Responsabilité sociale des entreprises: mirage ou réalité ? - Dupont, Claire (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Responsabilité sociale des entreprises: mirage ou réalité ?," by Mustapha Bettache.

Temps horloge et temps religieux : une sociologie historique des familles ouvrières à Québec à la fin du 19e siècle et au début du 20e - Durou, Guillaume (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Au Canada, le 19e siècle constitue une période de transformations profondes. Parmi celles-ci etaient la transition au capitalisme qui simula l’économie coloniale et produisit une richesse nationale alors même que son mouvement engendra d’importantes inégalités sociales. Cette transition se loge au cœur de plusieurs questions qui occupent la sociologie historique sur les façons dont le capitalisme transforma les relations sociales en Occident et au Canada. Nombreuses de ces questions ont déjà été éclairées alors que d’autres demandent toujours à sortir de l’obscurité. Cet article a pour objectif de dresser un portrait des familles ouvrières et de leurs différentes stratégies de reproduction. À l’aide des données recueillies sur la population de la ville de Québec, nous souhaitons comparer différentes pratiques sociales en mettant l’accent sur les caractéristiques d’un nouveau régime temporel et mesurer son influence sur les ouvriers et ouvrières.

Transforming Provincial Politics: The Political Economy of Canada’s Provinces and Territories in the Neoliberal Era - Dyck, Rand (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Transforming Provincial Politics: The Political Economy of Canada’s Provinces and Territories in the Neoliberal Era," edited by Bryan M. Evans and Charles W. Smith.

Mental Health in the Workplace: Unions' Role in Identifying and Combating Psychosocial Hazards - Edelson, Miriam Karin (University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 2016)
The world of paid work has shifted extraordinarily in the last several decades. Globalization, technology, lean production, the intensification of work, mergers and reorganizations and precarious work have all meant a toughening of the conditions for workers. Unions organize in these conditions, confronting issues of concern to workers. Very little has been written about the role unions play in trying to protect the psychological health of their members. The major question of this thesis is whether unions are identifying and combating psychosocial hazards in the workplace. The thesis adds to knowledge on this subject by analyzing two data sets. First I conduct an analysis of grey literature on the Internet about psychological health and safety concerns. Second, I explore a series of questions with union health and safety experts representing every major Canadian union from each sector of the economy. The questions probe how unions are dealing with psychosocial risks in the workplace, how unions are organizing resistance and building solidarity. My inquiry also explores the issue of how unions deal with return-to-work for workers who have been absent for mental health reasons. I am not a neutral observer: I write from the standpoint of workers. My work has a practical utility to the degree that it can be directly applied to these real life problems facing health and safety practitioners. It attempts to theorize that which these union specialists should do. It also tries to anticipate some practical problems they may need to solve in future as a result of current health and safety practices. I observe real life phenomena and develop theory around them. One of these is that unions resist employer restraints and power and in so doing bump up against managementsâ right to control production and dictate work organization. In this thesis, I show the fledgling ways in which unions are challenging managementsâ typical rights in the interests of better working conditions. I give evidence of three promising practices that unions are adopting and propose that these may be adapted further for initiatives in other sectors. I argue that workersâ psychological health is one potential winner of these strategies. I also propose that union representatives be educated to deal more empathically with members that are absent for reasons of psychological ill health, in advocating for them when they return and by building solidarity among co-workers.

Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948 - Eidlin, Barry (American Sociological Review, 2016)
Why is there no labor party in the United States? This question has had deep implications for U.S. politics and social policy. Existing explanations use “reflection” models of parties, whereby parties reflect preexisting cleavages or institutional arrangements. But a comparison with Canada, whose political terrain was supposedly more favorable to labor parties, challenges reflection models. Newly compiled electoral data show that underlying social structures and institutions did not affect labor party support as expected: support was similar in both countries prior to the 1930s, then diverged. To explain this, I propose a modified “articulation” model of parties, emphasizing parties’ role in assembling and naturalizing political coalitions within structural constraints. In both cases, ruling party responses to labor and agrarian unrest during the Great Depression determined which among a range of possible political alliances actually emerged. In the United States, FDR used the crisis to mobilize new constituencies. Rhetorical appeals to the “forgotten man” and policy reforms absorbed some farmer and labor groups into the New Deal coalition and divided and excluded others, undermining labor party support. In Canada, mainstream parties excluded farmer and labor constituencies, leaving room for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to organize them into a third-party coalition.

Ginger Goodwin: A Worker's Friend - Ellyn, Laura (Between the Lines, 2016)
With bright, strong imagery, Ginger Goodwin presents the story of labour activist and martyr Albert “Ginger” Goodwin. This accessible and thoughtful graphic history explores Goodwin’s life, work, and death in the mining communities of Cumberland and Trail, British Columbia. Drawing on local history, and exploring the ways the history of labour organizing affects contemporary movements, Ginger Goodwin is a story that needs to be shared. --Publisher's description

A Survey of the Living Wage Movement in Canada: Prospects and Challenges - Evans, Bryan M.; Fanelli, Carlo (Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements, 2016)
The contemporary living wage movement emerged in the United States through the 1990s. It marked a particularly dramatic response at the local and regional level to the erosion in the quality of employment in the American labour market. In many respects it was and is today a rebellion of urban, racialized service sector workers. What is much less discussed are efforts to establish living wage policies in Canada. The Canadian living wage campaigns are much less movements than a strategy of rational policy advocacy. A variety of legal, political and ideological factors make this so. It is not a judgement but an observation meriting some greater interrogation.

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People - Evans, Sterling (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People," by Michel Hogue.

Multi-Scalar Trade Unionism: Lessons from Maritime Unions - Fairbrother, Peter; Gekara, Victor (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Union approaches in relation to the global recalibration of work and employment relations and practices over the last three decades are being worked out in practice. The question for unions is by which means they either have leverage or the potential to exercise power in relation to state and corporate decisions and strategies. Unions thus face challenging questions about the ways they organize, exercise their capacities and attempt to meet their purposes. With reference to the Australian maritime sector, the study examines the ways the main union, the Maritime Union of Australia, developed multi-scalar approaches to localized events. The problem unions face is to defend and advance workers’ interests. The task is to organize, to realize their capacities to defend and advance maritime workers’ interests, increasingly in multi-scalar ways. The argument is that leaderships and activity that ‘bridge’ scalar relationships are an important condition in this process. There appears to be a complex set of cross-connections between the local, the national and the international. While transnational connectivity increasingly defines contemporary forms of trade unionism, these scalar relations are defined in relation to the workplace, the everyday world, and by the ways that transport is a defining characteristic of the global world. These relations constitute contemporary class struggle where work and employment relations are always in a process of change and development. Trade unionism, thus, remains a collective expression of power relations, in an increasingly internationalized world of work and employment. Thus, this research presents important lessons for multi-scalar organization and campaigning by unions to realize their capacities and purpose. Nonetheless, this study is only a beginning. While it indicates the processes of bridging, the next step is to investigate the variety of ways that bridging may take place and with what outcomes for the development of multi-scalar activity. // Les approches syndicales en relation avec le rééquilibrage des relations industrielles et des pratiques en matière d’emploi et de travail durant les trois dernières décennies s’élaborent dans la pratique. La question qui se pose pour les syndicats est de savoir quels sont les moyens qui peuvent leur permettre d’influencer ou qui ont un potentiel pour influer sur les décisions et les stratégies de l’État et des entreprises. Les syndicats sont ainsi confrontés à diverses questions concernant les manières d’organiser et d’exercer leurs capacités ainsi que d’atteindre leurs objectifs. En se basant sur l’expérience du syndicalisme maritime australien, cette étude examine la façon dont le principal syndicat, le Syndicat maritime de l’Australie (Maritime Union of Australia), a su développer des approches à paliers multiples pour aborder les situations locales. Le problème auquel les syndicats doivent faire face est celui de défendre et de faire progresser les intérêts des travailleurs. Leur défi principal est d’organiser et de montrer leurs capacités à défendre et faire progresser les intérêts des travailleurs maritimes, en utilisant davantage l’approche à paliers multiples. Notre argumentation est à l’effet que le leadership et les activités qui permettent de faire le pont entre les paliers multiples constituent une importante condition du processus. Il semble exister un ensemble de connexions complexes entre les paliers local, national et international. Alors que la connectivité transnationale définit de plus en plus les formes contemporaines de syndicalisme, ces relations à paliers multiples sont définies en rapport avec les milieux de travail, le monde du quotidien, et par le fait que le transport s’avère une caractéristique du monde global. Ces relations constituent le lieu de la lutte des classes contemporaine où le travail et les relations industrielles s’insèrent continuellement dans un processus de changement et d’évolution. Ainsi, le syndicalisme demeure une expression collective des relations de pouvoir dans un monde du travail et de l’emploi s’internationalisant de plus en plus. Aussi, la présente recherche offre de tirer d’importantes leçons pour les organisations à paliers multiples et pour les syndicats qui cherchent à mettre en oeuvre leurs ressources et leurs objectifs. Malgré tout, cette étude constitue seulement un début. Bien qu’elle procure des indications sur le processus d’harmonisation des paliers multiples, la prochaine étape sera d’étudier les diverses manières dont cette recherche d’harmonisation peut se dérouler et avec quels résultats pour le développement d’activités à paliers multiples.

Canada’s Choice: Decent Work or Entrenched Exploitation for Canada’s Migrant Workers? - Faraday, Fay (Metcalf Foundation, 2016)
For the approximately 600,000 migrants currently working in Canada, changes made to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in 2014 have left them more vulnerable to exploitation and have further narrowed their access to permanent residence. These are the findings of Canada’s Choice: Decent Work or Entrenched Exploitation for Canada’s Migrant Workers?, the latest report from human rights lawyer and Metcalf Fellow Fay Faraday, that builds upon her two previous Metcalf papers on the precarious conditions created and perpetuated by Canada’s controversial Temporary Foreign Worker Program. “Canada has lost its innocence on temporary labour migration,” says Faraday. “The 2014 reforms do nothing to alleviate – and in many cases exacerbate – insecurity for migrant workers. And exploitation predictably follows.” The report details the continued exploitation faced by migrant workers — including unscrupulous recruitment practices, employment mobility restrictions, and a lack of protection from rights abuses— and provides clear policy recommendations to strengthen protections and build employment security for Canada’s migrant workers. Canada’s Choice is also part of a submission to the Parliamentary Committee that is currently studying the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. With Canada’s labour migration policy at a crossroads, we hope that this timely report will contribute to informing the public discourse and lead to comprehensive reforms that enforce the rights of some of our nation’s most vulnerable workers. --Publisher's description

Working through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective - Fast, Travis (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Working through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective," edited by Teri L. Caraway, Maria Lorena Cook and Stephen Crowley.

Varieties of Capitalism: A Critique - Fast, Travis William (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) has become the dominant approach in comparative political economy and enjoys wide application and attention in disciplines outside of political science and sociology. Indeed the VoC approach has enjoyed much attention in comparative industrial/employment relations (IR). This article undertakes a critical evaluation of the importation of the VoC paradigm into comparative IR. Inter alia, it is argued that the VoC approach, as it is presently configured, may have little to teach IR scholars because its basic theoretical concepts and methodological priors militate against accounting for change. This article begins with a summary of the routine problems researchers in comparative political economy and comparative IR have encountered when attempting to account for change within the constraints of the VoC paradigm. Here the focus is on the limitations imposed when privileging the national scale and the problems engendered by a heavy reliance on comparative statics methodology infused with the concepts of equilibrium and exogenous shocks. The article then goes beyond these routinely recognized limitations and argues that the importation of terminology from neoclassical economic theory, of which the original VoC statement makes foundational reference, further serves to constrain and add confusion to the comparative enterprise; namely, comparative advantage, Oliver Williamson’s neoclassical theory of the firm, the use of the distinction made between (im)perfect market competition in neoclassical economics and the fuzzy distinction made between firms, markets and networks. In the concluding section we argue that the VoC’s narrow focus on the firm and its coordination problems serve to legitimate IRs traditional narrow focus on labour management relations and the pride of place that HRM now enjoys in the remaining IR departments. Ultimately, however, the embrace of the VoC paradigm by comparative IR is a net negative normative move.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Techniciens de l’organisation sociale. La réorganisation de l’assistance catholique privée à Montréal (1930-1974) - Ferretti, Lucia (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Techniciens de l’organisation sociale. La réorganisation de l’assistance catholique privée à Montréal (1930-1974)," by Amélie Bourbeau.

A Survey of Sessional Faculty in Ontario Publicly Funded Universities - Field, Cynthia C.; Jones,, Glen A. (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Centre for the Study of Canadian and International Higher Education; OISE-University of Toronto., 2016)
Within the past decade, the unprecedented growth in non-tenure/tenure track faculty has led to speculation as to the learning environment and learning outcomes for students. Both national media and researchers have raised concerns about the growth in short-term contract faculty, yet there is little evidentiary data to support policy development. Our study of sessional faculty in Ontario’s publicly funded universities provides much needed data and insight into the current pressures, challenges, and adaptations of the rapidly rising number of university instructors who work on short-term contracts, also known as sessional faculty. --From Executive Summary

Jazz libre : « musique-action » ou la recherche d’une praxis révolutionnaire au Québec (1967–1975) - Fillion, Eric (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Fondé en 1967, le Jazz libre se démarque dans le paysage culturel du Québec par sa quête d’une praxis révolutionnaire dont la visée est de promouvoir la démocratie culturelle dans les milieux ouvriers. Durant ses huit années d’existence, ce groupe d’improvisateurs tisse des liens non négligeables avec le Conseil central des syndicats nationaux de Montréal, le Front de libération du Québec et le Front de libération des femmes. Les membres de ce collectif s’approprient le free jazz – une musique rattachée au nationalisme noir – afin de situer leur projet d’un Québec socialiste et indépendant dans un processus historique marqué par la décolonisation. Cette appropriation exprime un désir de concrétiser un rapprochement entre l’individu québécois colonisé – celui que Pierre Vallières qualifie de « nègre blanc d’Amérique » – et son homologue afro-américain. Elle repose sur la conviction que l’improvisation en musique est un vecteur de communication, d’organisation et de participation. La présente étude interroge le discours politico-culturel sur lequel la « musique-action » du Jazz libre repose. Elle propose une analyse élargie de la place occupée par le free jazz dans les mouvements de résistance au pouvoir tout en mettant en relief le volet culturel du militantisme politique déployé au Québec durant les années 1960 et 1970.

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class - Fleche, Andre M. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class," by Mark A. Lause.

L’intervention en santé et en sécurité du travail. Pour agir en prévention dans les milieux de travail - Fortin, Renée (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "L’intervention en santé et en sécurité du travail. Pour agir en prévention dans les milieux de travail," edited Sylvie Montreuil, Pierre-Sébastien Fournier and Geneviève Baril-Gingras.

Solidarity on the TransCanada: The Role of Immigrant Activism and Innovative Union Tactics in the 2005 Lakeside Packers Strike - Foster, Jason (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The 2005 first-contract strike at Lakeside Packers in Brooks, Alberta was one of the largest private sector labour victories in that province in over twenty years. At the time, the strike made national headlines for violence and animosity on the picket line. The strike is also noteworthy because African and Asian immigrant and refugee workers played a central role in the dispute. The union involved, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, adopted a series of innovative tactics which also contributed to the outcome. This article examines the events of the 2005 strike and explores the role played by immigrant activism in catalyzing and anchoring the struggle. It also analyzes which strategies employed by the union were most effective in organizing this group of workers. The article concludes by contemplating possible lessons for the labour movement today for organizing immigrant workers.

Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces - Foster, Jason; Barnetson, Bob (Open paths to enriched learning, 2016)
Workplace injuries happen every day and can profoundly affect workers, their families, and the communities in which they live. This textbook provides workers and students with an introduction to effective injury prevention. It pays particular attention to how issues of precarious employment, gender, and ill-health can be better handled in Canadian occupational health and safety (OHS). Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces offers an extensive overview of central OHS concepts and practices and provides practical suggestions for health and safety advocacy. It attempts to bring OHS into a twenty-first century context by discussing contemporary workplaces and the health effects of new work processes and structures while recognizing that safety has gendered and racialized dimensions. Foster and Barnetson contend that the practice of occupational health and safety can only be understood if we acknowledge that workers and employers have conflicting interests. Who identifies what workplace hazards should be controlled is therefore a product of the broader political economy of employment and one that should be well understood by those working in the field. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Workplace injury in theory and practice -- Legislative framework of injury prevention and compensation -- Hazard recognition, assessment and control -- Physical hazards -- Chemical and biological hazards -- Psycho-social hazards -- Health effects of employment -- Training and injury prevention programs -- Incident investigation -- Disability management and return to work -- The practice of health and safety.
Keywords: Canada; Industrial safety

Public Goods and Good Jobs: The Byrne Report and the Labour Question in New Brunswick, 1963–1968 - Frank, David (Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region / Revue d'histoire de la region atlantique, 2016)
When Professor Murray Young was teaching his pioneering courses on New Brunswick history up to what was then the recent past of the 1960s, colleagues would ask him what text he was using for the contemporary period. His answer was the Byrne Report. Students in that class learned how to read tables of data and lists of recommendations, and they came to appreciate the Report of the Royal Commission on Finance and Municipal Taxation as one of the most significant documents in the historical evolution of the province. --Introduction

Sensing Disorder: Sensory History and Future Directions for Working-Class and Urban Environmental Scholarship - Frankenbach, Julia C. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the books, "Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers," by Adam Mack, "Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago," by Colin Fisher, "The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour," by Nancy B. Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank, and "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town," by Ellen Griffith Spears.

Watching Women’s Liberation 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News - Freeman, Barbara M. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Watching Women’s Liberation 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News," by Bonnie J. Dow.

"You Will Have a Good Career Here, but Not a Great Career": Male Mentoring and the Women Journalists of the Canadian Press News Cooperative, 1965–2000 - Freeman, Barbara M. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Analyzes various forms of discrimination experienced by women journalists at Canadian Press from the mid-1960s to 2000. A feminist, interdisciplinary approach is used to examine masculine newsroom norms and how they affected women's careers. Problems of mentoring are also explored. The study is based on over 30 oral interviews including with women who worked at different times as journalists and editors at CP.

The Right to Strike: The Supreme Court of Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Arc of Workplace Justice - Fudge, Judy; Jensen, Heather (King's Law Journal, 2016)
In a momentous decision, released on 30 January 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v Saskatchewan (SFL) that the right to strike is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom's guarantee of freedom of association. Writing for the majority (5:2), Justice Abella asserted: The conclusion that the right to strike is an essential part of a meaningful collective bargaining process in our system of labour relations is supported by history, by jurisprudence, and by Canada's international obligations … The right to strike is not merely derivative of collective bargaining, it is an indispensable component of that right. It seems to me to be the time to give this conclusion constitutional benediction. The case is significant not only for the Court's conclusion that the freedom of association protected in section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter includes the right to strike, but also because it signalled that the gradual expansion of the scope of constitutional protection for labour rights that began in 2001 with Dunmore, had not been reversed in 2011 in Fraser. In fact, Justice Abella began her judgment in SFL by remarking that ‘clearly the arc bends increasingly towards workplace justice’. The crucial issue before the Court was the constitutionality of provincial legislation that unilaterally designated public sector workers as essential and prohibited them from striking.... --Introduction (footnotes omitted)

Quand le syndicat devient vecteur d’inégalités : les effets des clauses « orphelins » sur l’association syndicale - Gagné, Diane; Dupuis, Marie-Josée (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Depuis les années 1980, les syndicats locaux doivent souvent gérer les compressions demandées par la partie patronale lors des rondes de négociation. Disposant de très peu de marge de manoeuvre dans sa négociation, le syndicat se voit contraint de choisir entre une précarité généralisée et une précarité réservée à un groupe de travailleurs. Il en arrive à faire des compromis qui l’amènent à devenir un vecteur d’inégalités économiques et sociales, plutôt qu’un moteur d’amélioration des conditions des travailleurs. Les diverses clauses de disparité de traitement confèrent des droits et des avantages différents à certaines catégories de salariés travaillant pour un même employeur, que ce soit en raison de leur statut d’emploi (Bernier, 2011), de leur affiliation syndicale ou de leur date d’embauche (Côté, 2008).L'objectif principal de cette étude est de traiter des conséquences qu'ont eu la présence de ces clauses « orphelins », ainsi que leur contestation, sur les deux syndicats locaux étudiés. Également, nous souhaitons fournir des pistes de réflexion quant à ses impacts sur le collectif syndical. En effet, nous avons observé, chez les deux syndicats étudiés, que l'on refuse de considérer la double échelle salariale comme étant de la discrimination, et ce, pour deux principales raisons. D'abord, les exécutifs locaux sont peu familiers avec la notion de discrimination. Leurs connaissances se limitent souvent à la discrimination directe, alors que les plaignants allèguent une discrimination indirecte désavantageant les salariés les plus récemment embauchés, et donc plus jeunes. Secundo, les syndicats ne se reconnaissent aucune part de responsabilité dans l'entente intervenue en raison du contexte économique et juridique de la négociation et des fortes pressions exercées par l'employeur. En conclusion, nous aborderons les différents effets de la négociation de clauses « orphelins », soit la persistance des inégalités et la difficulté de mettre en oeuvre la norme d'égalité en milieu syndiqué. // Title in English: When the Union Becomes a Vector of Inequalities: The Effects of Orphan Clauses on Union Association. Since the 1980s, unions have often been under pressure to accept wage compressions during collective bargaining. Faced with little bargaining power, their only choice sometimes ends up being between accepting eroded conditions for all or only some of their members. In this context, unions go from being a partner in the fight against inequalities to being a vector of inequalities. Based on two case studies where unions agreed to introduce orphan clauses to existing collective agreements, this paper aims to document the consequences unions have to deal with when some of their members decide to challenge such clauses because they find them to be discriminatory.We observed that in both unions, there was a refusal to consider the dual salary scale as being discriminatory for two main reasons: first, local officers are unfamiliar with the notion of discrimination, often limited to direct discrimination, while the orphan clauses create indirect discrimination that impacts the newlyhired employees, and consequently those employees that are younger; second, Unions do not recognize any responsibility on their part as the labour agreement was reached in a specific legal and economic context and under pressure from the employer.In conclusion, we find that various effects of the negotiation of orphan clauses include the persistence of inequalities and the difficulty to implement equality rules within the unionized sector.

