this modern form of slavery in Canada. Through a content analysis of 33 Solicitor General of Canada and CORCAN annual reports, I demonstrate how CORCAN’s prison labour program is legitimated as a “positive reform” (Mathiesen, 1974, p. 202) of Canada’s penal system, beneficial to the reintegration of prisoners into society, communities, and the needs of the Canadian state and economy. Underneath this benevolent mask such representations are found to reproduce neoliberal capitalism as the hegemonic form of economic organization, construing prisoners and prison labour as solutions to the gaps and shifts in the national economy and labour market. After outlining these contributions, I suggest ways that future research can reveal and discredit penal ‘solutions’ such as prison labour to eradicate the penal system as a means to address the harms inherent in our social and economic systems.

In April 2005, non-management lawyers working at the federal Department of Justice Canada (DOJ) were recognized by the Public Service Labour Relations Act (PSLRA) as employees. This dissertation explores DOJ lawyers unionizing by addressing two research questions: (1) what led DOJ lawyers to unionize with the Association of Justice Counsel (AJC)? and (2) what was the AJC’s experience in negotiating a first collective agreement? The dissertation is organized using a conventional structure. The literature review presented in Chapter 2 maps the academic study of lawyer unionization. Chapter 3 elaborates on the dissertation’s research design as a case study. Chapter 4 explains DOJ lawyers’ exclusion from the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the DOJ’s administration of the individual employment relationship, and introduces the Legal Officers’ Advisory Committee (LOAC). Chapter 5 provides a historical analysis of events leading to LOAC becoming the AJC. The chapter describes how redressing an exclusive wage premium known as the “Toronto differential” helped LOAC generate employee support for forming the AJC as a professional association, and, later, campaigning for union recognition under the PSLRA. Chapter 6 presents the AJC’s negotiation and completion of a first labour agreement. Chapter 7 concludes the work. Findings from the seven chapters are synthesized into a descriptive theory that addresses the two research questions. Its thesis is that DOJ lawyers’ desire for workplace representation and improved wages, executive level support from the DOJ, and introduction of the PSLRA facilitated the creation and development of the AJC into a vehicle that directed the unionization process. The argument further holds that the AJC negotiated a first collective agreement with an employer who engaged in hard bargaining that resulted in deadlocked negotiations, but was conduct, nonetheless, the courts determined had allowed the AJC a meaningful process of collective bargaining prior to the imposition of wage-restraint legislation. The dissertation’s findings: (1) detail the establishment of a new professional union in Canada’s federal public service; (2) confirm the relevance of the processual model for understanding DOJ lawyers unionizing; and (3) suggest that litigation challenging legislation remains unpredictable despite jurisprudence that protects the process of collective bargaining.

Workplace mental health is becoming of increasing importance, in part due to the rising social and economic costs of mental health issues in the workplace. Little is known about how the experience of workers with mental health issues is actively produced through their participation in workplace procedures and associated supports. The purpose of this research is to better understand how employees actively engage in institutional practices and associated social relations that ultimately coordinate and produce their workplace experience. Using institutional ethnography, I take up the standpoint of the employee living with mental health issues to explore the coordinating relations associated with workplace mental health. This approach sheds light on how employees' experiences are socially produced and coordinated across and between institutional processes and practices. Data collection included over 140 hours of ethnographic observations, the analysis of associated texts and documents, and interviews that were conducted with 17 informants. This research details some of the challenges experienced by one novice health science researcher while conducting ethnographic research, and provides techniques for addressing personal and professional boundaries, negotiating ethical dilemmas, and reconciling the emotional experience of transitioning back and forth between being an `outsider' and `insider'. In addition to these insights, the findings explicate the social relations and institutional processes that coordinate sick time utilization for workers experiencing mental health issues. We revealed that employee's work of managing workplace absence management programs while negotiating episodes of mental ill health was perceived as overwhelming, unfair, and even punitive. Employees would require formal and informal respite from work, and would often utilized vacation time when unwell in order to avoid institutional processes all together. The biomedical focus of the absence management program created uncertainty about what constitutes a bona fide illness, and caused managers to come to know their work activities as distinctively separate from the work of healthcare practitioners. This research contributes to the literature by highlighting how tensions are created through textually coordinated work activities within and between the corporate and healthcare sector. These insights are important in establishing where and how to enact change from the standpoint of the worker.

