Putting Labour Law to Work: Imperative of Race Conscious Labour Law - Arumugam, Harshini (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2026)
History shows that race and labour are deeply connected in Canada. For the labour movement to advance racial equality, it must contend with this reality. Through a critical race analysis, this paper examines how race-evasive approaches in labour laws and practices have contributed to systemic racial inequality. It argues that race-conscious strategies are essential for addressing the specific experiences and needs of racialized workers. By leveraging existing legal tools and intentionally incorporating race-conscious approaches into areas such as collective bargaining, the collective agreement, and the duty of fair representation, labour law can be a powerful mechanism for achieving racial justice in the workplace.

Unjust Transition: The Future of Fossil Fuel Workers - Bettini, Anna (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Unjust Transition: The Future of Fossil Fuel Workers," by Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker, eds.

Salud y Shalom: Conversations with Jewish Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade - Bick, Sam (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Salud y Shalom: Conversations with Jewish Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade " by Joseph Butwin.

Social Support, Strain, and Surveillance: Peer Relationships and Representation among Migrant Farm Workers in Canada - Borrelli, Erika (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
Workplace representation – the process through which workers voice concerns, negotiate conditions, and participate in decision-making – can be a crucial mechanism for reducing employment strain. Access to such structures is particularly vital for precarious workers, like temporary migrant farm workers in Canada, who face intensified demands owing to employer-tied contracts, congregate living arrangements, and persistent fears of job loss and deportation. Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus groups with migrant farm workers in three agriculturally dense regions in southern Ontario, this study explores the workers’ perceptions of one form of workplace representation: peer representation. While peer representation may foster lateral communication and social support for an otherwise isolated workforce, it is complicated by the structural precarity that intensifies competition and conflict among migrant farm workers. This article demonstrates how the conditions of entry and residency for migrant farm workers in Canada generate lateral surveillance and intra-worker control, amplifying workplace pressures and demands and reinforcing the strain that peer representation might otherwise help to alleviate.
Keywords: employment strain; lateral surveillance; migrant farm workers; precarious employment; workplace representation

The Evolution of Broad-Based Employee Ownership in Canada - Busaan, Lorin; Pek, Simon (International Review of Applied Economics, 2026)
Inspired by the recent national policy framework establishing the Canadian Employee Ownership Trust, we survey the landscape of broad-based employee ownership (BBEO) in Canada, focusing on the two prominent forms: worker co-operatives and broad-based employee share ownership. We conceptualize BBEO based on two inclusion criteria: the percentage of shares held by employees and the breadth of access to ownership opportunities. We also draw attention to two other relevant factors: the extent of employee control rights and degree of equality of share allocation. We then discuss the evolution and prevalence of the two forms of BBEO in Canada, utilizing limited available data and supplementing with illustrative examples. Finally, we call for an integrated and comparative research and policy agenda that bridges worker co-operatives and broad-based employee share ownership models.
Keywords: Canadian Employee Ownership Trust; J54; J58; P13; Worker co-operative; broad-based employee ownership

Ships of State: Literature and the Seaman’s Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain - Cadigan, Sean T. (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Ships of State: Literature and the Seaman’s Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain," by Laurie Ellinghausen.

Uneven Development in the Platform Economy: Stratified Immigration Policies and Uneven Access to Transnational Social Protections in North America - Cervantes-Macías, María E. (Digital Geography and Society, 2026)
How do digital platforms, such as Uber, Amazon, or DoorDash, reterritorialize social protections for immigrant workers at urban, national, and transnational scales? In this paper I show how they function as tools of economic integration, situating interplays between states, markets to generate new territorial configurations and exclusions in the digital economy. By analyzing the role of immigrant workers in the platform economy, I aim to show how platform economies both enable and constrain transnational mobility, deepening global inequalities through the uneven impact of flexible labour mediated by digital infrastructures. I focus specifically on software engineers and gig workers, who perform what Vallas and Schor (2020) identify as “geographically tethered work”. These two migrant groups allow me to observe how platformization has reterritorialized labour relations. Providing an analysis of different immigrant workers in the North American platform economy, I aim to show the ways in which immigration status makes these labour relations more precarious, increasing the reliance on transnational infrastructures of care.
Keywords: Credentialized mobility; Gig workers; Immigrant labour; Platform economy; Reterritorialization; Social protections; Uneven development

The Persistent Roots of Racial Capitalism in the Era of Digital Platforms - Chatterjee, Anuneeta (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This essay examines the expansion of digital platforms through the lens of racial capitalism, focusing on their implications for people of colour in the Global South and migrant populations. It begins by outlining racial capitalism as a theoretical framework that extends beyond classical Marxism by centring the historical and ongoing racialization of labour, dispossession, and accumulation. Drawing on foundational insights from W. E. B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson, the essay situates capitalism as inherently structured by racial hierarchies rather than merely class relations. It then engages in a critical review of recent scholarship addressing racial capitalism across domains such as social reproduction, migration, and border regimes, highlighting how digital platforms intensify and reorganize these dynamics. The analysis emphasizes how digital infrastructures reproduce longstanding patterns of exploitation, surveillance, and differential mobility while rendering racialized bodies central to global circuits of labour and value extraction. Finally, the essay applies this framework to the study of digital migration and embodiment, illustrating how platform-mediated environments both constrain and reshape the lived experiences of racialized populations. By foregrounding the interplay between race, technology, and political economy, the essay argues for the continued relevance of racial capitalism in understanding contemporary forms of inequality and in envisioning alternatives.

"I Have a Lot Working Against Me": Trans Precarious Labourers in Canada - Chudyk, Elliot; Devor, Aaron; Lepp, Annalee (Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, 2026)
While we know that transgender people are not a monolith, the spectrum of labour precarity that exists for trans workers as well as the additional factors that lead some trans people into deeper levels of life precariousness remain understudied. In this article, we consider how employment precarity impacts trans peoples' quality of life, and how trans peoples' social and material conditions mediate their overall life precarity alongside their experiences of labour precarity. This article is based on 55 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, including 41 interviews with trans precarious workers and 14 with service providers who have worked with trans people experiencing precarious labour. Our analysis highlights participants embodied experiences of labour precarity and explores how varied positions of marginality and material barriers among trans people mediate the kinds of precarity they face. Examining participants' recollections and personal narrations, we explored relationships among poverty, disability, migration, gender, and labour precarity as well as trans workers' deployments of hope, agency, and resistance.

Spatial Control, Precarity, and Union Resistance in Digital Remote Work: An Analysis of ‘Work From Home’ in US and Canadian Call Centres - Doellgast, Virginia; O’Brady, Sean; Kim, Jeonghun (Work, Employment and Society, 2026)
This article analyses the experiences of US and Canadian call centre workers and their unions with the shift from physical call centres to ‘work from home’ (WFH) arrangements. Drawing on interviews, focus groups and a worker survey, the authors find that the shift enabled new forms of spatial control grounded in worker preferences for remote work and associated with different forms of precarity. Management control over the physical location of work could increase job insecurity; control over the costs and risk associated with WFH arrangements could increase income insecurity; and control over communication between workers and with their unions could increase collective representation and voice insecurity. Local unions engaged in modes of resistance to spatial control, but with uneven success. Findings suggest that labour power requires union strategies that both defend WFH rights and develop protections targeted at forms of precarity associated with being able to work from home.

Statesman of the Piano: Jazz, Race and History in the Life of Lou Hooper - Dumais, Samia (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Statesman of the Piano: Jazz, Race and History in the Life of Lou Hooper," by Sean Mills, Eric Fillion et Désirée Rochat (dir).

Union Organizing in the Northern Canadian Mining Industry - Fitzpatrick, Mason; Mills, Suzanne (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
For much of the 20th century, mining was a highly unionized sector, including in the Canadian North. From the 1960s to the 1990s, there was near-complete union coverage in mines in the northern territories, significantly increasing the share of wealth and political power claimed by many northern mining workers. Today, only two of ten producing mines are unionized: the Ekati diamond mine in the Northwest Territories (Public Service Alliance of Canada [ psac]) and the Mary River mine in Nunavut (International Union of Operating Engineers [ iuoe]). This article explores the reasons for this decline and contemporary barriers to organizing, drawing on archival research, document analysis, and interviews with Indigenous organizations, union organizers, servicing staff, and officials. Changes in labour practices – such as the use of long-distance commuting, subcontracting, impact and benefit agreements ( ibas), and the shift to smaller, more highly skilled workforces – have created a more challenging organizing environment. These external challenges are compounded by internal union issues, including a failure to prioritize northern organizing and to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities and governments. We draw on these results to suggest strategies for overcoming these barriers. These included targeting workers in the remediation phase mines and catering and housekeeping workers to gain a foothold in the sector, locating choke points in the fly-in/fly-out production process, investing in offices and permanent organizing staff in northern cities, and working to decolonize unions through education and meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities.

Deskilled and Degraded: The Interaction of Precarious Status and Precarious Employment Trajectories for Migrant Workers in Canada - Foster, Jason; Coderre, Mylène; Carranza-Hernandez, Giovanni; Mahmood, Zainab (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This research explores the intersection of precarious legal status and precarious employment of migrants who came to Canada with a temporary status, whether for work, study, or protection purposes. Drawing on data collected from 148 interviews with precarious-status migrants, the article investigates how transitions in status impact employment trajectories. It builds upon a mixed-method analysis, identifying how employment precarity intensifies with increased status insecurity, which results in progressive deskilling and the degradation of working conditions over time. By foregrounding deskilling as a cumulative and temporal process, this study demonstrates how Canada’s temporary migration regime systematically deteriorates migrant workers’ skills and opportunities, extending precarity beyond the immediate moment of employment. This analysis contributes to an understanding of the lived experiences of migrant workers, highlighting the long-term effects of migration policies and regulations on employment and working conditions.
Keywords: Canada; deskilling; migrant workers; precarious employment; precarious status

Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future - Gupta, Priya; Skerrett, Kevin (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future," by Tom Fraser.

From “Offender” to “Employee”: Canadian Prison Labour and Neoliberal Citizenship - Haentjens, Sandrine; Scanlan, Padraic X. (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article analyzes a neoliberal redefinition of citizenship as market participation through the lens of prison labour in Canadian federal penitentiaries. We focus on corcan, a special operating agency of Correctional Service Canada, which employs approximately 4,000 prisoners in various industries. Despite performing tasks like those of free workers, incarcerated individuals are not recognized as employees under Canadian law and are excluded from employment protections. corcan emphasizes employability as a key criterion for evaluating an offender’s rehabilitation. In effect, many prisoners must demonstrate evidence of compliance with a specific model of labour-market participation in order to be paroled, and to be restored to the liberties and rights of citizenship. We highlight the ideological and practical implications of this transformation, suggesting that prison labour serves as both a means of maintaining prison discipline and a window into the logic of a market-driven society. We conclude by exploring the broader significance of these changes for understanding citizenship and labour relations.
Keywords: CORCAN; Correctional Service Canada; citizenship; coerced labour; labour markets; neoliberalism; prison labour; rehabilitation

Law at Work: The Coercion and Co-option of the Working Class - Hammoudi, Ali (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Law at Work: The Coercion and Co-option of the Working Class," by Harry Glasbeek.

The Open Shop, Closed Shop, Agency Shop, and Union Default in Comparative Perspective: Members, Resources, and Individual Autonomy - Harcourt, Mark; Gall, Gregor (Industrial Relations Journal, 2026)
Strategies designed to revive the declining union movement require new resources and new members for success. For this, many unions often used closed or agency shops. We compare these with the now dominant open shop as well as the union default. These options are assessed by asking how effective would each be at securing both members and resources for unions; and how much would each option protect and/or advance worker's autonomy in terms of various individual freedoms? Though closed and agency shops have many merits, especially in relation to the open shop, we conclude that the union default is superior to both.
Keywords: closed shop; union default; unions; worker representation

Fit for the Task? Assessing the Suitability of Canadian Labour Law to Respond to New Forms of Technology in the Workplace - Hastie, Bethany; Galway, Devin (UBC Law Review, 2026)
This article takes up the challenge of examining whether, and to what extent, existing labour laws in Canada are equipped to respond to new technological changes in the workplace. While the notion that technology changes labour is not new, both the types of technology associated with this new wave of change, and their rapid deployment, make this an urgently needed inquiry, given their impacts on material working conditions. Further, given that core statutory provisions regulating labour relations in Canada have remained relatively unchanged over the past 50 years, there is reason to speculate about their continued relevance, or suitability to respond to new technology in the workplace. --From Introduction

Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics - High, Steven (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics," by Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage.

Unpaid Work and Feminist Alliances across Difference: Three Local Studies of Wages for Housework Organizing in Canada - Hillyard Little, Margaret; Marks, Lynne; Hughes, Christine; Watson, Morghan; Aniyan, Cherene (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article analyzes Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians organizing in Canada through three local case studies in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto, showing how struggles over unpaid caring labour generated feminist alliances across race, class, sexuality, and immigration status. Using interviews with movement leaders and rank-and-file activists alongside private and public archival collections, it traces both solidarities and conflicts between these Marxist feminist groups, low-income mothers, immigrant women’s organizations, Indigenous women, and mainstream feminist bodies such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The authors argue that Canadian Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians activism was locally vibrant, transnationally connected, and has left a durable legacy in contemporary organizing around welfare rights, immigrant domestic workers, queer politics, and the recognition of women’s unpaid and underpaid care work.

Policy Analysis of Canadian Occupational Health and Safety Legislation and Regulations: Workplace Protections for Reproductive Health and Fetal Development - Jahel, Fatima; Phillips, Karen P. (New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, 2026)
Canada's occupational health and safety (OHS) legislative frameworks describe the general rights and responsibilities of employers and employees to ensure safe workplaces. However, the extent to which these OHS frameworks recognize and safeguard reproductive health and fetal development remains understudied. Protections for reproductive health and fetal development were evaluated in OHS legislation, employment standards, and associated regulations across Canada's federal and 13 provincial/territorial jurisdictions by a policy analysis, supported by a sex and gender-based thematic and content analysis. OHS and reproductive health keyword frequencies were also determined. Three major themes were identified: (1) inconsistent recognition of workplace risks to reproductive health, (2) job modification, and (3) employer-mandated pregnancy leave. Our review found that workplace protections were generally limited to pregnancy, with little recognition of workplace risks to fertility, suggesting gaps in workplace protections for reproductive health and fetal development. We recommend contemporary reform of Canada's OHS legislation and regulations to support universal, comprehensive, and inclusive protections for reproductive health and fetal development for all workers, regardless of sex and pregnancy status.

After Redress: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice - Komori, Jane (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "After Redress: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice," by Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Mona Oikawa, eds.

A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist - Latham, Graham (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist ," by Don Hamerquist. Edited by Luis Brennan.

200 ans de cohabitation sociale - LeBoutillier, Emma (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "200 ans de cohabitation sociale," by Camille Champagne-Tremblay et Martin Petitclerc.

Remapping an Ableist World: Disability and Oppression Under Capitalism - Lieffers, Caroline (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Remapping an Ableist World: Disability and Oppression Under Capitalism," by Vera Chouinard.

Good Enough to Work, Good Enough to Stay: Domestic Work, Feminist Publishing, and the Archive - Lobo, Rachel (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
The International Coalition to End Domestic Exploitation (intercede) was a Toronto-based organization that began to mobilize in 1979 in response to the growing crisis of abuse faced by domestic workers as a result of exclusionary immigration laws and the absence of workplace rights. The organization convened its activism on three main fronts: lobbying the federal government for new immigration policies that would allow domestic workers to settle in Canada permanently; petitioning for basic protections for domestic workers to be enshrined under provincial labour laws; and undertaking public advocacy that politically linked issues of women’s rights, workers’ rights, and migrant justice through transnational analysis and coalition building. Despite the unprecedented achievements made by intercede, it has largely been excluded from histories of workers’ struggle in Canada. This essay looks at the publication archive of Domestics’ Cross-Cultural News (dc-cn), a monthly newsletter published by intercede from 1984 to 2006 and housed within the online collection of the Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive. As one of only a few periodicals produced by racialized women during this period, dc-cn is not only culturally significant but also an important historiographical tool, offering insight into how work and workers’ struggles have been racialized and gendered within a multicultural and transnational framework. This essay therefore positions dc-cn as a rich artifact that allowed domestic workers to become narrators of their own historical experience.
Keywords: domestic work; feminist print cultures; labour history; social movements; transnational feminisms

Canada’s Women’s Land Army: Wartime Labour and the Power of Visual Evidence - Lonie, Kelsey (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This research note examines Canada’s wartime Women’s Land Army and associated farmerette programs to highlight the value of visual sources for understanding women’s agricultural labour during the First and Second World Wars. Drawing on twenty photographs of women working in orchards, fields, and canneries alongside feminist ethnohistorical methods, it shows how images of uniforms, camp life, and physically demanding farm work both document women’s contributions to the war effort and recover experiences largely absent from conventional archives and policy records. The author argues that combining visual evidence with narrative and reflexive analysis can personalize the historical record, challenge male-centred accounts of wartime labour, and make scholarship on rural women’s work more accessible beyond academia.

Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988 - Miller, Matthew (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988," by David Wight.

Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism - Naylor, James (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism," by Shelton Stromquist.

The Surplus Value and De-Alienation of Working-Class Literatures: On the Work of Chris Pannell - Neilson, Shane (Humanities, 2026)
Though working-class literatures poorly fit within the theoretical purview of contemporary literary studies, the absence of scholarship in the Canadian context is particularly acute. Neoliberal readings thrive at the expense of labour-focused readings, with the possible result of insulating against the desired change such readings wish to bring into being. Because Chris Pannell’s poetry is so focused on work, its representations and spiritual qualities amidst a particular post-industrial location (Hamilton, Ontario), it makes for poetry well suited my goal: to create an ambidextrous reading method. In this article, I summarize the work done to date in Canadian literary studies on both labour and neoliberalism. Due to the relatively thin literature in CanLit available over the past few decades, I bring in Lukács and some American literary scholars (Jameson, Christopher and Whitson, Clarke) to round out what a working-class literature might be theorized as, and read as, in Canada while also keeping in view how critiques of neoliberalism are inadequate to the task of serving the working-class. To recalibrate Canadian literary studies, I bring forward Marx’s ideas concerning surplus value and alienation as they pertain to the production of poetry. While acknowledging the contributions of critiques of neoliberalism in Canadian literature, I critique those readings as rooted in Marx.
Keywords: Canadian literature; alienation; neoliberalism; poetics

Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943 - Niergarth, Kirk (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943," by Andy Friend.

Democracy’s Decline: What’s Class Got to Do with It? - Pilon, Dennis (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This paper critiques the dominant literature on democratic backsliding, arguing that contemporary analyses overemphasize normative decline, populist leadership, and political culture while neglecting the structural role of capitalism. While influential accounts, such as Levitsky and Ziblatt’s focus on eroding norms of mutual toleration and institutional restraint, explain how democratic erosion occurs, they offer limited insight into why the postwar democratic consensus has fractured. Drawing on critiques such as Adam Tooze’s, this study contends that existing scholarship remains analytically thin in its treatment of power. In particular, it highlights the systematic absence of class analysis and the reduction of “the economy” to market fluctuations rather than a set of historically contingent, coercive social relations. Revisiting mid-20th-century critical theorists, including C. Wright Mills, Ralph Miliband, and Göran Therborn, the paper argues for a renewed engagement with the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It suggests that without integrating class dynamics and structural inequalities into analyses of democratic decline, current scholarship risks offering incomplete diagnoses and inadequate remedies for the crisis facing Western democracies.