« J'entends parler de leurs intérêts les plus chers » : Alphonse-Télesphore Lépine et l'engagement électoral des Chevaliers du travail à Montréal (1888–1896) - Gagnon, Marc-André (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Cet article fait la lumière sur le militantisme et la vie politique d’Alphonse-Télesphore Lépine (1855–1943), premier député ouvrier élu à la Chambre des communes du Canada (1888–1896). Dans le cadre de cette analyse, nous explorons la manière dont ce membre influent de l’Ordre des Chevaliers du travail de Montréal met en place sa campagne électorale et nous tentons de comprendre les liens, parfois tumultueux, que celui-ci entretient avec les militants de l’Ordre. Centrant notre analyse sur la personne d’Alphonse-Télesphore Lépine comme objet historique – dont les choix, les relations professionnelles, les idées et les valeurs sont au centre de la chose publique –, nous cherchons à rendre compte des réseaux partisans, et plus largement, de la culture politique des ouvriers.

Packing Disability into the Historian’s Toolbox: On the Merits of Labour Histories of Disability - Galer, Dustin (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews and comments on the books, "Disability Histories," edited by Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, and "Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging," edited by Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth Linker.

Understanding the Pathways to Above-Mandatory Severance Pay When Downsizing: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 20 Cases in France - Garaudel, Pierre; Beaujolin, Rachel; Noël, Florent; Schmidt, Géraldine (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
When it comes to negotiating over a collective dismissals plan, the French national legal framework explicitly encourages social partners to favour outplacement services over significant indemnity payments. However, significant above-mandatory redundancy payments are commonly granted to laid-off workers. Based on these factual observations, this article aims to identify the antecedent conditions, or, more precisely, the combinations of conditions, that lead to the granting of a large severance pay. We conducted a qualitative comparative analysis (Crisp set QCA) methodology applied to 20 monographs on downsizing operations that took place in France during the 2000s. The results show that above-mandatory severance payments are closely related to two major dimensions characterizing the economic and social context in which restructuring processes are carried out. The first one is about the balance of power prevailing between the company decisionmakers and the employees. This balance of power dimension is subsumed by two distinct conditions: the availability of financial resources and the presence of active unions. The second dimension relates to the moral and economic damages inflicted upon laid-off workers. This dimension is intrinsically connected to two downsizing process features, i.e. the perceived degree of legitimacy associated with the downsizing process and the degree of employability associated with the laid-off workers. Most notably, it appears that none of the identified conditions is sufficient by itself to induce the payment of a significant above-mandatory indemnity. However, some causal conditions may induce the outcome variable when they are combined with some specific other antecedent conditions. Thus, our research shows that the financial resource condition leads to the granting of an above-mandatory indemnity either in conjunction with a low degree of worker’s employability or in conjunction with both a weak perceived legitimacy of the restructuring process and the presence of active unions.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Charivari et justice populaire au Québec - Garneau, Jean-Philippe (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Charivari et justice populaire au Québec," by René Hardy.

Santé et travail à la mine, XIXe-XXIe siècle - Gaudreau, Guy (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Santé et travail à la mine, XIXe-XXIe siècle," edited by Judith Rainhorn.

The Seeds of Divergence: The Economy of French North America, 1688 to 1760 - Geloso, Vincent (London School of Economics and Political Science, 2016)
Generally, Canada has been ignored in the literature on the colonial origins of divergence with most of the attention going to the United States. Late nineteenth century estimates of income per capita show that Canada was relatively poorer than the United States and that within Canada, the French and Catholic population of Quebec was considerably poorer. Was this gap long standing? Some evidence has been advanced for earlier periods, but it is quite limited and not well-suited for comparison with other societies. This thesis aims to contribute both to Canadian economic history and to comparative work on inequality across nations during the early modern period. With the use of novel prices and wages from Quebec—which was then the largest settlement in Canada and under French rule—a price index, a series of real wages and a measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are constructed. They are used to shed light both on the course of economic development until the French were defeated by the British in 1760 and on standards of living in that colony relative to the mother country, France, as well as the American colonies. The work is divided into three components. The first component relates to the construction of a price index. The absence of such an index has been a thorn in the side of Canadian historians as it has limited the ability of historians to obtain real values of wages, output and living standards. This index shows that prices did not follow any trend and remained at a stable level. However, there were episodes of wide swings—mostly due to wars and the monetary experiment of playing card money. The creation of this index lays the foundation of the next component. The second component constructs a standardized real wage series in the form of welfare ratios (a consumption basket divided by nominal wage rate multiplied by length of work year) to compare Canada with France, England and Colonial America. Two measures are derived. The first relies on a “bare bones” definition of consumption with a large share of land-intensive goods. This measure indicates that Canada was poorer than England and Colonial America and not appreciably richer than France. However, this measure overestimates the relative position of Canada to the Old World because of the strong presence of land-intensive goods. A second measure is created using a “respectable” definition of consumption in which the basket includes a larger share of manufactured goods and capital-intensive goods. This second basket better reflects differences in living standards since the abundance of land in Canada (and Colonial America) made it easy to achieve bare subsistence, but the scarcity of capital and skilled labor made the consumption of luxuries and manufactured goods (clothing, lighting, imported goods) highly expensive. With this measure, the advantage of New France over France evaporates and turns slightly negative. In comparison with Britain and Colonial America, the gap widens appreciably. This element is the most important for future research. By showing a reversal because of a shift to a different type of basket, it shows that Old World and New World comparisons are very sensitive to how we measure the cost of living. Furthermore, there are no sustained improvements in living standards over the period regardless of the measure used. Gaps in living standards observed later in the nineteenth century existed as far back as the seventeenth century. In a wider American perspective that includes the Spanish colonies, Canada fares better. The third component computes a new series for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is to avoid problems associated with using real wages in the form of welfare ratios which assume a constant labor supply. This assumption is hard to defend in the case of Colonial Canada as there were many signs of increasing industriousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The GDP series suggest no long-run trend in living standards (from 1688 to circa 1765). The long peace era of 1713 to 1740 was marked by modest economic growth which offset a steady decline that had started in 1688, but by 1760 (as a result of constant warfare) living standards had sunk below their 1688 levels. These developments are accompanied by observations that suggest that other indicators of living standard declined. The flat-lining of incomes is accompanied by substantial increases in the amount of time worked, rising mortality and rising infant mortality. In addition, comparisons of incomes with the American colonies confirm the results obtained with wages— Canada was considerably poorer. At the end, a long conclusion is provides an exploratory discussion of why Canada would have diverged early on. In structural terms, it is argued that the French colony was plagued by the problem of a small population which prohibited the existence of scale effects. In combination with the fact that it was dispersed throughout the territory, the small population of New France limited the scope for specialization and economies of scale. However, this problem was in part created, and in part aggravated, by institutional factors like seigneurial tenure. The colonial origins of French America’s divergence from the rest of North America are thus partly institutional.

L’usage par les travailleurs étrangers temporaires des ressources proposées par le droit du travail : une contribution aux études portant sur l’effectivité du droit - Gesualdi-Fecteau, Dalia (Université de Montréal, 2016)
Au Canada, le nombre de travailleurs étrangers temporaires est en forte hausse et ce, depuis 2003. Les travailleurs étrangers temporaires ne disposent ni de la citoyenneté politique, ni de la résidence permanente; leur mobilité professionnelle est restreinte et leur durée de séjour est limitée et prédéterminée. Sur le plan formel, ces travailleurs bénéficient des protections prévues par le droit du travail nonobstant leur statut migratoire. Toutefois, plusieurs travaux ont démontré que les travailleurs étrangers temporaires occupant des emplois qui requièrent un niveau réduit de formation sont généralement moins enclins à dénoncer la violation de leurs droits au travail. Le droit du travail constitue-t-il un rempart utile pour ces travailleurs? À l’aide d’une méthodologie mixte impliquant notamment une enquête de terrain auprès des acteurs-clé, la présente thèse poursuit deux objectifs distincts. Sur le plan empirique, elle permet de mettre en lumière l’incidence du système d’emploi singulier dans lequel s’insèrent les travailleurs étrangers temporaires sur leur usage des ressources proposées par le droit du travail. Le recours à ces ressources n’est pas contingent et prédéterminé; il est inextricablement lié aux opportunités et aux contraintes avec lesquelles ces travailleurs composent. Cette recherche révèle également que les stratégies échafaudées par différents acteurs qui ne sont pas, sur le plan juridique, des parties au rapport salarial, ont une incidence significative sur l’usage du droit par ses destinataires ; leur impact dépend largement du pouvoir dont ces acteurs disposent dans le système d’emploi. Sur le plan théorique, cette thèse s’inscrit dans le champ plus large des études portant sur l’effectivité du droit; elle propose de distinguer entre l’étude des effets du droit et l’analyse de son usage. Elle présente, à cette fin, un cadre analytique permettant de saisir le rapport qu’entretiennent les destinataires avec le droit.

Le système d’emploi des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers : portrait d’un rapport salarial multipartite - Gesualdi-Fecteau, Dalia (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Les programmes de migration temporaire constituent une manifestation de la division internationale du travail qui se concrétise par le déplacement de la main-d’oeuvre. Les travailleurs étrangers temporaires et leurs employeurs s’insèrent dans un système d’emploi qui se caractérise par l’action intervenant à l’occasion de la formation, de l’exécution et de la terminaison du rapport salarial. Or, si l’action intervenant au sein d’un système d’emploi résulte notamment des effets des règles juridiques applicables, elle découle également des schémas d’action mis de l’avant par les acteurs qui y interagissent. Cependant, certains de ces acteurs sont susceptibles d’occuper, de façon singulière, la scène de l’action : la prégnance de leurs schémas d’action est directement proportionnelle à la nature et à la portée du rôle qu’ils assument dans le système d’emploi. Cet article présente les résultats d’une étude de terrain qui a permis de cerner les contours du système d’emploi dans lequel s’insèrent les travailleurs agricoles guatémaltèques embauchés via le « Volet agricole » du Programme des travailleurs étrangers temporaires. Notre recherche révèle de quelle façon s’organise la capacité d’action des acteurs exogènes et endogènes au champ du travail. Elle permet également de comprendre de quelle façon certains acteurs sont contraints par l’effet de frontières géographiques et systémiques. Finalement, l’appréhension empirique du système d’emploi étudié amène aussi à brosser le portrait d’un rapport salarial multipartite tout à fait singulier. // Title in English: Temporary migration programs are a manifestation of the international division of labour that is reflected in the movement of productive agents. Temporary foreign workers and their employers are part of a unique employment system that is characterized by game mechanisms involved during the formation, implementation and termination of the wage relationship. If these games are inextricably linked to the legal rules regulating the wage relationship, they also stem from the practices and strategies deployed by the actors interacting within the employment system. However, some of these actors have the ability to occupy a unique place at the scene of the action, with the significance of their action plans being directly proportional to the nature and scope of the role they play in the employment system. This article presents the results of a field study that identified the contours of the employment system in which Guatemalan agricultural workers were hired through the agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program. This research shows how actors, who can be exogenous or endogenous to the labour field, organize their capacity for action. Hence, if the action of some actors is constrained by the effect of geographic and system boundaries, an empirical understanding of the employment system studied also shows a mismatch between the legal power granted to the employer under labour law and the strategic power that is available to certain actors who are external to the labour field. To conclude, this article provides an overview of the ways in which this multiparty context has consequences for the wage relationship studied.

Geopolitics, State-Formation and Economic Development in Quebec and Ontario - Gheller, Frantz (York University, 2016)
This dissertation challenges the prevailing periodization of Quebec and Ontario’s economic development in Canadian historiography by contrasting the specificity of capitalist social relations with the non-capitalist forms of social reproduction belonging to French Canadian peasants and Upper Canadian farmers in the colonial period. With a few notable exceptions, existing historical interpretations assume that capitalism was there, at least in embryo, from the colony’s very beginning in the guise of the fur trade, manufacturing, or a local bourgeoisie. By contrast, this thesis brings together, through a comparative perspective, different pieces of the interconnected histories of France, Britain, the United States, Ontario, and Quebec in order to show that capitalism did not arrive on the shores of the St. Lawrence River with the first settlers. The dissertation also brings together pieces of the uneven intra-regional histories of these regions, and provides a general reflection on how to systematically integrate the geopolitical dimension of social change into historical sociology, political economy, and comparative politics. As such, the question with which the thesis is concerned is not exclusively that of the transition to capitalism in Quebec or in Ontario, but more broadly the interrelated questions of state-formation and ‘late development’ in north-eastern North America. One of the main findings of the dissertation is that only with the development of industrial capitalism in the north-eastern United States were the conditions for the emergence of capital-intensive types of agriculture in rural areas of Quebec and Ontario put in place. American breakthroughs toward industrial capitalism irrevocably transformed the system-wide conditions under which subsequent agricultural evolution took place in neighbouring regions, generating a new geopolitical configuration in which customary peasant production continued to persist in Quebec alongside petty-commodity farmers in Upper Canada and the development of industrial capitalism in urban areas such as Montreal. These findings bring to the fore the need to directly address the ‘peasant question’ in order to understand the impact of the continued existence of a large peasantry on state-formation and the long-term economic development of Quebec during the period when industrial capitalism was emerging as a dominant feature of the North American economy.

Workplace Democracy for the 21st Century: Towards a New Agenda for Employee Voice and Representation in Canada - Gomez, Rafael; Gomez, Juan (Broadbent Institute, 2016)
In this discussion paper, we make the case for a renewed national dialogue on workplace democracy. Though the term may sound better suited to an academic/policy conference from the 1970s, in plain terms workplace democracy actually speaks to an ever-present need: i.e., advancing the fundamental rights of employees to associate freely and to have some say over decisions that affect their lives in the workplace. By expanding employee voice, as a country, we can also generate positive spillovers that enhance job satisfaction, raise productivity and increase civic participation. These benefits improve the lives of workers, increase the bottom lines for firms and enrich society as a whole. These are also ideas, it should be noted, that lie at the heart of industrial relations scholarship going back more than a century and which we draw from in this discussion paper. --Executive Summary

Canada since 1960: A People's History: A Left Perspective on 50 Years of Politics, Economics and Culture - Gonick, Cy (Lorimer, 2016)
When Winnipeg's Cy Gonick started the magazine Canadian Dimension in 1963 to provide a home for the thinking and analysis of mostly young leftists engaged in Canadian economic, social, cultural, artistic and political issues, he had no grand plan. But Canadian Dimension was welcomed by intellectuals, scholars and students, and it proved enduring. Hundreds of Canada's leading figures of the left have contributed to its pages over the years, writing about every major topic in Canadian public life. This book offers an account of the most important developments in Canadian history from the sixties until today, as seen and interpreted by scholars and writers on the pages of Dimension. Each chapter reviews a major theme, such as Canada's relationship to the U.S., the development of our health care system, the dynamics of Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations and the role of Canadian cultural work in shaping Canadian society. Taken together, the book provides a unique and broad perspective on virtually every significant event and development in recent Canadian history. Readers who know the magazine will find this book a compelling summary of how Canada changed in the past five decades, and how the Left saw those changes and challenged them. Readers who discover Canadian Dimension through this book will find a multitude of compelling voices who challenge the dominant neoliberal thinking of mainstream Canadian intellectual life. --Publisher's description.
Keywords: New Left -- Canada

Prévenir les problèmes de santé mentale au travail : contribution d’une recherche-action en milieu scolaire - Gouin, Marie-Michelle (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Prévenir les problèmes de santé mentale au travail : contribution d’une recherche-action en milieu scolaire," by Marie-France Maranda, Simon Viviers et Jean-Simon Deslauriers.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

International and Comparative Employment Relations. National regulation, global changes - Gould, Anthony (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "International and Comparative Employment Relations. National regulation, global changes," 6th ed., by Greg J. Bamber, Russell D. Lansbury, Nick Wailes and Chris F. Wright.

The Philosophical Foundations of Management Thought - Gould, Anthony (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "The Philosophical Foundations of Management Thought," by Jean-Etienne Joullié and Robert Spillane.

Establishing the South Slavic Radical Labour Press in Canada: The 1931 Reminiscences of Anyox Miner Marko P. Hećimović - Granic, Stan (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Introduces the memoir of Marko P. Hećimović (1894-1967). Written in 1939, the memoir focuses on Hećimović's role in the establishment of a communist press in Canada in 1931 that was published in the language of South Slavic immigrant workers such as himself (at the time, Hećimović, a Croat, was a miner in Anyox, BC).

Austerity as an Opportunity for Union Revival: Québec Public School Teachers - Grenier, Jean-Noël; Jalette, Patrice (The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2016)
This article proposes an account of how two teachers’ labour federations have been reacting to austerity measures in public education. Current austerity measures have coincided with the renewal of collective agreements, thus allowing the study of how unions link bargaining stances to wider issues of service quality and accessibility. Union responses are the result of at least three influences: the institutional framework for public sector collective bargaining and worker representation, the previous orientation of members and their organisations towards social and work relations, and ongoing innovations for renewal and member engagement. We posit that union responses can contribute to renewal if they are guided by concerns to redefine union purpose, union organisation and building capacities. Under these conditions, unions are able to engage members and push forward an alternative agenda to that of the government. In doing so, they may be able to forge temporary alliances with outside stakeholders, namely parents. Analysis of union responses should consider the dialectic between union renewal effort and the opportunities and constraints of the institutional framework for public sector collective bargaining. The challenge for these two labour federations is in sustaining member engagement and activism beyond the current context of collective bargaining.

What’s Next after Psychological Contract Violation? - Guerrero, Sylvie; Naulleau, Mickael (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article adopts an in-depth clinical perspective based on the theoretical framework of grief in order to examine individuals’ reactions following psychological contract violation over a period of 12 months. By focusing on emotional intra-psychic phenomena our study provides evidence of the enduring effects of psychological contract violation on individuals and the employment relationship. We conducted a total of 60 interviews among 11 managers of a temporary employment agency that has implemented a series of organizational changes, mainly related to restructuring and downsizing decisions. The 11 managers interviewed have been chosen after having reported in a short survey that they experienced a psychological contract violation at work. Our results indicate that psychological contract violation triggers the subject into a grief process only when violation deprives the individual from a highly invested object at work. In these circumstances, the grief process lasts longer than we originally expected since, over 12 months, we were unable to observe the grief process in its entirety among our participants. We also find that the grief process may be accelerated or stopped according to the capacity of the organization and the individual to offer new objects that satisfy the individual’s needs and thus may help the person mourn the loss experienced as a result of the violation. Finally, our results show that the grief process deeply alters the employment relationship and modifies the amount and intensity of energy that the participants of our study devote to their work. // Cet article adopte une perspective clinique fondée sur le cadre théorique du deuil afin de d’examiner les réactions à la violation du contrat psychologique au cours d’une période de 12 mois. En se centrant sur les phénomènes émotionnels propres à l’individu, notre étude apporte des éléments d’observation des effets durables que peut engendrer la violation du contrat psychologique chez les personnes concernées, et de la manière dont ces effets altèrent leur relation d’emploi avec l’entreprise. Nous avons mené, au total, 60 entretiens auprès de 11 gestionnaires d’une agence de travail temporaire qui a mis en place une série de changements organisationnels importants, portant essentiellement sur des restructurations et coupures de poste. Les 11 gestionnaires interrogés furent sélectionnés après avoir vérifié, au préalable lors d’une enquête brève, qu’ils avaient bien vécu un sentiment de violation du contrat psychologique. Nos résultats montrent que la violation du contrat psychologique ne pousse le sujet à effectuer un travail de deuil que lorsque cette violation prive l’individu d’un objet fortement investi au travail. Dans ces circonstances, le deuil est un processus plus long que nous l’avions anticipé, puisqu’à l’issue de la période de collecte (soit 12 mois), nous n’avons pas été en mesure d’observer l’ensemble du processus chez les participants. Nos résultats indiquent aussi que le processus de deuil peut être accéléré ou ralenti selon la capacité de l’organisation et de l’individu à offrir ou trouver de nouveaux objets qui satisfont les besoins de l’individu et l’aident à accepter la perte vécue lors de la violation. Finalement, nos résultats montrent que le processus de deuil conduit à une modification importante de la relation d’emploi et qu’il change tant le contenu que l’intensité de l’énergie que les participants consacrent à leur travail.