Violence in the workplace has attracted widespread scholarly and media attention in the United States and Canada since the 1980s. Governments and corporations on both sides of the border have identified this violence as a serious problem affecting the health and safety of workers. However, there is still much that is unknown about workplace violence. Is the problem of workplace violence more serious than it was today? How has it changed over time? What are the factors that have produced violence at work? How have workers, management, and governments defined violence at work? How have they approached the problem? This dissertation historicizes the phenomenon of workplace violence, investigating on-the-job violence in the North American automotive industry between 1960-1980. It embeds violence at work in its economic, political, and cultural contexts and investigates how violence shaped the North American workplace and identities of class, gender, and race on the job. A comparative, transnational approach is central to this study. If we seek to understand the structural factors causing workplace violence, the national context cannot be ignored. This is especially true when considering the US and Canada, two countries which are extraordinarily integrated economically but often contrasted socially and culturally. My research has uncovered a significant history of violence in the automotive workplaces of Detroit and Windsor, and shows that national and local contexts were crucial in determining the level of violence. Violence was a regular element of shop-floor culture and workplace conflict in both countries, but was different in each. In Detroit, violence at work reached epidemic levels and was a major factor in the crisis that gripped the city's auto plants in the 1960s and 1970s. This was not the case in Windsor. Yet in both cities workplace violence became a major concern outside the factory when work-related murders seized national headlines and challenged citizens to understand these tragedies. The thesis demonstrates that, though the patterns and levels of violence were different in each place, violence was no aberration, no freak occurrence, but an ongoing phenomenon that influenced the labour process and workplace culture in both Detroit and Windsor.

Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada was in force from1919 to 1936. The dissertation traces the way in which Canada incorporated emergency law, created during the First World War under the War Measures Act, into the Criminal Code as Section 98 after the war to combat political radicalism from 1919 to 1936. In contrast to existing scholarship, this work not only explains how a liberal democracy like Canada can legally use emergency legislation outside of a state of emergency through a process of `normalization' but it also examines the effects of such laws on their human targets through case studies of criminal trials and deportation hearings. Targets included political activists, immigrants and women. It makes contributions to Canada's legal, immigration, labour and intelligence history. The study also examines the international influences on Canadian policy makers in creating such laws and the complex international identities of the transnational activists at whom these laws were often directed. The work examines how culture played a crucial role in underpinning the intelligence cycle that led to the prosecution of leading Communist Party of Canada (CPC) members. It also complicates our understanding of the CPC during Moscow's `Third Period.' It was a party that both marginalized and welcomed immigrant workers. The dissertation provides an in-depth examination of the trial of Rex v. Buck et al and the ways in which political ideology was interpreted by the court as a criminal act. It examines cases of deportation that resulted from the trial, such as the case of the `Halifax Ten,' and traces what happened to the deportees after their deportation making use of Finnish, Polish, Croatian, and German primary sources. In addition, this work demonstrates how the communist led organization, the Canadian Labour Defense League (CLDL) initiated Canada's civil rights movement by joining with moderate leftists during the `Third Period,' and before the Communist International's shift to the `United Front' policy, to repeal Section 98. It demonstrates how the normalization of emergency law continued after Section 98's repeal when its core elements were retained and folded into Canada's sedition laws where it remains today.