The Changing Class Basis of Canadian and Social Democratic Futures - Polacko, Matthew; Graefe, Peter; Kiss, Simon (Perspectives, 2026)
Elements of a redistributive and working-class agenda are already in demand, but many voters and especially the working class, feel politically alienated and disaffected that their interests are not being pursued.

Caring Labour and Domestic Violence Shelter Work in the COVID-19 Pandemic - Quinlan, Andrea; Singh, Rashmee; Olenewa, Jenniffer (Social Problems, 2026)
Caring labour has long been a key part of the labour required of domestic violence shelter workers. Under the weight of public health directives during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature and consequences of this caring labour changed. This paper examines these shifts within the broader context of the enduring invisibility of caring labour and the depoliticization of anti-violence work, both of which began long before the COVID-19 pandemic and has endured after. Drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with shelter staff and residents working and living in domestic violence shelters in Ontario, Canada in 2022, we examine the pandemic-related shifts in shelter work and their wide-reaching consequences for workers, survivors, and anti-violence work.

A Timely Exhibit in a Gem of an Archive: Labour, Feminism, Trade, and Free Trade, Then and Now - Sangster, Joan (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article analyzes a contemporary online exhibit from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives that explores feminist perspectives on labour, trade, and free trade in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s, situating these struggles within broader debates over capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Drawing on archival materials documenting organizing by socialist, Marxist, and labour feminists, unions, and community groups, it highlights how critiques of unpaid domestic work, precarious wage labour, and the Canada–US free trade agreement were intertwined with concerns about sovereignty, social programs, immigration, and human rights in the Global South. The article argues that the exhibit’s explicitly political curatorial stance illustrates the importance of “outsider” and community-linked archives for preserving and interpreting the histories of labour, feminism, and the Left, while tracing how earlier feminist economies prefigure later critiques of global trade bodies such as the WTO and IMF.

Labour and the NDP: Revisiting the Past, Looking to the Future - Savage, Larry (Perspectives, 2026)
The NDP’s ability to credibly advance this alternative vision depends largely on whether the labour movement is itself willing and able to engage in such political and economic education.

The Working Class and Politics in Canada - Savage, Larry (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "The Working Class and Politics in Canada," by Jacob Robbins-Kanter, Royce Koop, and Daniel Troup, eds.

“When We Fight, We Win”: Migrant Domestic Worker Organizing and Engaged Intersectional Research in Canada - Shaw, Jennifer E.; Minh, Anita; Massie, Alicia; Bagon, Cenen; Cordero, Kassandra; Mũrage, Alice; Calamba, Rincy Dominic C.; Rosario Martinez, Noemi (International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2026)
Migrant domestic workers have formed the backbone of Canada's care economy, filling gaps in care and performing this undervalued work since the inception of the settler-colonial state. Premilla Nadasen (2023) argues that the care economy is not only subject to the sexist devaluation of women's reproductive work but is rooted in slavery and the racist extraction of work that makes all other work possible. Nadasen also points to the history of resistance, noting that care work has not only been a site of oppression but also a site of resistance. In Canada, stories of exploitation and activist-led change in the care sector have unfolded over two centuries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British women were brought to Canada as nannies. Fitting the image of the white nation brazenly embodied in immigration policies, these white women were provided permanent status on arrival. When the post-World War II period brought larger gaps in care, the Canadian state initiated the West Indian Domestic Scheme in 1955.... --Introduction

Racialized Agrarian Labour Regimes in Canada: Punjabi Farmworkers’ Struggles in the 1980s - Singh, Paramjit (Human Geography, 2026)
This article examines the conditions and struggles of Punjabi farmworkers in Canada during the 1980s, highlighting their resistance to exploitation within a racialized agrarian capitalist system. Focusing on the systemic challenges faced by these workers, the analysis underscores how exploitative practices perpetuated through the capitalist–contractor–corporate food regime shaped the economic and social realities of Punjabi farmworkers. The article also explores the pivotal role of the Canadian Farmworkers Union in mobilizing grassroots action, advocating for workers’ rights, and addressing systemic inequalities. By situating these efforts within broader labor movements, the study sheds light on the intersections of migration, labor, and racial capitalism in Canadian agriculture that still continue in the form of the seasonal agricultural worker program.

Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada - Smith, Charles (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada," by Gregory P. Marchildon.

Poisoned Fields, Fated Lives: Destiny Politics in A Time to Rise - Soomal, Sajdeep (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article examines destiny politics in Anand Patwardhan and Jim Munro’s 1981 documentary A Time to Rise (Uthan da Vela), a film that captures the political struggles of Punjabi farm workers as they organized to establish the Canadian Farmworkers Union (cfu). It argues that the film highlights how Punjabi farm workers in British Columbia could not build a life beyond the exploitative and toxic labour conditions of BC farms without first confronting powerful cultural and religious ideas about predestined life. This article demonstrates that the three main figures involved in making the film – Anand Patwardhan (the filmmaker), Pritam Kaur Hayre (the protagonist), and Sant Ram Udasi (the singer) – each sought to dismantle the hold of destiny politics over the future. First, I explain that A Time to Rise marked a first experiment with what was to become Patwardhan’s signature style of documentary filmmaking: talking groups. Through this reconfiguration of the documentary as a tool for collective dialogue and movement building, Patwardhan sought to break the enduring power of destiny within South Asian communities. Second, I discuss the film’s protagonist Pritam Kaur Hayre, who contested the politics of destiny by seeking a better life through the union rather than the Punjabi family. Lastly, I show how upending destiny politics was a central preoccupation in the anti-caste thought of Sant Ram Udasi, the Mazhabi Punjabi farm-worker-turned-activist who visited British Columbia in 1979 and wrote and performed the film’s titular song, “Uthan da Vela.”
Keywords: Anand Patwardhan; British Columbia; Punjabi feminism; South Asian diaspora; anti-caste philosophy; chemical exposures; destiny; documentary film; farm worker unions

Exceptional Exceptionalism: Does Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code Authorize the Federal Government to Terminate or Suspend the Freedom to Strike by Executive Order? - Tucker, Eric M. (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
Recently the federal government has invoked section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to order the end of otherwise lawful strikes. The government’s claim that the section provides it with this power is in dispute. This research report, adapted from an expert witness report prepared for the law firm representing one of the unions subjected to these orders, investigates the historical understanding of the section and its precursors dating back to its earliest version, enacted in 1918. It finds that the historical understanding of the section was that its purpose was to strengthen statutory conciliation processes, not to empower the government to end otherwise lawful strikes by executive action. This government action not only continues a longer history of exceptionalism in collective bargaining but also marks a rupture by its attempt to enhance the power of the executive.
Keywords: Canada; Canada Labour Code; government interference; history; labour law; right to strike

We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953 - Webb, Brandon (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953," by Shaun Richman.

A Political Economy of Canadian Broadcasting: Public Good Versus Private Profit - Webb, Jeff (Labour / Le Travail, 2026)
This article reviews the book, "A Political Economy of Canadian Broadcasting: Public Good Versus Private Profit," by David Skinner.

Does Employee Organising Power Matter on Wage Levels in the Canadian Gig Economy: The Role of Unionisation, Inflation, Immigration and Information and Communication Technology - Ali, Md Idris (International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 2025)
The progressive advancement of technology and the rise of fissured workplaces have led to significant shifts in global employment structures, particularly towards the gig economy. In Canada, however, gig economy workers remain largely excluded from opportunities for unionisation. Historically, unions have demonstrated substantial organisational power, serving as critical institutions for improving workplace conditions through collective bargaining. This study, therefore, aims to examine the impact of unionisation, immigration, human capital, inflation and information and communication technology on wage determination in Canada, situating the analysis within the broader context of a rapidly evolving employment landscape. Using Canadian time series data from 1980 to 2022, the research uses the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag approach to identify both cointegrating relationships and counterfactual effects among the variables. Additionally, the counterfactual analysis examines the effects of ±1% and ±5% shocks on the dependent variables. The robustness of these findings is confirmed through the kernel-based regularised least squares machine learning approach.,The findings reveal that unionisation, inflation, immigration and information and communication technology development significantly influence wages at a 1% level, while human capital at a 5% level in the long term. The robustness of these findings is further confirmed by the kernel regularised least squares machine learning algorithm.,Based on the findings, the study recommends that policymakers should implement targeted strategies to enhance union representation among gig economy workers and strengthen collective bargaining mechanisms. Additionally, addressing broader factors influencing wage dynamics, such as human capital development, immigration policies, information and communication technology advancements and inflation-indexed wage adjustments, can foster equitable and sustainable wage growth across diverse sectors. Exploring the dynamic and cointegrating relationships between unions’ organising power and wage levels within the purview of inflation, immigration, human capital and information and communication technology development is unprecedented. Additionally, applying the kernel regularised least squares machine learning algorithm to check robustness is completely new in a study within the realm of employment relationships.

Inclusive Management in Public Administration: The Development of a Work-Centred Training Program - Almeida, Beatriz; Cadilhe, Maria; Pereira, Cláudia; Santos, Marta (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
In this article, we aim to understand how a training program can help managers promote inclusive management. We present the development and implementation of a work activity-centred training program for inclusive management in an institution of the Portuguese Public Administration. Using a mixed design-based research methodology, we brought 24 municipal managers into the development and implementation phases of the training program. We organized a focus group of managers to understand their experiences, constraints and training needs for the promotion of inclusive management in their work activity. Questions were put to them before, during and after program implementation. To promote inclusion actions in their work activity, we developed a 60-hour b-learning program. Our findings show the effectiveness of integrating work activity analysis and group reflection when co-creating the training program with participating managers to help them act in their work activity and meet the challenges of inclusive management. The managers reported they had improved their knowledge and resources for inclusive management in their work activity, particularly by thinking and creating together as a group. They valued the participatory and context-specific approach. We conclude that work activity-centred training programs can be key to enhancing the ability of managers to promote inclusive management. The participatory design fostered group learning, grounded in real work contexts, and helped the managers develop inclusion strategies. We provide insights into how inclusive management can be developed collectively, thereby showing the importance of collaboration between Academia and Public Institutions in the development of training programs.
Keywords: Activité de travail; Administration publique; Cadres dirigeants; Diversity; Diversité; Formation; Inclusion; Leadership; Manager; Milieu de travail; Public Administration; Training; Work Activity; Workplace

Symposium - Promising Practices in Scholar-Union Collaboration: Lessons for Building Effective Research Partnerships - Armstrong, Pat; Bittman, Kevin; Hurley, Michael; Stanford, Jim; Tucker, Sean; Vela, Jakin; Weststar, Johanna; Wilson, Fred (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
This symposium considers the prospects for research collaboration between industrial relations scholars and trade unions, as well as its challenges. First, in remarks presented in the 2025 H.D. Woods Lecture at the Canadian Industrial Relations Association / Association canadienne des relations industrielles conference, Jim Stanford reviews the mutual benefits for both scholars and trade unionists from successful research partnerships and proposes strategies for building more respectful and trusting relationships between them. The symposium then presents three case studies of lasting, productive research partnerships, each described by a matched pairing of a scholar with a union representative. Lessons are drawn for future research collaborations.

‘Flying Grannies’ and Human-Capital Citizenship: Care in Humanitarian and Compassionate Cases - Atique, Asma; Tungohan, Ethel; Gaucher, Megan; Yalamarty, Harshita (Social & Legal Studies, 2025)
Given Canada's child care deficit, economic migration remains contingent on the unpaid care work of grandparent migrants, particularly grandmothers or ‘flying grannies’, who arrive through temporary pathways such as the super visa and often juggle multiple transnational caring obligations. However, routine pauses to the parent and grandparent sponsorship program render humanitarian and compassionate applications one of the few options available for grandparents seeking permanent residence. Yet this discretionary tool and grandparents’ multiple caregiving roles continue to be understudied. This socio-legal study, therefore, unpacks narratives of care in 171 humanitarian and compassionate grounds cases involving grandparents who applied to, considered applying, or were referred by judges and immigration officers to apply for the Super Visa. Drawing on Ellermann, we argue that the types of care that are valued and, subsequently, which ‘exceptional’ cases are granted permanent residence, reflect a human-capital citizenship logic and membership status. The subjective criteria used by judges and other ‘gatekeepers’, especially when determining the best interest of any child and hardship, reveal multiple tensions, inconsistencies and a limited notion of care that entrench stereotypes based on race, gender, culture, class and other vectors of social location. Ultimately, family reunification is deemed conditional, and grandparents are rendered temporary.

Remembering Joy Parr (1949–2024) - Backhouse, Constance; Janovicek, Nancy (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Homage to the life and work of historian Joy Parr, who wrote widely on labour and gender history, and the history of technology.

Navigating Streets, Restaurants, and Algorithms: A Study of Young Immigrant Food Delivery Couriers in Montréal and Toronto - Baril, Émile; Vultur, Mircea (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Major Canadian cities have seen an overrepresentation of young and immigrant workers delivering meals in their food delivery industries. This type of labour is increasingly done via online digital platforms. The objective of this article is to use interviews to analyze the working conditions and experiences of food delivery workers in Toronto and Montréal, highlighting the elements of precariousness that characterize this type of work. The degree to which customers perform managerial functions through digital platforms is only one of the various forms and aspects of algorithmic control experienced by delivery workers. Through 30 semi-structured interviews with delivery riders, and notes collected through participatory observation, this article presents commonly experienced negative aspects of platform work among young and immigrant delivery drivers.
Keywords: algorithmic control; digital economy; food delivery; platform labour; precarity; urban spaces

The ‘Contract’ and Its Discontents: Can It Address Protection Gaps for Migrant Agricultural Workers in Canada? - Basok, Tanya; Tucker, Eric M.; Vosko, Leah F.; Caxaj, C. Susana; Hennebry, Jenna L.; Mayell, Stephanie; McLaughlin, Janet; Weiler, Anelyse M. (International Migration, 2025)
Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that the article co-authors presented during the annual Contract negotiations between Canada and sending states in 2020. The article then explains why these recommendations were not accepted, situating the negotiation process within the structural context that produces migrant workers' vulnerability, on the one hand, and limits the capacity of representatives of sending and receiving states to expand rights and offer stronger protections to migrant farmworkers, on the other hand. We argue that fundamental changes are required to address the vulnerability of migrant agricultural workers. In the absence of structural changes, it is nevertheless important to seek improvements in the regulation of the programme through any means possible, including strengthening the Contract.

Dans la rue. Une histoire du frapru et des luttes pour le logement au Québec - Bergeron-Gaudin, Jean-Vincent (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the book, "Dans la rue. Une histoire du frapru et des luttes pour le logement au Québec," by François Saillant.

Beyond a Boundary of Systemic Anti-Black Racism in the Workplace in Canada - Blackett, Adelle (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2025)
In this lecture, I will, however, focus on one of the legacies of slavery, that is, the largely untold story of racial segregation in the world of work in Canada. We have come so effectively, and rightly, to focus on the effects of discrimination, that we may have inadvertently walked past the history. Reclaiming this history will comprise the first part of my talk. The second part of my talk will reference the emergence of the duty of fair representation. I will seek to illustrate the weight of the erasure of anti-Black racism through this duty. In other words, far from representing a peculiarity of US law that failed to travel well,8 Steele v Louisville & Nashville Railway Co’s9 foundation in racial discrimination needs to be acknowledged and engaged for an inherent tension to be addressed. So third and finally, I will posit the paradox of unresolved “choice” at the heart of the majoritarian frame of the Wagner Act, not to try somehow to resolve it, but by refusing to allow us to all too quickly individualize it, and instead to steer us closer to a related, necessary justification for a proactive commitment that we have already, if incompletely, made— the commitment to embracing the societal transformation entailed by achieving and sustaining substantive equality through employment equity

La négociation collective au tournant du millénaire : le cas des travailleurs chez Columbia Forest Products à Hearst - Blais, Sophie (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
À l’aube du 21e siècle, l’arrivée des multinationales change à tout jamais la dynamique entre les travailleurs et le patronat dans l’industrie forestière à Hearst en Ontario. Cet article examine le déroulement des événements et les principales transformations apportées aux conventions collectives signées entre les travailleurs hearstois et l’entreprise américaine Columbia Forest Products, un producteur de contreplaqué, pendant environ une décennie. Lorsque des scieries familiales sont vendues à des géants de l’industrie, le processus de négociation des ententes se métamorphose. La conjoncture économique joue également un rôle déterminant dans l’articulation des conventions collectives à un moment où l’industrie forestière nord-ontarienne traverse une série de crises, notamment le conflit canado-américain du bois d’œuvre. À maintes reprises, les travailleurs syndiqués doivent consentir une partie de leurs gains historiques pour tenter de sauver leurs emplois.
Keywords: Franco-Ontarian workforce; Hearst; Northern Ontario; collective agreements; forestry industry; sawmills; softwood lumber dispute

Bargaining for Equity at MSVU: From Performativity to Transformation - Boulet, Geneviève; Findlay, Tammy; Piccitto, Diane; Resmer, Kelly; Gillis, Michael (CAUT Journal, 2025)
In this paper, we reflect on our experiences in the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association and our efforts to prioritize decolonizing, indigenizing, and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EDIA) in the collective bargaining process. We examine the performative nature of EDIA efforts in negotiations by university administrators and the Board of Governors, outlining our employer’s active resistance to proposals pertaining to EDIA, their lack of explicit Indigenous and EDIA expertise on their bargaining team, their sidelining and exclusion of university Indigenous and EDIA experts, as well as the absence of transparency and accountability in decision-making. We suggest that three actions — strengthening internal and external solidarity, democratizing governance, and pursuing legislative reform — offer a pathway to rethinking equity-based bargaining, challenging the instrumentalization of EDIA, and achieving genuine structural change.
Keywords: bargaining; decolonizing; equity; indigenizing; university governance

From Post-Hoc Accommodation to Inclusive Design: Bargaining for Policies that Truly Include Workers With Disabilities - Breward, Katherine (CAUT Journal, 2025)
Efforts to improve inclusion of workers with disabilities have often focused on providing accommodations. While this is useful and necessary, the need for an accommodation signals that a barrier exists. What if fewer barriers existed in the first place? The inclusive design movement seeks to create tools, policies, and practices that are inherently barrier-free. This paper reviews how to apply inclusive design principles to HR policies and procedures, enabling the creation of more inherently equitable practices. Bargaining teams have an important role to play in ensuring that collective agreement clauses related to HR comply with inclusive design principles. Specific recommendations are made, with particular attention to recruitment, selection, tenure and promotion, attendance management, scheduling, and enforcement of respectful communication policies.
Keywords: HR policy; Inclusive design; collective agreements; disability; diversity; equity

Structured Exclusions, Partial Inclusions: Transnational Care Chains and Temporary Foreign Workers in Atlantic Canada - Bryan, Catherine; Fitting, Elizabeth (Dialectical Anthropology, 2025)
This paper explores the transnational practices of migrant workers who access short-term employment in Atlantic Canada’s food production sector via two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP): the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the low-waged stream. Based on interviews with migrant workers—SAWP farmworkers from Jamaica and Mexico and low-waged fish plant workers from the Philippines—we explore their differential rights in Canada corresponding to the different parameters of each immigration stream. Reflecting the livelihood strategies and reproductive efforts of our interviewees and the extent to which these have been transformed in response to the conditions and limited opportunities afforded by Canadian immigration policy, we advance the concepts of “agricultural care chains” and “citizenship care chains”. In doing so, we suggest that the consideration of work and outcomes not conventionally understood as “care” reflects an important analytical and political contribution to the care chain scholarship as well as draws attention to how care scholarship and social reproduction theory can be more closely aligned. Central to our efforts is Tungohan’s argument (2019) that in considering transnational circuits of care, we must recognize the asymmetry that characterizes peoples’ relationships and the social locations they occupy—asymmetry that, in the context of our participants’ lives, is reinforced through the differential rights and opportunities afforded to migrant workers by Canadian immigration policy.
Keywords: Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP); Citizenship care chains; Migrant food workers; Social reproduction; Transnational agricultural care chains; Transnationalism

The Spectre of the Manifesto: Classical Marxism and Its Discontents - Burgmann, Verity (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Using the more inclusive terminology of "alter-globalization" [i.e., the various names for radical protest against globalization], this article investigates the political predilections of this movement during its heyday around the turn of the millennium and seeks to understand why a force leading the charge against neoliberal global capitalism ostensibly owed little to Marxism compared with its other avowed sources for inspiration. It finds that although Marxian analysis was being substantied by the remorseless spread of capitalism around the world, there was a practical political problem related to the very salience of this Classical Marxian approach: that is, the Marxism of the Second International - in short, the Marxism expressed in the [Communist] Manifesto. --From introduction
Keywords: Autonomism; Marxism; Meghnad Desai; Perry Anderson; Stuart Hall; anarchism; globalization; neoliberalism; utopianism

Resisting Eviction: Domicide and the Financialization of Rental Housing - Burrill, Fred (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the book, "Resisting Eviction: Domicide and the Financialization of Rental Housing," by Andrew Crosby.