Canadian State Trials, Volume IV: Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914–1939 - Guth, DeLloyd J. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Canadian State Trials, Volume IV: Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914–1939, edited by Barry Wright, Eric Tucker, and Susan Binnie.

Identifying Knowledge Activism in Worker Health and Safety Representation: A Cluster Analysis - Hall, Alan; Oudyk, John; King, Andrew; Naqvi, Syed; Lewchuk, Wayne (American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2016)
Background: Although worker representation in OHS has been widely recognized as contributing to health and safety improvements at work, few studies have examined the role that worker representatives play in this process. Using a large quantitative sample, this paper seeks to confirm findings from an earlier exploratory qualitative study that worker representatives can be differentiated by the knowledge intensive tactics and strategies that they use to achieve changes in their workplace. Methods: Just under 900 worker health and safety representatives in Ontario completed surveys which asked them to report on the amount of time they devoted to different types of representation activities (i.e., technical activities such as inspections and report writing vs. political activities such as mobilizing workers to build support), the kinds of conditions or hazards they tried to address through their representation (e.g., housekeeping vs. modifications in ventilation systems), and their reported success in making positive improvements. A cluster analysis was used to determine whether the worker representatives could be distinguished in terms of the relative time devoted to different activities and the clusters were then compared with reference to types of intervention efforts and outcomes. Results: The cluster analysis identified three distinct groupings of representatives with significant differences in reported types of interventions and in their level of reported impact. Two of the clusters were consistent with the findings in the exploratory study, identified as knowledge activism for greater emphasis on knowledge based political activity and technical-legal representation for greater emphasis on formalized technical oriented procedures and legal regulations. Knowledge activists were more likely to take on challenging interventions and they reported more impact across the full range of interventions. Conclusions This paper provides further support for the concepts of knowledge activism and technical-legal representation when differentiating the strategic orientations and impact of worker health and safety representatives, with important implications for education, political support and recruitment.
Keywords: accidents; committees; health; injuries; occupational; representatives; safety; workers

Reproduction and Resistance: An Anti-Colonial Contribution to Social-Reproduction Feminism - Hall, Rebecca Jane (Historical Materialism, 2016)
In Northern Canada, Indigenous mixed economies persist alongside and in resistance to capital accumulation. The day-to-day sites and processes of colonial struggle, and, in particular, their gendered nature, are too often ignored. This piece takes an anti-colonial materialist approach to the multiple labours of Indigenous women in Canada, arguing that their social-reproductive labour is a primary site of struggle: a site of violent capitalist accumulation and persistent decolonising resistance. In making this argument, this piece draws on social-reproduction feminism, and anti-racist, Indigenous and anti-colonial feminism, asking what it means to take an anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism. It presents an expanded conception of production that encompasses not just the dialectic of capitalist production and reproduction, but also non-capitalist, subsistence production. An anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism challenges one to think through questions of non-capitalist labour and the way different forms of labour persist relationally, reproducing and resisting capitalist modes of production.

Soviet Princeton: Slim Evans and the 1932–33 Miners' Strike - Hannant, Larry (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Soviet Princeton: Slim Evans and the 1932–33 Miners' Strike by Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat.

Part-time, Poorly Paid, Unprotected: Experiences of Precarious Work in Retail, Food Service, and Hospitality in Victoria, BC - Hardman, Stefanie (Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group, 2016)
In this report, we begin by setting the context of living and working in Greater Victoria, examining low wages, high cost of living, and employment trends, particularly in relation to work in the retail, food service, and hospitality industries. We characterize retail, food service, and hospitality work as “precarious work,” providing workers with very little in the way of wages, benefits, job security, stability, protection, or basic respect and dignity. Existing employment standards are not adequate to protect workers in retail, food service, and hospitality. The key contribution of this report is its exploration of key areas of concern – low-wages, lack of benefits, unstable scheduling practices, unfair job expectations, disregard for workersʼ health and safety, poor treatment, workplace justice – through the workersʼ own experiences and voices. We would like to thank these workers for sharing their experiences with us. By bringing these various and similar experiences together, we hope this report will help provide a grounding to fight for workplace justice.

La « rébellion de 1837 » à travers le prisme du Montreal Herald. La refondation par les armes des institutions politiques canadiennes - Harvey, Louis-Georges (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "La « rébellion de 1837 » à travers le prisme du Montreal Herald. La refondation par les armes des institutions politiques canadiennes," by François Deschamps.

Capitalism: A Short History - Heller, Henry (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Capitalism: A Short History," by Jürgen Kocka.

La pratique de la négociation basée sur les intérêts dans les processus de négociation collective : perceptions et appropriations syndicales - Hennebert, Marc-Antonin; Faulkner, Marcel; Bourque, Reynald (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Après plusieurs décennies de formation et de mises en pratique de la NBI dans les relations patronales-syndicales, cette étude cherche à comprendre la résonnance pratique de cette approche auprès des négociateurs syndicaux ainsi que comment elle est réellement utilisée dans le cadre de négociations collectives. Rapportant les résultats d’une étude empirique menée auprès de quarante-cinq négociateurs syndicaux œuvrant dans le secteur privé et ayant, pour la plupart, mis en pratique à plusieurs reprises la NBI au cours des dernières années, les résultats de cette recherche soulignent à la fois les limites et les retombées multiples de cette approche sur la pratique de la négociation collective en entreprise. Les résultats de notre étude démontrent que les négociateurs syndicaux n’hésitent pas à s’approprier la NBI et à modeler ses principes et procédés en fonction de leurs besoins et du contexte dans lequel ils interviennent. Cette « appropriation imaginative » de la NBI ainsi que les pratiques innovantes auxquelles elle donne lieu montrent, non seulement l’existence de frontières poreuses entre les approches distributive et intégrative et l’existence de « négociation mixte » (ou mixed motive bargaining), mais également les différentes formes que peuvent prendre cette négociation mixte dans le cadre de la négociation collective. Enfin, si les négociateurs syndicaux interrogés rapportent très peu de cas d’application intégrale de la NBI, cette recherche révèle néanmoins à quel point cette approche s’avère, à travers ses diverses formes d’appropriation, une source fondamentale de l’évolution de la pratique de la négociation collective.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Analyzing Exclusion in Global Worker Health Policy - Hilgert, Jeffrey (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article examines the development of the ILO’s Global Strategy on Occupational Safety and Health through the lens of social exclusion. Social exclusion is a transversal concept across the social sciences. The article integrates the study of exclusion as an essential element of institutional analysis in industrial relations. After discussing the treatment of the study of exclusion in labour and employment relations scholarship, it presents an analytic frame using four mechanisms of exclusion taken from sociology: 1- encoding; 2- framing pathways; 3- non-decision making; and 4- mining actualities. Observations are presented from a qualitative study of 125 preparatory and legal texts created through the development of the Global Strategy between 2000 and 2015. The method of analysis is a socio-historic interpretation following the principles of analysis of primary source documents outlined by Marc Trachtenberg in his book The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method. Exclusionary dynamics are observed in three areas: 1- managing the meaning of OSH policy integration; 2- shaping the role of collective labour rights in OSH policy; and 3- sidestepping the development of specific OSH hazard protections. Comparisons are made at key points with recent normative work by UN human rights bodies, including the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and their General Comment No. 23 on the human right to just and favourable conditions of work. The result is a Global OSH Strategy with promotional strengths, but also neoliberal values interwoven in its policy framework. // Cet article examine le développement de la Stratégie globale en matière de sécurité et de santé au travail de l’Organisation internationale du Travail (OIT) à travers le prisme de l’exclusion sociale. L’exclusion sociale est un concept transversal dans les sciences sociales. L’article intègre l’étude de l’exclusion comme une composante essentielle d’une analyse institutionnelle en relations industrielles. Il présente un cadre analytique en utilisant quatre mécanismes d’exclusion repris de la sociologie : 1- l’encodage ; 2- les voies encadrant ; 3- la non-prise de décision ; et 4- les actualités minées. Les observations sont présentées à partir d’une étude qualitative de 125 textes juridiques préparatoires rédigés dans le cadre du développement de la Stratégie globale entre 2000 et 2015. Notre méthode s’avère être une interprétation socio-historique suivant les principes de l’analyse des documents primaires articulés par Marc Trachtenberg dans son livre The Craft of International History : A Guide to Method. Des dynamiques d’exclusion furent observées dans trois domaines : 1- la gestion du sens de l’intégration des politiques en matière de SST ; 2- l’élaboration du rôle des droits collectifs du travail dans la politique en matière de SST ; et 3- le développement des protections spécifiques de danger en matière de SST. Le résultat a donné une Stratégie globale en matière de SST avec des forces de promotion, mais aussi des valeurs néolibérales entrelacées dans le cadre de sa politique.

Race, Labour, and the Postmodern Plantation: Jamaican Migrant Farmworkers in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program - Hjalmarson, Kirsten Elise (University of British Columbia, 2016)
This ethnographic thesis project critically examines the experiences of Jamaican migrant farmworkers employed in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia via the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). First introduced in 1966, the SAWP is the oldest and longest-standing labour migration regime in Canada and the principal agricultural stream of the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Drawing upon the salient work of numerous activists and scholars who have contended that the SAWP facilitates a form of transnational indentureship by bonding migrant workers to their employers, I argue that the SAWP farm site constitutes a peculiar and totalizing institution that capitalizes on the unfreedom of black labour. I apply critical race theory to situate workers’ experiences of surveillance, immobilization, and hyper-exploitation in addition to their characterization of farm life as “prison life” within a postslavery context. I conclude that only by acknowledging the role of racism and its relationship to the border can we ever hope to truly achieve justice for migrant farmworkers in Canada.

Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era - Horssen, Jessica van (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era," by Jacob A.C. Remes.

Local Government, the Standard Employment Relationship, and the Making of Ontario’s Public Sector, 1945–1963 - Hurl, Chris (Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2016)
This article examines the unionization of local government workers in Ontario during the 1940s and 1950s. While these workers played a central role in consolidating a standard employment relationship across the public sector, the advancement of collective bargaining rights, regular hours of work, and wages and benefits was fractured and spatially uneven. Bringing together theories of state formation with recent debates in labour geography, this article explores the politics of scale in the unionization of local government workers. Through the 1950s, it is argued that local government workers were able to effectively mount campaigns for recognition, develop shared bargaining capacities and establish federated labour organizations across the province, building from their embeddedness in a rapidly expanding metropolitan environment. Moreover, it is shown that the ‘scaling up’ of collective bargaining in this way provoked civic officials to establish new governance structures with the aim of containing the explosive growth of public sector unions. This entailed both the professionalization of labour relations practices and the development of more centralized administrative capacities. In this sense, it is argued that state formation through the 1950s and 1960s advanced through the efforts to normalize the demands of local government workers within a wider economy of service.

Irresponsibility, Obligation, and the "Manly Modern": Tensions in Working-class Masculinities in Postwar Saint John, New Brunswick - Huskins, Bonnie; Boudreau, Michael (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Historians have analyzed working-class masculinities from multiple perspectives, but few have examined how these masculinities were viewed and experienced by working-class women. Ida Martin (nee Friars), a working-class diarist from Saint John, New Brunswick, commented on the work-related activities and social behaviours of her husband, Allan Robert Martin (AR), a longshoreman and odd-jobber. Ida’s diaries reveal that older forms of working-class masculinity persisted in the postwar period in Saint John, including participation in a homosocial recreational culture; risk-taking behaviour; and a commitment to direct action as a form of labour unrest. Moreover, Martin’s diaries illustrate that AR’s participation in these forms of masculinity threatened the stability of the family economy. By documenting AR’s various injuries, the diaries also highlight the impact that physically demanding and dangerous work had on working-class male bodies.

Working Poverty in Metro Vancouver - Ivanova, Iglika (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, BC Office, 2016)
This study examines Metro Vancouver working poverty trends by neighbourhood pre- and post- the 2008 recession. We are often told that the solution to poverty is for the poor to “get a job” or for various sectors to create more jobs. But this study finds that a job is not a guaranteed path out of poverty. Over 100,000 working-age people in Metro Vancouver were working but stuck below the poverty line in 2012, not counting students and young adults living at home with their parents. Contrary to stereotypes about poverty being concentrated mainly in Vancouver and Surrey, this study finds the growing ranks of the working poor are spread out across the Metro Vancouver region. The study explores the economic and public policy contributing to working poverty and develops recommendations for change. The study is a co-publication of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office, the United Way of the Lower Mainland, and the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition.

Welcome to Resisterville: American Dissidents in British Columbia - Janovicek, Nancy (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Welcome to Resisterville: American Dissidents in British Columbia," by Kathleen Rodgers.

Labour Standards in Global Value Chains: Disentangling Workers’ Voice, Vicarious Voice, Power Relations, and Regulation - Josserand, Emmanuel; Kaine, Sarah (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Theoretical developments and case studies have started to explore the complexity and intricacies of new forms of labour regulation in Global Value Chains (GVCs). This paper builds on these to integrate what we know into a coherent framework that can guide practice and future research. We bring together existing knowledge on new forms of labour standards regulation—such as Private Social Standards (PSSs) and International Framework Agreements (IFAs)—into a framework that integrates and disentangles the contextual determinants, processes, regulatory mechanisms, and outcomes of such regulation in GVCs. Of special significance is the distinction between regulatory processes—vicarious voice, workers’ voice, coordinated international campaigns—, and regulatory mechanisms—IFAs and PSSs. Extant literature tends to deal with existing forms of regulation without much clarity on their respective roles. Our framework identifies two pathways from regulatory processes to regulatory mechanisms: the labour power and the customer power pathways. Our framework also establishes clear connections between concepts, underlining links of causality and moderating effects. We explore the impact of value chain structure, and specifically, the connections between workers’ and vicarious voice, on regulatory outcomes. With regard to the structure of supply chains, we examine the coupling of operations and the sensitivity of value chain participants to reputational risk and drive within value chains. We add the significant dimension of ‘internal drive’ to existing understandings of drive to capture the possible internal discrepancies leading managers in multinational companies (MNCs) to apply mixed incentives to their suppliers to comply with labour standards. Additionally, we introduce the concept of ‘vicarious voice’, which we define as a situation where workers’ voice is substituted by that of actors who, unlike local unions or activist unionism, do not have a close representative link with workers. Vicarious voice may be composed of ethical consumerism, social advocacy, and international union federations. // Certains développements théoriques et des études de cas récentes ont commencé à explorer la complexité et les subtilités des nouvelles formes de régulation du travail dans les chaînes de valeur mondiales (CVM). À partir de ces analyses, le présent article cherche à intégrer ce que nous savons déjà dans un cadre cohérent qui puisse guider la pratique et la recherche à l’avenir. Nous y intégrons les connaissances actuelles sur les nouvelles formes de régulation du travail — telles les normes sociales privées (NSP) et les accords-cadres internationaux (ACI) — dans un cadre cohérent qui intègre, tout en les démêlant, les déterminants contextuels, processus et mécanismes de régulation, ainsi que les résultats de cette régulation dans les CVM. S’avère particulièrement importante la distinction entre les processus de régulation — tels la voix du salariat (workers’ voice en anglais), la voix par procuration (vicarious voice), les campagnes coordonnées au niveau international — et les mécanismes de régulation — tels les NSP et ACI. La littérature existante a tendance à traiter ces diverses formes de régulation sans grande nuance quant à leurs rôles respectifs. Notre cadre identifie deux avenues permettant de passer des processus de régulation aux mécanismes de régulation : le pouvoir des travailleurs et le pouvoir des consommateurs. Il établit également des connexions claires entre concepts, liens de causalité sous-jacents et effets modérateurs. Nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement à l’impact des structures des chaînes de valeur, des connexions entre voix du salariat et voix par procuration, sur les résultats de la régulation. En ce qui ce qui a trait aux structures des chaînes de valeur, nous examinons le couplage des opérations, la sensibilité des participants à l’intérieur de ces chaînes au risque à la réputation, ce qui procure une influence (drive en anglais) à l’intérieur de ces chaînes de valeurs. Nous ajoutons la dimension significative de « l’influence interne » aux termes déjà convenus du sens de l’influence, cela afin de mieux pouvoir saisir les divergences internes possibles pouvant conduire les gestionnaires principaux dans les multinationales à mettre en place divers types d’incitatifs pour leurs fournisseurs afin de satisfaire aux normes du travail. De plus, nous introduisons le concept de voix par procuration (vicarious voice en anglais), que nous définissons comme une situation dans laquelle le moyen traditionnel qu’est la voix du salariat — tel le syndicalisme local ou l’activisme syndical en tant qu’agent de représentation des travailleurs — se voit remplacé par des acteurs qui n’ont pas de lien de proximité avec les travailleurs. La « voix par procuration » peut s’exprimer par le consumérisme éthique, les groupes de pression sociale, ou les fédérations syndicales internationales.

Canada Post workers fight for a fairer, greener future - Judd, Monica (Canadian Dimension, 2016)
Discusses the conflict between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Describes the union's vision of the postal service (in particular, postal banking) in "Delivering Community Power: How Canada Post Can Be the Hub of Our Next Economy," released on the website, deliveringcommunitypower.ca, on Feb. 29, 2016.
Keywords: Canada Post; Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)

Maximizing the Benefits of Internationalization: The Moderating Role of Labour Flexibility - Jung, Heung-Jun; Noh, Sung-Chul; Chung, Sun-Wook (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
SummaryUsing the large-scale Korean Workplace Panel Survey, this study examines the interplay between international diversification, labour flexibility, and workplace-level performance in the context of advanced emerging markets. Filling the gap in the literature on the international diversification-performance (IDP) relationship, which focuses primarily on firm-level characteristics and overlooks the role of labour factors as contingent variables, we draw attention to the workplace level dynamics by exploring how the two types of labour flexibility—functional and numerical flexibility—moderate the impact of international diversification on performance. The results show that when workplaces invest in training for job enlargement and employee involvement programs that lead to the enhancement of functional flexibility, the link between international diversification and performance can be strengthened.This finding supports the assertion in the international HRM literature that, in the ever-globalized business environment, investment in human capital is a better strategy for improving financial performance in the long run. Furthermore, we find that numerical flexibility, as measured by in-house subcontracting arrangements, has a negative impact on the IDP relationship. Overall, our study suggests that the quality of human resources and a well-designed workplace configuration may still help improve performance in the context of international diversification, whereas excessive dependence on employment externalization for cost reduction is likely to hurt not only financial performance but also long-term sustainability. We also believe that our findings on the advanced emerging market economy complement insights from previous studies, which are largely based on Western developed economies, thus enriching current theories on labour flexibility. // En s’appuyant sur une enquête à grande échelle, le « Panel d’enquête coréen sur les milieux de travail » (Korean Workplace Panel Survey), la présente étude examine l’interaction entre diversification internationale, flexibilité du travail et rendement au travail en contexte de marchés avancés émergents. Afin de combler les écarts dans la littérature sur la relation entre rendement et diversification internationale — laquelle met principalement l’accent sur les caractéristiques de l’entreprise et néglige le rôle des facteurs liés au travail comme variables conditionnelles —, nous attirons l’attention sur les dynamiques en cours au niveau du milieu de travail en explorant comment les deux types de flexibilité du travail, soit la flexibilité fonctionnelle et la flexibilité numérique, atténuent l’effet de la diversification internationale sur le rendement. Les résultats montrent que lorsque, dans les milieux de travail, on investit dans des programmes de formation en vue de l’élargissement des tâches et la participation des salariés afin d’accroître la flexibilité fonctionnelle, le lien entre diversification internationale et rendement devrait se renforcir.Ces résultats appuient l’assertion de la littérature internationale sur la gestion des ressources humaines à l’effet que, dans un environnement commercial sans cesse globalisé, l’investissement en capital humain constitue une meilleure stratégie pour améliorer la performance financière à long terme. De plus, nous constatons que la flexibilité numérique, telle que déterminée dans les ententes de sous-traitance internes, a une influence négative sur la relation entre rendement et diversification internationale. Globalement, notre étude suggère que la qualité des ressources humaines et une configuration bien conçue du milieu de travail peuvent aider à améliorer la performance dans un environnement de diversification internationale, tandis qu’une dépendance excessive à l’égard de l’externalisation de l’emploi dans le but de réduire les coûts est susceptible de plomber non seulement la performance financière, mais aussi le développement à long terme. Nous pensons également que nos résultats relatifs à une économie de marché émergente avancée ajoutent aux observations rapportées dans d’autres études qui portaient principalement sur les économies occidentales avancées, constituent un enrichissement des théories actuelles sur la flexibilité du travail.

