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...Lead author Dr. Catherine Bryan, Associate Professor in the Dalhousie School of Social Work, had this to say about the report, “This report draws on voices and experiences of child protection social workers in Nova Scotia to describe how they understand and manage the conditions of child protection work in Nova Scotia. More precisely, it details a growing set of concerns about the conditions of child welfare work in the province and, in turn, about the ability of child protection social workers to effectively, compassionately, and justly meet the needs of children and families.” This report is an effort to uncover the key concerns and daily struggles of those tasked with “protecting” children, while also making both short-term and long-term recommendations for changes to address those challenges, from improving training, mentoring, and professional recognition to reducing poverty. --From website description

Retirement security is the dream of every Canadian, but employers, particularly those in the private sector, are moving away from providing the gold standard of a workplace pension plan. In 2023, 6.9 million working Canadians—34 per cent of all employed people—were covered by a registered pension plan. The retirement income those plans contribute to national and local economies, to government budgets and to equalizing retirement security for equity-seeking groups is underappreciated. This report puts that value in context. --Website description

Discusses the CHL class actions and the settlement in Ontario and Alberta as well as the failure to settle in Quebec. Concludes that the present state of affairs is very unsatisfactory.

Discusses injury rates of warehouse workers at Amazon, with particular reference to Ontario. Concludes that workers must organize to counterbalance the management priorities of the world's second largest corporation.

This article is a minimum filmography about the fundamental issue of mobility. The films reviewed here represent Mexican workers who travel to Canada as temporary workers, thus, who are legal economic migrants. ...This article seeks to introduce the main problems of SAWP [Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program] in the framework of an approach that takes place in the 2020’s; presenting the activists’ struggle, pointing out SAWP’s problems for the families affected and with regard to the process of temporary workers soliciting Canadian citizenship. I analyze five films produced over the last 15 years and present them chronologically to discover how seasonal agricultural workers’ participation in the programs signed by Mexico and Canada is documented.

In June 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced impending new pilot programs for migrant care workers. While the announcement brings hope that “new pilot programs will provide home care workers with permanent residence on arrival in Canada,” this report identifies persistent problems with Canada’s migrant care worker programs and demonstrates why permanency upon arrival is a requisite for necessary program changes. Given the ongoing and structural issues of Canada’s migrant care worker programs, the newest pilot programs will also need other critical improvements to ensure dignified work and meaningful inclusion for much-needed care workers in Canada. --Website summary

The 2024 review of the Labour Relations Code, only the second in more than two decades, comes at a critical juncture for labour relations in British Columbia. It is imperative that this review bring a comprehensive package of reforms to markedly improve workers’ abilities to meaningfully exercise their statutory rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining in the current context of fissured workplaces and increasingly insecure work arrangements in many sectors of the BC economy. --Website summary

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has approved a $30 million settlement resolving class action lawsuits regarding the employment status of players in the Canadian Hockey League’s Ontario Hockey League (OHL), Western Hockey League (WHL), and Québec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL). The decision comes after a complex legal battle spanning nearly a decade, affecting approximately 4,286 amateur hockey players. But it still needs to be approved by courts in Alberta and Quebec.

A detailed look at the experiences of migrant and immigrant women’s working conditions in low-wage essential sectors in Nova Scotia before, during, and following the most acute periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, this report draws on 27 in-depth, qualitative interviews.... --Website summary

This paper examines freedom of association in Canada. In particular, it traces why Canada’s constitutional protection of freedom of association has developed only slowly and principally in the union context so far, reaching in a struggling way toward what I call “half a constitutional freedom.” --Introduction

The evidence presented in this report runs counter to arguments that card-check and anti-scab legislation give excessive power to workers over employers. Rather, card-check certification and a replacement worker ban are fundamental to upholding workers rights within Canada’s labour relations system. The right to join a union and the right to strike are two foundational aspects of Canadian labour relations. Testimonials from workers in this report make clear that mandatory votes suppress workers’ freedom to join a union without coercion from anti-union employers. --Website summary

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.

L’objectif de cet article consiste à analyser les spécificités et les enjeux entrepreneuriaux de la relation de travail atypique que constitue la coopération amapienne entretenue entre un petit producteur agricole et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Assimilable à une forme spécifique d’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole, la création d’une association pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne (AMAP) se matérialise par un engagement contractualisé des consommateurs dans l’activité de production agricole et de vente directe de produits alimentaires locaux. L’engagement de ces consommateurs constitue alors une véritable force de travail pour le petit producteur agricole facilitant l’accès à des expertises et compétences complémentaires. Notre recherche vise à comprendre comment la coopération amapienne, en tant que relation de travail atypique, permet de stimuler, au sein d’un territoire, l’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole entre un petit producteur et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Basés sur une méthodologie qualitative, nos résultats montrent que cette relation de travail atypique se caractérise par un système de coproduction, de cogestion et de réciprocité apprenante. Par ailleurs, elle favorise, pour l’entrepreneur agricole, la mise en place d’un environnement capacitant grâce aux principes de suppléance, de soutien, d’éducation et d’accompagnement auxquels obéit la création d’une AMAP et qui renforcent la capacité d’action et d’autonomisation du petit producteur. Ainsi, la finalité de cette relation de travail atypique réside dans un « entreprendre ensemble » pour, in fine, cocréer de la valeur sociale. Cette approche entrepreneuriale et altruiste de la relation de travail atypique enrichit la littérature académique qui l’envisageait, jusqu’à présent, principalement à partir de la situation de vulnérabilité du travailleur. Nous proposons en effet de la considérer aussi à partir de la capacité du travailleur à prendre part à un projet d’entrepreneuriat collectif en mettant à disposition d’une communauté un ensemble d’expertises et de compétences.

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.

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.

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.

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

This book brings together the vast research literature about gender and technology to help designers understand what a gender perspective and a focus on intersectionality can contribute to designing information technology systems and artifacts, and to assist organizations as they work to develop work cultures that are supportive of women and marginalized genders and people. Drawing on empirical and analytical studies of women's work and technology in many parts of the world, the book addresses how to make invisible aspects of work visible; how to recognize women's skills without falling into the trap of gender stereotyping; how to engage in improving working conditions; and how to defend care of life situations and needs against a managerial logic. It addresses challenges for design, including many overlooked and undervalued aspects, such as the complexities involved in human–machine interactions, as well as the need to create safe spaces for research subjects. --Publisher's description

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