Long-Haul Issue No. 1 (Winter 2025) - Camfield, David (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the journal issue. "Long-Haul Issue No. 1 (Winter 2025)" edited by Dylan Davis and Stefan Yong.

“Why Have There Been So Many Strikes at York University?”: An Explanation by Way of Ideological Stratification - Campbell, Colin (Canadian Journal of Practical Philosophy, 2025)
This paper employs a four-fold ideological schema – business liberalism, welfare liberalism, social democracy, and hard-left socialism or communism – to examine the dynamics of the history of labour disruptions at York University. It sets the strikes in the context of a long-term decline of funding for postsecondary education in the social sciences and humanities, with the current rounds of restructuring at York representing a new local point of crisis. The problem of blame as a mode of explaining and resolving conflicts is discussed, along with a view of how contrasting and overlapping pragmatic or principled, individualistic or group-oriented ideas account for the prevalence of labour action.
Keywords: Blame; Business Liberalism; Communism; Pragmatism; Principle; Social Democracy; Socialism; Welfare Liberalism

On Marxism, Rosa Luxemburg, and Anti-globalization: A Response to Burgmann - Campbell, J. Peter (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article challenges Verity Burgmann’s claim that “Classical Marxism” is fatally enamoured with the dynamism of capital and therefore unable to sustain resistance to globalization. It argues that this charge rests on an overly neat identification of Classical Marxism with Second International orthodoxy and a distorted reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s work, particularly The Accumulation of Capital, which is shown to emphasize the violent incorporation and intensified exploitation of colonized and racialized workers rather than celebrating capitalist advance. The article also contends that Burgmann’s dismissal of Leninism and Third International Marxism erases their formative role in anti‑colonial struggles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America that helped make later anti‑ and alter‑globalization movements possible. In addition, it questions Burgmann’s elevation of anarchism and autonomist Marxism, noting her neglect of feminist organizing and women’s movements, and arguing that many of the qualities she attributes to these currents, above all, an insistence on agency, consciousness, and mass self‑activity, are already present in Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s Marxism. The article concludes that Marxism, understood through Luxemburg and Lenin rather than through Burgmann’s caricature of Classical Marxism, offers a still‑vital framework for confronting contemporary globalization, grounded in working‑class self‑emancipation and internationalist opposition to imperialism.
Keywords: Leninism; Marxism; anarchism; anti-globalization; capitalism; colonialism; globalization; imperialism; masses; proletariat

Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change - Castellini, Valentina (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change," by Stefania Barca.

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Employment of Immigrants: A Case Study of Bangladeshi Women in Canada - Chowdhury, Farah Deeba (Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 2025)
The Canadian economy has been suffering from the damaging impact of COVID-19. The adverse impact of COVID-19 on employment and income has been unevenly affecting different socio-economic and demographic groups in Canada. Labour market impact of COVID-19 disproportionately affected immigrants, particularly women as they are overrepresented in low paid and precarious work in Canada. Although federal emergency benefits were provided such as Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), marginalized workers were excluded from these benefits as they were not able to meet the eligibility criteria. Based on the interviews of 20 women from the Bangladeshi community in the Greater Toronto Area my research finds that neoliberalism contributes to the rise of  precarious employment and labour market insecurity and the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the stark contrast in divisions in the labour market between workers with relatively secure jobs and the ability to work from home, those without the ability to work from home (especially in precarious jobs) and those who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.  My findings show that a majority of immigrant Bangladeshi women in the Greater Toronto Area who were employed were working in precarious jobs that were low-paying, temporary or contractual in nature. I find a high level of job loss, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, disproportionately experienced by immigrant Bangladeshi women as they are more vulnerable and marginalized in Canada.
Keywords: Bangladesh; COVID-19; Canada; Neoliberalism; Precarious Employment

Organiser, mobiliser, gagner. Guide de renouveau syndical - Collombat, Thomas (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the book, "Organiser, mobiliser, gagner. Guide de renouveau syndical," by Alain Savard.

Les simulacres du socialisme: les relations entre les mouvements marxistes-léninistes canadiens et l’Albanie - Dani, Doan (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article highlights the relationships between the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and the Party of Labour of Albania in an ambivalent context, where the process of establishing bilateral relations between Ottawa and Tirana is sluggish, while the façades of socialist Albania and the regime’s rhetoric circulate widely thanks to a highly dynamic network of Marxist proselytizers and propaganda instruments. Focusing on the period from the founding of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) in 1970 to the collapse of the regime in Albania in 1991, the analysis is primarily based on unpublished archives from the Party of Labour and the Albanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as articles from the Canadian press. It seeks to answer the following questions: How do relations between Ottawa and Tirana unfold? How and why does Albania become a beacon of socialism in Canada? Why is the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) recognized by Tirana? How do these relations manifest themselves?
Keywords: Albania; Canada; Communist Party; Marxism-Leninism; Quebec; political pilgrimage; propaganda

Unionization Rates and Health in Canadian Provinces, 2000 - 2020 - Das, Anupam; Hudson, Ian; Hudson, Mark (Journal of Critical Public Health, 2025)
This paper examines one possible, but understudied, institution that might have an impact on health: unionization. We outline four distinct, although complementary, pathways through which unions might influence population health outcomes based on two axes: the levers that unions can potentially pull to influence any policy environment (collective bargaining and political action) and the manner in which health can be influenced in a society (the Social Determinants of Health and health care). We test whether unionization rates have an impact on total, preventable, and treatable mortality using panel data on Canadian provinces between 2000 and 2020. We find that unionization rates are negatively associated with all three measures of mortality.
Keywords: Canada; Health; Mortality; Political Economy of Health; Social Determinants of Health; Unions

« Arrêter, une fois pour toutes, de manger de la vache enragée. » Le Groupe Action-Alimentation de Pointe-Saint-Charles et le droit à l’alimentation, 1970–2000 - Durand, Caroline (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article tells the story of the Groupe Action-Alimentation, a workshop created by the Carrefour d’éducation populaire of Pointe-Saint-Charles in the 1970s. It describes how, in a neoliberal context, the participants and their main facilitator advocate for the right to food. They expose the experience of hunger, they affirm the skills of low-income women in matters of dietetics, cooking, and consumption, they use the language of law, they denounce the use of charity, and they criticize the state and private companies. This research illustrates how the participants in this workshop perceive, qualify, and interpret their reality, how they manifest their class consciousness and their convictions about their right to health, dignity, and well-being. We observe that this local resistance to social and economic marginalization had an impact on the positions taken by nutrition professionals and, ultimately, on certain Quebec policies aimed at achieving food security, adopted in the early 2000s. This contribution to the history of economic, social, and cultural rights analyzes the words of women who refused to individualize the problem of food among the most deprived and who instead denounced the commodification of essential goods.
Keywords: Groupe Action-Alimentation; Pointe-Saint-Charles Montreal; fight against poverty; food; nutrition; right to food

Framing Modern Slavery: Do Stakeholders Talk Past Each Other? - Durocher, Sylvain; Himick, Darlene; Walsh, Leigh Ellen (Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences / Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l'Administration, 2025)
Modern slavery literature has thus far mostly adopted a downstream perspective, in the sense that researchers investigated corporate actors' responses after the enactment of transparency legislation. The common finding is that corporate disclosure is poor and ineffective, contributing to a failure to eradicate modern slavery. Our contribution is to adopt an upstream perspective in which we examine debates before regulation is crafted. We conceive of modern slavery as a public policy issue where multiple actors—NGOs, institutional investors, corporations and policymakers—hold various views about modern slavery and how to act upon it. Drawing on framing theory as used in public policy research, our aim is to uncover how stakeholders comparatively frame the issue of modern slavery, enabling a better understanding of why transparency legislation fails. Focussing on the Canadian context, where regulatory requirements on modern slavery were recently enacted, we examine an extensive set of communications, including testimony before parliamentary committees by four stakeholder groups. We explore stakeholders' rhetorical frames, uncovering how they conceive of modern slavery and their action frames, highlighting how they believe it should be acted upon. We show that stakeholders' rhetorical and action frames are embedded within overarching opposing metacultural frames, namely a community frame held by NGOs and a market frame held by institutional investors, corporations and policymakers. NGOs' community metacultural frame paves the way for approaches focused on eradication because harm to a community implies removing the harm. In opposition, other stakeholders' market metacultural frames pave the way for approaches focused on risk assessment, management and reporting, since the appearance of information on modern slavery and associated risks implies being able to manage it. Although stakeholders talk past each other about the issue of modern slavery, we identify possibilities for reframing, where holders of a market frame could move closer to a community frame.
Keywords: Canadian legislation; framing theory; modern slavery; multi-stakeholder approach

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Political Mobilization and Policy Reform in Québec - Eidlin, Barry; Guay, Emanuel (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Québec enacted major solidaristic family and housing policy reforms toward the end of the 1990s, precisely when other countries were moving toward more individualized policies. Against what existing theories would predict, these reforms took place at a moment when labour's power had weakened, the ruling left party had scaled back its progressive commitments, and employers opposed the proposed reforms. Why did Québec expand its social policies in a broader context of retrenchment? We argue that this resulted from a shift in the context of contention that sparked a process of institutional conversion. First, labour-allied progressive movements in the province were able, through their own cycle of mobilization, to fill the gap left by unions' retreat from direct action and mass mobilization from the 1980s onwards. Second, employers remained relatively weak and state-dependent, leading them to accept the government's agenda as long as it did not differ significantly from their priorities of deficit and tax reduction. Third, the idea of the "social economy" served as a floating signifier in the province's public policy debates of the 1990s, providing a framework within which unions, community groups, employers, and the government could operate while assigning it different definitions and aims. The ambiguity of the idea of the social economy helped to forge a disparate coalition of Québec social actors, resulting in solidaristic policy reforms. Our analysis aligns with recent literature calling for a renewed attention to the role played by contention in the development of social policies in Québec.
Keywords: Québec; childcare; housing; policy reform; poverty; social movements; social reproduction; state-society relations; welfare state

Timely Reminders: Pulignano and Domecka’s The Politics of Unpaid Labour: How the Study of Unpaid Labour Can Help Address Inequality in Precarious Work - Emilien, Blandine (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

The Transformative Potential of Casework: Analyzing the Political Subjectivation of Migrant Workers at the Immigrant Workers Center - Etienne, Aurélie (Social Movement Studies, 2025)
Canada’s immigration policy has undergone a major shift in recent decades, from an approach centered on permanent immigration to a system increasingly focused on temporary migration. Temporary migrants face highly unequal power relations in the workplace, making them particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Drawing on fieldwork at the Immigrant Workers Center (IWC), a Quebec-based activist organization, this paper examines how migrant workers come to engage in political action despite this adverse context, and how they experience such action. The analysis is informed by the concept of political subjectivation, defined as the process by which individuals contest their subordinate position within a political order and seek to redefine it on more egalitarian terms. I argue that migrant workers’ political subjectivation is supported by the IWC’s participatory and collective approach to casework. In workers centers, casework refers to the practice of providing individual assistance to workers. While it is often described as an individualized and depoliticized approach to social change, my research shows how the practice of casework at the IWC fosters individual and collective transformations conducive to political subjectivation. Thus, it contributes to recent literature on radical approaches to casework and literature at the intersection of social movement and popular education scholarship.
Keywords: Migrant workers; casework; labour struggles; political subjectivation; workers centers

Navigating Engagement in the New Normal of Telework: Cultural Differences between France and Canada - Falcon, Gaëlle; Klarsfeld, Alain; Saba, Tania (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
The shift to telework has significantly transformed traditional work environments, introducing new dynamics in employee relationships and organizational structures. Telework is now mainstream, but it also presents new challenges for employee engagement. To address these challenges, effective management requires processes aimed at improving employees’ sense of engagement. This study compares the effects of three variables, organizational fairness, trust in/by managers, and trust in/by colleagues, on teleworkers’ psychological engagement in Canada and France. Based on a PLS-SEM analysis on two samples of 196 participants in France and 454 in Canada, findings show that organizational fairness is a key common antecedent of teleworkers' engagement in both countries. They also revealed strong cultural differences: trust in and by managers is crucial in Canada, while trust in and by colleagues is significant in France.

The Transnational Agricultural Care Chains of Migrant Farmworkers: Land, Livelihoods, and Social Reproduction - Fitting, Elizabeth (Agriculture and Human Values, 2025)
Drawing on interviews with seasonal agricultural workers employed in Canada from Jamaica and Mexico, this paper focuses in on the experiences of a Jamaican farmworker who remits funds to pay a neighbour to farm his land (or the land he leases) while in Canada, and who participates in regular long-distance discussions with family members and neighbours back home about the upkeep of the farm. The concept of a “transnational agricultural care chain” is proposed here to capture a series of personal links between people, located, at least temporarily, in different countries, who tend to the crops and farmland as a practice that entails asymmetrical relations of obligation to care for others. Agricultural care chains form part of a strategy to get by and possibly even advance the economic and social standing of one’s family under difficult economic conditions. Land access, as a co-constitutive sphere of production and reproduction, is another important factor in the livelihood strategies of rurally-rooted migrants, but the significance placed on land must be understood in connection to the uneven processes of global capitalism, histories of colonialism and, in the case of Jamaica, plantation slavery. The paper concludes with a reflection on how transnational agricultural care chains as paradigmatic of the contemporary food system are relevant to political and conceptual discussions around food sovereignty.
Keywords: Canada; Food system; Jamaica; Livelihoods; Mexico; Migrant farmworkers; Rural surplus labour; Social reproduction; The temporary foreign worker program; Transnational agricultural care chains

Reading the Zoom Room: Union Negotiators’ Experience of Virtual Bargaining during COVID-19 - Foster, Jason (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
One adaptation required by the Covid-19 pandemic was a shift to virtual meetings. Collective bargaining has traditionally been conducted in person, but covid forced union and employer negotiators to adopt virtual forms of bargaining. This article examines union negotiators’ experiences with virtual bargaining in this period – first, to document the nature of the adaptations made during a historical public health event, and second, to determine whether either the shift to virtual bargaining or other covid restrictions undermined union bargaining power. It finds that the technical aspects of virtual bargaining did not significantly impact bargaining power, but broader challenges caused by covid did negatively impact union bargaining power at and away from the table.
Keywords: bargaining power; collective bargaining; covid-19; virtual negotiation

Introductory Article – Thematic Issue "Perspectives on Inclusive Management from Both Sides of the Atlantic” - Fourot, Loïc; Meier, Olivier; Brière, Sophie; Makaya, Christian; Bruna, Maria-Giuseppina (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Article introductif – numéro thématique « Regards croisés des deux côtés de l’Atlantique sur le management de l’inclusion » - Fourot, M. Loïc; Meier, Olivier; Brière, Sophie; Makaya, Christian; Bruna, Maria-Giuseppina (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Strike Law and Workers’ Power Resources in Global Supply Chains and Platform Giants - Fudge, Judy; Shamir, Hila (Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 2025)
The right to strike is a key feature of freedom of association and effective collective bargaining. We consider how the legal regulation of strikes and boycotts affects the power resources available to workers and unions to improve working conditions and workers’ voice in firms, such as global supply chains and platform giants, that utilize network-of-contracts business models. We begin by bringing the literatures on power resources theory and supply chain and platform capitalism into conversation. Treating law as a form of institutional power influencing workers’ ability to exercise other power resources in network-of-contracts business models, we then examine how the laws regulating strikes influence workers’ ability to mobilize their other power resources to affect the terms and conditions of work. We investigate the Make Amazon Pay campaign and related strikes to gauge how the legal regulation of strikes affects workers’ power to disrupt supply and production under network-of-contracts business models. We conclude by highlighting the need to revise the law of strikes to fit the power relations under supply and platform capitalism.

Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain - Glass, Melissa (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain," by Heather Meek.

Résister et fleurir - Grandbois-Bernard, Estelle (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Résister et fleurir," by Jean-Félix Chénier and Yoakim Bélanger.