Athletic Labour, Spectatorship, and Social Reproduction in the World of Professional Hockey - Kalman-Lamb, Nathan (York University, 2016)
Existing literature in the sociology of sport largely omits any discussion of the relation between the spectator and athlete in professional and high performance sport. This dissertation explores that relation, demonstrating that exploitation in athletic labour and the enduring allure of sport as spectacle are inextricably linked as part of a broader political economy. The labour of professional athletes is theorized as a form of social reproductive labour that offers affective/subjective renewal for fans. Spectators who experience isolation and alienation in their day-to-day lives as capitalist subjects come to sport seeking a sense of meaning, connection, and community. Athletic labour in professional sport provides this to them and enables them to continue to function as productive capitalist subjects by serving as an armature upon which an imagined athletic community of fans can be built. However, for social reproduction to occur for fans, athletes must sacrifice their bodies completely in the performance of their labour. It is only through this sacrifice that the imagined athletic community becomes concretized as something tangible and real and spectators become willing to spend their money on sports fandom. This theoretical understanding of athletic labour and spectatorship is explored through semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight former professional hockey players and eight spectators of sport. The testimony of former players consistently links the political economy of professional sport and the harm and exploitation they experienced in the course of their work. The testimony of spectators, on the other hand, typically fails to acknowledge that the meaning and pleasure derived from watching professional sport is predicated on the destruction of athletic bodies. This study ultimately suggests that a form of alienation exists between athletes and spectators. The spectator grasps for an elusive sense of community within a society structured to deny that form of connection by placing vicarious investment in the bodies of athletes. Yet, this act of investment instrumentalizes and commodifies the athlete. Athletes understand this process as it occurs because it denies them their humanity by transforming them into something both more (the heroic vessel) and less (the abject failure) than human.
Keywords: Exploitation; Hockey; Imagined community; Injury; Interviews; Labor; Labour; Labour relations; Marxism; Masculinity; Political economy; Qualitative methodology; Social reproduction; Social theory; Spectatorship; Sport

Editor's Note = Note de la rédaction [78, Fall 2016] - Kealey, Gregory S. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Announces the appointment of Charles Smith and Joan Sangster as co-editors of the journal.

Editors’ Note = Note des rédacteurs en chef - Kealey, Gregory S.; Palmer, Bryan D. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Announces Sean Cadigan's resignation as editor. Bryan Palmer and Gregory Kealey to be interim co-editors until a new appointment is made. Takes note of the Canadian Labour Studies database, an open access bibliography of labour studies resources produced by Laurentian University librarians Desmond Maley and Dan Scott.

Principles and Processes for Food Sovereignty: An Evaluation of the Blueberry Sector in British Columbia - Klassen, Susanna (Susanna Elsie) (University of British Columbia, 2016)
As a concept that has increasingly been invoked in discussions of social and political food systems dynamics, food sovereignty calls for the holistic consideration of human and ecological aspects of agricultural systems with a focus on power and political dynamics. We investigated an export-oriented agricultural production system as a case study to understand how and to what extent food sovereignty principles can be enacted in the context of agriculture in the Global North. The blueberry industry in British Columbia, Canada, is socially and economically significant within a regional food system, and is globally integrated through export and trade. This study employs the framework of food sovereignty by drawing on principles of equity, empowerment and ecology as a methodological tool for assessing food systems, and examines how local producers in the BC blueberry industry are responding to pressures, constraints and opportunities in the global food system. I identified and operationalized key principles and processes for food sovereignty in the form of indicators. I conducted 33 structured interviews with blueberry growers representing a range of scales and modes of production. Significant themes and dynamics related to food sovereignty discussed by growers were: high demands for seasonal labour leading to mechanization; blueberry production as a means to attain a farming lifestyle while supplementing with significant off-farm income; and a perceived lack of power among growers relative to other actors in the food system. Participants expressed reduced decision autonomy through resource constraints and economic pressures. The combination of economic forces and social dynamics that have most growers locked into an industrial production cycle represent a barrier to achieving food sovereignty principles. On the other hand, there were several important institutions in the industry that support and empower growers through democratic participation opportunities, knowledge translation, and field expertise. A significant re-orientation of food systems governance and policy combined with economic re-structuring and social empowerment mechanisms would be needed to approach the realization of food sovereignty principles in the BC food system.

The Differential Impact of Universal Child Benefits on the Labour Supply of Married and Single Mothers - Koebel, Kourtney; Schirle, Tammy (Canadian Public Policy, 2016)
We examine the effects of the Universal Child Care Benefit on the labour supply of mothers. The benefit has a significant negative effect on the labour supply of legally married mothers, reducing their likelihood of participation in the labour force by 1.4 percentage points and hours worked by nearly one hour per week. In contrast, the likelihood of participation by divorced mothers rises by 2.8 percentage points when receiving the benefit and does not affect hours worked. Moreover, the benefit does not have a statistically significant effect on the participation of common-law married mothers or never-married mothers.

The Rise of the “Gig Economy” and Implications for Understanding Work and Workers - Kuhn, Kristine M. (Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2016)
Bergman and Jean (2016) include freelancers as one of the categories of workers who are understudied in the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology literature. This neglect is particularly striking given the attention paid by the popular media and by politicians to the rise of the “gig economy,” comprising primarily short-term independent freelance workers (e.g., Cook, 2015; Kessler, 2014; Scheiber, 2014; Warner, 2015). This may be due in part to challenges involved in accessing and researching this population, as discussed by Bergman and Jean, but it may also arise from complexities in defining and conceptualizing freelance work, as well as from misunderstandings about the nature of the work now performed by many people who are considered freelancers. Major topics of interest to I-O psychologists such as organizational attraction, job satisfaction, and turnover may seem at first glance to lack relevance to the study of workers who are officially classified as self-employed. But there is substantial opportunity for I-O psychologists and other behaviorally oriented organizational researchers to contribute to our understanding of the growing number of people who earn all or some of their income by freelancing.

Generation Rising: The Time of the Québec Student Spring - Lafrance, Xavier (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Generation Rising: The Time of the Québec Student Spring," by Shawn Katz.

Swedes in Canada: Invisible Immigrants - Lahlum, Lori Ann (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Swedes in Canada: Invisible Immigrants," by Elinor Barr.

The Workers' State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 - Lalande, J.-Guy (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Workers' State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958," by Mark Pittaway.

The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 - Lang, John B. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1," by Mick Lowe.

Amélioration ou polarisation ? Évolution de la structure et de la qualité des emplois au Québec et au Canada, 1997-2013 - Lapointe, Paul-André; Bach, Catherine (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Les micro-données de l’Enquête sur la population active de Statistique Canada sont utilisées dans le cadre d’une approche centrée sur les professions, qui repose elle-même sur l’approche des régimes d’emploi. Les auteurs construisent une typologie des professions en huit classes. Sur la base de la part relative des classes professionnelles dans l’emploi salarié, il appert que les professionnels et les techniciens, tant dans les sciences naturelles et dans les nouvelles technologies de l’information et des communications que dans les sciences sociales et dans les sciences de la santé, ont enregistré la croissance la plus importante ; les employés faiblement qualifiés dans les services interpersonnels ont également connu une croissance, tandis que les cols bleus et les cols blancs ont subi un déclin alors que les cadres supérieurs et les professionnels de la finances se sont enlisés dans la stagnation. Toutefois, ces derniers se sont avéré être les véritables gagnants de la répartition des revenus au cours de la période. Sur le plan de la qualité des emplois mesurée par la croissance relative des professions regroupées en quintiles de revenus, on observe un phénomène de polarisation asymétrique : les quintiles supérieurs regroupant les bons emplois, ont connu une croissance plus élevée que le quintile inférieur, associé aux mauvais emplois, alors que les quintiles intermédiaires ont régressé. On enregistre également une croissance des inégalités salariales, en ce sens que les salaires du quintile supérieur se sont accrus plus rapidement que ceux des autres quintiles de revenus. Enfin, le Québec et le Canada appartiennent au régime néolibéral. Le Québec est, certes, une société plus égalitaire, mais, contrairement aux pays du modèle social-démocrate, ce caractère « distinctif » n’est pas le résultat de politiques sociales plus progressistes et d’un syndicalisme davantage inclusif qui auraient rehaussé les salaires du quintile inférieur ; il s’explique plutôt par la stagnation, voire le déclin, de l’emploi dans le quintile supérieur et des salaires dans le quatrième quintile.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Le Capital au XXIe siècle - Lavoie, Marc (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Le Capital au XXIe siècle," by Thomas Piketty.

Migrant Dreams - Lee, Min Sook (TV Ontario, 2016)
Director Min Sook Lee's award-winning documentary follows the story of migrant workers who come to labour in Ontario greenhouses as part of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Many are women recruited by brokers who illegally charge fees upwards of $7,000, with greenhouse owners complicit in the scam. The film examines the lives of a group of strong, vibrant migrant women who resist systemic oppression and exploitation. --TV Ontario website description

When SAMS Met "ad hoc": Work Organization and Stress at ODSP - Lewchuk, Wayne (Ontario Public Service Employees Union, 2016)
This report is a study of occupational health and safety conditions at Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) offices in the wake of two sets of changes: The reorganization of work associated with the Modernized Service Delivery Model (MSDM) introduced in 2010 (commonly referred to as Modernization), and the 2014 implementation of the Social Assistance Management System, a new computer system knowns as SAMS. As I crossed Ontario interviewing ODSP workers and read dozens of pages of comments workers added to their online survey, I heard and read numerous stories of frustration and disappointment with the changes, frustrations that were negatively affecting the health of workers. However, I also heard how many ODSP workers had been looking forward to these changes.

Precarious Employment and Precarious Resistance: “We Are People Still” - Lewchuk, Wayne; Dassinger, Janet (Studies in Political Economy, 2016)
This paper explores worker resistance at the point of production, and how the terrain of workplace control is both different and more ambiguous for workers in precarious employment compared to that of workers in secure employment. For the most part, this is the story of unorganized workers who face their employers without the protection of a formal union. The main focus of this study is the individualized, informal, and under-the-radar strategies that workers employ to shape workplace outcomes, and how these strategies might translate into broader collective action.
Keywords: Labour markets; precarious employment; unions; unorganized workers; worker resistance

Seeking Security: Gay Labour Migration and Uneven Landscapes of Work - Lewis, Nathaniel M; Mills, Suzanne (Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2016)
Previous research has understood the migrations of gay men and other queer people through a lens of identity development, whereby relocation is driven by processes of coming out and consuming particular urban amenities. Meanwhile, labour geographers have largely overlooked sexuality, seeking to understand work-related migration in relation to gender, race, citizenship and the collective organization of workers. Drawing on the migration narratives of gay-identified men living in Ottawa, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, we argue that the norms governing gender and sexuality within various workplaces, economic sectors and locales continuously influence migration related to work and inextricably linked processes of social reproduction. In particular, we explain how the affective needs of gay workers both deflect them from and attract them to particular locales and workplaces. In their migration destinations, gay workers tend to also transform the norms of social reproduction within workplaces and sectors. While gay workers may use migration to successfully negotiate the uneven landscapes of inclusion and visibility in North America, their agency is also constrained by the ongoing of regulation of sexuality in both workplaces and social and community environments.

Changes and Continuities in the Workplace of Long-Term Residential Care in Canada, 1970–2015 - Lowndes, Ruth; Struthers, James (Journal of Canadian Studies, 2016)
In this article, we compare current Canadian nursing home workers’ experiences and conditions of care to past work and care conditions to determine changes and similarities over the period from 1970 to the present. Employing a feminist political economy framework and a team-based rapid ethnography approach, our study involved observations of and in-depth interviews with management, health providers, support staff, informal care providers, union officials, and residents between 2012 and 2015. The historical substudy drew on interviews of past and present workers of one large long-term residential care home in Ontario. While improvements have been made in training and in the physical safety of staff and residents in these gendered spaces of work, there has been a persistence, if not intensification, in job precarity; inadequate staffing levels coupled with heavy workloads; routinized, assembly-line types of work; and cost-cutting on supplies.
Keywords: care conditions; care work; care worker experience; conditions de soin; effectifs; elder care; ethnographie; ethnography; expériences des travailleurs du domaine des soins; feminist political economy; formation; histoire; history; long-term care; niveau de dotation; relational care; soins de longue durée; soins des ainés; soins relationnels; staffing levels; training; travail soignant; économie politique féministe

Ressources humaines. Gérer les personnes et l’ordre social dans l’entreprise - Luc, Sylvain (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Ressources humaines. Gérer les personnes et l’ordre social dans l’entreprise," by Évelyne Léonard.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary - Lynn, Denise (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary," by Lara Vapnik.

Deindustrialization on the Periphery: An Oral History of Sydney Steel, 1945-2001 - MacKinnon, Lachlan (Concordia University, 2016)
This thesis is an historical examination of the multi-layered processes of deindustrialization in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The history of a steel plant formerly located in the centre of the city is used as a case study through which the mechanisms of deindustrialization are fully explored. In 1967, the provincial government of Nova Scotia nationalized the Sydney Works. This marks a significant divergence from previous studies of deindustrialization, which have traditionally focused on the wave of industrial closures in the North American heartland during the 1970s and 1980s. Framed by oral history accounts of former steelworkers, this dissertation reveals the combined impact of Canadian regionalism, political economy, and working-class cultures of resistance on local experiences of industrial decline. This represents a synthesis between the econo-political historiography of deindustrialization favoured in the 1980s and the cultural/representational approaches of the 1990s and 2000s. The title, “Deindustrialization on the Periphery,” speaks to the specific national and regional contexts that frame the decline of Sydney Steel. The longue durée of economic change on the rural resource frontier has been understudied. In Cape Breton, the devastation wrought by the end of industry has roots that stretch back to the early 20th century. Tracing these through the use of Harold Innis’ “staples trap,” my thesis reveals how deindustrialization stretches from decades before closure to the years after a mine, mill, or factory are shuttered for the last time. Workers and other residents in Sydney continue to face the bodily aftermath of workplace injury, occupational, and environmental illness long after the structures of the plant have been demolished. But so, too, have experiences of working at the mill and living in the neighbourhoods that surrounded its gates created particular forms of culture, solidarity, and identity. My research is more than a eulogy for a defunct steel town. It seeks to expose the tensions between different forms of memory and experience, and to examine how the industrial past remains inextricably connected to the “post-industrial” present.

Détroit pas d’accord pour crever. Une révolution urbaine - Madi, Sari (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Détroit pas d’accord pour crever. Une révolution urbaine," by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin; translated from English by Laure Mistral.

L’identification au contenu du travail comme déterminant du souhait de rester dans un emploi - Mainhagu, Sebastien; Castéran, Herbert (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Les recherches sur le choix de demeurer dans un emploi sont peu nombreuses ou traitent ce sujet à travers des modèles sur le roulement de personnel (turnover), considérant que les mêmes déterminants influencent de manière opposée l'intention de rester ou de quitter. De plus, à l'exception notable de Cossette et Gosselin (2012), les chercheurs ne traitent que le choix de rester dans l'entreprise, mêlant dans la même variable expliquée le choix de rester dans un emploi et celui de la mobilité intra-organisationnelle.Cette recherche poursuit deux objectifs: 1- identifier des concepts associés au souhait de rester dans son emploi; 2- explorer les relations entre les variables identifiées et le désir de rester. L'apport de cette recherche est double. Il s'avère tout d'abord théorique puisque nous avons identifié les variables associées au souhait de rester dans un emploi. Les résultats obtenus permettent de proposer un modèle théorique décrivant les relations entre trois groupes de variables (identification, contextes personnel et au travail) et le souhait de rester. Nous montrons, en particulier, l'influence probable des variables d'identification au contenu du travail sur le souhait de rester dans l'emploi, réalité rarement prise en compte dans les analyses sur ce sujet, que nous définissons comme un état où un salarié établit une équivalence entre ce qu'il est et ce qu'il fait. Cette identification est obtenue suite aux succès obtenus par la personne, qui lui indiquent ses compétences et lui procurent un sentiment d'efficacité, source de fierté. Le second apport de cette recherche est méthodologique. Il semble fécond d'associer une analyse des entretiens, appliquant les principes de la théorie enracinée, à un traitement statistique de type analyse des correspondances multiples, peu connu des chercheurs anglosaxons. // Title in English: Identification with Work Content as a Determinant of the Desire to Stay in a Job. Research on the choice to remain in a job is limited, and that which exists tends to be based on turnover models that consider that the determinants influencing the intent to remain or to leave a job are the same. Furthermore, with the exception of Cossette and Gosselin (2012), scholars have traditionally only dealt with the choice to remain within a company and have not made any distinction between variables that explain the choice of employees to remain in a particular job or to be intraorganizationally mobile.This research serves two purposes: 1- it identifies the concepts related to the desire to stay in a job; 2- it explores the interrelationships between identified variables and the desire to stay in a job. The contribution of this research is twofold: the first is theoretical in so far as we identify the variables associated with the desire to remain in a job. The findings make it possible to propose a theoretical model that describes the relationships between three groups of variables (identification, personal context, and work context) and the desire to stay. In particular, we show the likely influence of how people identify with work content upon the desire to remain in a job. Rarely taken into account in analyses on this topic, we define this influence as a condition where an employee establishes equivalence between what he/she is and what he/she does. This identification follows the success achieved by a person that attests to his/her range of skills and provides him/her with a feeling of efficacy. The person identifies with this source of pride. The second contribution of this research is methodological. It appears to be fruitful to associate interview analysis, applying the principles of grounded theory, with a statistical process, such as a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), an approach that is little known to Anglo-Saxon scholars.

Les critiques de la gestion - Malo, François (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Les critiques de la gestion," by Jean Nizet and François Pichault.

The Game: Easier or Tougher? A Study of Hamilton Millennials and Self-Employment - Martin, Jeffrey C. (Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario/McMaster University, Labour Studies, 2016)
The effects of neoliberal capitalism have had a significant impact on the structure of the Canadian labour market and economy, but also on the employment opportunities for young workers in the early 21st century. And despite being the most educated generation ever, the millennials are faced with fewer full-time, secure jobs. Many have opted to embrace self-employment, sometimes not by choice but by necessity. This qualitative study embraced similar themes from the McMaster University/United Way of Toronto/PEPSO study, “The Precarity Penalty,” to determine how self employment affects their personal, work, social and community lives. One-on-one interviews were conducted with 10 Hamilton millennials (born 1981-1997), who were recruited through the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce’s affiliated organizations, Hamilton HIVE and Young Entrepreneurs and Professionals Hamilton. A total of 28 questions explored five topical areas: 1) their employment relationship; 2) how their employment relationship affected their life outside of work – i.e., family life, friends, community involvement; 3) physical and mental health; 4) their outlook on the future in terms of employment-related opportunities and potential barriers; and 5) their overall view on work and the current generation of workers. This research provided a glimpseinto the challenges that young, well-educated, self-employed millennials face, and their views on work and the labour market today. and their views on work and the labour market today. --From Executive Summary

Up-Rooted Lives, Deep-Rooted Memories: Stress and Resilience Among Jamaican Agricultural Workers in Southern Ontario - Mayell, Stephanie (McMaster University, 2016)
The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is a transnational labour agreement between Canada, Mexico, and various Caribbean countries that brings thousands of Jamaican migrant workers to Canada each year to work on farms. This thesis explores Jamaican SAWP workers’ experiences of stress in Ontario, and situates these experiences within a system of power and international inequality. When describing their experiences of stress and suffering in Ontario, many Jamaican workers drew analogies between historic and modern slavery under the SAWP. However, stress discourses also inspired workers to emphasise their resilience, and many workers gave equal attention to explaining their inherent strength as “Jamaicans”, which they associate with national independence and the history of slavery. In this way, I suggest stress discourses are sites of flexibility and resilience for Jamaican workers, and this thesis presents the foremost cultural, political, and historical factors that support Jamaican workers’ resilience in Ontario. Moreover, the predominant coping strategies workers employ in Ontario will be explored within the context of their restricted agency under the SAWP. This thesis concludes with a discussion of stress as an expression of subjectivity that is characterised by strength, faith, and the history of slavery.

