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The anti-sweatshop movement has long committed to abolishing sweatshop labour and ensuring workers’ rights for all. There is an established body of literature on sport and the anti-sweatshop movement on the roles played by a range of actors concerning the mega-sporting events, which have been plagued with abuses of workers’ lives in the name of the sport spectacle. In effort to move past this troubled history, FIFA has embedded internationally recognized human and labour rights into their 2026 bid process. This study evaluates how the City of Toronto, Canada Soccer Association, and FIFA have considered ethical procurement and sweatshop labour as part of their bid for co-hosting the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup. Employing a critical theoretical approach, this study finds that despite the varying levels of considerations given to ethical (anti-sweatshop) procurement, the efforts remain insufficient. This is attributed to the unequal power dynamics that prioritize a discourse of (neoliberal capitalist) development for soft power.

Despite a large body of research exploring the obstacles sex workers face due to their occupational stigma, little research focuses on how their stigmatized paid work influences their navigation of unpaid care, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. My dissertation examines the narrated and photographic experiences of womxn in Canada who identify as both mothers and sex workers and asks: how do these womxn navigate and negotiate the daily work of unwaged social reproduction and paid work in stigmatized and precarious conditions? This dissertation is informed by feminist methodologies, visual methodologies, and contributes to literatures on stigma, sex work stigma, social reproduction, unpaid care work, mothering, and working motherhood. Fourteen participants in this qualitative project engaged in autophotography, capturing their daily routines and surroundings to provide visual insight into their daily lives. Then each participant attended a photo elicitation interview to discuss the meanings, experiences, and feelings being conveyed in their selected photographs. My findings illuminate that sex work stigma operates contextually, influencing these mothers’ engagement with and disclosure of their stigmatized paid work, their families’ experiences with courtesy stigma, and the structural barriers they face as sex working mothers. This dissertation also explores participants’ engagement with mothering practices, crediting their ability to be good, empathetic mothers because of their experiences navigating stigmatic occupations and their transferrable skills as sex workers. Womxn’s choices to navigate sex work and mothering are acknowledged as being both calculated and meaningful— granting sex workers financial security, flexible working hours, and unique opportunities to invest time into themselves and their families. To uphold the aims of producing accessible research, these images were displayed in public fundraising exhibits, relying on participant observation and anonymous feedback to further assess the project’s ability to co-produce destigmatizing and empathetic knowledges—by, with and for sex workers. All funds raised from these exhibits were donated to various sex worker grassroots organizations in Canada to assist in funding their ongoing mutual aid efforts and to ensure this research possess tangible benefits for sex workers themselves.

This doctoral thesis combines empirical research and theoretical innovations aimed at comprehending the dynamics of platform labour within advanced-capitalist economies. Through case studies in Paris, France, and Toronto, Canada, the thesis contributes to the evolving landscape of platform labour studies, migration studies, and labour geography. The over-representation of racialized immigrants engaged in platform food delivery has attracted significant attention from both academia and mainstream media, notably in Toronto with international students from India and in Paris with sans-papiers from Africa. Focusing specifically on migration and working conditions, this study unveils hyper-precarity in Euro-American cities. The primary objective of the thesis is to provide a new perspective that includes immigration and citizenship within current discourse on platform labour. Drawing inspiration from critical urban studies, migration studies, and science and technology studies, the research introduces two conceptual propositions: i) “citizen-rentier-ship”, designed to elucidate how various stakeholders benefit from precarious citizenship status, and ii) a “relational comparison” of platform labour resistance, offering insights into the evolution of the unrest against platform labour exploitation—a crucial facet of urban development. The thesis is based on extensive interviews with food riders, workers, spokespersons, and other key actors, shedding light on their capacity for self-organization within advanced capitalist societies. By exploring strategies, limitations, and the dimensions of resistance—both digital and physical—through interactions with riders and individuals who resisted deactivation, low wages, and algorithmic management, the research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by these workers. The case studies place emphasis on migrant workers’ perspectives. They reshape ongoing debates about global platforms by centering attention on the bottom ends of labour markets. In conclusion, the study contends that the struggles of migrant workers are deeply entwined with labour laws, immigration policies, misclassification practices, and urban policies in France and Canada.