This dissertation examines the experiences of Indigenous women engaged in precarious and seasonal salmon cannery work. The dissertation argues that to grasp the nature of the women's work, which is exceedingly precarious, it is necessary to consider how it is shaped by a host of social, political, environmental and economic forces. In particular, the dissertation illustrates how provincial and Canadian neoliberal policies that developed during the past few decades have amplified the vulnerable status of Indigenous women cannery workers. Neoliberal discourses of active (worthy) and passive (unworthy) citizens embedded in social policies powerfully shape qualification requirements to programs such as Employment Insurance and Income Assistance while individualizing social inequalities experienced by Indigenous women. The dissertation employs both decolonizing and feminist methodologies to examine the everyday experiences of Indigenous women and to map out the social relations that shape their experience as precarious workers. Overall the dissertation contributes to making Indigenous women worker's lives more visible, to showing their significance in the salmon canning industry, to highlighting how their precarious labour undermines their well being and that of their families, and to demonstrating their resilience in the face of major obstacles.

This study presents a qualitative cross-case analysis of the discourses of teacher professionalism amongst union active teachers in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario. Data collection included interviews with 11 members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and 13 members from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, which were grounded in a document analysis of various reports, member magazines, news articles, and press releases dating back to the 1990s. The study reveals a triad of influences on the professionalism discourses of union-active teachers: engagement in teacher associations, the larger policy environment, and teacher agency. More specifically, participants’ inner drive to affect change, coupled with the capacity building experiences gained through their teacher association, saw many participants enacting and espousing discourses that positioned teachers as learners, leaders, advocates, and autonomous experts. That being said, member discourses were also impacted by the organizational priorities of their teacher associations and the extent to which the associations had been able to sway discourses within the larger policy environment to be supportive of teachers. These discursive influences are not static, however, nor are they mutually exclusive. Rather, a complex, mutually reinforcing relationship exists between these elements that change over time as teachers, their unions, and governments respond to each other in new and evolving ways. This results in discourses of teacher professionalism “from within” and “from without” that are more akin to two sides of the same coin than they are to the juxtaposed manner which they are often conceived of. In this way the study illustrates the power of teachers and their unions to alter the balance between democratic discourses which position teachers as advocates, agents, and policy actors; and neoliberal portrayals of teachers as the objects of educational reform.

This dissertation is a history of an idea, a retelling of a simple story about an idea as a complicated one, and an explanation of the effects of believing the simple story. From 1869 to 1985, to be an Indian in the eyes of the Canadian state—to be a “status Indian”—a person had to have a status Indian father. The Canadian government registered a population of Indigenous people as status Indians and decided that Indian status passed along the male line. If an Indian man married a non-Indian woman, his wife gained status and their children were status Indians. In contrast, if a status Indian woman married a non-Indian man, she lost her Indian status, and her children were not status Indians. This rule exiled women from their families of birth and tore them from the political fabric of their communities. The Indian status system is a keystone in Canada’s colonizing governance of Indigenous life. The rules in the Indian Act for the transmission of Indian status came under heavy criticism and, in 1985, the federal government amended the law. Because the 1985 amendments perpetuated sex discrimination by conferring an advantage to those who traced Indian status along the male line, the rules for Indian status were the object of decades of subsequent campaigning and litigation. In 2008 and 2015, landmark judgments in McIvor and Descheneaux declared the rules to be in breach of the gender equality guarantees in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In overturning the Indian Act’s status rules, the courts have relied on the government’s explanation of the history of these rules. The legislative history told by the government mirrors commonly held views about the history of the 1985 amendments to the Indian Act. According to this canonical history, the core explanation for the Indian Act amendments is a tension between individual rights to gender equality and collective rights to Indigenous self-governance, embodied in a conflict between Indigenous women and Indigenous communities (often represented by male Indigenous leaders). According to the canonical history, the opposition between these groups yielded an intractable political stalemate—a Gordian political knot that could only be sliced by the equality rights offered in constitutional and international human rights law. This dissertation unseats the canonical history by advancing an alternative account, one with both a wider aperture on the political and social context and a sharper focus on detail, complexity, and contingency. The dissertation asks how individual equality rights and Indigenous self-governance became juxtaposed to one another in a relationship of tension and dichotomous opposition and explains the discursive, political, and social forces that came together to create this idea of opposition. It situates the history of the Indian Act amendments in the context of negotiations for the re-founding of Canadian sovereignty and the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Indigenous demands for recognition as a third order of government in Canada’s federal state, changing understandings of equality in Canadian law, and shifts in the categorization of the problem of Indian women’s loss of status as a political, social, or cultural problem. It traces the role of Indigenous political organizations, Indigenous women’s political organizations, and the white-led women’s movement in shaping the debate. It tracks how an issue transformed from a political problem into a question of fundamental rights. Debates about amending the Indian Act showed a consensus among Indigenous people about the importance of Indigenous self-governance and the need to end sex discrimination in the Indian Act. Conflict among Indigenous groups arose about the mechanisms for recognizing Indigenous self-governance and the definition of self-governing polities. Rather than a pitched battle among Indigenous people, the central threads running throughout the history of reforms to the Indian Act are the federal government’s steadfast refusal to recognize inherent Indigenous self-governance and a desire to limit government spending on status Indians, all in service of a project of constructing and defending Canadian sovereignty. The dissertation exposes the government’s share of responsibility in creating a conflict between gender equality rights and Indigenous self-governance. It reveals the law’s hand in shaping the discourses of rights through which this idea of tension became articulated, labeling those rights as fundamental, pitting those rights against one another as intrinsically opposed, and then balancing them in the name of justice and fairness. In contemporary litigation over the Indian Act, the Canadian government deploys a story about competing interests of Indigenous women and Indigenous communities as a justification for continued discrimination in the Indian Act. (Abridged abstract)