Bargaining for Salary Equity: General Wage Increases and Equity in the Academic Labour Market - Green, Brian; Sahota, Derek; Scott, Jennifer (CAUT Journal, 2025)
In collective bargaining, General Wage Increases (GWI) are most normally framed and implemented as percentages, with each eligible member seeing a salary rise of X% on top of pre-existing salary. While this approach is not remarkable where salary grids are in place and union members start at the same rate, it can have significant effects where starting salaries vary, as is common in the university sector. Under these conditions, percentage increases over time contribute to the widening of intra-member salary inequity, exacerbating structurally gendered and racialized inequities of the academic labour market. This paper explores the impact of a flat rate increase approach to salary bargaining. Beginning with the context of collective bargaining in British Columbia, it examines how percentage-based and flat-rate increases would impact real salaries of faculty members at Simon Fraser University in order to better understand how faculty associations and unions could use flat rate approaches to begin to counteract the impact of differential starting salaries on the career earnings of faculty members. The paper finds that flat rate increases could be an effective tool against pay inequity even where that inequity is driven by forces outside the university.
Keywords: bargaining; equity; salaries

Drinking on the Job: Liquor and Labour in the Staples Trades - Greer, Allan (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article examines the role of alcohol, specifically rum, in labour relations in the early staples trades. In the 18th-century colonies that would later form Canada, labour was generally scarce and therefore expensive. Employers had to offer high wages as they struggled to recruit and retain workers, but because their enterprises were typically undercapitalized and vulnerable to market fluctuations, they could not afford to pay the salaries in full at the end of the contracted period. Focusing on the fishing servants of Newfoundland and the voyageurs of the North West Company, the article shows how wages were systematically clawed back through the workings of a version of "truck." Payment was deferred to the end of the season, and in the interim, employers would supply their men with goods at inflated prices, ensuring that many ended up indebted beyond the value of their nominal wages and had to sign on for a further term to pay off their debts. Rum was a crucial element in this system, its addictive qualities making it the ideal instrument for absorbing earnings. Many fishing masters and fur traders actively encouraged consumption; drinking on the job, then, was not only allowed but, in some cases, practically mandatory.
Keywords: North West Company; fishery; fur trade; history of Canada; history of alcohol; labour; rum; staples thesis; voyageurs

Flying High on Stipends: A Historical Analysis of Flight Attendant Union Struggles in (Neoliberal) Canada - Haggett, Kenneth; Kwon, Eugena; Cormier, Lauren (Labor History, 2025)
Since the establishment of the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants’ Association (CALFAA) in 1948 and the Airline Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in 1984, flight attendant unions have advocated for duty time limits, sufficient rest periods, and fair wages. Recently, CUPE’s Airline Division has focused their efforts on unpaid ground time – a vital but overlooked element of flight attendant labor. Despite the union’s efforts, the persistence of unpaid ground time illustrates a trend of systemic prioritization of corporate profit over workplace equity. Through an overview of academic and grey literature (e.g. news articles, government documents), this review details the history of Canadian flight attendant unions before and after neoliberal reforms in the 1980s to trace trends in labor relations. We argue that increased governmental intervention and corporate exemptions in employee-employer labor relations prioritize the industry’s financial stability, forming structural barriers that dilute unions’ change-making capacity. Ultimately, we contextualize unpaid ground time within these trends – where systemic prioritization of corporate interests trump unions’ labor concerns, leaving attendants’ workplace inequity unaddressed.
Keywords: Canada; Union; flight attendant; labor; neoliberalism; unpaid ground time

Serf-ing the Net: Contrasting Uber Workers in the United Kingdom With Uber Neo-Villeins in Ontario - Harvey, Geraint; Prakasam, Naveena; Shakirzhanov, Refat (Industrial Relations Journal, 2025)
We illustrate the exploitation in the relationship between Uber and its drivers by aligning their work with the characteristics of neo-villeiny. Two different legal developments in response to irregulation (or the lack of effective regulation) in similar institutional contexts emerge. While Uber drivers in the United Kingdom now have worker status, dysregulation (by which we mean regulation that exacerbates the problem it seeks to resolve) in Ontario has established neo-villeiny in law.
Keywords: Ontario; UK; Uber; digital platform; labour law; neo-villeiny

Collective Workers’ Funds and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Sweden and Québec - Ikebe, Shannon (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Wage-earner funds (löntagarfonder) in Sweden and the Fonds de solidarité ftq in Québec, both founded in 1983, are two of the most significant examples of collective workers' investment funds run by unions. This article situates the political context of their emergence in the neoliberal turn of social democracy in the early 1980s. In Sweden, the wage-earner funds were initially proposed as a radical anti-capitalist project in 1975, but the Social Democratic Party leadership developed the idea into a qualitatively distinct plan aimed at increasing investment capital available for private firms, as part of its new market-accommodating program. In Québec, the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (ftq) proposed the solidarity fund as it moved toward concertation and away from the democratic economic planning and autogestion (worker self-management) that it had championed in the 1970s. In both cases, pro-market forces within organized labour proposed the funds so that workers' capital could be used to stimulate private, for-profit investment, while recuperating elements of earlier labour radicalism that had sought to enhance workers' power over capital. Built with an institutional orientation toward the incorporation of workers into financial capitalism, these collective workers' funds represent a neoliberal shift within organized labour in Sweden and Québec, two places where labour is comparatively well organized.
Keywords: Québec; Sweden; economic democracy; labour-sponsored investment funds; neoliberalism; social democracy; wage-earner funds

Beyond Wage Increases: How Have Unionized Workplaces in Quebec’s Private Sector Adapted to Labour Shortages? - Jalette, Patrice (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
How have workplaces in Quebec's unionized private sector adapted to recent labour shortages? Based on original qualitative and quantitative data, we show that these shortages have affected collective bargaining, collective agreements, work organization, working conditions and union life. As a result, workplace actors have had to be pragmatic in adjusting their practices in response to disruptions caused by labour shortages. The originality of our research lies in its broad perspective on the consequences of labour market tension for labour relations, thus highlighting unexplored and unprecedented effects, both positive and negative on employers, workers and unions.
Keywords: Shortage; collective agreement; collective bargaining; discipline; employer; human resource management; labour; labour market; training; turnover; union

Par-delà les augmentations de salaire : comment les milieux de travail syndiqués du secteur privé se sont-ils adaptés au manque de main-d’œuvre au Québec ? - Jalette, Patrice (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
How have workplaces in Quebec's unionized private sector adapted to recent labour shortages? Based on original qualitative and quantitative data, we show that these shortages have affected collective bargaining, collective agreements, work organization, working conditions and union life. As a result, workplace actors have had to be pragmatic in adjusting their practices in response to disruptions caused by labour shortages. The originality of our research lies in its broad perspective on the consequences of labour market tension for labour relations, thus highlighting unexplored and unprecedented effects, both positive and negative, on employers, workers and unions.
Keywords: Pénurie; convention collective; discipline; employeur; formation; gestion des ressources humaines; main-d’oeuvre; marché du travail; négociation collective; roulement; syndicat

Introduction du numéro spécial traitant des répercussions des pénuries et des manques de main-d’œuvre et de compétences sur les relations industrielles et la gestion des ressources humaines - Jalette, Patrice; Charest, Jean; Kirov, Vassil (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Introduction to the special issue on the impact of labour and skills shortages on industrial relations and human resource management - Jalette, Patrice; Charest, Jean; Kirov, Vassil (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

Pratiques de management inclusives : développer l’autonomie au travail en ESAT à partir de la vulnérabilité - Jaujard, François; Dubruc, Nadine (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
In France, 7.5% of the total number of 15-64 year-olds recognized as disabled are in employment, i.e. 39%, compared with 68% for these age groups as a whole: this means that a vulnerable population remains a long way from employment. In contrast to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which seeks to eliminate segregation in employment and promote an open labor market, work-based support establishments and services (ESAT) aim to play a key role in helping people with disabilities access employment. They offer professional activity as well as medical, social and educational support in a protected environment. Our research does not assume that ESAT are models of inclusive organization but gives a voice to the workers and staff of these structures specialized in supporting work activity. If the aim of autonomy support is to create an enabling environment, according to the capabilities approach, our problem is to demonstrate the extent to which support in a situation of vulnerability encourages the development of autonomy with the aim of inclusion in the workplace. The analysis of testimonials from 70 people from 12 volunteer ESATs (54 hours of face-to-face interviews) identifies the demands and needs related to this support. The characteristics of the population surveyed are representative of those of the entire population of the ESATs studied and the interviews cover all the ESATs in the study in a balanced manner. The results inspire inclusive management practices in the workplace, based on mutual understanding that empowers people. They renew the concept of developing autonomy, defined not as a goal of self-sufficiency, but as a process of overcoming vulnerability through a supportive relationship. Care, a relationship of kindness and high standards, central to this approach, becomes the way to deal with vulnerability.
Keywords: ESAT; Inclusion; accompagnement; autonomie; autonomy; care; disability; handicap; support; travail; vulnerability; vulnérabilité; work

Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898-1918 - Kealey, Gregory S. (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the book, "Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898-1918" by Zhongping Chen.

Theorising New Potentials for Teacher Activism: Union and Grassroots Activist Responses to COVID-19 School Reopening Plans in Canada - Keil, Trudy; Osmond-Johnson, Pamela (Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2025)
Using post-structural theories, this paper explores the public discourses of several Canadian teacher unions and grassroots teacher activist groups around the issue of school reopening plans in Canada amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper aims to highlight the ways in which these two forces of teacher activism can influence and impress upon each other to create a different possible future for collective resistance to neoliberalism in education – an assemblage of union and grassroots activism intra-acting, shaping, and impressing upon one another.
Keywords: Teacher activism; affect theory; assemblage theory; neoliberalism; poststructuralism; teacher unions

Beyond the Usual Suspects: Job Desperation as a Driver of Turnover Intention and Job Search Behaviour - Kertechian, Kevin; El-Farr, Hadi (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
Workers may experience job desperation, characterized by frustration, pressure to quit and readiness to take extreme steps to secure a new job position. We examined the psychometric properties of a French-language version of the Job Desperation Scale by administering a survey to three independent cohorts of French-speaking employees, with a view to assessing the antecedents of job search behaviour and intention to quit. The first (n = 253) and second (n = 184) cohorts, composed of employees from France and Canada respectively, responded to the survey for the exploratory and confirmatory stages of analysis. The third sample (n = 252) of French employees responded both to the survey and to additional measures that typically identify antecedents of job search behaviour and turnover intention. The findings confirm the single-factor structure and robustness of the French-language version. More importantly, they show the substantial and incremental predictive power of job desperation in explaining job search behaviour and turnover intention. These insights help explain job desperation as a critical factor in contemporary labour markets and contribute to the vocational behaviour literature.

The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor - King, Adam D. K. (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor," by Hamilton Nolan.

Conscripted to Care: Women on the Frontlines of the covid-19 Response - Klostermann, Janna (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the book, "Conscripted to Care: Women on the Frontlines of the covid-19 Response," by Julia Smith.

“It Could Not Be an Ordinary Labour Union”: Race, Class, Exclusion, and the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers Union, 1920–1941 - Komori, Jane (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article provides a history of the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers Union (JCMWU), from its founding in 1920 until its dissolution during the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Canadians. The JCMWU was, according to union organizer Ryuichi Yoshida, a “general union of all Japanese workers” that “could not be an ordinary labour union.” Organized along the lines of race rather than by trade or industry, the union fought struggles against bosses, business owners, state officials, and the Asian exclusion movement through a number of programs and activities. But perhaps more than anything else, the jcmwu was a political education project, centred around its newspapers, Rōdō Shūhō and Nikkan Minshū. Drawing on previously untranslated materials from these newspapers, this article takes up the extraordinary analysis and activities of the JCMWU to contribute to broader discussions about the relationship of race, labour, capitalism, and imperialism.
Keywords: Asian exclusion; Japanese Camp and Mill Workers Union; Japanese Canadians; ethnic labour organizations; political education

Legal Responses to Work-Related Intimate Partner Violence in Canada: Troubling Privatization - Koshan, Jennifer (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2025)
Intimate partner violence and coercive control can manifest in abusers’ attempts to sabotage their partners’ participation in employment. Work-related intimate partner violence (WRIPV) also implicates employers, governments, and society more broadly, challenging the individualizing frame often applied to IPV. However, the legal recognition of WRIPV has been slow and sporadic, disproportionately impacting women experiencing intersecting inequalities, who are more vulnerable to IPV and to work-related inequalities. This article examines how governments have responded to WRIPV, situating their responses in the continuing legacy of the public/private distinction. Using a rights-based framework, I evaluate the two newest Canadian reforms concerning WRIPV: occupational health and safety and employment leave legislation. Both reforms specifically attend to WRIPV, at least in some jurisdictions, and provide preventive potential and remedial support for the economic and other consequences of IPV. Yet they also have shortcomings, including lack of coverage of some forms of IPV and some workplaces, loss of pay, and verification requirements that draw on gendered myths and stereotypes. I conclude by identifying further government action needed to better address WRIPV.

Documenting for Movement Building: A Conversation on Public History, Labour History, and Social Movements - Laframboise, Lauren; Christoff, Stefan; Gagnon, Simon-Olivier; Nesbitt, Doug (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)

Asian Women Workers in Massage Parlours and the Sex Industry and Their Fight Against Anti-Asian Racism - Lam, Elene (Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 2025)
This article examines how Asian migrant sex workers have continuously been targeted by the “carceral web” of Canadian laws and policies at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. A case study of Newmarket, Ontario’s municipal council’s recent “crackdown” on personal wellness establishments illustrates how systematic racism and “whorephobia” are embedded in the regulations targeting low-income Asian migrant women, particularly those who work in massage parlours and the sex industry. The article ends with a discussion of how Asian workers in massage parlours and the sex industry are actively working to resist, fight for their rights, and build solidarity to push back against racist oppressions targeting them.

Freedom from Medicare: Maternal Activists, Organized Business, and Popular Mobilization against the Welfare State During the Saskatchewan Doctors’ Strike, 1962 - Langford, Will (Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, 2025)
In July 1962, Saskatchewan doctors went on strike in a refusal to work under the Medicare Care Act, which introduced universal health insurance in the province. The much-studied conflict between organized medicine and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government has been understood as a decisive moment in the history of public healthcare in Canada. Less studied, but equally important, the doctors were supported by a larger protest movement that set out to oppose the expansion of the welfare state. This article reveals that an alliance between maternal activists who started the Keep Our Doctors committee, businessmen who aimed to foster popular anti-statism through the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Operation Freedom and the Free Citizens Association, and doctors was an unplanned coalition, but not something that emerged entirely by chance. The agitation was a form of conservative populism resolved, in exaggerated fashion, against compulsion, increased taxation, and alleged communism. It was also part of a distinctive transnational moment of right-wing radicalization. Principles of democracy and freedom united opponents of Medicare in Saskatchewan and linked them with American radical right peers in ways specific to the early 1960s.

Hunting for Employees, Employers, Independent Contractors, Dependent Contractors and Other Figments of the Legal Imagination - Langille, Brian; Mayer-Goodman, Ben (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2025)
This paper exposes the falsity of a fundamental assumption of labour law—namely that there is such a thing as an “employee” or “employer” or “independent contractor” and that such legal entities can be “found” through an examination of the facts. As we shall demonstrate, once we have discarded the flawed assumption that “employees” or “employers” (or “independent” or “dependent contractors,” or “worker,” or any other legal creature) exist in the real world, we see that labour law’s purpose as it is currently widely understood is also fundamentally flawed. It is from this standpoint that a new conceptual framework for—and normative underpinning of—labour law emerges.

L’entreprise face aux attentes de la génération Z : un risque de désalignement des valeurs - Laroutis, Dimitri; Makaya, Christian; Vermeylen, Guillaume (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
In a professional environment undergoing profound transformation, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic, understanding and meeting the expectations of Generation Z is crucial for businesses. This research explores the professional values and expectations of this generation, highlighting the importance of aligning personal values with those of the company, flexibility, and ethical work environments. Through a qualitative methodology using IRaMuTeQ software, semi-structured interviews revealed that Generation Z values management practices that promote regular recognition and personal development. The findings confirm the importance of transparency and daily accountability in task execution, as well as the need to create dynamic and collaborative work environments. Managerial implications suggest the proactive integration of these expectations into human resources policies to effectively attract and retain this generation. Recommendations include the implementation of sustainable environmental policies and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Context, Resources and Strategic Choice: Responses to Labour and Skill Shortages - Lavelle, Jonathan; Ryan, Lorraine; O’Sullivan, Michelle; Murphy, Caroline; MacMahon, Juliet; Dundon, Tony (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
Labour and skill shortages are widely reported across most countries. With changing demographics, increasing digitalization and the transition to a green economy, to name but a few factors, concern is mounting about the supply of labour and skills for future demands. As a result, actors in the labour market, such as unions, employers and employer associations, government and civil society organizations are concerned about looming shortages of labour and skills. Several strategies to address such shortages have been identified, but a more detailed engagement is required to fully understand the complex interplay between each strategy and the environment in which it is pursued. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Ireland with a range of actors who were specifically identified as having expertise and experience in strategies for labour and skill shortages. They reported a range of strategies that involved upskilling, higher pay, better working conditions, flexible work arrangements, use of migrant labour, development of untapped labour pools and provisioning of social goods. Decisions on these strategies had two key determinants: resource availability and the external environment. All actors mentioned a need for social dialogue to engage, explore and consider the wide range of options for dealing with labour and skill shortages.
Keywords: Labour and skill shortages; employers; social dialogue; unions; upskilling; wages; working conditions

Les facteurs à la source de la pénurie de main-d’œuvre au Québec : les jeunes en sont-ils responsables ? - Longo, María; Vultur, Mircea (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
This article explores the multifaceted causes of the labour shortage in Quebec and questions whether young people are to blame. Using statistical data about activity and vacancy and qualitative interviews with recruitment managers from companies in the Quebec City region, the authors aim to deconstruct oversimplified narratives. The findings reveal that labour shortages stem from a complex combination of factors: demographic changes, unattractive working conditions, training-job mismatch, and public policies. Contrary to popular belief, young people are very active in the labour market. They are already well-represented in sectors experiencing shortages (e.g. healthcare, hospitality, construction) and often possess higher education levels than what is required for most vacant positions, which are predominantly low-skilled. However, many employers perceive youth less available, as less loyal, and as having different expectations regarding work-life balance, job meaning, and flexibility—interpreted as a shift in "mentality." These perceptions heavily shape challenges faced and recruitment strategies, which tend to focus on adapting working conditions rather than rethinking job content or organizational practices. The article concludes that young workers are not to blame for the labour shortage. Instead, the phenomenon should be understood as a structural issue with complex causes. Effective responses require a comprehensive approach that considers the roles of employers, public institutions, and the evolving expectations of young workers. A nuanced, sector-specific analysis would allow for more targeted and meaningful solutions.
Keywords: Pénurie de main-d’oeuvre; conditions d’emploi; jeunes travailleurs; perceptions des employeurs; recrutement

Douter sur soi au travail. Un moteur du travail identitaire dans le parcours professionnel - Mainhagu, Sébastien; Defiebre-Muller, Renaud (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
The article makes a significant contribution to the study of identity dynamics in the professional context by focusing on self-doubt as a central theme in the analysis. The authors provide a comprehensive overview of the work on identity and demonstrate the importance of developing a more constructive approach to self-doubt. They also emphasize that the links with the ethical dimensions of employees' professional trajectories are not adequately addressed. The research aims to address these gaps by employing Ricoeur's idem et ipse approach to the study of identity. The data collected from employees in the French social sector provides insights into the phenomenon of self-doubt, as expressed by employees in their individual work reports, without the influence of external directives. This scenario is distinct from that of the “struggler”, who decline to address their employer's or colleagues' concerns regarding their capabilities and ethics.

Crip Time, Castoriadis, and Transcending the Duty to Accommodate in the Workplace - Malhotra, Ravi; Moizer, Jacqueline (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2025)
Disabled people often experience time in a manner that is distinct from able-bodied individuals. Disabled people may have shorter careers, have difficulty maintaining full-time employment, and may be forced to work part-time due to the impact of their impairments. Many disabled people face considerable barriers every day in accessing services to participate fully in the workplace, including accessible transportation and attendant services. These underfunded services are often late if delivered at all, wreaking havoc on the ability of workers with disabilities to plan their day and make firm commitments. Yet disability scholars have attempted to reclaim this experience as one that needs to be understood as one with liberating potential. Ellen Samuels and Alison Kafer have identified this phenomenon as “crip time.” In Canadian law, the duty to accommodate workers with disabilities up to the point of undue hardship has not typically engaged with how disabled people experience time differently. We develop a typology of what we call crip time from above to reflect the lived experiences of disabled people, and in particular, their experience of time. In this paper, we report initial findings from a multi-year qualitative research project exploring the relationship between disability accommodations and crip time. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, we undertook focus group interviews with disabled people to explore their experiences of time, followed by individual interviews. Influenced by the work of radical Greek–French philosopher, Cornelius Castoriadis, we argue that his notion of social imaginary time enriches the existing work of crip time and opens new possibilities to create a philosophy of accommodation that recognizes how disabled bodies experience the workplace. Our initial findings suggest that disabled people experience work differently because of a number of barriers relating to their experience of crip time. We conclude with some policy recommendations.