Making Women Count: The Unequal Economics of Women's Work - McInturff, Kate; Lambert, Brittany (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives/Oxfam Canada, 2016)
This study, co-published by CCPA and Oxfam Canada, looks at how women in Canada and around the world are affected by rising inequality, including the burden of unpaid work, the undervaluing of work in
Keywords: Employment; Equality; Women

Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990 - McPherson, Kathryn (Canadian social history series, 2016)
Nursing embodies the seemingly timeless characteristics of feminine healing, caring, and nurturing, yet this archetypally female vocation also boasts a distinctive and complex history. Bedside Matters traces four generations of Canadian nurses to explore changes in who became nurses, what work they performed, and how they organized to defend their occupational interests. Whether in the apprenticeship method of the early twentieth century or in the present day restructuring of hospital work, the position of nurses within the health-care system has been structured by class, gender, and ethnic and racial relations. Located between the doctors and untrained or subsidiary patient-care attendants, nurses have struggled to define the boundaries of their occupation vis à vis other members of the health-care hierarchy, even as tensions between bedside and administrative nurses created divisions within nursing itself. Focusing on the daily labours of 'ordinary nurses', McPherson argues that the persisting sex-typing of nursing as women's work has meant that gender consistently complicated nursing's easy categorization as either professional or proletariat. Combining archival records and oral histories, the author shows how nurses, in their work, activities, and social and sexual attitudes, sought recognition as skilled workers in the health-care system. --Publisher's description

Tribute to Richard J. Long / Hommage à Richard J. Long - Mentzer, Marc; Ponak, Allen (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)

The Canadian Oral History Reader - Mercier, Laurie (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Canadian Oral History Reader," edited by Kristina R. Llewellyn, Alexander Freund, and Nolan Reilly.

Migrant Workers and the Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Regulatory Impact Analysis of the TPP's Temporary Entry Provisions - Mertins-Kirkwood, Hadrian (Trade and Investment Research Project, 2016)
This study investigates the TPP's chapter on "temporary entry for business persons" to understand its potential consequences for Canadian immigration policy and the Canadian labour market. It examines the general provisions that apply to all TPP countries as well as Canada's specific commitments for different categories of workers under the TPP. The study finds that the TPP will give more leeway to employers to hire migrant workers and transfer employees across borders—even in industries and regions where unemployment is high and domestic workers are available—without offering mobility rights to workers themselves. Although the short-term impact on the Canadian labour market will likely be small, the potential long-term impact of the TPP's temporary entry provisions is significant. Like other aspects of the TPP, these provisions override Canada's existing immigration policy and cannot be changed by a future government.
Keywords: Deep integration; Employment; International trade; Investment policy; Labour

Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement - Mitchell, Tom (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement," by Chad Pearson.

Refonder le système de protection sociale. Pour une nouvelle génération de droits sociaux - Mohamed, Yasmine (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Refonder le système de protection sociale. Pour une nouvelle génération de droits sociaux," by Bernard Gazier, Bruno Palier and Hélène Périvier.

The Italians Who Built Toronto: Italian Workers and Contractors in the City’s Housebuilding Industry, 1950-1980 - Molinaro, Dennis (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Italians Who Built Toronto: Italian Workers and Contractors in the City’s Housebuilding Industry, 1950-1980," by Stefano Agnoletto.

Dressing Down Migrant Sex Work: The Global Anti-Trafficking Regime, Legal Employment Rights, and Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program - Montiel, Vasti (Toronto Metropolitan University, 2016)
This paper analyzes the contemporary global anti-trafficking regime and discusses the destructive influence this regime has had on the lives of migrant sex workers. Through the use of public documents and academic literature, I deconstruct the global anti-trafficking discourses and argue in favour of more viable rights-based solutions (e.g., labour rights, immigration rights, and sexual rights) for combating human trafficking. Within this analysis, I explore the Canadian government’s gradual commitment to combat human trafficking through the gradual discontinuation of the exotic dancer visa, and eventual implementation of the migrant sex worker ban. In formalizing its commitment to combating trafficking, the Canadian government has implemented restrictive policy measures terminating migrant women’s ability to legally access the Canadian sex industry. While this type of employment was problematic in many ways, the Canadian government should have addressed these issues through rights-based policy initiatives instead of prohibiting access as part of its anti-trafficking campaign

Inégalités, modes d'emploi: l'analyse sociologique des injustices dans le champ de l'emploi au Canada - Moulin, Stéphane (Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2016)
Les débats sur les inégalités dans l’emploi adoptent habituellement un point de vue économique en se concentrant sur la distribution des revenus plutôt que sur les processus de différenciation sociale. Pourtant, avant d’être un facteur de production, le travail est foncièrement un rapport social, essentiel à l’intégration des individus. La question des inégalités dans l’emploi doit donc être approchée d’un point de vue sociologique. C’est ce que propose cet ouvrage qui, tout en s’inscrivant dans les débats en cours sur la justice sociale, offre une synthèse remarquable des perspectives théoriques, historiques et comparatives sur les inégalités dans les relations d’emploi. Se fondant sur un ensemble de données statistiques récentes, l’auteur décrit les forces qui animent le champ de l’emploi et qui contribuent à définir le statut social au Canada, et dégage ainsi le rôle décisif des politiques publiques dans ce domaine.
Keywords: Canada; Marché du travail; Sociologie industrielle

The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific - Munro, John (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific," edited by Moon-Ho Jung.

Three Men: Three Radical Canadian Voices WWI to ca. 1980 - Murphy, Harvey; Knight, Rolf; Smith, John; Arntzen, Arnt (Draegerman, 2016)
The accounts of three men who are presented here were members of the left in Canada between the first decade of the twentieth century until the late 1970s, when their stories were compiled. --Preface

Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montréal - Namaste, Viviane (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montréal," by Mary Anne Poutanen.

Towards Transformative Solidarities: Wars of Position in the Making of Labour Internationalism in Canada - Nastovski, Katherine Slavka (York University, 2016)
Within the broad debates about neoliberalism, neoliberal globalization and the declining power of unions in the Global North, there has been renewed interest in the possibilities of international and transnational labour solidarity, coordination and action. Drawing from Rebecca Johns (1998) distinction between transformative and accommodationist forms of international labour solidarity I argue that we need to critically assess how these practices challenge or reinforce global divisions of labour born of the historical development of capitalism. To this end, this study provides an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the dominant practices of labour internationalism that emerged within the organized labour movement in Canada during the Cold War. I examine both the challenges to and possibilities for building transformative forms of international labour solidarity today. Challenges include the philosophies of social partnership, racism, white supremacy and nationalism that informed the labour imperialism and accommodationist solidarities of the institutionalized internationalism in this period. I argue that the brand of social democratic anti-communism that characterized this institutionalized labour internationalism was shaped by the wars of position over worker justice happening on the national level and internationally between unions, but also by ideas of race and nation. I outline the lessons from these practices by focusing on four cases: Kenya, Southeast Asia, The Caribbean and Palestine. Finally, I assess the grassroots labour solidarity that re-emerged inside the labour movement with the rise of the New Left. I argue that the model of international solidarity they built, called worker-to-worker, arose from the goals and strategies of class struggle unionism and constitutes an example of transformative solidarity that can inform discussions about organizing international soldiarity today. Rooted in anti-racist Marxist feminist theory, my historical sociological analysis draws from both archival research and interviews with union leaders, activists and staff. I make sense of the solidarities that determined these practices by exploring the terrain of class consciousness in which they were formed. Situating my analysis within the social and political contours of class formation in Canada and internationally, I pay particular attention to how these practices of labour internationalism intersect with issues of race, gender, nation and class struggle, and how racialized and gendered class formation in Canada has influenced ideas of worker justice and responses to imperialism, colonialism and national borders.

The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future - Naylor, James (University of Toronto Press, 2016)
Almost a century before the New Democratic Party rode the first "orange wave," their predecessors imagined a movement that could rally Canadians against economic insecurity, win access to necessary services such as health care, and confront the threat of war. The party they built during the Great Depression, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), permanently transformed the country's politics. Past histories have described the CCF as social democrats guided by middle-class intellectuals, a party which shied away from labour radicalism and communist agitation. James Naylor's assiduous research tells a very different story: a CCF created by working-class activists steeped in Marxist ideology who sought to create a movement that would be both loyal to its socialist principles and appealing to the wider electorate. The Fate of Labour Socialism is a fundamental reexamination of the CCF and Canadian working-class politics in the 1930s, one that will help historians better understand Canada's political, intellectual, and labour history. --Publisher's description.
Keywords: 20th century. Labor; 20th century. Partis politiques; 20th century. Socialism; 20th century. Working class; Canada; Histoire; History; Political activity; Political parties

“These French Canadian of the Woods are Half-Wild Folk”: Wilderness, Whiteness, and Work in North America, 1840–1955 - Newton, Jason L. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Examines the exodus of Quebeckers to the US and what was written about them, ranging from literary works to racialized science.

"Not to Be Bought, Nor for Sale": The Trials of Joseph Edward Bird - Nicol, Janet Mary (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Biographical account of lawyer Joseph Edward Bird (1868-1948) who, after his arrival in Vancouver from Ontario in 1902, became involved some of the leading labour and civil rights' cases of the day, including the Komagata Maru case (1914), where 376 Indian passengers were blocked from entry into Canada.

Les nouvelles formes de servitude et le rôle du droit : le cas de la privation de mobilité des travailleurs agricoles migrants au Canada - Ollivier-Gobeil, Jeanne (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2016)
Depuis le milieu des années 1960, le gouvernement canadien organise la migration temporaire de travailleurs agricoles originaires principalement des Caraïbes et d'Amérique centrale, via deux principaux programmes, soit le Programme des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers (PTAS) et le Volet agricole du Programme des travailleurs étrangers temporaires. Ces programmes ont permis de faire venir au Canada près de 42 530 travailleurs agricoles temporaires en 2013, dont 9760 au Québec seulement. Le PTAS et le Volet agricole soulèvent toutefois les critiques de plusieurs organisations et chercheurs. Une caractéristique commune centrale de ces programmes est particulièrement décriée, à savoir l'assignation des travailleurs à un employeur unique et à un emploi spécifique, puisque celle-ci aurait pour effet de priver les travailleurs de leur mobilité sur le marché du travail. En ce sens, il est notamment reproché à ces programmes de perpétuer des formes de travail non libre, alors que les travailleurs ne peuvent circuler librement sur le marché du travail. Dans la continuité de ces travaux critiques, ce projet de recherche se propose d'examiner le rôle de cette disposition juridique comme mécanisme de privation de la mobilité des travailleurs. Plus précisément, l'objectif de ce mémoire est d'analyser le rôle double du droit, d'une part, dans la production et l'encadrement de ces formes de travail non libre, et d'autre part, dans la possible contestation de celles-ci. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuierons tant sur analyse à la fois théorique et historique, que sur une vaste enquête de terrain. Cette enquête s'inscrit dans un projet de recherche plus large - dirigé par le professeur Martin Gallié - ayant permis de réaliser près de cent entretiens avec des travailleurs du PTAS et du Volet agricole de la région de Saint-Rémi, au Québec.

En déficit d'autonomie. La commission d'indemnisation des accidents du travail du Nouveau-Brunswick (1918–1932) - Ouellet, Nelson (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Empruntant la voie tracée par l’administration quotidienne de la Commission des accidents du travail au Nouveau-Brunswick, le présent texte examine les tensions engendrées par l’introduction d’un régime d’indemnisation sans égard à la faute durant sa phase d’implantation (1918-1932). L’augmentation des accidents du travail au Nouveau-Brunswick au cours des années 1920 ayant incité les commissaires à réviser les taux d’évaluation sectorielle pour maintenir en équilibre la caisse des accidents, des employeurs qui contestaient les hausses les contraignirent à recourir aux tribunaux pour protéger le pouvoir discrétionnaire que lui conférait la loi. Dans la seconde moitié de la décennie, lorsque les employeurs et les membres élus du nouveau gouvernement conservateur se rapprochèrent sous l’effet d’une économie tournant au ralenti, la Commission entra dans une phase critique de son histoire. Les déficits budgétaires étant absorbés par un État qui la priva d’une autonomie restreignant des projets de relance, la Commission se consacra à une gestion sélective de la décroissance, laquelle accentua l’état de dépendance des travailleurs accidentés et des familles endeuillées. À l’aube de la réforme législative introduite au printemps 1932, le déficit d’autonomie de la Commission ne réussit pas à capter l’attention des contemporains préoccupés par les risques du travail et de la dépendance matérielle. Comme les protagonistes élaborant l’« infrastructure de la prévention » pour contrer les crises, notre contribution cherche à pallier une connaissance qui confère à l’indemnisation une place trop modeste comme sujet d’étude historique et comme objet de réflexion théorique sur le risque et le désastre.

The Effects of the Psychological Contract Among Professional Employees Working in Non-Professional Organizations - Paillé, Pascal; Raineri, Nicolas; Valeau, Patrick (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Few researchers have sought to examine the consequences of psychological contract breach in the particular case of professional employees working for nonprofessional organizations. To increase our understanding, the purpose of this article was to test an original research model encompassing psychological contract breach, psychological contract violation, perceived organizational support, organizational and professional commitment, and intention to leave the organization. A study was conducted among a sample of 329 professional employees working in nonprofessional organizations. As predicted, this research shows a positive relationship between psychological contract breach and psychological contract violation, a negative relationship between breach and organizational commitment, and a negative relationship between organizational commitment and the intention to leave the organization. However, contrary to expectations, the results indicated that perceived organizational support has no moderating effect on the relationship between breach and violation. This finding does not confirm previous findings from the study by Suazo and Stone-Romero (2011). This unexpected result led to testing a different combination between perceived organizational support and PC-breach and PC-violation, which is documented in the literature on nonprofessional employees. Thus, in accordance with previous results by Suazo (2009), the data from our research indicate that the relationship between PC breach and perceived organizational support is mediated by PC violation. This alternative research model suggests testing a long mediation process by which the breach influences the intention to leave the organization via the violation, the perceived organizational support, and professional and organizational commitment. This long mediation process has been confirmed by our data. Finally, the results of this research suggest that when working in a non-professional context, professional employees tend to react to breaches of the psychological contract in a similar way to non-professional employees. // Peu de recherches ont examiné les conséquences de la brèche du contrat psychologique dans le cas particulier des employés professionnels travaillant pour des organisations non-professionnelles. Afin de combler cette lacune et dans le but de gagner en compréhension, cet article a pour objectif de tester un modèle de recherche original englobant la brèche et la violation, le soutien organisationnel perçu, les engagements organisationnel et professionnel, ainsi que l'intention de démissionner. Une recherche a été conduite auprès un échantillon de 329 employé(e)s professionnel(le)s travaillant dans des organisations non-professionnelles. Conformément aux prédictions, notre étude montre une relation positive entre la brèche et la violation, une relation négative entre la violation et l'engagement organisationnel, ainsi qu'une relation négative entre l'engagement organisationnel et l'intention de quitter l'organisation. Toutefois, contrairement aux attentes, les résultats ont indiqué que le soutien organisationnel perçu n'a pas d'effet modérateur sur la relation entre la brèche et la violation, ce qui tend à infirmer les conclusions précédentes de l'étude de Suazo et Stone-Romero (2011). Ce résultat inattendu a conduit au test d'une combinaison différente et documentée dans la littérature auprès d'employés non-professionnels. Ainsi, en conformité avec les résultats de Suazo (2009), les données indiquent que la violation a un effet médiateur sur la relation entre la brèche et le soutien organisationnel perçu. Ce modèle de recherche alternatif suggère de tester un processus de médiation long par lequel la brèche influence l'intention de quitter l'organisation via la violation, le soutien organisationnel perçu ainsi que les engagements professionnel et organisationnel. Ce long processus de médiation a été confirmé par nos données. Finalement, les résultats de cette recherche laissent penser que lorsqu'ils travaillent en contexte non-professionnel, les employés professionnels tendent à réagir aux brèches du contrat psychologique de manière semblable aux employés non-professionnels.

Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR - Palmer, Bryan D. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR," by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke.

Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History - Palmer, Bryan D.; Héroux, Gaétan (Between the Lines, 2016)
Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a historian of the working-class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities. --Publisher's description

L’interaction entre facteurs organisationnels et locus de contrôle dans la prédiction de l’engagement organisationnel affectif - Parent-Rocheleau, Xavier; Simard, Gilles; Bentein, Kathleen; Tremblay, Michel (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Nombreuses sont les études ayant répertorié les facteurs susceptibles de favoriser l’engagement affectif des employés envers leur organisation. Toutefois, davantage de recherches sont requises afin de comprendre les mécanismes par lesquels ces facteurs agissent sur le niveau d’engagement organisationnel affectif (EOA), et de cerner dans quel contexte et sous quelles conditions leurs effets s’avèrent les plus puissants (Becker, Klein, et Meyer, 2009). La présente étude s’inscrit dans la lignée des études récentes qui visent à surmonter cette limite en investiguant l’interaction entre les facteurs organisationnels et les caractéristiques individuelles dans la prédiction de l’EOA, soutenant que des dispositions individuelles modulent les perceptions des expériences de travail, influençant par le fait même les réactions attitudinales et comportementales. Plusieurs études démontrent que le locus de contrôle, défini comme la tendance des individus à croire qu’ils contrôlent ou non leur environnement et le cours des évènements (Rotter, 1954), joue notamment un rôle sur la façon dont les individus perçoivent leur environnement. Appuyant son raisonnement sur la théorie de l’échange social (Blau, 1964) et sur le modèle de l’engagement au groupe (Tyler et Blader, 2003), l’objectif de cette étude est d’examiner l’effet de l’interaction entre le locus de contrôle (interne/externe) et les perceptions de justice procédurale ainsi que la fierté organisationnelle des employés sur leur niveau d’engagement affectif. Les résultats indiquent que le locus de contrôle exerce un effet modérateur entre l’EOA et les deux antécédents proposés. Ainsi, en vertu de la norme de réciprocité, la tendance des individus à croire que la fierté organisationnelle et la justice procédurale sont le produit de leurs actions les conduiraient à s’engager affectivement auprès de cette dernière. En plus de souligner le rôle important du locus de contrôle dans les réactions attitudinales aux facteurs organisationnels, les résultats démontrent la pertinence d’étudier l’effet modérateur d’autres traits individuels susceptibles de moduler l’adoption de certains comportements et attitudes, ce qui peut représenter un avantage pour les salariés et les dirigeants.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers' City - Parnaby, Andrew (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers' City," by Craig Heron.

Job Displacement and the Implications for Job Quality: An Investigation of the Job Transition Process for Public Sector Workers in Scotland, Uk and Ontario, Canada During the Great Recession - Pascoe-Deslauriers, Rachelle M. (University of Strathclyde, 2016)
This thesis conceptualises the job transition as a continuous process in the context of organisational downsizing and restructuring. It argues that the policy and research related to re-employment following job loss, organisational downsizing and relevant labour market interventions remains disconnected from, and hence underemphasises, the sequential and cumulative nature of the transition process while also focussing disproportionately on modifying individual behaviour and action. This study explores the intersection and overlap in factors, actions and decisions made by actors in each part of the transition process to better understand the dynamic nature of job transition and its implications for re-employment and future job quality. This research considers job transition from two forms of displacement – job displacement and worker displacement. It comprises a cross-national comparative study of displacement from public sector work in Ontario, Canada and Scotland, UK. Forty expert and stakeholder interviews were carried out addressing different aspects of job transition, targeting academic and policy experts, employers/senior managers, union representatives and labour market programme service providers. Furthermore, 38 semi-structured work history interviews were conducted with displaced workers along with a follow-up survey. This research argues that downsizing policy and labour market interventions appear to view any job as a better outcome than redundancy. Where organisational policies maintain employment, the emphasis is on maintaining extrinsic features of work. Through practices like salary protection and lateral transfers, good quality work beyond equivalent remuneration is a bi-product rather that a central consideration. The study finds that individuals, faced with particular processes and limited information, modify their behaviour to protect valued aspects of work including, but not limited to, extrinsic job factors. Conceptually, this research contributes to knowledge on job loss and re-employment, organisational downsizing practice and job quality. Empirically, it contributes to debates on public sector restructuring following the Great Recession of 2008.

Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma: A History of British Columbia's Social Policy - Pasolli, Lisa (UBC Press, 2016)
Finding affordable, quality child care is a challenge for many Canadian families. In some areas of British Columbia, expectant mothers place their children on daycare waiting lists months before they are born. Yet, despite the demand, recent efforts to achieve a universal child care program have stalled. As Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma demonstrates, this is nothing new: child care policy in British Columbia has matured in the shadow of a persistent political uneasiness with working motherhood. Charting the growth of the child care movement in this province, Lisa Pasolli examines the arrival of Vancouver’s first crèche in 1912, the teetering steps forward during the debates of the interwar years, the development of child care policy, the rebellious advancements of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, and the maturation of provincial and national child care politics since the mid-70s. In addition to revealing much about historical attitudes toward women’s roles at home and in the workplace, Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma celebrates the efforts of mothers and advocates who, for decades, have lobbied for child care as a central part of women’s rights as workers, parents, and citizens.... --Publisher's description
Keywords: 1900-1999; British Columbia; Child care; Child care British Columbia; Child care Government policy; Child care Government policy British Columbia History 20th century; Colombie-Britannique Politique sociale Histoire 20e siècle; Enfants Soins Politique gouvernementale Colombie-Britannique Histoire 20e siècle; History; Maternité Colombie-Britannique Histoire 20e siècle; Motherhood; Motherhood British Columbia History 20th century; Mères au travail Colombie-Britannique; Mères au travail Colombie-Britannique Conditions sociales 20e siècle; Travail et familles Colombie-Britannique; Women Employment; Women Employment British Columbia; Work and family; Work and family British Columbia; Working mothers; Working mothers British Columbia; Working mothers British Columbia Social conditions 20th century; Working mothers Social conditions

Worker Voice: Employee Representation in the Workplace in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US, 1914-1939 - Patmore, Greg (Studies in Labour History, 2016)
This book informs debates about worker participation in the workplace or worker voice by analysing comparative historical data relating to these ideas during the inter-war period in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. The issue is topical because of the contemporary shift to a workplace focus in many countries without a corresponding development of infrastructure at the workplace level, and because of the growing ‘representation gap’ as union membership declines. Some commentators have called for the introduction of works councils to address these issues. Other scholars have gone back and examined the experiences with the non-union Employee Representation Plans (ERPs) in Canada and the US. This book will test these claims through examining and comparing the historical record of previous efforts of five countries during a rich period of experimentation between the Wars. --Publisher's description.

More Menial than Housemaids?: Racialized and Gendered Labour in the Fruit and Vegetable Industry of Canada's Niagara Region, 1880–1945 - Patrias, Carmela (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
During the period of the expansion and consolidation of the fruit and vegetable industry between about 1880 and 1945, seasonal work in the fields, orchards, packing houses and canneries of the Niagara Peninsula was performed by two main groups of marginalized workers: immigrant women and adolescents of eastern and southern European origin, and indigenous families. Contemporaries believed that these groups were inherently suited for the long hours, physical demands and low wages that characterized such work that those with greater options avoided. Such racial classification restricted their access to year-round, better-paid and cleaner work. That it was largely performed by minority groups, in turn, derogated such seasonal labour. During the two world wars, a radically different group of workers entered Niagara’s agricultural workforce: middle-class, Anglo-Canadian girls and women, most often labelled farmerettes. By comparing minority workers and farmerettes in Niagara’s fruit and vegetable industry the study sheds light on a little-studied sector of Canada’s workforce. The willingness of the state and growers to improve working conditions generally deemed perfectly acceptable for “foreigners" and “Indians," for the benefit of farmerettes, illustrates the workings of a racialized hierarchy in Canada’s labour market with great clarity. At the same time, the limit on wages even for the privileged farmerettes simultaneously demonstrates the depth and endurance of gender-based inequality in the workforce.

The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago - Pearson, Chad (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago," by Cedric de Leon.

Insights into Nurses’ Work: Exploring Relationships among Work Attitudes Work-related Behaviours - Perreira, Tyrone (University of Toronto, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, 2016)
Work motivation has been associated with work productivity. In health care, low motivation levels are associated with low productivity and linked to poor performance, decreased patient safety, and overall poor quality care. Hence the importance, ascribed in the literature, to clearly identifying the relationships between and among factors associated with work motivation, including work attitudes, and behaviours linked to work performance such as extra-role behaviours. Despite their importance to performance in health care, these relationships are understudied and poorly understood. The purpose of this study is to better understand work attitudes and their relationships to one another and to extra-role behaviours amongst nurses working in hospitals, the community, and long-term care settings in Ontario. This study comprises two stages: first, a scoping review focused on identifying individual-, unit-level, and organization-level characteristics that influence work motivation in health service organizations. The findings from the scoping review, augmented by a more in-depth review of the literature, aided in the development of a conceptual framework that guided the second stage of the study, to examine relationships amongst a specific set of nurses’ work attitudes - including perceptions of organizational justice, perceived organizational support, and affective commitment - and extra-role behaviours – specifically, organizational citizenship behaviours - in Ontario health care settings. In the second stage of the study, a survey was developed and administered to frontline nurses actively working in hospitals, the community, and long-term care settings in Ontario. Relationships amongst the constructs of interest were examined using structural equation modeling and path analysis. Examining the relationships of these concepts in a single model is novel, and offers insights regarding their complexity. The analyses further suggest that prior studies may be under-nuanced, and approaches to conceptualizing the concepts of perceived organizational justice and affective commitment in particular may have led to erroneous conclusions regarding their associations with perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship behaviours. This study further addresses four significant gaps previously identified in the work motivation and work behaviour literature: (1) how affective commitment relates to behavioural efforts, specifically organizational citizenship behaviours; (2) utilization of reliable and validated instruments to study work motivation; (3) use of a sufficiently large sample to have empirical support for generalizability; and (4) examination of these phenomena, among nurses, across diverse health care settings.

Ten Pathways to Death and Disaster - Pérusse, Michel (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Ten Pathways to Death and Disaster," by Michael Quinlan.

Reaching Gold Mountain: Diasporic Labour Narratives in Chinese Canadian Literature and Film - Phung, Malissa (McMaster University, 2016)
This project provides a coalitional reading of Chinese Canadian literature, film, and history based on an allegorical framework of Asian-Indigenous relationalities. It tracks how Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion can not only leverage national belonging for Chinese settlers but also be reread for a different sense of belonging that remains attentive to other exclusions made natural by settler colonial discourses and institutional structures, that is, the disavowal of Indigenous presence and claims to sovereignty and autochthony. It contributes to important discussions about the experiences of racism and oppression that typically privilege the relations and tensions of diasporic and Indigenous communities but hardly with each other. What is more, this study aligns with a recent surge of interest in investigating Asian-Indigenous relations in Asian Canadian, Asian American, and Asian diaspora studies. The political investments driving this project show a deep commitment to anti-racist and decolonial advocacy. By examining how Chinese cultural workers in Canada have tried to do justice to the Head Tax generation’s experiences of racial exclusion and intersectional oppressions in fiction, non-fiction, graphic non-fiction, and documentaries, it asks whether there are ways to ethically assert an excluded and marginalized Chinese presence in the context of the settler colonial state. By doing justice to the exclusion of Chinese settlers in the national imaginary, do Chinese cultural workers as a result perform an injustice to the originary presence of Indigenous peoples? This thesis re-examines the anti-racist imperative that frames Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion in Canada: by exploring whether social justice projects by racially marginalized communities can simultaneously re-assert an excluded racialized presence and honour their treaty rights and responsibilities, it works to apprehend the colonial positionality of the Chinese diaspora within the Canadian settler state.

From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Métis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries - Pigeon, Émilie (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Métis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries," by Gerhard J. Ens and Joe Sawchuk.

Reviving Social Democracy: The Near Death and Surprising Rise of the Federal NDP - Pilon, Dennis (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Reviving Social Democracy: The Near Death and Surprising Rise of the Federal NDP," edited by David Laycock and Lynda Erickson.

Mentir au travail - Plamondon, Frederick (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Mentir au travail," by Duarte Rolo.

American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century - Powell, Christopher (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century," by Leilah Danielson.

Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties - Powell, Christopher (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties," by Thomas M. Grace.

Trumbo - Powell, Christopher (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the film, "Trumbo," directed by Jay Roach, written by John McNamara, ShivHans Pictures, Everyman Pictures, Groundswell Productions, 2015.

Workers and Dictators: Brazilian Labour History 50 Years after the Military Coup - Purdy, Sean (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the books, "Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo," by Paulo Fontes and "Trabalhadores e Ditaduras: Brasil, Espanha e Portugal," edited by Marcelo Badaró Mattos and Rubén Vega.

Labour Rights and Labour Politics Under the Charter - Quail, Susanna (Ottawa Law Review, 2016)
This paper analyzes the impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on of the Canadian labour movement, identifying advantages and pitfalls in relying on constitutional law to advance labour rights.
Keywords: Labour Rights and Labour Politics Under the Charter; SSRN; Susanna Quail

The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s - Rabinovitch-Fox, Einav (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s," by Jane Nicholas.

The Fallen Woman - Ramsay, Ellen L. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Fallen Woman," by Lynda Nead.

Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives - Raphael, Dennis (Canadian Scholars' Press, 2016)
The third edition of Social Determinants of Health focuses on the socio-economic conditions that shape the health of individuals and communities. This edited collection includes contributions from top academics and high-profile experts from across the country. The chapters take a public policy approach that sees the mainsprings of health emerging from the social distribution of resources. The collection as a whole integrates insights from the health sciences, the sociology of health, and the political economy of health. This revised edition has been well updated and includes a greater focus on the political pathways and mechanisms that explain how the social determinants of health come to be distributed amongst the population; early childhood development in Canada in relation to other developed nations; Indigenous health and its determinants; public policy and the social safety net; and the growing network of civil society organizations addressing the inequitable distribution of the social determinants of health. --Publisher's description
Keywords: Public health -- Social aspects -- Canada

A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada - Reiter, Ester (Between the Lines, 2016)
Driven from their homes in Russia, Poland, and Romania by pogroms and poverty, many Jews who came to Canada in the wave of immigration after the 1905 Russian revolution were committed radicals. A Future Without Hate or Need brings to life the rich and multi-layered lives of a dissident political community, their shared experiences and community-building cultural projects, as they attempted to weave together their ethnic particularity—their identity as Jews—with their internationalist class politics.--Publisher's description
Keywords: 1900-1999; Canada; Canada Emigration and immigration History 20th century; Canada Émigration et immigration Histoire 20e siècle; Communism and Judaism; Communism and Judaism Canada History 20th century; Communisme et judaïsme Canada Histoire 20e siècle; History; Jewish socialists Canada; Jews; Jews Canada History; Jews Canada History 20th century; Jews Canada Identity; Jews Canada Politics and government; Jews Canada Social life and customs; Jews Identity; Jews Political activity Canada; Jews Politics and government; Jews Social life and customs; Judaism and politics; Judaism and politics Canada History 20th century; Judaïsme et politique Canada Histoire 20e siècle; Juifs Canada Histoire; Juifs Canada Histoire 20e siècle; Juifs Canada Identité; Juifs Canada Mœurs et coutumes; Juifs Canada Politique et gouvernement; Socialism and Judaism; Socialism and Judaism Canada History 20th century; Socialisme et judaïsme Canada Histoire 20e siècle

Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg - Reiter, Ester (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg," by Kate Evans.

Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics - Rennie, Bradford J. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics," by Michael J. Lansing.

Words at Work: Constructing a Labour Conflict - Reshef, Yonatan; Keim, Charles (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
Summary: We use the 2011-12 conflict between the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) and the British Columbia (BC) government to explore how the union president, Susan Lambert, used language to bring the conflict into being and mobilize union members in opposition to the government. We use newspaper articles and archival material from mid-2011 to June 2012 to explore how Lambert identified the core issues and actors, prescribed roles, relationships and actions, and, importantly, inspired a will to act in union members and supporters.To explore how she constructed the conflict, we adopt a mobilization theory developed by scholars of social movement organizations (SMO). Snow and Benford (1988: 200-202) conceptualize three core pillars of conflict: 1- diagnostic framing identifies a problem, attributes blame or causality, and identifies the key actors; 2- prognostic framing offers a solution and identifies strategies, tactics and targets; 3- motivational framing provides a call to arms, or rationale for action while inspiring an urge to act among members and supporters. In exploring how she urged action among members, we use the four archetypal legitimation strategies identified by Van Leeuwen (2008) and Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999): authorization, rationalization, moralization and mythopoesis.McAdam (1982: 48) argues that before collective action can begin people must come to view their situation as unjust and subject to change. We use the above framework to structure our exploration of how the union president used language to frame members’ understanding of the conflict. Through language she ushered the reality of labour conflict into being and constructed a reality in which union members could identify themselves as agents of protest and change. // Dans cet article, nous nous penchons sur le conflit de travail, survenu en 2011-2012, entre la Fédération des enseignants-es de la Colombie-Britannique et le gouvernement de cette province, afin d’examiner de quelle manière la présidente de cette fédération, Susan Lambert, a utilisé le langage pour amener ses membres à réaliser l’ampleur du conflit et les mobiliser contre le gouvernement. À cette fin, nous avons passé en revue des articles de quotidiens et des documents d’archives couvrant la période s’étendant de la mi-2011 à juin 2012, dans le but de cerner comment Mme Lambert est parvenue à identifier les enjeux et les acteurs cruciaux, attribuer les rôles, établir les relations et les actions, et, surtout, comment elle a réussi à inspirer une volonté d’agir chez les membres et leurs partisans.Pour explorer comment elle a « construit » le conflit, nous adoptons une théorie de la mobilisation développée par des universitaires qui ont étudié les mouvements sociaux organisés. Snow et Benford (1988 : 200-202) ont conceptualisé trois piliers-clés du conflit : 1-élaboration du diagnostic, soit identifier un problème, en attribuer le blâme ou la cause, et identifier les acteurs-clés; 2- élaboration du pronostique, soit offrir une solution et en identifier les stratégies, tactiques et cibles; et, enfin, 3- élaboration de la motivation, soit faire un appel aux armes ou offrir un argumentaire qui convaincra les membres et les partisans de l’urgence de passer à l’action. Pour analyser la manière dont la présidente a réussi cela, nous nous référons aux quatre stratégies de légitimation identifiées par Van Leeuwen (2008), et Van Leeuwen et Wodack (1999) : autorisation, rationalisation, moralisation et construction d’un mythe.McAdam (1982 : 48) soutient qu’avant qu’une action collective ne débute, il faut que les personnes concernées considèrent leur situation comme étant injuste et devant être changée. Nous nous servons de ce cadre d’analyse pour explorer la manière dont la présidente a utilisé le langage pour « construire » cette vision. Grâce au langage utilisé, elle est parvenue à faire ressortir les enjeux du conflit et à « construire une réalité » où les membres ont pu s’identifier comme agents de changement et acteurs de la protestation.

Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915 –2000 - Rhomberg, Chris (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915 –2000," by Jeffrey T. Manuel.

Rise up! Feminist Digital Archive – Canadian Feminism: 1970s-1990s - Rise Up Collective (2016)
Rise Up! is a digital archive of feminist activism in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s. We were part of a worldwide wave of liberation and anti-oppression movements that won some victories, changed some attitudes, and radically altered the gendered and political landscape. This site is dedicated to documenting and sharing these histories. --Website description

Temporary Foreign Workers in British Columbia: Unfree Labour and the Rise of Unscrupulous Recruitment Practices - Rodgers, Alexandra Ellen (Simon Fraser University, 2016)
The political and economic processes of neoliberalization have led to the intensification of worker exploitation. In Canada, Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) who enter through the Low-waged Streams of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) are amongst the most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This thesis uses theories on unfree labour, state transformation, and anti-racism, along with data generated through qualitative research, to examine the state legislated exploitation of TFWs in British Columbia. I argue that the unscrupulous recruitment of TFWs into British Columbia is the functional process through which labour flexibility and unfreedom is achieved within the larger project of neoliberalization. I conclude by considering how regulatory reform of labour markets can be used in conjunction with anti-racist and anti-imperialist political demands that aim to challenge the functional processes of neoliberalization.

No Regrets: Counter-Culture and Anarchism in Vancouver - Rolston, Abby (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "No Regrets: Counter-Culture and Anarchism in Vancouver," by Larry Gambone.

Analyzing Digital Narratives as Global Social Work Texts: A Case Study of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker” - Rose, Tara La (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
This paper considers the digital media story “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker” as a case study demonstrating the potential depth of meaning that may be made through the use of digital media storytelling. Here Anthony Baldry and Paul J. Thibault’s approach to multi-modal analysis is used to deconstruct meanings,14 demonstrating the ways globalization has not only made social work a transnational profession but has also made the problems facing workers in the field something that may be represented and recognized globally, potentially creating the conditions for the building of a kind of international social work solidarity. --From author's introduction

The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order - Rosenow, Michael K. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order," by Leon Fink.

Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada - Rozum, Molly P. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada," edited by Adele Perry, Esylit W. Jones, and Leah Morton.

Hell's History - Sandborn, Tom (United Steelworkers, 2016)
Chronicles the United Steelworkers' fight to prevent workplace deaths and injuries from the 1992 Westray mine disaster through 2016. Discusses workplace deaths, the failure of employers to keep workers safe, and the ongoing need for stronger enforcement of the Westray Law. Written by former Tyee journalist Tom Sanborn.

On Gender, Labor and Inequality - Sangster, Joan (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "On Gender, Labor and Inequality," by Ruth Milkman.

Analyse des composantes de la charge de travail perçue par les cadres dans un contexte de gestion des compétences - Sassi, Narjes; Ben Aissa, Hazem (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
La gestion des compétences est, de nos jours, largement utilisée dans les grandes entreprises françaises qui cherchent, par ce biais, à s'assurer une meilleure performance et un maintien de l'employabilité de ses salariés (Dietrich et al., 2010; MEDEF, 1998). En dépit de ses avantages (autonomie, requalification des salariés, progression de carrière), la gestion des compétences est aussi associée à certains risques psychosociaux (Bouteiller et Gilbert, 2005; Reynaud, 2001). En effet, ce modèle véhicule une transformation du travail — en particulier pour les cadres — puisque les pratiques inhérentes peuvent générer une charge de travail supplémentaire (rapports fréquents à effectuer, évaluations stressantes, exigences comportementales).L'objectif de cet article est donc de caractériser les composantes de la charge de travail perçue par les cadres d'entreprises qui pratiquent la gestion des compétences. Une étude qualitative exploratoire, s'appuyant sur des entretiens semi-directifs, a été menée à cet effet. Les résultats montrent que, dans des entreprises ayant adopté une gestion des compétences, la charge de travail perçue par les cadres se compose de trois paramètres « réformés » (rapport au temps de travail, rapport aux exigences du poste, rapport aux autres) et d'un nouveau paramètre (rapport aux exigences de maintien et de développement des compétences). // Title in English: Executive Managers’ Perceptions of Workload in the Context of Skills Management. Nowadays, the skills management model has become common in many organizations and seeks to develop employees' performance and preserve their employability (Dietrich et al., 2010). In spite of the advantages widely put forward in the literature (autonomy, employee requalification, career progress), the skills management model can also be associated with some psychosocial risks (Bouteiller and Gilbert, 2005; Reynaud, 2001). Indeed, this model engenders a transformation of employees' work—in particular that of executives—because tools and practices inherent in this model could generate an additional workload (frequent reporting, evaluation, repeated training, and strict behavioural requirements).The objective of this article is to characterize executive managers' perceptions of their workloads in organizations using the skills management model. To do this, we conducted exploratory and qualitative research by carrying out twenty interviews with executives. Results suggest that executives' perceptions of workload in a context of skills management consist of three modified parameters (working time, demands of the position, relationships with others) and a new emerging parameter (related to the demands of maintaining and developing skills).

The Tragedy of Social Democracy - Schmidt, Ingo (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Tragedy of Social Democracy," by Sirvan Karimi.

Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization - Scipes, Kim (Haymarket Books, 2016)
Since the 1980s, the world’s working class has been under continual assault by the forces of neoliberalism and imperialism. In response, new labor movements have emerged across the Global South—from Brazil and South Africa to Indonesia and Pakistan.Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization is a call for international solidarity to resist the assaults on labor’s power. This collection of essays by international labor activists and academics examines models of worker solidarity, different forms of labor organizations, and those models’ and organizations’ relationships to social movements and civil society. --Publisher's description.

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power - Sears, Alan (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power," by Steve Fraser.

A "Minor League Equivalent to the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building": Vancouver's Penthouse Nightclub - Shearman, Mary (Simon Fraser University, 2016)
The Penthouse is rumoured to be the oldest continuously operating nightclub in the land we now know as Canada and is without a doubt the oldest exotic nightclub. Owned and operated by an Italian family who emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, The Penthouse has survived numerous waves of moral crackdown in the city as well as many offers to buy the prime location in the face of aggressive development. A staggering number of nightclubs in Vancouver, exotic or otherwise, have not shared the same fate. Through conducting an institutional history of The Penthouse I locate it within changing local politics related to feminist activism, policing, and the sex industry as well as larger shifts in cultural attitudes towards sexual labour and sex workers' bodies. Further I assemble a social history of the dancers, looking at their experiences in the club and their perception of the intersections between feminism, identity, performance, and sex. Feminist theory, women's and gender history, and performance studies inform this multi-method project, which includes results and analysis from archival research and oral history interviews conducted with dancers employed at the club from 1978-2012. Overwhelmingly, the narrators reflected on their time as dancers as valuable to their lives in a myriad of ways, including helping to foster healthy relationships with their bodies and sexualities. Nevertheless most felt that the stigma they faced as sexual labourers impacted their lives in a negative way and was in conflict with the way they experienced their work themselves. This ongoing stigma was often a driving force for abandoning striptease for more 'square' or respectable work. Others continue to work in the sex industry. Eleven dancers shared their stories for this project, as did one member of the serving staff at The Penthouse, booking agent Randy Knowlan, and current owner/operator Danny Filippone. These stories offer a history of the Penthouse which places it as a central part of Vancouver's history. At a time when conventional striptease seems to be in decline and other facets of the sex industry seem to be under attack by new forms of criminal regulation, the interviews with dancers, staff, and the owner/operator suggest that future possibilities for Vancouver's contemporary striptease communities might lie in the evolving local neo-burlesque scene.