In recent years, labour unrest in Canada and elsewhere has led to a resurgence in union organizing, job action and contract gains. This thesis sets out to understand how greater attentiveness to working-class affects or emotions might support this potentially revitalizing moment. Given the limited scholarship in this area, this study connects a literature review of affect theory with radical labour history to develop a framework for thinking about the affective dimensions of collective action within unions. Using that framework, the study then investigates the affective life of two Western Canadian unions through surveys and interviews. The thesis concludes that acknowledging and becoming more intentional in efforts to mediate the affective intensities that circulate, move people and organize life at the level of union membership represents an important focal point as a new cycle of class recomposition potentially takes shape.

This paper delves into the implications of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) through the lens of international human rights law (IHRL), spotlighting the nuanced effects on migrant agricultural workers' rights. Originating in 1966, the SAWP has been pivotal in recruiting labour from Mexico and the Caribbean to bolster Canada's agricultural sector. The paper critiques the program's core policies, notably the restrictive employment system that ties workers to specific employers and the significant barriers to obtaining permanent residency (PR) and citizenship. These policies are scrutinized for their potential violation of fundamental human rights, including the rights to equality, liberty and security, and access to justice, under both Canadian and international legal frameworks. A comprehensive analysis is presented, underpinning Canada's obligations under IHRL and the apparent discrepancies within its treatment of SAWP participants. The study proposes substantial policy reforms aimed at rectifying these discrepancies, advocating for a transition towards open work permits, and establishing clear pathways to PR and citizenship for SAWP workers. The research underscores the necessity for Canada to reconcile its labour demands within the agricultural sector with its human rights obligations, ensuring a fair and humane treatment of migrant workers who play a crucial role in the country's economy.

In this dissertation, I draw on Frantz Fanon’s concepts of cultural imposition and collective catharsis to examine how the colonized subject, like the incarcerated Black worker, undergoes a double process of dehumanization wherein they are perceived as both an invisible and hypervisible subject. I argue that the colonized subject is invisible insofar as they are subjected to various forms of dehumanization such as physiological and psychological abuse, lack of access to resources, and neglect. However, they are also perceived as hypervisible because they are viewed as existing in excess as hypersexual, hyper deviant, and hyper criminal creatures and therefore deserving of the treatment they endure. Similarly, the incarcerated worker is viewed as invisible and hypervisible because they are viewed as unskilled and subhuman beings undeserving of adequate pay and protections but are also perceived as best suited to work in poor conditions doing less skilled, undervalued, low-paying work. By tracing how this relationship between race, racialization and labour is underpinned by whiteness both historically and in a contemporary sense, I demonstrate how the use of prison labour within a Canadian multicultural context must necessarily be read through a normalizing white gaze, under the guise of public safety and rehabilitation; here the prison functions as a disciplinary site wherein Black and racialized prisoners are constructed as inferior beings in need of heightened control through labour. In doing so, I argue that the use of prison labour in Canadian prisons is a form of colonial violence that reproduces inferior and superior colonial identities.

This thesis explored the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based policing models in law enforcement anti-trafficking initiatives and examined potential impacts of expanding state surveillance through police use of AI-based policing models. Computer scientists aspire to develop AI to identify victims of trafficking through websites that host ads for sexual services. Little research has explored sex workers’ views on the proposed AI-based policing models and their likely impacts. To fill this gap, I conducted 21 semistructured interviews with sex workers, academics, and members of sex worker rights organizations to discuss the effects of AI-based policing models. Participants expressed concern that these models will continue a long history of anti-trafficking initiatives causing harm, particularly against racialized, migrant, and transgender sex workers. Findings also suggest developers should be cautious about creating AI-based policing models without input of sex workers and without a firm knowledge base of the sex industry.

This thesis examines shifting masculinities and platform labour, following eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with male Toronto-based Uber and Lyft rideshare workers with dependents (children). Women have commonly done non-standard work, hence the proliferation of non-standard work being contextualized as the ‘feminization of work’ (Zahn, 2019). In contrast, rideshare work is a non-standard form of gig work done predominantly by men, rendering it a relevant form of platform work to examine with its complicated relationship to the historical context of gender and nonstandard work. This thesis argues for a need to organize the worker as a whole, examining how workers’ unpaid social reproductive labour and balancing of rideshare work, and often another form of paid work, impacts the viability of classic organizing methods. I argue that these issues of convoluted boundaries between paid and unpaid work must be incorporated into the potential organizing demands of a rideshare workers’ union and identify areas for further research on organizing rideshare workers accounting for shifting masculinities.