This dissertation explored the relationship between individual-level value differences and workplace attitudes. Using data from a sample of Canadian workers whose co-workers were currently using flexible work arrangements, the relationship between allocentrism and workers' job satisfaction and organizational commitment was explored. A workplace-allocentrism scale was developed and validated. The scale showed adequate validity and reliability and thus was used in the main study. The Co-Worker Model was developed and tested on a sample of adults in Canada who work in organizations where flexible work arrangements are used. Data were collected from an online research panel and then tested using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that allocentric value orientations were positively related to reported organizational commitment, mediated by job satisfaction. This study sheds light on the importance of understanding individual-level value differences when examining the effectiveness and/or ineffectiveness of organizational policies and practices.

There has been a long-time debate over whether issues conclusively decided at labour arbitration should be subject to a subsequent proceeding before a human rights tribunal. The author examines Supreme Court of Canada decisions dealing with re-litigation of issues before multiple decision-makers, and demonstrates how they are interpreted by the human rights tribunal. This paper identifies principles from cases before other decision-makers that can be applied to the problem of shared jurisdiction between labour arbitration and human rights.

My dissertation, Housework and Social Subversion: Wages, Housework, and Feminist Activism in 1970s Italy and Canada, presents a history of the Wages for Housework movements in Italy and Canada (1972-1978), looking at the parallel development of autonomist feminist politics in these locations. Based on a series of interviews with feminists involved in the movement, my dissertation highlights the significant political value in the way the groups theoretical perspective influenced our current understanding of social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to the unpaid activities associated with family and societal maintenance procreation, socialization, and nurturance as well as paid work in social sectors such as health care, education, childcare, and social services. In the context of Wages for Housework, my dissertation re-examines the movements understandings of wages, housework, and the gendered relations of production in the home. In critiquing the capitalist, patriarchal, imperialist nuclear family, they re-conceptualized wages and housework in a way that allowed for the uncovering of the most hidden aspect of housework: emotional labour and care. Looking at the parallel development of Wages for Housework movements in Italy and Canada, I also highlight the emergence of similar tensions regarding the demand for wages and the role of the working class housewife in their analyses. As Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici wrote, Our power as women begins with the social struggle for the wage, not to be let into the wage relation (for we were never out of it) but to be le out of it, for every sector of the working class to be left out of it (1975, 11). In light of the continued pervasiveness of care as work, this dissertation contributes to building a better understanding of social reproduction in a global context.