Bad Time Stories: Government-Union Conflicts and the Rhetoric of Legitimation Strategies - Smith, Charles W. (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Bad Time Stories: Government-Union Conflicts and the Rhetoric of Legitimation Strategies," by Yonatan Reshef and Charles Keim.

Union Organizing in the Canadian Banking Industry, 1940-1980 - Smith, Julia Maureen (Trent University, 2016)
In this dissertation, I examine union organizing in the Canadian banking industry between 1940 and 1980. By demonstrating that bank workers consistently sought to unionize throughout the twentieth century, I challenge claims that bank employees and other private sector white-collar workers have low rates of unionization because they are not interested in unions or suffer from false consciousness. This research also suggests, however, that many bank workers saw themselves as different from blue-collar industrial workers; the lived reality of bank work as precarious, poorly paid, and rife with gender inequality intersected with ideas about professionalism and aspirations of advancing up the career ladder. Banks, unions, and workers drew on these ideas and experiences in their arguments for and against unionization. I also look at why previous organizing efforts did not establish a strong union presence in the banking industry. Most of these attempts failed, I argue, due to several key issues, including the banks’ anti-union activity, federal and provincial labour board decisions, and labour movement disputes over ideology, jurisdiction, and strategy. The banks consistently opposed unionization and used a variety of tactics to thwart union organizing, both overtly and covertly. The state, in the form of labour legislation and labour boards, provided unions and workers with some means by which to compel the banks to recognize unions, negotiate contracts, and deal with employee grievances; however, state action and inaction more often worked to undermine union organizing. The attitudes and strategies of high-ranking labour movement officials also shaped the outcome of union drives in the banks. Between 1940 and 1980, the mostly male labour leadership repeatedly used top-down organizing strategies and appointed male organizers with no experience of bank work to oversee union drives in a sector with an increasingly feminized workforce; labour leaders’ inability or unwillingness to reflect on this approach and to support grassroots campaigns and alternative strategies hindered bank union organizing. I thus highlight the intersection of gender and class and reveal how these factors have historically shaped the labour movement bureaucracy, union organizing, and the relationship between labour and the state. Author Keywords: banks, gender, labour bureaucracy, trade unions, union organizing, white-collar workers.

Class Lives: Stories from Across the Economic Divide - Soron, Dennis (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Class Lives: Stories from Across the Economic Divide," by Chuck Collins et al.

Centre for Future Work - Stanford, Jim (Centre for Future Work, 2016)
The Centre for Future Work is a progressive research institute, founded in 2016, with operations in Canada and Australia. The Centre is a unique centre of excellence on the full range of economic issues facing working people: including the future of jobs, wages and income distribution, skills and training, sector and industry policies, globalization, the role of government, public services, and more. The Centre also develops timely and practical policy proposals to help make the world of work better for working people and their families. The Centre is independent and non-partisan. [Jim Stanford, Director.] --Website description

Collective Action and Labour Militancy Interrupted: Back-to-Work Legislation and the State of Permanent Exceptionalism at Air Canada - Stevens, Andrew; Templeton, Andrew (Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2016)
Using data collected from survey responses and interviews conducted in 2014, this study examines the consequences of back-to-work legislation from the perspective of customer service workers at Air Canada represented by Unifor Local 2002. By examining union attitudes, opinions of strikes, wildcat actions and back-to-work legislation deployed in 2011 and 2012, the study concludes that this type of legislation functioned to protect the interests of the employer in an ongoing process of corporate restructuring. Such ad hoc legislative measures, defined by political economists as ‘permanent exceptionalism’, further undermines the industrial pluralist regime that is the foundation of Canadian labour relations.
Keywords: Air Canada; back-to-work legislation; industrial pluralism; union attitudes; wildcat action

Transcending the National in Migration History in North America - Takai, Yukari (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews and comments on several books including "Beyond the Nation?: Immigrants’ Local Lives in Transnational Culture," edited by Alexander Freund, "Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," by Grace Peña Delgado, and"Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 1919–1971," by Aya Fujiwara.

Precarious Work in Montreal: Women, Urban Space, and Time - Teeple Hopkins, Carmen (University of Toronto, 2016)
This dissertation examines the impact of precarious work on women in Montreal. Precariousness is increasingly common in Quebec, where women are overrepresented in part-time, temporary, and self-employed work. Based on three years of fieldwork, the thesis argues that while many women experience precariousness in the labour market, they do not experience it in the same ways. The neighbourhoods in which women live significantly shape their lives at work and home. Building critically on the literature on precariousness and social class, my research theorizes precarious workers as members of the working class, not as a marginalized social class outside it. Specifically, the dissertation asks how urban space influences precarious work and how time pressures impact experiences of work and home. First, while noting that precarious workers across industries (e.g. art, teaching, service) face housing pressures similar to those experienced by other members of the working class, the research shows that precarious women workers living in central neighbourhoods are especially at risk of being displaced by the middle-class. Second, the project brings important attention to paid and unpaid domestic work. Most research in the field of “time-use” at work focuses on sectors outside the home, even though women have long performed unwaged housework and many women continue to undertake paid employment or self-employment in the home. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which women’s workloads have increased in the sphere of the home, diminishing their physical health and rendering them more precarious. Third, with reference to women who continue to perform large amounts of unpaid work, the research considers the relevance of historical and contemporary debates around the relationship between paid and unpaid labour, illustrating how women’s wages are negatively impacted by this unpaid work. This dissertation brings together the social dimensions of gender, race, social class, and urban space. In so doing, the project contributes a multi-scalar analysis to antiracist feminist political economy and reaffirms the importance of social class within feminist geography. Bridging these two broader traditions – political economy and economic geography – the project provides a critical framework for understanding the specificities of precarious work for women in Montreal.

L’abbé Pierre Gravel : Syndicaliste et ultranationaliste - Théorêt, Hugues (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "L’abbé Pierre Gravel : Syndicaliste et ultranationaliste," by Alexandre Dumas.

Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour - Thiessen, Janis (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016)
This book investigates the labour history of a people who have not been involved in the twentieth-century labour movement in large numbers: North American Mennonites. It explores their historically-constructed attitudes toward organized labour and unions, which it attempts to understand on its own terms. Although Mennonites are typically associated with rural life, they in fact became very involved as workers in specific locations in both traditional Mennonite enclaves in Ohio, Indiana, Ontario, and Manitoba, and those to which they migrated in the twentieth century, such as British Columbia and California. Mennonites in these locales found employment both as field workers for large agri-business operations (for example, the orchards and packing plants of the San Joaquin Valley in California) and as factory hands in manufacturing firms (such as the automotive factories in southern Ontario). The late twentieth century experiences of North American Mennonites in these settings caused them to confront and reassess their attitudes toward unions. A study of these Mennonites--united by transnational ties of ethnic and religious identity yet shaped, at times, in distinct ways by their differing geographic locations, immigration histories and ethnic origins, denominational ties, and class positions--provides insights into how and why the majority of North American Mennonites have rejected labour unions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The oral histories of the 113 Mennonites interviewed provide insight into why many working North Americans are not union supporters, and how people in general negotiate tensions between their commitments to faith and conscience and the demands of their employment. An important aim of the book is to bring labour historians and historians of religion into conversation. --Publisher's description

The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class - Thiessen, Janis Lee (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, edited by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake.

Three Worlds of Professional and Managerial Staff in France - Thoemmes, Jens (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
SummaryChanges in the work of professional and managerial staff (PMS, cadres) in France were studied in a research project based on 100 interviews, conducted in seven private and public companies. Through a discourse and correspondence analysis—of a corpus amounting to some 600,000 words—, this study concludes that this particular French employment group can be seen neither as a homogeneous entity, nor as a totally fragmented socio-professional category. Rather, reflecting on working life experiences, it describes three groups that correspond to a horizontal division of professional and managerial staff: the serene, the individualized and the resistant.“Serene” PMS perceive their professional lives as being free of major problems. Their career trajectories go up, leading to senior positions in the organization. Training opportunities are used and personal assessment by supervisors is seen as a favourable orientation. This world is stabilized by law or by collectively negotiated agreements and characterized by autonomy and concern for the common good, which are the basis of their beliefs.“Individualized” PMS consider themselves to be responsible for their own success and to be the architects of their careers. They put in countless hours of service, arriving early in the morning and going home late in the evening. They prioritize work over family and aim to be active in highly competitive markets. The individualized have everything they need to be “happy,” except that work leaves them very little time for their private lives. In addition, these employees fear threats to job security and to their careers.“Resistant” PMS’s working time is measured in hours and minutes. Unpaid overtime is refused. This strict regulation of working time is nevertheless accompanied by a considerable workload. Deadlines are difficult to respect. Manifestations of stress and responsibilities in personnel management lead the resisting employee to a negative view of work. The importance of sociability in and outside of work compensates for the loss of the traditional prestige of these PMS. // Les changements dans le travail des professionnels et du management (cadres) en France ont été étudiés dans le cadre d’un projet de recherche sur la base de 100 entretiens, menés dans sept entreprises privées et publiques. Une analyse du discours et une analyse factorielle des correspondances basée sur un corpus de 600 000 mots montre que cette catégorie professionnelle ne peut être considérée ni comme une entité homogène, ni comme totalement fragmenté. En partant des expériences de vie au travail des employés, nous décrivons trois groupes, correspondant à une division horizontale des cadres : les sereins, les individualisés et les résistants.Les « sereins » perçoivent leur vie professionnelle comme étant exempt de problèmes majeurs. Leur trajectoire de carrière est montante, conduisant à des postes de direction dans l’organisation. Les possibilités de formation sont pleinement utilisées et l’évaluation personnelle par les superviseurs est considérée avec bienveillance. Ce monde est stabilisé par la loi ou par des accords négociés collectivement. Il est caractérisé par l’autonomie et par le souci du bien commun, qui sont la base de leurs croyances.Les « individualisés » se considèrent responsables de leur propre succès et ils estiment être les architectes de leur carrière. Ils consacrent d’innombrables heures de service, en arrivant tôt le matin et en rentrant à la maison tard dans la soirée. Ils privilégient le travail à la famille et voudraient être actifs dans des marchés hautement concurrentiels. Les individualisés ont tout pour être « heureux », sauf que le travail ne leur laisse que très peu de temps pour leur vie privée. En outre, ces employés craignent les menaces sur la sécurité de leur emploi et de leur carrière.Le temps de travail des « résistants » se mesure en heures et minutes. Des heures supplémentaires non rémunérées sont refusées. Cette règlementation stricte du temps de travail est néanmoins accompagnée d’une charge de travail considérable. Les délais sont difficiles à respecter. Les manifestations de stress et les responsabilités dans la gestion du personnel conduisent les résistants à une vision négative du travail. L’importance de la sociabilité dans et en dehors du travail compense ici la perte du prestige traditionnel des cadres.

Accountability and Reform in the Aftermath of the Westray Mine Explosion - Tucker, Eric (Working Disasters, 2016)
The Westray mine exploded on May 9, 1992 killing all 26 miners who were working underground at the time. It quickly became apparent that the explosion was not an unforeseeable accident, but rather the predictable result of unsafe and unlawful mining practices, and lax regulatory enforcement. Inadequate ventilation allowed methane concentrations to reach explosive levels and coal dust had been permitted to accumulate. A spark, most probably from an underground mining machine striking a rock, ignited the gas, growing into a rolling methane flame that in turn ignited the coal dust, causing a coal-dust explosion. The mine inspectors knew of these hazardous conditions. During the summer of 1991, without making a formal order, they demanded that the company produce a stone-dusting plan to address the coal-dust hazard. By March 1992 nothing had been done. At that time the inspectors first became aware of dangerous levels of methane, but nothing was done. The next inspection took place on April 29, 1992. Finding that the coal dust problem still had not been addressed, the inspector finally issued a formal order requiring the company to clean up the hazard immediately and to produce a coal-dusting plan by mid-May. Ten days later, the mine exploded (Glasbeek and Tucker 1993; Jobb 1994; Richard 1997).

Nine Workers Died - Tulchinsky, Gerald (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
Discusses the death of nine workers due to the flash fire at Phillips garment factory in Toronto on 20 January 1950, which resulted in a public inquiry. Concludes with six short poems in memory of the workers.

Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 - Turner, Michael (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848," by Katrina Navickas.

Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver - Tye, Nathan (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver," by Todd McCallum.

A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community - Van Horssen, Jessica (Nature, history, society; Variation: Nature, history, society., 2016)
For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos from the town of Asbestos, Quebec, to produce fire-retardant products. Then, over time, people learned about the mineral's devastating effects on human health. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community's survival, the residents of Asbestos developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local/global tensions that defined Asbestos's proud and painful history to reveal the challenges similar resource communities have faced--and continue to face today. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Foreword: the long dying / Graeme Wynn -- Introduction: introducing Asbestos -- Creation stories: Asbestos before 1918 -- Land with a future, not a past, 1918-49 -- Negotiating risk, 1918-49 -- Essential characteristics, 1918-49 -- Bodies collide: the strike of 1949 -- "Une ville qui se deplace," 1949-83 -- Useful tools, 1949-83 -- Altered authority, 1949-83 -- Conclusion: surviving collapse: Asbestos post-1983.
Keywords: Asbestos mines and mining; Asbestos. Amiante; Asbestos. Asbestos industry; Asbestos. Asbestos mines and mining; Asbestos. Asbestos. Environmental Exposure; Aspect de l'environnement; Aspect politique; Aspect sanitaire; Environmental aspects; Health aspects; Industrie; Mines et extraction; Political aspects; Qubec (Province); economics. Cities; economics. History, 20th Century; history. Environmental Illness; psychology. Denial (Psychology) Mining

"Comrades! I Am Far from You, but I Am with You!": Ukrainian Working Women, Transnationalism, and the Soviet Cultural Revolution in Winnipeg, 1928 - Vargscarr, Karolya (University of Manitoba, 2016)
Using local primary sources, this work answers two questions. Firstly, is there a transnational political connection, reflected ideologically or materially, between the readership of Robitnytsia in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928? Secondly, what are the interests of the readership of Robitnytsia, as reflected in the Letters section? The answers to these questions are relevant to social historians because their focus is on content generated by the female readership of the journal, not the content generated by the male activists and political leaders who both contributed to and edited it. This work also highlights the value of Robitnytsia as a historical source of Canada, labour, gender, women's, and transnational histories; one that has been under-utilized to date and is readily available to researchers in Winnipeg and other cities across Canada. To evaluate and provide an analysis of Robitnytsia as a source of primary evidence, a brief introduction to the ULFTA, Robitnytsia, and the Soviet Cultural Revolution is helpful to the reader. After addressing the relevant historiography, the three chapters that follow provide analysis and the relevant context for the source work, including photographs and illustrations from the journal. Photographs featured on the covers of Robitnytsia provide insight into the imagery of the journal, as well as to the rhetoric associated with well-known images and icons within the working class Ukrainian community in Winnipeg. Discovering the answer to the second question posed in this work was straightforward, as the priorities and interests of the working women in Winnipeg were highly localized and specific, including recognizable and accessible priorities to even those readers who are not familiar with the work of the ULFTA. These interests included basic literacy, education, labour organization, and participation in political and social activities. The evidence regarding a transnational link to the Soviet Union, the first question of this work, was even more clear: at the grassroots level, there was no such transnational link between the Ukrainian Left in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928. --From Introduction

Empty Labor. Idleness and Wokplace Resistance - Vultur, Mircea (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This article reviews the book, "Empty Labor. Idleness and Wokplace Resistance," by Roland Paulsen.

Self-Employment among Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex Couples in Canada: Sexual Orientation and Self-Employment in Canada - Waite, Sean; Denier, Nicole (Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2016)
This study presents novel evidence on the relationship between sexual orientation and self‐employment. Using data from the 2001 and 2006 Census of Canada and the 2011 Canadian National Household Survey, we explore the propensity for self‐employment among same‐ and opposite‐sex couples. We examine the demographic, human capital, and family characteristics of coupled gay men and lesbians relative to their coupled heterosexual counterparts to offer potential mechanisms generating differences in rates of self‐employment. Our analysis further considers occupational variability in the likelihood of self‐employment. We find that gay men are less likely and lesbians more likely than heterosexuals to be self‐employed; however, there is significant variation across occupations. Gay men are more likely to be self‐employed in arts and culture, sales and service, and natural and applied sciences, but less likely in business, finance, and health‐related occupations. Lesbians are much more likely to be self‐employed in health‐related occupations, natural and applied sciences, and arts and culture. Marriage and having children are significant predictors of self‐employment for coupled heterosexual women but not lesbians.

The Pitfalls of Embracing Minority Unionism - Walchuk, Brad (SAGE Open, 2016)
In a series of recent cases involving the right to bargain collectively, the Supreme Court of Canada asserted that Wagner Act model, or a model of unionism which is both exclusive and majoritarian, need not be the only model available to workers in Canada (as is currently the case). Although the possible move away from Wagner Act unionism toward some form of minority unionism has received some support, this article argues that there are far too many dangers associated with minority unionism, namely, that it will be a corollary for right-to-work laws, will cause infighting between unions, and will divide and fragment workers’ sense of solidarity, and that the supposed benefits that may be attained through constitutionally protected minority unionism can, and should, be attained without it.

Supply Chain Leverage and Regulating Health and Safety Management in Shipping - Walters, David; James, Philip; Sampson, Helen; Bhattacharya, Syamantak; Xue, Conghua; Wadsworth, Emma (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
The aim of paper is to understand the role and significance of supply chain leverage in promoting health and safety management at sea, the institutional contexts in which it occurs and under which circumstances it is effective. This is a qualitative research study that examined the views of seafarers and their managers on what drives the implementation of occupational health and safety (OHS) management arrangements in two shipping sectors, namely, the independent oil and chemical tanker trade and the container trade. It is based on interviews with seafarers working on board several of these vessels and with representatives of the companies managing and operating the ships. As might be anticipated from previous theorizing of supply chain effects on OHS, the study found there to be strong evidence of its influence on OHS management arrangements on tankers. The most significant driver of this effect for both managers and seafarers appeared to be the surveillance of their OHS arrangements instituted by the heads of the supply chain—in this case the oil majors and their inspection systems. Perhaps more surprisingly, despite the more diffuse, transactional and arms-length supply arrangements in the container trade, in the one case study from this sector examined in the paper, supply chain influences on OHS were nevertheless discernable. However, it also demonstrated the positive role played by the framework for maritime regulation in determining the significance of these influences. Essentially, the results indicate that, under certain conditions, supply chain relations are useful in helping to support implementation of arrangements for OHS management on merchant vessels. However, it also more broadly demonstrates that such leverage is most likely to be effective when it operates within a wider institutional framework in which public regulation and its surveillance by regulatory authorities remains a key element.
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Safeguarding Workers: A Study of Health and Safety Representatives in the Queensland Coalmining Industry, 1990-2013 - Walters, David; Johnstone, Richard; Quinlan, Michael; Wadsworth, Emma (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2016)
This paper explores the practice of worker representation coalmining in Australia, in which there are both serious risks to health and safety and where regulatory provisions on worker representation on health and safety are longstanding. Despite their longevity, their operation has been little studied. The aim of the paper is to address this gap by examining the quality of the practice of worker representation in the sector. In particular, it explores strategies used by representatives to undertake their role in the context of the hostile industrial relations that are characteristic of coalmining. It examines documentary records of statutory inspections by worker representatives and government mines inspectors and analyses the content of qualitative interviews. It finds that the representatives address serious and potentially fatal risks in their activities and make effective use of their statutory powers in doing so, including their power to suspend operations they deem to be unacceptably dangerous. Nevertheless, they strive to operate within the boundaries of regulation in order to offset the negative influences of a hostile labour relations climate, As well as cautious use of their powers to order the cessation of operations where they deem the risks to be unacceptable, they also avoid accusations of unnecessarily impeding production and engaging with labour relations matters that are outside their statutory remit, through good communication between themselves and other workplace representatives. This is made possible by support from the relatively high level of workplace trade union organization present in the mines and further support derived from the trade union more widely and from the unique two-tier form of representation provided for by legislation. Both ensure the representatives are well informed, well trained and supported in their role. Overall, the study highlights the positive role representatives and unions play in preventive health and safety even in hostile labour relations climates., // Cette étude explore la pratique de représentation des travailleurs dans l'industrie minière australienne, industrie comportant des risques sérieux en matière de santé et de sécurité au travail, et où des dispositions réglementaires à cet effet existent depuis fort longtemps. En dépit de cette longévité, leur application a fait l'objet de peu d'étude. Le but de cet article est de combler cette lacune en analysant la qualité de la pratique de la représentation des travailleurs dans ce secteur. Plus particulièrement, nous nous intéressons aux stratégies mises en place par les représentants afin de jouer pleinement leur rôle dans le contexte hostile des relations de travail qui caractérise l'industrie minière australienne. Nous passons en revue les documents d'archives des inspections obligatoires menées par les représentants des travailleurs et les inspecteurs miniers gouvernementaux, et nous analysons le contenu d'entrevues qualitatives. Il ressort que les représentants des travailleurs sont avant tout préoccupés de contrer les risques graves et potentiellement mortels dans le cours des activités des mineurs et, ce faisant, ils utilisent de manière efficace leurs pouvoirs réglementaires, incluant celui de suspendre les opérations jugées potentiellement dangereuses. Néanmoins, ils s'efforcent d'opérer dans les limites fixées par la règlementation, dans le but de compenser les effets négatifs de l'hostilité du climat des relations de travail. En conséquence, ils se montrent prudents dans l'utilisation de leurs pouvoirs d'ordonner la cessation d'opérations qu'ils jugent comporter un risque inacceptable. Ainsi, ils évitent d'être accusés d'avoir indûment fait cesser des opérations et de s'être engagés sur des questions de relations de travail qui sont en dehors de leurs attributions légales. Ils maintiennent également de bonnes pratiques de communication entre eux et les autres représentants des travailleurs. Tout ceci est rendu possible grâce au soutien des hautes instances syndicales dans les mines et de l'appui émanant du mouvement syndical en général et du système unique de représentation bipartite prévu à la législation, lesquels font en sorte que les représentants des travailleurs sont bien informés, bien formés et bien supportés dans leur rôle. Dans l'ensemble, l'étude met en lumière le rôle positif que les représentants des travailleurs et les syndicats jouent en matière de prévention en santé et sécurité, même lorsque le climat des relations de travail s'avère hostile.