This qualitative research study examines how the Labour Market Integration (LMI) site constitutes a site of ongoing colonial violence and spirit injury, where race plays a central role in legitimizing the politics of credential recognition, in which Foreign Educated Racialized Immigrant Women (FERIW) are evicted from the category “qualified” in Canada. My analysis draws upon concepts of racial capitalism and structural violence to locate the acts of eviction that FERIW are subjected to within the LMI space in Canada and the consequences and impacts of this eviction. I argue that racialized immigration on the move to Canada represents the human face of Canada’s ongoing nation-building and economic policy agenda. The LMI space reinforces and reproduces the colonial racial hierarchical order in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 FERIW, I explore how within the LMI space, racialized immigrant women are stripped of their foreign credentials, discursively framed as unqualified and deficient, and repurposed as a source of cheap labour within the political economy. Delegitimization carries severe material and socio-economic consequences. The intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigrant status results in FERIW becoming “ghettoized” into low-paying, precarious, low-end jobs, and, for many of these women, low income and poverty. This work represents a decolonial work articulated through anti-colonial and feminist anti-racist theory, to present a nuanced historical account of the experiences of gendered racialized immigrant labour within global and local structures that look very similar to the old structures of colonialism.

Queer history in Canada has often centred around metropolitan areas, like Toronto and Montreal, usually foregrounding social movements. This means that queer histories of the periphery are often overlooked, and that histories of metropole are taken as representative of the national context. In this thesis, I examine queer oral histories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Through these oral histories I aim to complicate dominant narratives in both queer history and histories of deindustrialization in Canada. Cape Breton is a former steel and coal region in Nova Scotia that underwent a comparatively slow, state-managed deindustrialization in the latter half of the 20th century. Today, like in deindustrialized areas across the world, the “structure of feeling” of industrial life remains, despite plant and mine closure. Often, histories of deindustrialization center around a mythologized white male (and indubitably heterosexual) breadwinner, centering not just workers, but the specific function that masculine industrial labour played in the social reproduction of the Fordist accord in the household. By taking up the life stories of queer people, we can critically examine this centring of the nuclear family in deindustrialization studies. In the first chapter, I offer a theoretical and historiographical intervention arguing for a queer investigation of deindustrialization. In the second chapter, I apply this line of thinking to oral histories of Cape Breton queers, arguing that these narrators’ desires for queer history and queer future are ultimately filtered through the prism of deindustrialization’s half-life.

This thesis examines the experiences of pupils-cum-inmates who attended the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (OIB) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Customary assessments of segregated education, which investigate administrators’ campaigns to implement pedagogical or curricular advancements, have characterized institutionalization as educational and emancipatory. Instead, this project challenges identity-centric, rights-based narratives by reframing the OIB as constitutive of Ontario’s carceral apparatus. Drawing upon first-person testimony gathered during four investigations into the OIB conducted by the Government of Ontario, the analysis demonstrates that capitalist development dispossessed blind Canadians from waged labour, generating an underclass of precarious and oft-wageless proletarians. Institutionalization socialized the workers-in-training within a prison-like environment where punishments like whippings and beatings, solitary confinement, and material deprivation were commonplace. Educational opportunities were haphazard and irregular, while living and working conditions were uncomfortable, bordering on intolerable. Biomedical understandings of blindness rationalized the mistreatment of inmates, as administrators attempted to reintegrate graduates into waged labour. Children and adolescents survived by developing cultures of delinquency and transgression; inmates, especially working-class inmates, organized popular resistance movements that challenged institutional authority. Educational authorities responded by overseeing the repression of working-class culture. By funneling graduates into either working-class occupations or “gentlemanly” and “learned” professions, institutionalization fomented processes of class formation, creating, first, an underclass of labourers and musicians and, second, a vanguard of capitalists and professionals.

Scholarship on the development of slavery in the colonial Maritimes region during the pre-Loyalist period remains scarce, with even fewer studies examining slave ownership. By situating the expansion of slaveholding in the region (that makes up present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) within the Atlantic world socio-economic context, I show how Maritime society reproduced anti-Black attitudes and slaving practices found in West Indian slave societies. Through trading and social relationships with New Englanders, the region’s colonisation became tethered to the Caribbean. New England’s commercial dependence on West Indian plantations beginning in 1637, and expanding thereafter, fostered intra-regional mercantile and military ventures, bringing their Caribbean partnerships into the Maritimes after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The social aspects of these commercial interactions reveal how settling New Englanders transplanted their ideological, interpersonal, and familial connections to the Caribbean and their slaveholding norms to the Maritimes. By comparing Maritime slave-owning practices to those found in the West Indies, we see Maritime slaveholding to be, in many ways, a mere extension of the plantation regime.