Bargaining for a Transformative Vision of Decolonial Indigenization: The Critical Role of University Faculty Associations - Marks, Lynne; O'Bonsawin, Christine (CAUT Journal, 2025)
The diversification of the academic workforce is primarily the responsibility of management in most Canadian universities. However, the University of Victoria Faculty Association played a critical role in the last two bargaining rounds, successfully negotiating meaningful advancements concerning equity, indigenization and decolonization. In the 2019–2022 collective bargaining round, for example, an Indigenous hiring fund was negotiated. Empowered with a strong mandate from the membership, the faculty association sought in the next bargaining round to move beyond an “Indigenous inclusion” framework, which simply added more Indigenous people to the academy, towards bargaining for a more decolonized space in which, for example, Indigenous members faced fewer barriers in tenure and promotion processes, and were recognized for the additional decolonial work they do in and for the institution, and beyond. We discuss the challenges and successes for Indigenous members in this bargaining round and the crucial role of faculty association Indigenous members in shaping these bargaining successes.
Keywords: Indigenization; collective bargaining; decolonization; equity; transformative change

The Gig Economy of Care: Analyzing “The Airbnb of Eldercare” and Its Policy Implications in British Columbia - Massie, Alicia; Hilstob, Kayla (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2025)
Background: This study critically analyzes the impact of platform capitalism on elder care in British Columbia, focusing on Tuktu, an app-based tech startup that mediates care services through digital platforms. Analysis: Using feminist and intersectional theory, we explore how Tuktu’s business model commodifies care and exploits care workers by misclassifying them as independent contractors and stripping them of labour rights and protections.Conclusions and implications: We advocate for comprehensive policy reforms that ensure equitable labour standards, uphold the dignity of care recipients, and promote community-based care solutions. The study also calls for stronger regulation of digital platforms in the care economy, ensuring that the integration of technology enhances, rather than undermines, the quality of care and labour conditions.

The Point of No Return? Impediments to Return to Work for Injured Migrant Agricultural Workers in Two Canadian Provinces - Mayell, Stephanie; McLaughlin, Janet; Hennebry, Jenna; Sanchez, Guillermo Ventura; Goswami, Pankil; Hanley, Jill (New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, 2025)
Migrant agricultural workers employed through Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program face serious occupational health and safety hazards, with compounded difficulties in accessing workers’ compensation (WC) if they are sick or injured by the job. Little is known, however, about their ability to return to work (RTW) upon recovery—a fundamental right included in the conception of WC, but complicated by their restrictive work permits and precarious immigration status. Based on interviews with injured migrant workers in two Canadian provinces (Quebec and Ontario), our research suggests that workers’ RTW process is anything but straightforward. This article highlights three key issues—pressure to return to work prematurely, communication and bureaucratic challenges with WC agencies, and impacts of injury/illness and failure to return to work on workers’ long-term well-being. Consequences and opportunities for reform are discussed.

The Return of the Housewife: Why Women are Still Cleaning Up - McCoy, Ted (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article reviews the book, "The Return of the Housewife: Why Women are Still Cleaning Up," by Emma Casey.

Introduction: Christie Symposium on Law and Labour Market Inequality - McHugh-Russell, Liam (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2025)
Introduces the special issue's themes including frames (sociological and labour law's) on labour market inequality, gaps in labour law, complicity of labour law in inequality, and equality as transformation.

A Social Gospel Experiment: C. S. Eby’s People’s Institute in Early 20th-Century Toronto - McIntyre, Heather (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
In 1909, an atypical church emerged in Toronto’s industrial core, the “People’s Institute,” which closed its doors less than two years later. Helmed by missionary C. S. Eby, the People’s Institute was an experiment designed to encourage political involvement and spread a Christian anti-capitalist ethic. This article situates the People’s Institute in the changing landscape of 1909 Toronto and within the larger trends of the labour church and the social gospel. It also argues that Eby’s experiment serves as an example of broader obstacles that prevented the long-term flourishing of left-wing approaches to Christianity in Canada.
Keywords: Charles Samuel Eby; Christianity; Toronto; labour church; microhistory; religion; social gospel; working class

Management inclusif des personnes tatouées en France : désamorcer les discriminations grâce à la sécurité psychologique - Meyer, Vincent; de Vassoigne, Tony; Alves, Sarah (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
While tattooing is becoming increasingly popular in France, particularly among younger generations, its acceptance in the professional world remains ambivalent. Inclusion of tattooed individuals is emerging issue in many organizations, but academic literature, mainly Anglo-Saxon, remains limited and contradictory on the subject. Our study is therefore rooted in a dual theoretical tradition: on the one hand, the tensions between the so-called “blind” and “conscious” approaches to inclusion (Konrad & Linnehan, 1995), and on the other hand, the structuring role of psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) in inclusive management. Our results, based on two quantitative surveys conducted in 2023 (n=123) and 2024 (n=283) among tattooed people working in France, reveal a significant sense of discrimination, despite a normative shift in society. This stigmatization, although often implicit, translates into increased vigilance and concealment strategies, especially in contexts of high public exposure. Our study shows a significant impact on the engagement of young people, for whom tattoos are a strong marker of identity and a claim to authenticity. Our study also highlights the moderating role of psychological safety: by promoting a climate of openness, mutual support, and the right to make mistakes, it mitigates the effects of discrimination and strengthens the commitment of tattooed employees. This dynamic appears to be essential in the early stages of experiencing discrimination, underscoring the importance of strengthening psychological safety to promote the inclusion of tattooed people in the workplace. Our research thus contributes to the literature on psychological safety and inclusive management by addressing a subject that has yet to be fully explored. It also invites us to rethink managerial practices to allow individuals to express their identity while strengthening their professional commitment.
Keywords: France; discrimination; inclusion; psychological safety; sécurité psychologique; tatouage; tattoos

A CAAT-A Work-to-Rule Tweet Sequence (2021–2022) - Mills, Rebecca M. (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article examines the 2021–22 work-to-rule job action undertaken by CAAT-A, the academic division of OPSEU/SEFPO representing Ontario college faculty. Drawing on a deleted Twitter thread by a participating professor, it presents a first-hand account of the bargaining conflict between CAAT-A and the College Employer Council (CEC). The piece situates the campaign within broader tensions over Bill 124’s wage cap, workload disputes, and employer tactics such as forced-offer votes and imposed terms. It highlights CAAT-A’s phased approach to WTR, culminating in near-strike conditions before resolution through binding interest arbitration. Through the lens of digital labour activism and institutional power, the text documents how faculty used social media and collective solidarity to resist efforts to undermine democratic bargaining in Ontario’s public college system.

JEDDI as Labour Imperative - Mulé, Nick (CAUT Journal, 2025)
The post-secondary education sector is increasingly incorporating equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) frameworks into its institutions. This transition from traditional concepts of affirmative action and employment equity to a decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion (DEDI) model was very much in development both at administrative and faculty levels during my stint as Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Administration of the Agreement (JCoAA), representing a large faculty association. In regular meetings with Labour Relations, representing university administration, conceptual perspectives differed, objectives needed to be agreed upon, and goals compromised. This paper explores the broader model of justice, equity, diversity, decolonization, and inclusion (JEDDI) and the absolute importance of such a perspective for the higher education sector and labour market in general. Implementing and actualizing JEDDI is important as universities continue to diversify. Utilizing such frameworks can assist in assuaging tensions regarding academic freedom, governance, and labour practices.
Keywords: Higher Education; JEDDI; Post-Secondary Education Sector; Universities

Repurposing Institutions through Categorization: New Apprenticeship Programs in Peripheral Service Industries - Nicklich, Manuel; Pekarek, Andreas (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
The rise of precarious work is an increasing concern for policymakers and researchers, with outsourcing frequently identified as a key driver. In response, skills development and formal qualifications are widely promoted as potential remedies. We examine this development through a categorization lens, focusing on two vocational credentials created for industrial services in Germany. By analyzing how industry actors categorize the work of apprenticeship-qualified employees, we investigate whether recategorizing peripheral jobs as skilled labour effectively addresses precarious employment.

Editor's note = Note de la rédaction - Niergarth, Kirk (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Discusses the new, high quality reproductions of Henry Orenstein's mural , "Mine Mill Local 598," published in the current issue in conjunction with Elizabeth Quinlan's "Note and Correction" regarding the painting. The painting was originally reproduced on the cover of Labour/Le Travail, no. 93 (2024) as part of Quinlan's article, "Making Space for Creativity: Cultural Intiatives of Sudbury's Mine-Mill Local 598 in the Postwar Era."

Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist - Niergarth, Kirk (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist," by Michael Boudreau and Bonnie Huskins.

Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Committee on Labour History, 17 July 2025, Convened virtually from locations across Turtle Island - Niergarth, Kirk; Smith, Charles (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)

Editor's Note - Niergarth, Kirk; Smith, Charles (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This will be Ted McCoy's last volume as the English-language book review editor for Labour/Le Travail. The editors would like to take this opportunity to thank Ted for his service. Ted was appointed to this role in 2019 and has helped guide the review section of the journal through challenging times. In recent months, he has been generously helping to smooth the transition for Fred Burrill, who is taking on the position. Fred, of the University of New Brunswick, is no stranger to the pages of Labour/Le Travail. The editors, alongside French-language book review editor Camille Robert and managing editor Kathy Killoh, warmly welcome Fred to the editorial team. We invite the broader Labour/Le Travail community to welcome Fred too, particularly by accepting his invitations to write reviews and review essays. The review section provides an important, indeed vital, service to the intellectual life of the field, but it is very much dependent upon our collective willingness to contribute and enhance its breadth and depth. The review section of Labour/Le Travail has been the site of wide-ranging coverage and lively critical engagement for half a century; let it long remain so under the guidance of Fred and Camille.

Financement public des associations sanitaires et sociales françaises et écart salarial femmes-hommes - Nirello, Laura; Prouteau, Lionel (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
The disparity in gender pay gaps among nonprofit organizations (NPOs) has rarely been studied. In this article, we examine this issue by focusing on French associations, which represent the vast majority of NPOs in this country, and more specifically those working in the health and social sectors. We start from the hypothesis that there is a negative correlation between the gender pay gap in these organizations and the share of public funding in their monetary resources. Two arguments are put forward to support this hypothesis: a) public authorities may make their funding, particularly through public procurement, conditional on the reduction of gender pay gaps within the organizations receiving public support; b) NPOs that are heavily dependent on this support are likely, through a process of hybridization, to adopt wage policies that are less unfavorable to women, as is the case in the public sector.

Capital Contradictions in the Age of Incorporation: Queer and Trans Materialism at Work - Oswin, Natalie; Mills, Suzanne (Geoforum, 2025)
...In this paper, we aim to contribute to the scholarly literatures and related policy debates on LGBTQ+ work and life that [the Toronto-based advocacy organization] Egale highlights, and to bring these debates into economic geography and queer and trans geographies, fields which have heretofore only minimally examined sexual orientation and gender identity and/in the workplace.

Achieving a Caregiver-Friendly Workplace Standard for Canadian Carer-Workers: An Ex Ante Evaluation of Potential Uptake - Patterson, Ashleigh; Williams, Allison (Evaluation and Program Planning, 2025)
With the assistance of a Committee of experts, McMaster University partnered with the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) to develop the Caregiver Inclusive and Accommodating Organizations Standard (B701-17). The Standard provides workplace guidelines to better accommodate carer-workers through building carer-friendly workplace programs. A qualitative ex ante evaluation was undertaken to determine stakeholders’ (n=17) views regarding the significance and potential uptake of the Standard. This involved seeking feedback from stakeholders in various types of organizations across Canada, after they had read the draft Standard. Following transcription, interviews were thematically analyzed, resulting in four themes: (1) necessity; (2) impact of employer size; (3) motivators for implementation, and (4) use as an educational tool. Although initially in its early stages, the Standard now provides a key tool to improve accommodations for carer-workers.
Keywords: Accommodations; Carer-workers; Employers; Standard; ex-ante evaluation; qualitative evaluation

A Great Place To Work. How Best Workplaces Affect How Senior Women Perceive Inclusion and Fairness - Perrin, Thibault; Vuilmet, Angélique (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
In this research, we investigated how senior women perceive working in workplaces that have received the Great Place to Work® label in France, compared to those in other workplaces. Our data came from the anonymous Trust Index© survey of 346,516 respondents from 418 organizations. We used hierarchical linear regression to examine the impact of work in such workplaces on perceptions of inclusion and fairness, as a function of respondent age and gender. Our findings, compared to those reported by Carberry and Meyers (2017) for the United States, suggest that best workplaces may influence these perceptions more strongly in France. While this award serves as a barrier against the sexist double standard of aging, it has a limited effect on how senior women perceive inclusion. Our research contributes to contemporary social exchange theory on intra-organizational social structuration based on age and gender. We suggest that employment branding labels should consider demographic characteristics prior to promoting a workplace as fair and inclusive for all employees, especially in the case of senior women in France.
Keywords: Contemporary Social Exchange Theory; Double Standard of Aging; Double standard du vieillissement; Employment Branding Label; Equité; Fairness; Gender; Genre; Great Place to Work; Inclusion; Label employeur; Théorie contemporaine de l’échange social

“Who Gave You Permission to Have This Idea?”: Collective Creation and Emancipatory Pedagogy Under Unfree Labour - Perry, J. Adam (International Journal of Lifelong Education, 2025)
This article reflects on the pedagogical tensions that emerged through a collective play creation process with migrant farm workers employed under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s conception of emancipation, the article considers how participants engaged in a theatre-based project that explored their lived experiences of unfree labour. While the process opened space for collective self-expression and aesthetic rupture, it also exposed the ambivalence and risk entangled with acts of visibility within systems of surveillance and control. Through an analysis of post-performance dialogue, the article contends that critical pedagogy under constraint must reckon with refusal and partial subjectification as politically meaningful. Emancipatory education, in this view, may emerge not through the orchestration of overt resistance, but through the negotiation of fragile and embodied expressions that unsettle dominant scripts.
Keywords: Migrant farm workers; emancipatory education; unfree labour

Henry Orenstein’s Mine Mill Local 598 (1956): A Correction and Reproduction - Quinlan, Elizabeth (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Discusses Orenstein's painting, "Mine Mill Local 598," which was reproduced on the cover of Labour/Le Travail, no. 93 (Spring 2024). Included are new, colour reproductions of the panels of the 39-foot-long mural, which Orenstein painted during a 1956 residency in Sudbury. The painting was thought to be no longer extant because of a 2008 fire, but in fact it is still held in the Sudbury union's collection.

Seeing Through Whiteness: The Particular Formation of Academic Institutional Racism as ‘Snowblindness’ - Rahman, Momin (CAUT Journal, 2025)
In this paper, I explore a particular formation of institutional racism within academic organizations. First, I detail the recent positive recognition of systemic barriers to inclusion in Canada through the rhetoric and policies from national research funding agencies, university managements, and faculty unions. I go on to suggest, however, that there is a contradiction in the promotional framing of these commitments as ‘inclusive excellence’ because the discourse of excellence implies that the institution is already performing at peak function and hence needs no systemic organizational change. I argue that this contradiction undermines the development of genuine motivations to address exclusions and reduces equity policies to tokenistic promotional branding. The excellence discourse appeals to the vanity of the academics who are being encouraged to be more inclusive, a vanity of ‘excellence’ that is a manifestation of the broader epistemological understanding of our profession as both very intelligent and neutral or objective in our approach to generating and assessing knowledge. This professional epistemology anchors our understanding of why the profession looks the way it does: white ethnic dominance is taken as a reflection of objective merit, which then prevents any consideration of whiteness as a contributing privilege to entering and progressing through the academy. I term this equation of whiteness with our professional capacities as ‘professional snowblindness’ because it prevents recognition of the whiteness of the profession precisely through recourse to our professional skills and capacities. I argue that this ‘snowblindness’ is the particular formation of institutional racism in the academy and, crucially, that it needs to be named and discussed if we are to create genuine motivations for equity.
Keywords: academy; diversity; equity; inclusion; institutional racism

Seeing Equity as Labour Justice - Rahman, Momin; Hearn, Alison (CAUT Journal, 2025)
Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on seeing equity as labour justice.
Keywords: equity; labour justice

L’intégration des personnes immigrantes sur le milieu de travail et la valeur ajoutée d’une perspective subjective - Ren, Sijie; Schomaker, Margaret (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
The challenges of integrating immigrants into the workplace can attenuate the potential benefits of cultural diversity. Existing literature offers a limited perspective on the success of this integration and its determinants. This study examines the professional integration of immigrants, focusing on individual dimensions such as their commitment to work and their own perception of integration. It addresses three questions: How do immigrants perceive successful integration? What factors influence this perception? How do these factors interact? We address these questions through a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. Based on three theories of integration (social capital theory, social identity theory and organisational climate), a conceptual framework of factors influencing immigrants' perceptions of their integration is proposed. A modest test of this framework on three interviews confirms that several factors influence immigrants' perception of integration, including social capital, sense of belonging, organisational support, diversity, assistance from colleagues, access to local networks, trust, and language skills. It has been established that an organisational climate that is inclusive and respectful of diversity appears to strengthen immigrants' sense of belonging and promote their perception of integration. All these elements interact synergistically, influencing immigrants’ perceptions of their integration. The study contributes to a better understanding of the complex and multidimensional nature of the integration process, going beyond simple considerations of economic integration. It also highlights the need for more inclusive practices that take into consideration the experiences of immigrants in order to better understand and improve their integration.
Keywords: diversity management; gestion de la diversité; immigrant; intégration sur le milieu de travail; personnes immigrantes; perspective subjective; subjective perspective; workplace integration

Rethinking Feminist History and Theory: Essays on Gender, Class, and Labour - Ricci, Amanda (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Rethinking Feminist History and Theory: Essays on Gender, Class, and Labour," edited by Lisa Pasolli and Julia Smith

In Search of the Desperate Athlete: Serious Organised Team Sport Athletes as Neo-Indentured Labour - Riedl, Mark (Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2025)
In this article, I pursue the ‘desperate athlete’—a familiar figure for me, a basketball coach and trainer—by arguing serious organised team sport athletes are neo-indentured labourers by illustrating the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport. This article contributes the original analogy ‘indentured’ to the philosophy of sport which is a stronger claim than what other scholars have argued, and in turn provides the neo-indentured desperate athlete as a framework and mode of understanding and to make sense of how serious organised team sport athletes are constructed, explained by way of Foucauldian concepts of objectification, discursive power relations and bio-power. It is an effort to introduce the original concept of the neo-indentured ‘desperate athlete’ and develop that figure as an important subject deserving of scholarly inquiry into the philosophy of discipline in team sport. To ignore the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport would be an example of sport discourse dismissing the inconvenient; so too would be ignoring the ‘desperate athlete’.
Keywords: Indenture; bio-power; discipline; labour; mistreatment; sport

Local Food-Global Labour: Contradictions and Tensions Between Farmers and Migrant Farmworkers and Possibilities for Solidarity in Canada - Robbins, Martha Jane (Agriculture and Human Values, 2025)
The logic of the corporate food regime requires a system of labour based on migration. Free trade agreements have entrenched a drive for ever-expanding export agriculture and resulted in both a devastation of peasant agriculture, creating migrant workers, and an increased need for temporary labour on Canadian farms. Family farmers in Canada face labour challenges exacerbated by the current food regime and, for some, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is seen as an answer to those challenges. However, the SAWP is based on systemic exploitation of migrant workers. This paper seeks to assess the role of migrant labour in Canadian food systems and reveal the contradictions, tensions, and possibilities of farmers acting in solidarity with migrant farmworkers by exploring the formation and political direction of the National Farmers Union’s Migrant Worker Solidarity Working Group (MWSWG).
Keywords: Corporate food regime; Farm income crisis; Farmer to farmworker solidarity; Global labour; Local food; Migrant farmworkers; Moral economy; National Farmers Union – Canada

“Sooner or Later, You’ll Discover Kelvinator”: The Causes and Consequences of a Plant Closure in an Ontario City in the Late 1960s - Russell, Jason (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The loss of manufacturing jobs is an ongoing challenge for organized labour in Canada and a trend that has been happening for several decades. The loss of full-time, unionized factory work in Canada is commonly thought to have started in the 1990s or 2000s, but the possibility of deindustrialization was already evident in the late 1960s. This article examines the closure of the Kelvinator of Canada plant in London, Ontario, in 1969. That closure illustrates the impact of industrial job loss on workers during a period when Canada’s economy was prosperous and its manufacturing sector was robust. This analysis also reveals how a branch plant opened and expanded in Canada, and why it closed. Appliance manufacturing has never been as prominent in discussions of industrial job loss as other sectors, like automotive, but the Kelvinator closure reveals, over 55 years after it happened, that losing the London plant had a lasting impact on workers and their community while serving as a harbinger of future deindustrialization.
Keywords: London; Ontario; United Auto Workers; appliance industry; branch plant; deindustrialization; employer paternalism; industrial unions; labour politics; wartime production

Climat de diversité et leadership authentique : l’effet médiateur du stéréotype masculin du leader - Saint-Michel, Sarah; Petit, Valérie (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
This article presents the results of a quantitative study conducted on 711 managers exploring the relationship between diversity climate and the expression of authentic leadership. Through a moderated mediation model, we highlight the role of the masculine stereotype of the high-performing leader. The results confirm the positive relationship between diversity climate and authentic leadership, and they also reveal that diversity climate contributes to the expression of authentic leadership by significantly reducing the masculine stereotype of the high-performing leader, particularly for male respondents. Our findings thus contribute to a better understanding of the mechanism by which diversity climate influences leadership behaviours, especially among leaders. Practically, they invite organizations wishing to develop the authentic leadership of their managers to focus DEI policy efforts not only on gender stereotypes but also on transforming leader stereotypes and leadership culture.
Keywords: authentic leadership; climat de diversité; diversity climate; gendered leadership; genre et leadership; leadership authentique; stereotypes; stéréotype masculin

Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor - Sangster, Joan (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor," by Kim Kelly.