Le « moment 68 » et la réinvention de l’Acadie - Warren, Jean-Philippe (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Le « moment 68 » et la réinvention de l’Acadie," by Joel Belliveau.

Building the Power: The Labourers' Union in British Columbia - Warrior, M. C. (Construction and Specialized Workers' Union, LiUNA Local 1611, 2016)
“Building The Power” is a fascinating look into the history of LiUNA Local 1611, documenting the dramatic events and accomplishments of its members since 1937, written by Local 1611’s Strategic Researcher and labour activist Mark Warrior. In 1953, Stacey Warner, while organizing pipeline workers, was threatened with a shotgun by a company thug hired for the sole purpose of intimidation. The police did not take notice. In 1981, the Labour Relations Board ignored the fact that the employer offered union member a $1,000 bribe to change his vote—right at the Labour Relations Board office—when LiUNA Local 1070 was attempting to certify his bargaining unit. Ignoring naked violence had been replaced by ignoring blatant lawbreaking. But the result was not the same. Warner succeeded in organizing the workers. These are examples of the conflict and often dangerous scenarios those in the Labour Movement have faced in their effort to secure workers’ right and fair working wages and safe working conditions. --Website description
Keywords: Laborers' International Union of North America; Laborers' International Union of North America. Local 1611

Accumulating Cares: Women, Whiteness, and the Affective Labour of Responsible Reproduction in Neoliberal Times - Watson, Amanda (University of Ottawa, 2016)
This thesis examines contemporary popular and news media representation of motherhood and labour in Canada and the United States. I explore what texts about motherhood and maternal labour suggest about gendered responsibilities to citizenship in neoliberal conditions. Building on important feminist research in the fields of citizenship, care, and the welfare state, I ask how are mothers being socially responsibilized toward multiple forms of labour simultaneously and to what effect? By engaging feminist theories of citizenship and bridging this field with feminist theories of science, media, and affect, I demonstrate how, under neoliberal conditions and in precarious circumstances, the ways in which women appear to juggle their commitments to paid and unpaid labour, determines how mainstream discourses reflect their value as citizens. This dissertation uses feminist critical discourse analysis to assess how, as women are responsibilized toward unpaid intimate work in newly empirical ways at the same time that they are encouraged to pursue career success in full-time paid employment, contemporary women in Canada and the United States are encouraged to rise above welfare retrenchment and inadequate provision by juggling “it all.” My thesis is an intersectional feminist project that interrogates questions of gendered citizenship and maternal affect, and I join feminist political theorists in applying pressure to the field of citizenship studies to centre reproduction in discussion of gendered welfare.

Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution - Webb, Christopher (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution," by James Ferguson.

North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes - Whitfield, Harvey Amani (UBC Press, 2016)
Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring escaped slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, many Loyalist families brought slaves with them when they settled in the Maritime colonies of British North America. Once there, slaves used their traditions of survival, resistance, and kinship networks to negotiate their new reality. Harvey Amani Whitfield’s book, the first on slavery in the Maritimes, is a startling corrective to the enduring and triumphant narrative of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad. --Publisher's description

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie - Wilkerson, Jessica (Labour / Le Travail, 2016)
The article reviews the book, "Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie," by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf.

Green Jobs: An Alternative to Neoliberalism? Recycling in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Toronto, Canada - Yap, Lilian (York University, 2016)
In recent years, environmental organizations and labour unions have begun to more seriously campaign for the promotion of green jobs as a way to address the twin problems of climate change and economic stagnation, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. They variously suggest that green jobs will be created through increased investment in green sectors; for some, this requires public investment and the adoption of a Green New Deal (GND) policy orientation, while for others this requires only increased private investment in green industries. The former emphasize that since green sectors are more labour-intensive than traditional industries, investment in green infrastructure could thus generate comparatively more employment per dollar invested. At the heart of these proposals is the proposition that capitalist economic growth could be made consistent with social and ecological justice. This dissertation is a critical engagement with the propositions of the green jobs campaign through the concrete examination of two diverse cases of residential (i.e. post-consumer) recycling, a quintessentially green sector, in Buenos Aires and Toronto. Defining recycling as the (global) production of value from waste, the analysis pays particular attention to both the labour process and historical development of recycling. Through a combination of qualitative document analysis, archival research, and qualitative interviews, this thesis argues that purely market-coordinated recycling is not able to simultaneously deliver large-scale employment creation and improved socio-ecological outcomes because of the inherent tension between labour intensiveness and methods of increasing productivity. This tension, in turn, is rooted in the distributive conflict characteristic of capitalist production, the resolution of which requires increased economic growth. From an ecological perspective, then, this is simply a deferment of the problem. In line with proponents of the Green New Deal, this dissertation argues that mediation of this tension in a direction favourable to both ecological and social concerns requires collective intervention. However, going beyond the Green New Deal, it concludes that commitment to social and ecological justice requires moving in the direction of decommodified, cooperative production and collective consumption.

Hockey's Puppy Mill: A Former Junior Player Takes the CHL [Canadian Hockey League] to Court - Hune-Brown, Nicholas (The Walrus, 2015)
Profile of Sam Berg, a former junior hockey player who in October 2014 agreed to become the representative plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the three major junion hockey leagues: the Ontario Hockey League, the Western Hockey League, and the Quebec Major Junion Hockey League.

Statistical Profiling of the Unemployed - Grundy, John (Studies in Political Economy, 2015)
Labour market policy in Canada has undergone profound reforms over the past several decades. Successive federal and provincial governments have sought to “activate” the unemployed through measures such as Employment Insurance (EI) retrenchment and employment service models that stress individual responsibility for the problem of unemployment. This paper analyzes a little known attempt by federal officials to implement statistical profiling of the unemployed in employment service delivery during the mid-1990s. Known as the Service Outcome Measurement System (SOMS) and intended for use by frontline employment counsellors, the technology computed personal data about unemployed service users to predict the employment outcomes of different service options.
Keywords: data; employment services; neoliberalism; public administration; unemployment

Gay Pay for Straight Work: Mechanisms Generating Disadvantage - Waite, Sean; Denier, Nicole (Gender & Society, 2015)
Drawing from the gender wage gap literature, we explore four possible causes of sexual minority earnings gaps: (1) variation in human capital and labor force participation, (2) occupational and industrial sorting, (3) differences in the institutional organization of the public and private sector, and (4) different returns to marriage and parenthood. Using the 2006 Census of Canada, we find that heterosexual men earn more than gay men, followed by lesbians and heterosexual women. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions show that industry of employment, rather than occupation, disadvantages gay men, lesbians, and heterosexual women. High levels of educational attainment lead to employment in lucrative occupations, but sexual minorities earn significantly less than heterosexual men within these occupations. Wage gaps are reduced in the public sector for heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians. Finally, we find that heterosexual women experience a motherhood penalty, heterosexual men experience a fatherhood premium, and both receive a premium for marriage; however, the presence of children and marriage have no effect on the earnings of either gay men or lesbians in conjugal relationships.

Gendering Environmental Assessment: Women’s Participation and Employment Outcomes at Voisey’s Bay - Cox, David; Mills, Suzanne (Arctic, 2015)
This paper examines the effect of Inuit and Innu women’s participation in environmental assessment (EA) processes on EA recommendations, impact benefit agreement (IBA) negotiations, and women’s employment experiences at Voisey’s Bay Mine, Labrador. The literature on Indigenous participation in EAs has been critiqued for being overly process oriented and for neglecting to examine how power influences EA decision making. In this regard, two issues have emerged as critical to participation in EAs: how EA processes are influenced by other institutions that may help or hinder participation and whether EAs enable marginalized groups within Indigenous communities to influence development outcomes. To address these issues we examine the case of the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Mine in Labrador, in which Indigenous women’s groups made several collective submissions pertaining to employment throughout the EA process. We compare the submissions that Inuit and Innu women’s groups made to the EA panel in the late 1990s to the final EA recommendations and then compare these recommendations to employment-related provisions in the IBA. Finally we compare IBA provisions to workers’ perceptions of gender relations at the mine in 2010. Semi-structured interviews revealed that, notwithstanding the recommendations by women’s groups concerning employment throughout the EA process, women working at the site experienced gendered employment barriers similar to those experienced by women in mining elsewhere. We suggest that the ineffective translation of EA submissions into EA regulations and the IBA, coupled with persistent masculinity within the mining industry, weakened the effect of women’s requests for a comprehensive program to hire and train Indigenous women.
Keywords: Aboriginal; EA; IBA; employment; environmental assessment; impact benefit agreement; resource development; women

Regulating Hospital Social Workers and Nurses: Propping Up an Efficient Lean Health Care System - O'Neill, Laura (Studies in Political Economy, 2015)
Information technology implementation in health care settings is contributing to work intensification and overwork for social workers and nurses. But strong professional and personal values lead workers to endure these conditions and prop up an increasingly “efficient” and lean health care system. A study done in Ontario, Canada, examines these circumstances and forms the basis for this article’s contribution to the deskilling/upskilling debate in labour process theory.

Feminist Scholarship and Family Sociology: New Ways of Thinking, Outstanding Questions - Luxton, Meg (Canadian Review of Sociology, 2015)
The article discusses the research and scholarship of feminist scholars on family sociology in Canada from the 1960s through the mid 2010s, including the feminist sociology of families. The relationship between neoliberalism and gender, including the alleged indifference of neoliberal government policies to gender of income earners, is discussed. An overview of Canada's national statistics agency Statistics Canada's data on labor, including on domestic labor, gender divisions in labor, women's employment and unpaid household work, is provided.
Keywords: FAMILIES -- Canada; FEMINIST theory -- History; FEMINISTS -- History; GENDER -- Social aspects; HOUSEKEEPING -- Social aspects; LABOR -- Canada; LEARNING & scholarship -- History; NEOLIBERALISM -- Social aspects; SOCIOLOGICAL research -- Canada; SOCIOLOGY -- Canada; STATISTICS Canada; WOMEN -- California -- Employment

Poverty & Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario Project (PEPSO) - Lewchuk, Wayne (Poverty & Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, 2015)
Research and advocacy group sponsored by McMaster University and United Way Toronto.

Abstracts / Résumés [v. 76, Fall 2015] (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
English/French abstracts of article published in the Fall 2015 volume.

Abstracts, volume 75 (Spring/Printemps 2015) (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
English/French abstracts of articles in the Spring 2015 issue.

Contributors / Collaborateurs (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
List of contributors to the Fall 2015 volume.

Index — Volume 70 — 2015 (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2015)
Keywords: SnR_publicationTitle_Relations industrielles_Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations_2025-09-22T15:31:55.974Z

Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Abdou, Abdella Abdulkadir (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
The article reviews the book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Pikkety.

Bringing Canada's Wagner Act regime into compliance with international human rights law and the Charter. - Adams, Roy J. (Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, 2015)
In recognizing a constitutional right to strike in its Saskatchewan Federation of Labour decision, the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed that workers in Canada are entitled to freedom of association rights that are at least equivalent to those provided by international human rights instruments. This paper considers the implications of this principle for employees in the private sector, where unionization rates have been in continual decline for sev- eral decades, by focusing on the potential of "minority" unionism for realizing Canada's international law obligations. The author notes that the ILO's super- visory committees have approved three options as being consistent with ILO principles on freedom of association: minority worker associations, each of which has full rights to represent its own members; unions which, though not representing a majority of the workers in the bargaining unit, are recognized as being the "most representative," and as such have the right to conclude a col- lective agreement applicable to all the workers; and unions certified under the North American Wagner Act model, through a majoritarian procedure. Thus, while ILO member-states are permitted to adopt legislation based on majoritar- ian exclusivity, such legislation cannot have the effect of depriving non-majority unions of the right to bargain collectively on behalf of their members, in those workplaces where no exclusive agent has been certified. With a view to ensuring that labour law and practice in Canada conform to international standards, the author proposes that every Canadian jurisdiction revise its legislation to provide for certification of the "most representative" minority union in a work- place, while retaining the existing procedures for certification of an exclusive bargaining agent. Under this proposal, the most representative union (or coali- tion of unions) in a bargaining unit would have all the rights and duties of an exclusive agent, but not an exclusive right of representation. In this way, the author contends, Canada could live up to its international law commitment to "promote" collective bargaining.

No Hobo is an Island: Power and Political Culture in the Federal Work Relief Camps in British Columbia, 1932-1935 - Adolph, Neal Robert (Simon Fraser University, 2015)
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.

Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas - Aivalis, Christo (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
This article reviews the book, "Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas," by Kenneth C. Dewar.

Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left, 1945-2000 - Aivalis, Christo (Queen's University, 2015)
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.
Keywords: Canadian Labour Congress; Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Cooperative Commonwealth Federation; Foreign Investment Review Agency; Liberalism; National Energy Program; New Democratic Party; Organized Labour; Pierre Elliott Trudeau; Quiet Revolution; Socialism; Thesis; Wage and Price Controls

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City - Akers, Joshua (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
The article reviews the book, "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," by Gordon Young.

Commoditized Workers: Case Study Research on Labor Law Issues Arising from a Set of on-Demand/Gig Economy Platforms - Aloisi, Antonio (Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 2015)
In the framework of the so-called “on-demand/gig economy,” the number of on-demand companies matching labor supply and demand is on the rise. These schemes may enlarge opportunities for people willing to find a job or to top up their salaries. Despite the upside of creating new “peer marketplaces,” these platforms may also be used to circumvent employment regulation, by operating informally in traditionally regulated markets. The literature showed how, by 2009, millions of worker accounts have been generated within these frameworks. Productivity may be fostered but, at the same time, a new version of Taylorism is disseminated (i.e., the fragmentation of labor into hyper-temporary jobs – called microtasks – on a virtual or local assembly line), strengthened by globalization and computerization. All these intermediaries recruit freelance or casual workers who are labelled as independent contractors even though many indicators seem to reveal a disguised employment relationship. Uncertainty and insecurity are the price for extreme flexibility. A bulk of business risk is shifted to workers, and potential costs such as benefits or unemployment insurance are avoided. Minimum wages are often far from being reached.

At War with the Machine: Canadian Workers’ Resistance to Taylorism in the Early 20th Century - Antaya, Sean (The Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History, 2015)
This essay looks at the ways Frederick Winslow Taylor's distinctly modern theories of scientific management (i.e. Taylorism) transformed Canadian workplaces in the early 20thcentury. In particular, it shows how Taylorism negatively impacted Canadian workers' lives, and examines the various ways that workers consequently resisted Taylorist methods. The essay argues that though workers were unable to stop the widespread implementation of Taylorism and its normalization in Canadian workplaces, their resistance to Taylorism still played an important role in unionist and radical political movements which gradually gained important concessions and rights for Canadian workers during the first half of the 20thcentury. Additionally, the essay argues that resistance was significant as an outlet for workers to retain bodily autonomy in work environments which increasingly aimed to make workers more machine-like. Ultimately, the essay highlights important ways that the Canadian working class has exercised historical agency via solidarity and perseverance.

Darcus Howe: A Political Biography - Austin, David (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
This article reviews the book, "Darcus Howe: A Political Biography," by Robin Bunce and Paul Field.

Resisting Regulatory Rigidities: Lessons from Front-Line Care Work - Baines, Donna; Daly, Tamara (Studies in Political Economy, 2015)
In order to advance an argument addressing whether or not ethical and empowering care work is possible within the context of neoliberalism and managerialism, this article draws on international comparative, qualitative case-study data to ask whether processes and practices of radical care and emancipation already exist in nonprofit long-term care and social service work. If so, what do they look like, and what factors hinder or nurture social justice-based care practices? Given that paid and unpaid care continues to be a highly gendered and increasingly racialized realm of feminized struggle, it warrants further theorization and greater centrality within emancipatory projects and strategies.

The Economic Impact on Plan Members of the Shift from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution in Workplace Pension Plans Workplace Pensions: Next Generation or Final Frontier - Baldwin, Bob (Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, 2015)
The overarching theme of this paper is whether future retirees are likely to have an adequate standard of living in retirement, and related policy issues. The author begins by outlining Canada's three-pillared retirement income sys- tem, and by identifying the similarities and differences between defined benefit (DB) pension plans and defined contribution (DC) pension plans. Given the relative imprecision of these terms, the author cautions against treating pension plan design as a binary choice between DB and DC. The dimensions of the ongoing shift from DB to DC plans are measured by reference to information from Statistics Canada. The paper goes on to consider the capacity of DB and DC plans to generate pension income, through an examination of comparative data on contributions, rates of return and expenses. The paper also asks whether participants in DB plans enjoy an advantage over participants in other types of plans, in terms of accumulation of retirement wealth. As a corollary to this question, the author reviews several studies that attempt to map the range of benefit outcomes in DC plans. In sum, the author concludes that the switch from DB to DC increases the unpredictability of retirement income, manifested as both unpredictable retirement ages and unpredictable levels of income. Recent attempts have been made to enhance the predictability of contributions and benefits by creating plan designs which incorporate elements of both DB and DC, i.e. target benefit plans. However, the author points out, of almost equal importance to the issue of plan design is the issue of identifying appropriate organizational platforms for the delivery of pension benefits.

The Shift in Workplace Pension Plans from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution: Measuring the Impact Using LifePaths Workplace Pensions: Next Generation or Final Frontier - Baldwin, Bob; Moore, Kevin D. (Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, 2015)
This paper applies a statistical analysis to quantify the impact of the ongoing shift in Canadian workplaces from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution pension plans. The basis for the analysis is Statistics Canada's LifePaths model, which aims to simulate the life experiences of "synthetic individuals" to whom are assigned characteristics which are rep- resentative of the Canadian population, as identified by census, survey and administrative data. The authors conclude that the shift from DB plans to DC plans has a significant negative impact on pre-tax registered pension plan (RPP) income. The losses are considerably smaller when the focus of analysis moves to total income and net after-tax income. However, because much of what reduces the larger gross effect of lost RPP income is lower personal income taxes, the trend from DB to DC involves a fiscal impact, by generating upward pressure on public expenditures. The authors emphasize that the results of this study reflect the attributes of DC plans as they have existed until now, and not as they might exist in a reconceptualized form.

Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War - Bangarth, Stephanie (Labour / Le Travail, 2015)
The article reviews the book, "Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War," by Cindy I-Fen Cheng.

Low Wages, No Benefits: Expanding Access To Health Benefits For Low Income Ontarians - Barnes, Steve (2015)
One-third of workers in Ontario do not receive employer-provided benefits. Seniors and those receiving social assistance are eligible for some level of public coverage, however, low-income Ontarians who are employed, are falling through the cracks without any health coverage at all. Living with low income and experiencing a lack of resources can increase the risk for poor health. Low income is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of diabetes complications, and poor mental health due to high rates of anxiety, stress, and depression. Good dental care, access to medication, and vision care are important parts of maintaining overall health and are particularly income sensitive. This paper uses data from Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics to identify who is more or less likely to have employer-provided health benefits.... Website summary