This dissertation provides the first historical overview of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU) and its affiliates from 1969 to 1992. Formed at the end of the 1960s as a foil to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), the CCU sought to nationalize the Canadian labour movement by fomenting the formation of Canadian unions. As a left-nationalist labour body, the CCU charged the CLC with conservatism, complacency, and collaboration in its approach to organizing and collective bargaining. Chief among the CCU’s concerns was the domination of American international unions in the CLC. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the CCU organized workplaces in unorganized industries, bringing a host of immigrant women into the ranks of the Canadian labour movement, while establishing large bargaining units in industries primarily organized by American unions. At the same time, the CCU forwarded a left-nationalist politics inspired by the New Canadian Political Economy (NCPE) that criticized Canada’s economic, political, and cultural dependence on the United States, and used this politics to mobilize its members against continental free trade and towards a nationalized, socialized home economy. The CCU and its affiliates also formed important linkages with the New Left and the women’s movement during these decades and proved itself a militant actor in confrontations with the state and industrial law. Several CCU affiliates eventually merged with the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) in the 1990s in the wake of extensive economic restructuring and corresponding changes in the Canadian labour movement. The dissertation contributes to the scholarship on industrial relations, industrial legality, and nationalism by providing a historical case study of a left-nationalist labour institution that simultaneously challenged and was shaped by federal and provincial law. It provides a critical institutionalist perspective on union federations that accounts for the law as a contested terrain, and nationalism as a historically contingent politics.

This dissertation establishes that work injury and injured workers are relatively neglected in Critical Disability Studies (CDS). A further observation is that CDS tends to avoid a class analysis of disability politics in favour of identitarian approaches. This research focuses on income security. Through a Marxist critical policy historiography, I compare workers’ compensation benefits and state-sponsored benefits for disabled people whose disabilities originated outside of the workplace in Ontario. I argue that the workers’ compensation program is superior to the state-sponsored program because of the class location and politics of the respective groups of people with disabilities seeking income security. The discussion also highlights some of the reasons for the missing injured worker in CDS. Specifically, injured workers experience disability as a loss worthy of compensation rather than a positive identity. Further, rather than viewing prevention measures as the erasure of disabled people, injured workers support the prevention of disability through occupational health and safety laws and workplace practices. By focusing on the political economy of each program, the historical narrative suggests that disability benefit programs in Ontario were developed less by moral suasion and more because of their role in capital accumulation. Although the argument holds for the early history of the two programs in their early history. the negative impact of neoliberalism on both workers’ compensation and the current benefits program in Ontario (the Ontario Disability Support Program) has created a convergence of interests between permanently impaired injured workers and other disabled people, underscoring the importance of including injured workers’ perspectives in CDS.

Embargoed until: 2025-11-29 This thesis explores Canada’s regulatory response to modern slavery in global supply chains. It investigates the factors which influenced Canada to enact transparency modern slavery legislation. It also analyzes Canada’s strategy of utilizing multiple soft and hard law governance and regulatory techniques to strengthen its response to modern slavery. Using a theoretical framework which combines global governance and regulation literature with literature regarding the national institutionalization of global norms, this thesis examines how international actors that comprise the global anti-slavery network disseminate anti-slavery and corporate accountability norms. These norms are subsequently filtered through a country’s domestic political economy, and are translated into either transparency or mandatory human rights due diligence (MHRDD) legislation. The qualitative methods used in this thesis were documentary analysis and key informant interviews. Key informant interviews in conjunction with an analysis of relevant reports and parliamentary debates provided insight into the influences behind Canada’s enactment of various governance and regulatory techniques. Doctrinal legal analysis, and an assessment of the various techniques implemented in Canada, revealed the effectiveness of the individual techniques and how they interacted with each other. This thesis found that Canada adopted a transparency law due to a combination of: (1) International norm diffusion via an epistemic, global anti-slavery network; and (2) Canada’s unique domestic political economy. Features of Canada’s domestic political economy, including its affiliation as part of the Anglosphere, and its powerful mining industry, ultimately determined the enactment of transparency legislation. The thesis also found that Canada’s use of multiple, increasingly hard law governance and regulatory techniques is currently ineffective as these techniques do not complement each other, and actually weaken Canada’s regulatory response to modern slavery. Consequently, labour standards have not improved for supply chain workers. This thesis posits that Canada should prioritize centering and empowering workers to protect their own rights.