Under the Hood: Detroit Three Bargaining and Intra-Union Tensions in Canada - Savage, Larry; Gray, Paul Christopher (Labor Studies Journal, 2025)
Despite achieving substantial contract gains, including significant wage increases, the 2023 pattern agreement reached between Unifor—Canada’s largest private sector union—and Detroit Three automakers was met with mixed reactions from union members, with particularly low support from skilled trades and more senior members. This study reveals how intra-union dynamics were shaped by shifting socioeconomic conditions, comparisons with the United Auto Workers, differences between production and skilled trades members, generational tensions, and leadership conflicts intertwined with strike dynamics. These factors influenced bargaining expectations and union strategy. The findings suggest that intra-union tensions weakened member solidarity and support for the historically strong pattern agreement, highlighting the complex interplay between external pressures and internal union dynamics in collective bargaining.

Union Endorsements and the Voting Intentions of Union Members in Canada - Savage, Larry; Westlake, Daniel (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
This article explores the impact of union endorsements on the voting intentions of union members in Canada. Through a survey of union members, the study reveals that while union endorsements generally do not significantly influence voting behaviour, satisfaction with one’s union enhances the likelihood of supporting union-endorsed candidates in federal, provincial, and local elections. This correlation underscores that having strongly supported unions in the workplace helps to build strong unions in the political arena with improved capacity to deliver union members’ votes. The findings also provide a basis for further research on the potential electoral significance of union endorsements.
Keywords: Québec; elections; federal politics; labour politics; political parties; unions

Return to Work After Injuries: Legal Challenges for Seafarers in Canada - Shan, Desai; Medley, Alex; Neis, Barbara; Small, Contessa (New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, 2025)
Return to work (RTW) after injury requires strong stakeholder coordination. Seafaring work is associated with high injury rates, but seafarers’ RTW is understudied. As federally regulated workers, Canadian seafarers are protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability. Following a work-related injury or illness, seafarers are eligible for provincial workers’ compensation benefits and RTW; however, RTW is also subject to federal regulations, including the requirement to have a valid marine medical certificate (MMC). This complex regulatory landscape may negatively influence seafarer RTW. Drawing upon a sociolegal study, we find that MMC-related human rights complaints against the federal government highlight the legal challenges seafarers face in the RTW process. Interview findings suggest that to ensure a valid MMC and employment eligibility, injured seafarers might avoid filing compensation claims or RTW before recovery. We recommend the federal-provincial agencies adopt more efficient coordination policies to support seafarers’ RTW.

Sibling Relationships and Developmental Disability Services: From Coerced Care to Entitlement - Spagnuolo, Natalie; Boulanger, Josée; Ries, Helen (Disability Studies Quarterly, 2025)
This article critically assesses the systems that structure unpaid care work for people with intellectual disabilities, with a focus on the role of siblings. We provide a preliminary analysis of this current trend in unpaid care work in the province of Ontario, Canada, addressing practices that are a) built upon a devaluation of people with intellectual disabilities, and that b) deny them choice in who provides them care. We combine existing evidence with relevant survey data to assess the risks associated with what we characterize as coercive care, as well as the many tensions that arise between self-advocacy and family-led advocacy initiatives. We interrogate the assumption that the role of siblings, and women in particular, is to take over unpaid care roles from parents. We also suggest how the current socioeconomic context of many individuals and families can limit opportunities for adopting potential solutions and propose practical avenues for future research. Throughout our analysis, we centre questions of agency and self-direction, pointing to the clash of values and inequitable outcomes that makes dominant support arrangements untenable. We conclude by drawing an ideal scenario of the publicly funded supports and services to which people with intellectual disabilities should be entitled and outline the many implications attached to this proposed model.
Keywords: Care economy; ethics of care; gender and labour; intellectual disability; sibling relationships

Understanding Temporary Labour Migration through a Settler Colonial Lens: A Critical Analysis of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy - Spring, Cynthia; Toomey, Nisha; Noack, Andrea; Vosko, Leah F. (Studies in Social Justice, 2025)
The relationship between differential inclusion of workers migrating for employment internationally and the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous people and lands is a growing area of study within critical migration studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to how (im)migration policies that foster migrant worker precariousness also extend settler colonial practices. Scholars situated in the transdisciplinary fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies have long theorized nation-state building as exclusionary to Black and Indigenous life, and reliant on limited mobilities and dispossession of Black and Indigenous peoples. Bridging this scholarship with critical migration studies, in this article we explore how policies regulating international migration for employment to Canada on temporary bases reflect and sustain the settler-colonial context in which they operate. We outline three logics of settler colonialism that underpin policies governing temporary migration for employment to Canada: (1) the racialized hierarchization of life and knowledge; (2) the reliance on technologies of governing, which foster unequal administrative burdens; and (3) the disruption of people’s relationships to land and livelihoods. Analyzing Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy, we illustrate how migration policies reinforce and replicate settler colonial practices.
Keywords: Black Studies; Indigenous Studies; international students; settler colonialism; temporary labour migration

The Unfulfilled Promise of Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux: A Case Study on the Reconciliation of Equality and Freedom of Association - Talarico, Andrea (Dalhousie Law Journal, 2025)
The evolution of the protection of collective bargaining rights in Canada has been marked by a tension between freedom of association (section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “the Charter”) and equality (section 15(1) of the Charter). In most cases before the Supreme Court of Canada (“the SCC”), the SCC has examined both rights separately. More recently, the SCC has treated equality as a value (rather than a right), using the value of equality to inform its interpretation of freedom of association. Both these approaches (the “Siloed Approach” and the “Charter Values” approach) fail to fully examine how equality and freedom of association exist bidirectionally. This article uses a 2008 case from the Quebec Superior Court as a case study of how equality can inform our understanding of association and how association can remedy inequality.

Unveiling the Interactions between Individual, Entrepreneurial and Organizational Resilience of Entrepreneurs with Disabilities - Tessier Dargent, Christel; Billion, Julien (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
In this article, we aim to shed light on the multiple levels of resilience, i.e., the ability to withstand or bounce back from difficulties individually and collectively, and how these levels interact in the case of entrepreneurs with disabilities. The aim is to determine the patterns and processes in the complex dynamics between the three levels of resilience—individual, entrepreneurial and organizational—which the literature describes as important, but without clearly elucidating how they interrelate. This question is crucial: resilience appears to be an essential capability for individuals and organizations alike in an unprecedentedly complex, challenging and uncertain environment. We interviewed twenty entrepreneurs with disabilities in France and found that individual resilience translates into entrepreneurial resilience, which in turn strengthens organizational resilience, via identified characteristics, e.g., anticipation, adaptation and empathy. Entrepreneurial resilience may also feed back into individual resilience, thereby strengthening control, self-efficacy and identity. Capabilities for resilience can be assisted at each level by resilience tutors through emotional, financial or professional support. Because people with disabilities have to develop significant individual resilience capabilities, they may become resilient entrepreneurs who foster resilience and inclusion in their organizations.
Keywords: Entrepreneurial resilience; Entrepreneurs en situation de handicap; Entrepreneurs with disabilities; Individual resilience; Organizational resilience; Résilience entrepreneuriale; Résilience individuelle; Résilience organisationnelle

Heat Stress in the World of Work: Canadian Collective Bargaining and Environmental Governance - Thorburn, Michael H. F. (Revista Catalana de Dret Ambiental, 2025)
As climate change accelerates, extreme heat is becoming a critical occupational hazard across Canada. Yet worker protections remain fragmented, reactive, and highly uneven across sectors and provinces. This article offers a socio-legal analysis of how heat stress is governed through regulation, collective bargaining, and emerging private governance mechanisms. Drawing on a review of federal and provincial occupational health and safety statutes, a content analysis of over 50,000 collective bargaining agreements, and an assessment of ESG disclosures, Global Framework Agreements, and Worker-Driven Social Responsibility models, the study maps Canada’s evolving approach to heat protection. It finds that CBA coverage remains minimal and concentrated in a small number of unionized manufacturing settings, particularly in Ontario. While Ontario demonstrates the potential for a more coordinated model—especially if proposed legislation complements negotiated protections—the province’s current framework remains limited in scope and sectoral reach. The article argues that effective heat governance will require hybrid coordination across statutory, contractual, and voluntary domains, supported by technology, institutional linkages, and adaptive worker voice. It concludes by outlining an integrated framework for climate-era labour protection grounded in enforceable rights, dynamic bargaining, and transparent corporate accountability.

Food Warriors: App-Based Delivery on Electric Micromobilities - Travers; Park, Kevin; Hall, Peter; Scott, Nicholas; Kwan, Grace (Mobilities, 2025)
Electric micromobilities (EMMs), including electric bikes, standup kick-style electric scooters, and electric unicycles are highly efficient and low impact modes for urban food delivery. However, the mobility they and their associated algorithmic platforms afford is implicated in a set of work practices and relations that reinforce precarious employment outcomes. Our interviews, observational and autoethnographic research in Vancouver, Canada, revealed that food delivery platforms promise flexibility and high earnings while motivating workers to toil for variable and low wages and engage in high-risk behaviour. We focused on food delivery workers using EMMs because barriers to accessing an EMM are lower than for a car, while affording greater mobility on congested city streets, incurring no parking fees, and delivering zero emission operation. However, ostensibly low financial barriers to entry mask the requirement for considerable knowledge of, and navigational skills within, the physical and virtual environments that workers must master to resist the control exercised by platforms (apps) in an intensely competitive playing field. App-based food delivery using EMMs implicates workers in a game that requires upfront investment, skill and the navigation of risk. It is a stacked game, in which mostly the house wins.

Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade - Trolio, Gerard Di (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
The article reviews the book, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade," by Jeff Schuhrke.

Labour Against the Law? Contesting the Restrictive Norms of Industrial Legality through Unlawful Strikes - Tucker, Eric (Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 2025)
North American regimes of industrial legality provide workers with protected rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike. However, they also limit the freedom to strike. Trade unions commonly accept and enforce these limits, but at great cost to solidarity and militancy. This article examines the many ways law works against labour by restricting the freedom to strike and explores the practice of unlawful strikes in North America, including recent examples that resulted in successful outcomes. It concludes with reflections on the revival of unlawful strikes as a tactic forrebuilding and remobilizing the North American labour movement. While the article’s focus is North America, the discussion of unlawful strikes may also be relevant in other countries that limit the freedom to strike.

Homes and Hands United: Bridging Housing and Labour Struggles at McMaster University - Ugalde, Elliot Goodell (Radical Housing Journal, 2025)
This paper examines the strategic alliance between the Tenant Solidarity Working Group (TSWG)—a graduate-student tenant union—and CUPE Local 3906, representing Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Situated within Hamilton’s ongoing economic shift from manufacturing, specifically steel production, toward increased real estate speculation, financialization, and intellectual labour, this study investigates whether tenant-labour collaborations provide an effective model for addressing systemic socio-economic inequalities in student housing. Utilizing Nancy Fraser’s analytical triad of recognition, redistribution, and representation, the research evaluates the potential and limitations of this collaboration in achieving tangible socio-economic justice outcomes for graduate tenants. Through the lens of Fraser’s framework, the study identifies how tenant and labour activists mobilize recognition by contesting normative stigmatization of graduate renters; pursue redistribution through collective action that has yielded financial concessions such as rent reductions; and seek representation by demanding political inclusion within university administrative structures and broader public discourse. The analysis underscores that, despite Hamilton’s persistent identity as a major steel producer, the city’s gradual pivot toward real estate investment and intellectual labour exemplifies David Harvey’s concept of a “spatial fix,” redirecting surplus capital and labour into the university sector, thus complicating the intersection of housing affordability and labour precarity.

“Red Haggis”: A Depression-Era Comic Strip in the Young Worker - Vance, Michael E. (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Introduces and reprints the "Red Haggis" comic strip that ran in 1934 in the Young Worker, the weekly publication of the Young Communist League of Canada. The strip's hero, Red Haggis, is depicted as a pugnacious amalgam of Popeye and "the hard man" of the Scottish working-class tradition. The artist - signed as "Crawford" in the strip - has not been definitively identified.
Keywords: Communists; Depression; Scots; comics; popular culture; “hard man”

Dominique Méda, Une société désirable. Comment prendre soin du monde, Paris, Flammarion/France Culture, 2025, 268 p. - Vultur, Mircea (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
An article from Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, on Érudit.

The Labour Vote Revisited: Impacts of Union Type and Demographics on Electoral Behaviour in Canadian Federal Politics - Westlake, Daniel; Savage, Larry; Butovsky, Jonah (Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 2025)
Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.
Keywords: Canadian politics; elections; labour; partis politiques; political parties; politique canadienne; syndicats; travail; unions; élections

Pouvoir de négociation syndical et stratégies patronales : illustration à travers la pénurie de main-d’œuvre au Québec - Wilson, Jordan; Laroche, Mélanie (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
The article suggests possible explanations for the variation in the effects of labour shortages on union bargaining power. To this end, a new conceptual model centred on the effectiveness of power is proposed, which lies at the intersection between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’: it therefore combines both the unions' ability to construct collective strategies and use their resources (power to) and their ability to exert a decisive influence on the other party to generate results that are beneficial to them (power over). In an attempt to avoid the determinism often associated with ‘power over’, this model proposes the integration of elements specific to the negotiation process, thus recognising the importance of actors' strategies. By means of interviews with experienced union negotiators, this article demonstrates that the same phenomenon, in this case the labour shortage, produces differentiated effects depending on the subjects of negotiation and the strategies deployed by the players, by affecting both the quality of the strategic leverages, the challenges posed to the unions' organizational capacity and the nature and strength of the employer resistance in negotiation. Furthermore, this theoretical model facilitates an enhanced dialogue between literature focusing on the unions' agentivity and that focused on negotiation strategies and processes, while providing an analytical framework for labor relations practitioners to understand the effects of environmental changes on their bargaining power.
Keywords: Pénurie de main-d’oeuvre; pouvoir de négociation; syndicat

What Comes Around, Goes Around: Effects of Unethical Pro-Organizational Behaviour on Time Theft - Wu, Zhennan; Deng, Jianwei; Yu, Qianqian; Deng, Wenhao; Gao, Yongchuang; Guo, Yuangeng (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
In recent decades, China's rapid economic expansion has been accompanied by a rise in corporate ethical scandals, which have drawn increasing attention to unethical pro-organizational behaviour (UPB)—actions intended to benefit the organization but violating ethical norms. While often justified by employees as organizationally beneficial, UPB carries significant psychological and behavioural consequences. Using cognitive dissonance theory, we examine how UPB leads to time theft through the chain mediation of ego depletion and moral sensitivity, with managerial recognition serving as a key boundary condition. We collected data from 432 randomly selected retail employees through a structured questionnaire, including demographic data and measures of UPB, ego depletion, moral sensitivity, managerial recognition and time theft. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 27.0 for preliminary analyses (e.g., reliability, correlation) and MPLUS 8.3 for path analysis and hypothesis testing, including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and mediation analysis. The results show that UPB increases ego depletion and directly promotes time theft, while also reducing moral sensitivity indirectly through ego depletion. Ego depletion and moral sensitivity sequentially mediate the relationship between UPB and time theft. Importantly, managerial recognition moderates the mediation path by strengthening the positive relationship between ego depletion and time theft. These findings reveal not only the underlying psychological mechanism of UPB but also how organizational feedback can unintentionally reinforce deviant behaviour. We conclude that organizations should carefully evaluate recognition practices and implement ethics-oriented support systems to mitigate the hidden costs of UPB.

Gérer les sous-traitants dans un contexte de pénurie de main-d’œuvre : le rôle complexe des managers de proximité - Wuidar, Simon; Jemine, Grégory (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
This article reflects on the managerial challenges associated with the day-to-day management of subcontractors. Based on a survey of site managers working for large Belgian construction companies, we show how the day-to-day management of subcontractors leads to numerous arbitration situations aimed at ensuring the successful execution of projects. We detail the evolution of everyday management practices, which are increasingly aimed at attracting and retaining subcontractors who have become particularly scarce and indispensable in the context of structural shortages of skilled local labor. This analysis leads us to a discussion highlighting 1) the importance of local management in the management of subcontractor relationships, 2) the interdependences generated by the current state of the labor market, and 3) the risks of these developments for local management professions.
Keywords: Conducteur de chantier; Construction; Fidélisation; Pénurie de main-d’oeuvre; Sous-traitance

From Worker Victory to Policy Reform: Injured Migrant Workers Fight for Return to Work Justice in Workers’ Compensation in Ontario, Canada - Yachnin, Maryth (New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, 2025)
This article explores the challenges facing injured migrant farm workers in the workers’ compensation system in Canada's province of Ontario, with a focus on their fight for return to work justice. Told from the perspective of one of the lawyers who represented the workers, it highlights a recent victory achieved by 4 workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in defending their rights to workers’ compensation support. The workers’ compensation tribunal decided that the workers’ compensation board must evaluate these workers’ ability to return to work, access retraining, and receive compensation based on their labor markets in Jamaica—instead of based on fictional job prospects in Ontario. The tribunal also called out the need to consider systemic anti-Black racism in workers’ compensation law and policy. The article analyzes how this legal victory could reshape workers’ compensation policy in Ontario for injured migrant farm workers. It also discusses the implications of the win for injured workers in other temporary work programs and precarious employment sectors.

