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This article examines Pierre Elliott Trudeau's relationship with labour and social democratic organizations, 1949-1959. Using historiographic works, reflections from contemporary historical figures, and Trudeau's archival fonds, this essay demonstrates that his connections to labour and the left were motivated by his desire to enrich liberal democracy in both Quebec and Canada. Supporting labour unions and the provincial/federal Cooperative Commonwealth Federation during the early 1950s was imperative, as labour was a force for change and democratic renewal, and the CCF was the party with the strongest commitment to popular democracy, especially when contrasted with a Liberal Party and Union Nationale, which were dominated by regressive and financial interests. Using various theoretical approaches, including Ian McKay's Liberal Order Framework and Antonio Gramsci's concept of "trasformismo," I seek to show how Trudeau's leftist forays were informed by the desire to transform liberalism and capitalism in such a way that maintained their essences while inoculating them from their core flaws. This process of liberal transformation and hegemony is further emphasized in the later stages of the 1950s, as Trudeau began to reject social democratic and labour parties, arguing that they put their goals aside and join forces with liberals to fight for democracy first.

Considers the current regulatory environment for temporary employment workers in Quebec. Concludes that the legislative failure to regulate has resulted in abusive practices that undermine labour law.

Compares the legal regimes of British Columbia and Manitoba for employment agencies that recruit women from the Philippines to work as caregivers in Canadian homes. Concludes that the Manitoba regulatory framework is much more effective in protecting caregivers from the abusive practices of these agencies.

Debates centered on the role of social networks as a determinant of labour market outcomes have a long history in economics and sociology; however, determining causality remains a challenge. In this study we use information on random assignment to a unique intervention to identify the impact of changes in the size of alternative social network measures on subsequent employment at both the individual and community levels. Our results indicate that being assigned to the treatment protocol significantly increased the size of social networks, particularly weak ties. Nevertheless, these increases do not translate into improved employment outcomes 18 months following study completion. We do not find any evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity based on the initial size of one’s social network; rather those whose strong ties increased at a higher rate during the experiment were significantly less likely to hold a job following the experiment. We find that many of these results also hold at the community level among those who did not directly participate in the intervention. In summary, our results suggest that policies can successfully influence the [End Page S1] size of an individual’s social network, but that these increases have a limited impact on long-run labour market outcomes, with the notable exception of changes in the composition of individuals who hold jobs.

Workers in Ontario, Canada are on the edge of a crisis in the enforcement of their minimum employment standards (ES). This crisis is shaped not only by well-documented deficiencies in the scope of labour protection but by the fact that the administration of the ES system has not kept pace with the increasing number of workers and workplaces requiring protection under the province’s employment standards act. Coupled with an outmoded complaint-based system, the dearth of support for ES enforcement is cultivating a situation in which an unprecedented number of workers are bearers of rights without genuine opportunities for redress. Responding to this situation, this article explores how measures augmenting the voices of workers and their advocates could contribute to improving ES enforcement in Ontario. It does so through a review of innovative practices in other common law contexts characterized by similar enforcement regimes where labour market conditions have likewise deteriorated.

This article reconsiders the shift in Canada from an exclusively government-regulated occupational health and safety system to the Internal Responsibility System (IRS). The IRS gives workers rights, or “voice,” to manage, know about, and refuse unsafe working conditions. I present new evidence that worker voice and the IRS have weakened with the decline of unions and the rise of precarious employment. Survey data are analyzed from Ontario workers who rated the likelihood that raising a health and safety concern with their current employer would negatively affect their future employment. My analysis models how workers’ sex, race, unionization, sector, and degree of employment precarity affect their probability of exercising voice. Results of a logistic regression suggest the most precariously employed are the least likely to use voice. Consequently, I argue that the IRS should be supplemented with more external oversight in sectors where employment is most insecure.

[Examines] the prevalence of both precarious and stable employment in the labour market stretching from Hamilton in the west to Whitby in the east, and centred on the City of Toronto. [The report] expands the discussion of the social consequences of Canada’s polarizing income distribution by examining the effects of precarious employment on people’s lives. It explores how employment precarity and income together shape social outcomes. What makes this issue all the more important is our finding that barely 50% of people in our study are in jobs that are both permanent and full-time. --Website description. Contents: Background -- Part 1: The rise of precarious employment -- Part 2: The characteristics of the precariously employed -- Part 3: Precarity and household well-being -- Part 4: Precarity and the well-being of children -- Part 5: Precarity and community connection -- Part 6: Options for change -- Appendix A: How we collected our data -- Appendix B: Defining individuals in precarious employment -- Appendix C: How we determined low, middle, and high household income brackets -- Bibliography.

This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers' efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns-Port Alice and Port Alberni-to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers' struggles to 'defend place'; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Spring 2013 issue.

English/French abstracts of articles in the Fall 2013 issue.

The Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies (CAWLS) is an academic association for scholars interested in work, workers, and labour. --Website

Mobility for work is not new, but it is changing. Across the world a wide range of people are mobile for work – women and men, citizens and temporary foreign workers, new workers and those near retirement. From hours-long daily commutes, to travel that takes workers away from home for days, weeks, months and even years; from mobility within work (truck driving, shipping and others) to mobility to get to and from work; from cars and buses, to trains, ships and planes; from highly-paid top executive jobs, to minimum-wage service jobs; from natural resource dependent industry to natural wonder dependent tourism – the types of mobility are many and changing. The On the Move Partnership is a multi-year national scale research program with international links, investigating employment-related geographical mobility and its consequences for workers, families, employers, communities, and Canadian municipal, provincial and federal governments. --Website description

La vie professionnelle : âge, expérience et santé à l’épreuve des conditions de travail, edited by Anne-Françoise Molinié, Corinne Gaudart and Valérie Pueyo, is reviewed.

The article reviews and comments on the books "They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California," by Don Mitchell, "Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico," by Deborah Cohen, and "Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest," by Brinda Sarathy.

Ce texte propose une relecture du débat sur l’action syndicale à l’international entre la construction de coalitions globales et le développement de réseaux locaux. Il se base sur le récit des représentants syndicaux du secteur minier au Ghana et au Mexique. Les stratégies syndicales sont saisies sous les trois dimensions analytiques que sont les espaces de l’action syndicale à l’international, les modes d’interaction et le cadre de référence. L’objectif de l’article vise à comprendre comment les syndicats nationaux naviguent entre le local et le global, et les facteurs qui les poussent et les attirent vers les espaces transnationaux.Alors que les deux syndicats sont engagés dans un processus de renouvellement de leur action, leur stratégie transnationale diffère : les Ghanéens sont engagés dans le développement de nouvelles aptitudes et de nouveaux savoir-faire et les Mexicains dans la construction des coalitions. Ces constats suggèrent que l’action syndicale à l’international est fonction des contingences nationales. Primo, le syndicat ghanéen intervient surtout au niveau continental africain et privilégie le développement des compétences locales et nationales. De son côté, le syndicat mexicain est présent aussi bien au niveau continental nord-américain que transnational, notamment dans des campagnes de solidarité. Secundo, les Ghanéens entretiennent de faibles liens avec les autres syndicats. De l’autre, les Mexicains sont engagés dans un large répertoire d’action avec les syndicats nord-américains et les fédérations internationales. Tertio, les Ghanéens conçoivent leurs intérêts sur la base d’une forte identité clanique et définissent leur engagement international en termes de ressources. Pour leur part, les Mexicains bâtissent des coalitions transnationales sur la base d’une identité de classe.Allant au-delà de la dichotomie entre le local et le global, les stratégies syndicales à l’international sont socialement construites et localement enracinées. Elles s’expliquent par la dynamique de l’économie politique dans laquelle se trouvent insérés ces syndicats et les structures d’opportunité transnationale à leur portée.

Labour relations statutes across Canada generally use one of three stand- ing models for regulating essential service strikes - the "unfettered strike," "designation" and "no-strike" models. An ad hoc variant of the unfettered strike and designation models - what the author calls the "instant back-to-work" model - has recently been used several times by the federal government to circumvent the designation model in the Canada Labour Code. After reviewing these models, the author moves to the question of whatforms of strike regulation might be held to infringe freedom of association in section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and therefore to need justification under section 1 as a reasonable limit on that freedom. Pierre Verge, like Brian Langille, has argued that a constitutional right to strike should simply require governments to respect the common law freedom of employees to withdraw their services without incurring criminal or tort liability, in the absence of a section 1 justifi- cation for any infringement of that freedom. This approach, the author suggests, would require excessive recourse to section 1, and would be of value mainly to strategically placed employees because it would offer no protection against employer reprisals for strike action. In his view, a right to strike should instead be held to flow from the Charter-based right to collective bargaining adopted in B.C. Health and Fraser. This would leave legislatures with significant discretion to regulate industrial conflict, but would require that employees who are not allowed to strike must have access to a truly independent means of resolving col- lective bargaining disputes. To that end, the Supreme Court of Canada should reinstate the trial judgment in the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour case, which held (1) that the right to collective bargaining includes a limited right to strike; and (2) that this right was unjustifiably breached by a statute which gave the provincial government the unilateral right to designate those public sector employees who could not strike, and also denied those employees access to an alternative independent dispute resolution process.

The author argues that the current test for age discrimination in Canada, which is based on the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Kapp and which requires that discrimination be motivated by or perpetuate stereotyping or prejudice, has led adjudicators to fail to come to grips with wrongful ageism in the workplace. The fact that everyone ages, and that distinctions based on age may in the past have benefitted the same people who are now harmed by those distinctions, has in the author's view been given too much weight, thereby making discrimination against senior workers too easy to justify. She proposes that the legal test for age discrimination should focus on wrongs done in the present, and should not take account of any past or future benefits which may be attributed to a distinction drawn on the basis of age. On the basis of what the author calls the Dignified Lives Approach, she argues that an age-based distinc- tion should be held to be discriminatory if it violates any of these five principles: people of all ages must be assessed on their merits, must be treated as equals, must have enough means to live lives of dignity, must be socially included, and must retain their autonomy. Using as examples four recent cases of alleged age-based discrimination in the employment context decided by Canadian courts and administrative tribunals, the author demonstrates how the Dignified Lives Approach would in her view be more sensitive to different types of age dis- crimination and would bring more just outcomes.

The article reviews the book, "Age, Gender, and Work: Small Information Technology Firms in the New Economy," edited by Julie Anne McMullin.