The employment effects of the minimum wage are debated among economists, with traditional competitive models suggesting potential job losses for low-wage workers, while alternative models like institutional and dynamic monopsony suggest potential positive impacts. The institutional model posits that raising the minimum wage could boost employment if wages are below the marginal product of labor, and the dynamic monopsony model suggests that higher minimum wages could reduce turnover costs in low-wage labor markets, mitigating predicted job losses. Empirical studies, even within the competitive model, show mixed results, with some indicating significant disemployment effects and others not. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the impacts of minimum wage increases on employment and wages across Canada, utilizing a robust methodological framework including the bunching approach, event study analysis, and difference-in-difference methods to examine the effects of varying provincial minimum wages over time.To accomplish this, I first employ the bunching approach to detect any concentration of wages just above the minimum wage threshold, providing insights into employer behavior in response to wage regulations. This technique identifies subtle adjustments in wage distribution that might not be apparent through other methods. Next, I utilize event study analysis to explore the immediate and long-term effects of minimum wage hikes, comparing employment and wage data from periods before and after the increases. This method captures both short-term disruptions and long-term adjustments in the labor market. Additionally, the difference-in-difference method is employed to compare outcomes between provinces with and without minimum wage increases, isolating the specific effects of these policies by controlling for other influencing variables. This approach underscores the importance of regional economic conditions in shaping the effectiveness of wage regulations. The empirical analysis begins with Labor Force Survey data from Ontario, which experienced significant real minimum wage increases in January 2018. The study estimates the counterfactual frequency distribution of hourly wages in Ontario for three years before and two years after the minimum wage increase. The findings show a significant decrease in jobs paying below the new minimum wage and a proportional increase in jobs paying up to $4 above the real minimum wage, indicating no significant overall employment impact. Contrary to anticipated employment effects, the average wage of affected workers increased significantly by 22.7% over the two years following the minimum wage shock. The only exception in the Ontario study was for the teen group; contrary to much of the existing Canadian literature such as Fossati and Marchand (2024), I found a significant positive employment effect for teenagers. However, overall, I did not observe a significant negative employment effect for young adults. Further analysis includes other provinces, such as Alberta, and cities such as Gatineau versus Ottawa, which also experienced substantial nominal and real minimum wage increases. The study applies the same methodology to assess the employment and wage effects, finding similar results to the Ontario study. Contrary to the Ontario study, in the Alberta study, I found a significant negative employment effect for the teen group, but overall, I did not find a significant negative employment effect for young adults. Since referring to a single minimum wage is inherently problematic, I also investigated a pooled analysis of hourly wage data from all Canadian provinces from 1999 to 2019. This analysis, covering 56 minimum wage increases, reveals no significant employment effect (-2%) over six months following minimum wage increases but a significant average wage increase (6.4%) for affected workers. The study also investigates potential employment shifts from low-skilled to high-skilled workers, finding no indication of such shifts. Subgroup analyses by education level, age, and other demographics show approximately similar employment and wage effects, suggesting that the consequences of minimum wage policies are shared among different worker groups. Additionally, sectoral analyses show no negative employment effect in the food industry, aligning with Card and Krueger (1993)’s findings on the impact of minimum wage increases in the fast-food industry. However, a significant negative employment effect (-4%) was observed in the retail sector, highlighting the influence of local industry composition on minimum wage impacts. Finally, in the Canada study (pooling all 56 minimum wage increase across all provinces), I assess the size of wage spillovers, finding that only 7% of the impact on average wages of affected workers comes from wage spillovers at the lower part of the wage distribution, which was statistically insignificant. This aligns with Canadian literature, such as Campolieti (2015), which found modest wage spillovers based on Canadian data compared to American data. Overall, this thesis provides robust evidence on the employment and wage effects of minimum wage increases in Canada. The findings suggest that, contrary to the traditional competitive model, minimum wage increases do not significantly reduce overall employment of low-wage workers and can lead to substantial wage gains for them. This has important implications for policymakers considering minimum wage adjustments to improve labor market outcomes for low-wage workers.