Occupational Justice in Sociotechnical Contexts: Exploring Immigrant Platform Workers’ Experiences of Doing, Being, Becoming, and Belonging - Yekta, Atieh Razavi (Journal of Occupational Science, 2025)
Grounded in occupational justice and sociotechnical perspectives, this focused ethnographic study explored how immigrant platform workers construct meaning through diverse forms of occupational engagement—doing, being, becoming, and belonging—within sociotechnical contexts. Drawing on interviews with 30 immigrant platform workers in Vancouver, Canada, the study highlights the heterogeneity of platform labour, moving beyond commonly studied sectors such as ride-hailing and food delivery to challenge conventional narratives that frame platform-mediated employment solely as income-generating activity. The findings, organized into four interrelated themes, provide an in-depth account of how workers engage in, make sense of, and reconfigure their occupations within sociotechnically mediated contexts. The first theme, Doing Within and Beyond Sociotechnical Boundaries, examines how participants’ everyday occupations are shaped by both the technical demands of platforms and the social negotiations required to maintain client relationships, reputations, and relevance. The second theme, Being at the Edge of Visibility, explores how the interplay of social and technical systems renders workers simultaneously visible, through metrics, ratings, and platform profiles; and invisible, through lack of recognition and relational connection. The third theme, Boundless Becoming, reveals the fluid and aspirational nature of participants’ occupational trajectories, shaped by transnational opportunities and sociotechnical structures. Finally, Belonging Beyond the Bubble highlights how these workers cultivate inclusion within platform-specific communities while navigating broader structures of marginalization. This paper contributes to a more inclusive understanding of occupational engagement in platform-mediated labor, emphasizing the importance of supporting diverse occupational needs, rights, and aspirations beyond economic outcomes.
Keywords: Betätigungsgerechtigkeit; Ciencia ocupacional; Migrant*innen; Occupational Science; Occupational science; Plattformarbeit; Science de l’occupation; ethnographie ciblée; etnografía focalizada; focused ethnography; fokussierte Ethnografie; immigrants; inmigrantes; justice occupationnelle; justicia ocupacional; occupational justice; platform work; sistemas sociotécnicos; sociotechnical systems; soziotechnische Systeme; systèmes sociotechniques; trabajo en plataformas; travail sur plateformes; 平台工作; 社会技术系统; 移民; 职能正义; 职能科学; 聚焦民族志研究方法

French Trade Unions Put to the Test by the Political Crisis / Le syndicalisme français à l’épreuve de la crise politique - Yon, Karel (Labour / Le Travail, 2025)
Analyzes the state of trade unionism in France with particular reference to union participation in the pensions movement of 2023 and the formation of a left-wing popular front during the 2024 national election. Argues that this return to the political sphere by unions during a time of crisis is in contrast to their narrow, industrial relations focus (called "démocratie social") that has predominated over the past 30 years. Concludes that political unionism and a class-based focus on the broader representation of work are the strategic challenges. The text is an address originally given by the author at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal, on June 19, 2024.

Platformized Labour and Harassment in Canada: Quantifying the Effects of Racism on Content Creators - Zuzunaga Zegarra, Daniela (Platforms & Society, 2025)
Digital content creation is a growing area of labour in Canada. Alongside the development of this labour market, it has been reported there are rising issues of harassment, racism, and racial representation. Research germane to this area has provided rich qualitative accounts of how harassment and social oppression impact marginalized content creators. This study builds on this scholarly area to demonstrate quantitatively the ways in which harassment manifests in a Canadian setting. Using data from an online survey targeting Canadian content creators (N = 103), I specifically examine the incidence of harassment and racism among this population. Drawing on critical race theories, I argue that although online harassment is a widespread workplace hazard for content creators – regardless of identity, the consequences of this harassment are qualitatively different for those who have been historically marginalized. I expand on these findings to articulate how these impacts have downstream effects for marginalized creators, which may hinder their ability to sustain their labour in this environment. Finally, I situate these findings in the platformized environment within which these workplace hazards exist and problematize the arms-length approach that platforms take in regulating these hazards.

Labour Shortages and Wages. An Examination of Varying Bargaining Power among Workers - Zwysen, Wouter (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2025)
Labour shortages have become increasingly widespread across Europe and other advanced economies since the post-2008 recovery, due to rising demand and structural labour market transitions—digital, green and demographic. They further worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, through shifts in worker preferences, and again during the post-pandemic economic rebound. While policymakers and academics often attribute the shortages to skill gaps, which may be reduced via training or increased migration, there is growing recognition that unattractive wages and poor working conditions are also hindering recruitment.
Keywords: Europe; collective bargaining; job quality; power resources; shortages; tight labour market; vacancies; wages

The Racial Labour Geographies of Amazon in Canada’s Greater Toronto Area - Abdelbaki, Rawan (Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, 2024)
Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this paper highlights two distinct but related dynamics of racial differentiation in relation to Amazon in Greater Toronto Area (GTA): at the level of the region’s broader political economy and within Amazon’s warehouses. I outline the ways in which the e-commerce giant both exploits and (re)makes the racialized geography of the GTA. Amazon’s capitalization on neoliberal austerity and corporate welfare perpetuates class and racialized inequalities. These processes adversely affect these suburban localities and negatively impact employment in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this context, I argue that Amazon’s success has been, in no small part, due to its exploitation of Canada’s racially stratified labour market. Within the warehouse, the notion that digital Taylorism produces an undifferentiated workforce and a uniform labour process is interrogated. Instead, workers’ own accounts point to the ways digital technologies enable management to generate racial/ethnic differentiation and further squeeze value from workers. By situating Amazon within this specific socio-historical and political economic context, I demonstrate that the GTA offers a case study through which to examine the racial dynamics of digital capitalism and show that racialized and gendered social relations inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.

Does Cultural Intelligence Increase Professional Success among Immigrant Workers? A Quebec-Based Study - Agbon, Gildas; Ouedraogo, Salmata (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
We investigated the role of cultural intelligence (CQ) among immigrant workers (IWs) in their professional success within Quebec organizations. Professional success was assessed at two stages of a worker’s career: an intermediate (organizational socialization: OS) and an ultimate stage (objective career success: OCS). Data from a purposive sample of 103 IWs show that CQ predicts OS, but neither CQ nor OS predicts OCS, except for IWs from Global North countries. Thus, intermediate success depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to integrate into the organization’s culture, but this ability will increase objective career success only if the immigrant is from the Global North, and not from the Global South. These findings challenge the hypothesis that socio-economic integration depends on the immigrant’s personal ability to adapt. Finally, we discuss structural factors that may affect the CQ/OCS relationship.
Keywords: Compétences culturelles; Cultural competencies; career success; immigrant; immigrants; intégration socioprofessionnelle; socio-professional integration; succès de carrière

La coopération amapienne : une relation de travail atypique pour entreprendre ensemble dans un environnement capacitant - Aissaoui, Sonia; Bueno Merino, Pascale; Grandval, Samuel; Hamza, Hamdi (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
L’objectif de cet article consiste à analyser les spécificités et les enjeux entrepreneuriaux de la relation de travail atypique que constitue la coopération amapienne entretenue entre un petit producteur agricole et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Assimilable à une forme spécifique d’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole, la création d’une association pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne (AMAP) se matérialise par un engagement contractualisé des consommateurs dans l’activité de production agricole et de vente directe de produits alimentaires locaux. L’engagement de ces consommateurs constitue alors une véritable force de travail pour le petit producteur agricole facilitant l’accès à des expertises et compétences complémentaires. Notre recherche vise à comprendre comment la coopération amapienne, en tant que relation de travail atypique, permet de stimuler, au sein d’un territoire, l’entrepreneuriat collectif agricole entre un petit producteur et un groupe de consommateurs bénévoles. Basés sur une méthodologie qualitative, nos résultats montrent que cette relation de travail atypique se caractérise par un système de coproduction, de cogestion et de réciprocité apprenante. Par ailleurs, elle favorise, pour l’entrepreneur agricole, la mise en place d’un environnement capacitant grâce aux principes de suppléance, de soutien, d’éducation et d’accompagnement auxquels obéit la création d’une AMAP et qui renforcent la capacité d’action et d’autonomisation du petit producteur. Ainsi, la finalité de cette relation de travail atypique réside dans un « entreprendre ensemble » pour, in fine, cocréer de la valeur sociale. Cette approche entrepreneuriale et altruiste de la relation de travail atypique enrichit la littérature académique qui l’envisageait, jusqu’à présent, principalement à partir de la situation de vulnérabilité du travailleur. Nous proposons en effet de la considérer aussi à partir de la capacité du travailleur à prendre part à un projet d’entrepreneuriat collectif en mettant à disposition d’une communauté un ensemble d’expertises et de compétences.
Keywords: AMAP; Atypical Work Relationship; CSA; Collective Entrepreneurship; Community Supported Agriculture; Coopération amapienne; Enabling Environment; Entrepreneuriat agricole; Entrepreneuriat collectif; Entrepreneuriat social; Environnement capacitant; Relation de travail atypique; Rural Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship

Negotiating Job Security and Capital Investments in Response to Deindustrialization: The Case of Canada’s Auto Sector - Anastakis, Dimitry; High, Steven C. (Labor History, 2024)
Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective ‘social’ bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure.
Keywords: Bargaining; Canadian auto workers; Unifor; deindustrialization; investment

The Happiness of the British Working Class - Asser, Jared Kazik (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "The Happiness of the British Working Class," by Jamie L. Bronstein.

Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada's Cultural Diplomacy - Barbosa, Rosana (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada's Cultural Diplomacy," by Eric Fillion.

Pourquoi la loi protège mal la santé – sécurité : le bruit au travail au Québec ou l’échec de l’autorégulation et du marché - Baril-Gingras, Geneviève; Bruyère, Raphaëlle; Paradis, Jean-Philippe (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
L’étude cherche à contribuer à expliquer pourquoi les travailleurs et travailleuses continuent à être exposés à des conditions de travail pathogènes, malgré les législations en prévention en santé et en sécurité du travail. Elle examine pour cela le processus social de « régulation » de l’exposition au bruit, cas paradigmatique de risque pour la santé dont les effets et les éventuels coûts d’indemnisation sont différés et généralement pas perçus comme nuisant à la sécurité et la productivité. L’analyse s’appuie entre autres sur des données obtenues par demande d’accès à l’information auprès de la Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail, dont des rapports d’intervention d’inspecteurs. Alors que les cas de surdité professionnelle reconnus sont en augmentation marquée, l’analyse met en évidence une série de déficits de régulation : déficit de protection par un seuil réglementaire d’exposition au bruit inchangé jusqu’à 2023; absence de couverture de la majorité des secteurs d’activité par le Réseau de santé publique en santé au travail, aussi par paralysie réglementaire, alors que ses signalements donnent lieu à la majorité des interventions de l’inspectorat; déficit d’application (très faible nombre d’interventions sur le bruit, particulièrement dans les secteurs à majorité féminine), même après la priorisation de ce risque, le nombre d’inspecteurs restant inchangé malgré l’augmentation marquée du nombre d’établissements; finalement, déficit de responsabilisation des employeurs par l’absence d’imputation directe à l’employeur des coûts d’indemnisation des cas de surdité professionnelle reconnus, d’abord encouragée par le mode de tarification, puis systématique. Ces déficits combinés participent à la « normalisation » d’atteintes à la santé qui peuvent pourtant être prévenues. L’étude conclut à l’échec de l’autorégulation de facto (absence de réglementation adéquate et de ressources conséquentes de soutien et de contrôle) comme à celle du marché (coûts d’indemnisation et tarification en fonction de l’expérience).
Keywords: Bruit; Health; Noise; Occupational Safety and Health; Politiques publiques; Prevention; Prévention; Public Policies; Quebec; Québec; Regulation; Régulation; Santé; Santé et sécurité du travail

The Impacts of Sexual Harassment on the Health of Women Working in Male-Dominated Industries in Canada: A Literature Review - Bekkai, Dounia (American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 2024)
With the advancement of science and technology and the improvement of social attitudes and mentalities, many Canadian women nowadays hold professions that have always been held exclusively by men. They have been able to integrate educational training, academic programs, and professional careers that have always been “masculine”, such as engineering, architecture, accounting, finance, military, trades, construction, and law enforcement, to name a few. Women in Canada have successfully performed and integrated these “masculine” professions. However, this integration was only a one-way street in many circumstances, not appreciated or accepted by men who considered it an invasion of their professional property and territory. Therefore, it unfortunately opens the door to bullying, discrimination, intimidation, and even sexual harassment. Sexual harassment of women in the workplace has always been persistent, especially in male-dominated industries. Not only does it harm women’s health, advancement, and career, but it also harms the organizations and their reputations. This research will investigate the impacts of sexual harassment on the overall health of women working in male-dominated industries in Canada.

The Prophet’s Children: Parties, Sects, and Revolution - Blackledge, Paul (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews and comments on two books by John Kelly: "Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain" and "The Twilight of World Trotskyism."

Travailler moins ne suffit pas - Boucher, Marie-Pierre (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Travailler moins ne suffit pas," by Julia Posca.

Navigating Professional Dilemmas: How Public-Sector Engineers Navigate Ethical Tensions Arising from Conflicting Institutional Logics - Bourdages-Sylvain, Marie-Pierre; Adams, Tracey (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Over the last few decades, collegial forms of organization guided by norms of professionalism and shared decision-making have given way in public organizations to more corporate organizational forms that prioritize efficiency and economy. A growing body of research has explored these conflicting institutional logics, and identified the challenges of professional workers as they attempt to reconcile them on the job. At times, however, conflicting logics may create ethical dilemmas for professionals faced with competing imperatives, such as efficiency and public safety, if choosing the ethical imperative threatens their job security or professional standing. Their responses to such dilemmas have been under-explored in the literature. In this paper, we examine such dilemmas, and the responses to them, using qualitative data from public-sector engineers in two Canadian provinces. Public-sector engineers are ideal for such analysis because they work in changing environments where the tension between professional and managerial logics may be keenly felt. We find that these professionals have a range of responses, sometimes resisting and sometimes marginally acceding to workplace pressures. Light is thus shed on the circumstances under which ethical tensions might escalate.
Keywords: Canada; Engineers; Ethical tensions; Ingénieurs; Institutional logics; Logiques institutionnelles; Organisations publiques; Professions; Public organizations; Tensions éthiques

Academic Staff Associations and Vaccination Mandates in the Canadian University Sector - Braley-Rattai, Alison; Savage, Larry (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
We examine the pivotal role of academic staff associations (ASAs) in advocating and influencing the adoption of vaccination mandates at Canadian universities in the run-up to the fall 2021 term. Through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with ASA leaders and staff, we delve into the factors behind ASA positions on such mandates. We demonstrate that the vast majority of ASAs advocated robust COVID-19 mitigation measures, including vaccination mandates, but their approaches varied because of regional differences and institutional and sectoral dynamics. Many ASAs actively promoted mandatory vaccination, unlike the case with the vast majority of other unions.
Keywords: Associations universitaires; COVID-19; Canada; Pandémie; Travail académique; Universités; Vaccination obligatoire; academic labour; faculty associations; pandemic; universities; vaccination mandates

Union Responses to Workplace COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in Canada - Braley-Rattai, Alison; Savage, Larry (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
This article explores union responses to workplace-based covid-19 vaccine mandates in Canada. Specifically, the authors examine the complex interplay of factors that drove unions to adopt their respective positions on vaccine mandates and to frame those positions in particular ways for the benefit of their members and the wider public. Interviews with key informants, along with analysis of documents and arbitration decisions, reveal a disjuncture between the discursive quality of certain unions’ positions and their actual positions. In particular, media framing of unions as either “for” or “against” vaccine mandates oversimplified or misrepresented the actual positions adopted. In response, the article introduces a typology of union positions that distinguishes between support for mandatory-vaccination policies and support for voluntary-vaccination policies and reveals that the vast majority of unions favoured the latter. The authors further reveal that workplace vaccine mandates were both internally divisive and disorienting for unions, given the central role labour organizations play in managing workplace disputes and representing the interests of workers, both individually and collectively.
Keywords: covid-19; occupational health and safety; unions; vaccination

Pursuing the Unachievable: Examining Worker Burnout in Ontario’s Public Employment Services - Bromfield, Sheldon M.; Kanyogonya, Virginia (Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, 2024)
This paper utilizes the job demands–resources (JD-R) model to examine how the neoliberal governance of Employment Ontario (EO) contributes to worker burnout. The work of Employment Ontario specialists is governed by neoliberal policies, which are an apparatus of austerity politics mechanized through New Public Management (NPM). NPM places a strong emphasis on performance management, quantitative targets and the marketization of public services. This paper demonstrates how these neoliberal policies contribute to worker burnout in public employment services (PES). EO specialists who deliver PES, are tasked with helping vulnerable jobseekers quickly re-enter the paid labour force regardless of systemic barriers, which this study has revealed as a largely unachievable pursuit within a neoliberal market environment. Utilizing data from thirty-two interviews, our analysis indicates that EO workers/specialists experience burnout due to unreasonable job demands and a lack of sufficient resources, which inhibit their ability to meaningfully support vulnerable jobseekers. Having identified time pressures, work overload, lack of training and development opportunities and job insecurity as some of the stressors experienced by EO specialists, we conclude that prolonged exposure to these stressors leads to burnout.

Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America - Brown, R. Blake (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America," by Andrew C. McKevitt.

Déjouer la fatalité : pauvreté, familles, institutions - Cadrin, Meggie Sue (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the cyberexposition, "Déjouer la fatalité : pauvreté, familles, institutions," by the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (Montréal, 2022).

At Your Side, On Your Side: United Nurses of Alberta Communications Framing - Cake, Susan (Journal of Industrial Relations, 2024)
This case study focuses on the United Nurses of Alberta, the union representing registered nurses in the province of Alberta, Canada; this explores United Nurses of Alberta's communication strategies. Drawing on the collective action frames previously identified in United Nurses of Alberta's social media and newsletters from 2010 to 2015, which frames nurses as unique healthcare providers and advocates, this study leverages insights from 23 interviews conducted with the United Nurses of Alberta staff, highly involved members, and general members from 2016 to 2017. The article explores the motivations and tensions around the framing of nurses and the union. The findings indicate that the United Nurses of Alberta could enhance its communications by better aligning with members’ current struggles through various collective action frame bridging and extensions. The research also suggests the potential benefits of United Nurses of Alberta shifting away from collective action frames rooted in self-sacrifice. Furthermore, this case study provides recommendations for communication strategies that could strengthen member engagement and involvement within their unions.

Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program - Cake, Susan (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program," by Catherine E. Connelly.

Why the Construction Trades Have a Valuable Role in Meeting the Climate Challenge - Calvert, John (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The construction industry accounts for 18 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is extensive evidence that this can be reduced significantly by implementing aggressive net zero building practices. However, the way the industry is organized impedes this achievement because it fails to promote the development of a broadly based, highly qualified, climate-literate workforce. Successful low carbon construction requires enhancement of workers’ knowledge, skills, and competencies because it requires much higher energy performance standards than traditional construction practice. Yet the industry remains wedded to the current system of low-bid, low-quality construction to cut costs. The organization of much construction work reflects a Taylorist approach, with extensive piecework and subcontracting that relies heavily on precarious, unskilled, and semi-skilled workers. Most employers avoid investing in trades training, leaving it to governments, unions, and individual workers to fund workforce development. Committed to a deregulated market with minimal government interference in their profit-making activities, many contractors oppose tougher building and energy regulations while lobbying against higher labour standards, occupational certification requirements, and union organizing. To meet their net zero targets, governments must recognize that market forces are inadequate to create the well-trained, highly skilled workforce needed. Major policy interventions are required to force industry to make the necessary changes in vocational education and training (vet) and employment practices – changes designed to upskill the construction workforce and give workers and unions a greater voice in shaping climate-informed building practice.
Keywords: apprenticeship; building emissions; climate literacy; construction labour; net zero; vocational education and training (VET)

Nii Ndahlohke: Boys' and Girls' Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915 - Carleton, Sean (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Nii Ndahlohke: Boys' and Girls' Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915," by Mary Jane Logan McCallum.

Les interactions sociales favorisées par le travail en aire ouverte ? Le cas des espaces de coworking - Cheyrouze, Marlène; Tremblay, Diane-Gabrielle (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Les espaces de coworking sont propices aux interactions sociales, influencées en partie par la configuration de l’environnement. Impliquant le partage des locaux et du mobilier, l’aire ouverte crée une coprésence entre les personnes. Néanmoins, cette coprésence ne suffit pas à stimuler les interactions professionnelles, moins nombreuses que les interactions informelles. De plus, le bruit de parole est la principale contrainte du travail en aire ouverte. Dans ce contexte, cette étude en ergonomie vise à relever les conditions et les caractéristiques des interactions se produisant en aire ouverte. La méthodologie a été déployée auprès de 87 personnes, pendant 44 demi-journées et dans cinq espaces de coworking. Les personnes ont été observées dans l’aire ouverte pendant deux heures : toutes leurs interactions ont été relevées avec une grille d’observation papier et un plan d’observation informatisé. Ensuite, elles ont été interrogées individuellement dans une entrevue basée sur la technique de l’autoconfrontation. D’après les résultats, les interactions sont de courte durée (3 ± 6,55 ; 0,5-52) et se produisent surtout entre des personnes installées à la même table. Les trois quarts des interactions avec un-e collègue ont concerné des travailleur-ses salarié-es alors que les trois quarts des interactions avec un-e autre coworkeur-e ont concerné des travailleur-ses autonomes. Les interactions portant sur le contenu du travail ont été les plus nombreuses, suivies de près par les interactions informelles. L’étude propose plusieurs pistes d’amélioration de la dynamique sociale pour les responsables de la gestion, de l’animation, de l’architecture et de l’aménagement des espaces de coworking : repérer celles et ceux qui souhaitent s’installer en groupe, sélectionner les profils selon les caractéristiques de l’espace, ou organiser le mobilier selon ces profils.
Keywords: aire ouverte; co-presence; coprésence; coworking; ergonomics; ergonomie; interaction; interactions; open space

Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty in Britain - Clarke, John (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Scoundrels and Shirkers: Capitalism and Poverty in Britain," by Jim Silver.

Le Living lab, une démarche d’innovation au service de la qualité de vie et des conditions de travail ? - Cléty, Henry; Van Compernol, Hélène; Mortreux, Cindy; Soyez, Stéphane (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Menée au sein d’une collectivité territoriale, cette recherche-action visait à introduire une démarche Living lab dans un service de 42 agents. Reposant sur des principes de participation, de gouvernance partagée, d’apprenance et d’ateliers co-élaboratifs, la démarche a été impulsée adaptée dans l’objectif de traiter de la qualité de vie et des conditions de travail des agents. À partir de recueils de données effectués à intervalles réguliers au cours de la démarche, les analyses réalisées avec les acteurs témoignent d’une amélioration de la qualité de vie au travail et de leur appropriation de pratiques participatives et consultatives dans leur fonctionnement quotidien. Ces résultats s’expliquent a priori tant par les caractéristiques méthodologiques de la démarche (participation, co-élaboration, volontariat…) que par l’influence de déterminants organisationnels et managériaux propres à l’évolution du service (recrutement, investissements…). Cette étude illustre ainsi l’importance (i) des principes d’expression et de participation des travailleurs et (ii) de développer une recherche centrée sur les méthodes et processus de transformation et de changement organisationnel favorisant la qualité de vie et des conditions de travail. En outre, cette étude ouvre à de nombreux questionnements : à quelles conditions organisationnelles, méthodologiques ou psychosociales de tels processus peuvent-ils se pérenniser et s’inscrire dans la culture organisationnelle ? À quelles conditions une recherche-action en sciences sociales peut-elle être participative, et avec quelles limites ?
Keywords: Action research; Démarche participative; Living lab; Participatory Approach; Quality of Work Life; Qualité de vie au travail; Recherche-action

How the Dark Triad Affects Counterproductive Work Behaviour (CWB) and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) in Israeli-Arab Healthcare Organizations - Cohen, Aaron; Abdo, Geries (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Few studies have examined the relationship between dark triad personality traits and behavioral outcomes in healthcare organizations. Recent literature has called for much more extensive research on this issue because the dark triad can negatively affect healthcare organizations. To this end, we examined how dark triad traits relate to counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), as reported by supervisors and nurses. We surveyed Arab nurses in Israel, specifically 267 nurses at Arab hospitals and retirement homes in the North of the country, and obtained a response rate of 57%. We found that CWB (nurse-reported) is positively associated with secondary psychopathy and negatively associated with narcissism. We also found that OCB (nurse-reported) is negatively associated with secondary psychopathy and positively associated with narcissism. Both primary psychopathy and Machiavellianism are weakly associated with CWB and OCB. We conclude that these destructive behaviours are detrimental to organizational effectiveness and might lead to low-quality patient care. They should be addressed by management.
Keywords: Arabes israéliens; Dark triad personalities; Israeli Arabs; Personnalités de la triade sombre; collectivist culture; comportement contre-productif au travail; comportement de citoyenneté organisationnelle; counterproductive work behaviour; culture collectiviste; organizational citizenship behaviour

Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law - Comacchio, Cynthia (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law," by Luke Taylor.

Stéréotypes de genre et conflit entre travail et famille en Europe : une analyse sur plusieurs dimensions - Coron, Clotilde (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
La littérature existante s’est intéressée aux liens entre genre et conflit entre travail et famille, mais a peu exploré l’effet modérateur des stéréotypes de genre sur les effets différenciés du genre en fonction de la direction (conflit travail-famille et conflit famille-travail) et/ou de la dimension (temps, tension, comportements, cognition). La présente recherche utilise la dernière vague de l’enquête européenne sur les conditions de travail pour étudier l’effet modérateur des stéréotypes de genre à l’échelle nationale sur les effets du genre sur quatre combinaisons (direction x dimension) du conflit entre travail et famille. Cela permet de montrer que le conflit entre travail et famille est globalement moins élevé dans les pays caractérisés par une vision plus égalitaire du genre, et que, sur deux des quatre combinaisons, et sur le conflit global, cet effet est plus marqué pour les hommes que pour les femmes. Ces résultats nous permettent de discuter avec la littérature existante, à l’aune de la théorie des rôles de genre.
Keywords: Analyse statistique; Conflit travail-famille; Gender; Genre; Statistical analysis; Work-family conflict

Le capital algorithmique : accumulation, pouvoir et résistance à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle - Cossette, Samuel (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Le capital algorithmique : accumulation, pouvoir et résistance à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle," by Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martineau.

Le droit du travail en sociologie - Coutu, Michel (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Le droit du travail en sociologie," by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe and Jean-Philippe Tonneau.

Shaped by Boom-and-Bust: A History of the Canadian Mining Industry Since 1859 - Dallaire-Fortier, Clara (New Political Economy, 2024)
This article is concerned with the historical evolution of the mining industry in Canada since 1859. The focus is directed on changes that occurred in the industry and allows for the identification of four distinct mining regimes. These regimes are defined using the Regulation Theory, which connects conditions of production, technical progress, financial structures, and social relations. The identification of regimes gives a portrait of continuity and change in the industry. Continuity is present in the active role of the state, the legal framework based on Free Mining Principle and persistent speculation in the industry. Change is illustrated in price cycle, labour share and technological innovation. Interestingly, through time, price cycles have very different outcomes in financial and real economic terms. The most recent upswing in the late 1990s resulted in a punctual increase of financial assets but no significant increase in employment. Through this discussion, it becomes evident that the mechanisms underlying continuity and change have implications on the nature of state intervention and on the distribution of power between the corporate and regional actors like the workers and indigenous communities.
Keywords: Canada; Regulation theory; labour; mining; price cycle

Unionization Rates, Inequality, and Poverty in Canadian Provinces 2000–2020 - Das, Anupam; Hudson, Ian; Hudson, Mark (Capital & Class, 2024)
Unions can increase the power of workers through both collective bargaining and political avenues, potentially creating less income inequality and poverty. However, this potential may not be realized. Drawing on power resource theory, this study uses panel data to investigate the connection between unionization and two measures of after-tax inequality – the income share of the top 1% and the Gini coefficient – and three measures of poverty – the percentage of the population below the low-income cut-off, the average income of the bottom decile, and the percent of the population below the low-income measure – between Canadian provinces from 2000 to 2020. We find that unionization is negatively associated with income inequality in Canada. This relationship is statistically significant. However, we do not find evidence of any statistical association between unionization and poverty in Canada.

Where are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites - Dean, David (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Where are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites," edited by Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti.

Les modes managériales favorisent-elles le harcèlement moral ? Une étude juridico-gestionnaire de la jurisprudence française - Deharo, Gaëlle (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Les modes managériales entraînent des modifications des pratiques organisationnelles. Ces modifications sont d’autant plus rapides que le cycle de vie des modes managériales s’accélère et se raccourcit, favorisant les changements organisationnels. Partant du lien existant entre l’organisation du travail et la santé des salariés, en particulier en matière de harcèlement moral l’objectif de cet article est d’examiner le lien entre les modes managériales et le harcèlement moral. À partir de l’analyse exhaustive de la jurisprudence, cette étude montre une relation ambivalente entre le harcèlement moral et les modes managériales. Si, en effet, il n’est pas possible d’établir une corrélation directe entre les deux, l’analyse montre que l’adoption d’une pratique à la mode entraine des changements organisationnels, qui constituent eux-mêmes un terreau fertile pour le harcèlement moral. Ces conséquences, pourtant, sont peu interrogées par la littérature sur le harcèlement, qui ignore les modes managériales, comme par la littérature sur les modes managériales, qui remet peu en question l’implémentation des pratiques et limite l’analyse à l’alternative adoption / rejet des pratiques à la mode.
Keywords: harcèlement managérial; harcèlement moral; institutional life; management; managerial harassment; managerial methods; modes managériales; moral harassment; vie institutionnelle

Good Grievance - Dekker, Jennifer (CAUT Journal, 2024)
After failing to resolve an association grievance by means of mediation and collective bargaining, the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa signed a Letter of Understanding transferring grievance settlement to library council. This decision was both novel and carried risks, but ultimately led to unionized librarians using both the forum and worker voice effectively. This article explains the grievance, explores the concept of worker voice - including the cost of using voice - and questions whether library councils are conducive to voice. I also describe the member engagement that was necessary for librarians to participate in grievance resolution and offer advice on conditions that supported effective grievance resolution.
Keywords: collegial governance; grievance; library council

Introduction - Dekker, Jennifer (CAUT Journal, 2024)
Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on post-secondary information workers in Canada.
Keywords: archivists; information workers; librarians

How Belonging to a Minority Group, Receiving a Hiring Decision, and Getting Feedback on Test Results Affect the Intention to File a Complaint: The Mediating Role of Perceived Discrimination in Hiring - Denis, Pascale; Cossette, Michel; Stamate, Alina; Haeck-Pelletier, Justine; Sauvé, Geneviève (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Objective indicators, such as minority hiring rates or number of complaints, often fail to fully represent actual discrimination in hiring processes, particularly against racial and ethnic minorities (McGonagle et al., 2016). Despite legal efforts in Quebec to increase employment of minorities, their ongoing underrepresentation points to the need to examine discrimination in terms of perceived experiences. In line with Anderson (2011), we investigated perceived discrimination in hiring (PDH), its predictors and its effect on the intention to file a discrimination complaint, rather than solely considering actual complaints. Using a quasi-experimental design, we simulated a fictitious hiring process with 361 students from French-speaking Canadian universities. First, we confirmed the three dimensions of the recently developed PDH scale: differential treatment; breach of psychological contract; and non-competency-based assessment (Haeck-Pelletier, 2022). Second, using structural equation modelling (SEM), we found mediation effects: PDH scores were higher across all dimensions when a candidate belonged to a minority group, received a negative hiring decision or did not receive feedback on test results. However, only differential treatment predicted a candidate’s intention to file a complaint. In addition to this first empirical test of Anderson’s model, the results suggest that organizations should address perceptions of unfair treatment due to minority group membership by identifying and modifying the practices that contribute to them. The eventual outcome would be a more representative workforce.
Keywords: decision; discrimination; feedback; hiring; minority group; perception

Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression - Dennis, Michael (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression," by Chris Wright.

Conjuguer distance et présence : la réponse du personnel de la fonction publique à l’égard du travail hybride - Deschênes, Andrée-Anne (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
Dans la foulée de l’expérience de télétravail obligatoire vécue pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 et pour tirer profit à la fois des avantages du télétravail et du travail en présence, de nombreuses organisations ont récemment embrassé le travail hybride. La fonction publique québécoise s’est engagée dans cette voie, en déployant une politique-cadre en matière de télétravail qui régule le nombre de jours de télétravail hebdomadaires. La récence du déploiement à large échelle de cette modalité d’organisation du travail appelle à mieux comprendre ses effets sur la réponse attitudinale du personnel. Prenant appui sur le modèle d’acceptation de la technologie et sur la théorie du signal, cet article vise à examiner la réponse perceptuelle et attitudinale du personnel au travail hybride. À partir de données quantitatives et qualitatives collectées en octobre 2022 auprès du personnel professionnel de la fonction publique et parapublique (n = 3 904), les résultats montrent l’effet positif de l’agréabilité perçue et de l’utilité perçue d’une journée de travail en présence sur la satisfaction à l’égard du travail hybride. La satisfaction à l’endroit du travail hybride influence positivement l’adéquation personne/organisation. L’adéquation personne/organisation exerce un effet positif sur l’engagement organisationnel ainsi que sur la satisfaction au travail. Elle joue un rôle médiateur dans la relation entre la satisfaction envers l’expérience de travail hybride et l’engagement organisationnel, ainsi qu’entre la satisfaction envers l’expérience de travail hybride et la satisfaction au travail. Les résultats qualitatifs témoignent de l’absence de valeur ajoutée des jours de travail en présence, d’une insatisfaction à l’égard du manque de flexibilité et d’une perception positive à l’égard des avantages du télétravail. Ces résultats ajoutent aux connaissances empiriques quant à l’appréciation de l’adéquation personne/organisation dans un contexte de travail hybride. Ils contribuent aux connaissances managériales en soulignant l’importance de considérer les attentes et les valeurs du personnel dans le déploiement des pratiques et politiques organisationnelles.
Keywords: Travail hybride; adéquation personne/organisation; engagement; fonction publique; satisfaction au travail; théorie du signal; télétravail

Perceptions de justice et santé au travail. L’organisation à l’épreuve. Collection Inégalité et justice sociale - Dompierre, Johanne (Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Perceptions de justice et santé au travail. L’organisation à l’épreuve," edited by Stéphane Moulin.

Essential or Excluded? Union Pressures and State Responses to Platform Work in Three Liberal Market Economies - Duggan, James; O’Sullivan, Michelle; O’Sullivan, Maeve (Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2024)
The COVID-19 pandemic led to renewed discussion of decent work for people at the margins of the labour market. This article explores public policy on platform workers across three liberal market economies, namely the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, taking the pandemic as a focal point. Liberal market economies are generally difficult environments for unions, and we examine the nature of union political pressure on the state to enhance protections for platform workers and the extent to which policy has changed in each state. We find uneven levels of such union pressure, with the most limited attention afforded by Irish unions. In the United Kingdom, the unions did exert some influence through strategic litigation, creating a policy problem for the government. More progressive policies are evident in Canada, where the government recognises that platform workers’ precarious position has undesirable consequences for the state.

Regards croisés sur la grève d'Amoco à Hawkesbury, une histoire ouvrière de l'Ontario français - Durocher, Kathleen (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
The article reviews the book, "Regards croisés sur la grève d'Amoco à Hawkesbury, une histoire ouvrière de l'Ontario français," by Andréane Gagnon.

« Presque tous les ans, on a demandé l’aide de la milice » : la répression dans les conflits ouvriers au Québec, 1840–1909 - Durou, Guillaume (Journal of Canadian Studies, 2024)
La période d’avant-guerre au Québec est traversée d’intenses conflits de travail et d’épisodes de répression sans précédent. Sa complexité amène la sociologie historique à reculer dans le temps, s’interroger sur la militarisation des lieux de travail et l’expérience de la violence au sein de l’espace urbain et examiner comment ces derniers s’articulent autour du développement du capitalisme et de la formation de l’État. En partant des années 1840, cet article cherche à problématiser sur la longue durée la répression militaire dans le contexte de luttes ouvrières à partir de grèves clés et de mieux comprendre les dynamiques politique et économique de la répression.

Part of the Solution? Indigenous Apprentices and the Unionized Building Trades: The Way of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 793 - Fernandes, Gilberto (Labour / Le Travail, 2024)
There have never been more favourable conditions for drawing Indigenous workers into the unionized building trades. The construction industry needs to replenish and diversify its overwhelmingly white, male, and aging workforce to meet skilled labour demands in the next few decades, when major civil infrastructure, mining, and green energy developments are expected to occur in northern Indigenous territories. These projects will be mandated by impact benefit agreements to employ a significant number of Indigenous workers who will first need to be trained. At the same time, Indigenous peoples are the fastest-growing population in Canada and have shown a propensity for pursuing trades education. In recent years, Ontario's largest building trade unions have taken significant steps to recruit, train, and employ northern Indigenous workers, including in Nunavut. In collaboration with various stakeholders, the unions' efforts are starting to show positive results. But are their methods and goals informed by decolonization, reconciliation, and Indigenization? This article reflects on this question while examining the case of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 793, which has been a leader among building trades unions when it comes to establishing relationships with Indigenous partners, training Indigenous workers, and contributing to their economic self-determination.
Keywords: Autochtones; Indigenization; Indigenous; apprenticeships; apprentissage; autochtonisation; building trades; bénéfices communautaires; community benefits; decolonization; décolonisation; employment equity; formation professionnelle; métiers de la construction; reconciliation; réconciliation; skills training; syndicats; trade unions; équité en emploi