In recent years, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have increasingly turned their attention to the role of collective imagination in shaping sociotechnical futures. This scholarship leaves open the question of how the collectives involved in bringing these futures to life come into being. Starting with one episode in the ongoing conflict over the construction of Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory in settler-colonial Canada, this discourse analysis draws on scholarship in feminist, anticolonial, and co-productionist STS to study this process of collective formation in relation to sociotechnical futures. It does so by examining how oil and gas workers become enrolled into a sociotechnical imaginary I call Canadian resource techno-nationalism. Comparing media and politicians’ representations of oil and gas workers with White workers’ representations of themselves indicates that they can end up participating in this imaginary regardless of their affinity to it. Examining policy documents and scholarly literature about the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in impact assessment, as well as political debates and mainstream media coverage about the conflict over the Coastal GasLink pipeline, draws attention to how elites’ active construction and protection of the boundary between knowledge and politics works to enroll Indigenous people into oil and gas jobs and, therefore, into the collective performing Canadian resource techno-nationalism. In both cases, elite actors deploy the resources at their disposal in ways that help funnel oil and gas workers into lives imagined for them, securing the power of the settler state in the process. This dynamic illustrates the importance of disentangling participation in the collective performance of sociotechnical imaginaries from freely given consent. Residents of liberal states can end up performing dominant imaginaries less out of any sense of affinity to them than as a response to the disciplinary power these imaginaries help sustain.

Indigenous communities have been in direct conflict with the Canadian state when asserting their right to self-determination. Literature reveals that the Canadian state interprets Indigenous resistance as a threat to settler authority, responding with violence and criminal enforcement. This thesis investigates the relationship between the norms related to Indigenous rights articulated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the institutional enforcement response to Indigenous resistance in the case of Mi’kmaw moderate livelihood fishing. Through a critical discourse analysis of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s public statements, policy documents, and recorded actions, this research found a discursive influence on state institutions. Despite the rhetorical commitments, this research found that state response continued an approach of criminalization and violence against Mi’kmaw moderate livelihood fishers. These contradictions between rhetoric and practice challenge the institutional legitimacy of settler authority.

This study explores ableism within higher education through an examination of the collective agreements and institutional policies that govern the academic responsibilities of disabled faculty members. Critical disability theory serves as the theoretical framework for this study, which employs both institutional ethnography and qualitative content analysis in the review of the publicly available documents from English speaking U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities (n=13). The study unfolds in three parts: Part I presents the findings from the analysis of the collective agreements and institutional policies outlining the tenure and promotion process and the barriers disabled faculty members experience in fulfilling their academic responsibilities. Part II explores the tensions and contradictions between institutional accommodation processes and the language used in their public presentation of EDI initiatives, while Part III represents the everyday experiences of disabled faculty members though interviews, representing the embodiment and internalization of the texts examined in parts I and II. This research challenges and disrupts normative understandings of what it means to be a “good academic”, by addressing an absence in the literature exploring ableist representations and assumptions present in collective agreements and institutional policies. The examination of these texts and the lived experiences of disabled faculty members through interviews has illuminated the existing contradictions and tensions in these texts, showing ableism is strongly entrenched and condoned in university policies and governance.

Given the importance of the fishing industry to the Newfoundland economy and identity, understanding the realities of fish work in the province allows for a deeper understanding of labour practices, safety regulations, and the health of the many fisheries the bolster that Newfoundland economy and identity. Initially designed to assess the working experiences of migrant workers on Canadian fishing boats, this thesis turns to domestic workers to unpack labour realties and address the potential of exploitative and abusive practices that help chart fishing among one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. This research took place in Newfoundland in October of 2022, where crew members, boat captains, their owners, and industry and union representatives were approached to gather work experiences and opinions on the broader regional fishing industry in the province. From these experiences, an assessment of how and if exploitative working conditions can be improved utilizes existing and proposed international labour conventions, understandings of unionization, and the political economy, to represent exploitative labour conditions along a continuum. The evolving and changing economic and environmental realities of fishing both globally and in eastern Canada highlight how an already risk-taking, masculine, and community focused industry lives with, is shaped by, and can work towards limiting, the more damaging forms of exploitation. This thesis utilizes qualitative data to inform its assessment of precarious labour realities at sea in the Newfoundland fishing industry to further advocate for the move towards regionalized and industry specific seafarer support mechanisms. Through promoting these mechanisms, such as a seafarer support centre and the ratification of the Work in Fishing Convention (C188), this research calls for Newfoundland's fishing industry to lead the way towards better practices nationally.