Just Labour (E-Journal - York University)
Not a member yet
194 research outputs found
Sort by
Resisting Precarity in Toronto's Municipal Sector: The Justice and Dignity for Cleaners Campaign
Full text linkThis paper examines a relative rarity in recent Canadian labour-state relations: the successful resistance by public sector workers and their allies to government-driven employment precarity. At stake was Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s determination to contract out a thousand jobs held by city cleaners. In response, the cleaners and the city’s labour movement launched a Justice and Dignity for Cleaners campaign to preserve these jobs as living wage employment. Effective coalition building behind a morally compelling campaign, together with some fortuitous political alignments, has forestalled city efforts to privatize a significant yet undervalued segment of the workforce. Our examination of the Justice and Dignity for Cleaners campaign reveals that resistance to precarity is not futile, notwithstand ing some attendant ambiguity of what constitutes a labour victory
Shall Wagnerism have no Dominion?
Full text linkThe Wagner Act Model has formed the basis of Canada’s collectivebargaining regime since World War II but has come under intense scrutiny inrecent years because of legislative weakening of collective bargaining rights,constitutional litigation defending collective bargaining rights and decliningunion density. This article examines and assesses these developments, arguingthat legislatively we have not witnessed a wholesale attack on Wagnerism, butrather a selective weakening of some of its elements. In the courts, it brieflyappeared as if the judiciary might constitutionalize meaningful labour rights andimpede the erosion of Wagnerism, but recent judicial case law suggests theprospects for this outcome are fading. While the political defence of Wagnerismmay be necessary when the alternatives to it are likely worse, holding on to whatwe’ve got will not reverse the long-term decline inunion density. The articleconcludes that at present there are no legal solutions to the labour movement’sproblems and that innovative efforts to represent workers’ collective interestsoutside of formal collective bargaining provide a more promising alternative
The Destruction of the "House": Changing Social Relations in a Restructured Factory
Full text linkThis article explores the social changes within a dairy-products factory in Montevideo, Uruguay. Applying sociological research tools from ethnography and grounded theory, the data was collected through employment at the factory. My position as a temporary worker allowed me to interact with the many different individuals and social actors that made up the factory’s social universe. I observed major organizational shifts within the human resources department, such as the hiring of younger and more educated prospects for supervisory roles, as opposed to filling those positions with the older and more experienced workers. This shift towards “productive re-arrangement” was a consequence of the regional and commercial challenges which encouraged strategic changes to keep the company competitive. The most obvious and significant changes were found in the hiring process, when the factory began increasingly targeting temporary workers for employment. In this article, I argue that these changes were largely responsible for a new spirit and emotionality that began to emerge amongst the current working pool; one of uncertainty and mistrust. When the dairy factory altered its operating philosophy, so did its labourers. This study looks to capture the relations that developed between them
Up Against the Wall: The Political Economy of the New Attack on the Canadian Labour Movement: A Reply to Andrew Jackson
Full text linkRevitalizing Union Action: The Impact of Youth Committees in a Public Sector Labour Federation in Quebec
Full text linkThis article examines the revitalization of a union federation’s capacity to represent young workers. It presents a qualitative study of the role and impact of one of the most developed forms of youth involvement in a union, youth committees. It first analyzes the extent to which these committees helped put the concerns of members under the age of 30 on the union federation’s agenda and fostered their participation in its internal life. Second, it examines the ways in which these committees initiated a degree of change in the federation at the institutional level. Overall, our findings indicate that youth committees were able to question existing practices and initiate a degree of union change. However, the disagreements expressed by the young workers tended to remain confined within these parallel structures, thus limiting their potential to change the representative capacity of the federation
Health and Safety for Canadian Youth in Trades
Full text linkThis article examines occupational health and safety (OHS), with a particular focus on youth apprentices. It uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the incidence of injuries among youth apprentices, and their experiences related to health and safety at work in Canada. Analysis of large-scale national surveys suggests a high incidence of work-related injuries among youth and low participation rates of younger workers in formal OHS training. A survey of 173 former Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program (OYAP) and Registered Apprenticeship Program in Alberta (RAP) participants finds that one-fifth suffered serious occupational injuries, which required time off work. The results from this study have important implications for youth apprenticeship programs, particularly the OHS- and trade-specific knowledge required for youth to work safely during and following their apprenticeship training
Incidence of Work and Workplace Injury Among Alberta Teens
Full text linkUtilizing a convenience sample of nearly 2000 respondents drawn from administrative data, this study finds 43.7 percent of adolescents (aged 12-14) and 61.5 percent of young persons (aged 15-17) in the Canadian province of Alberta reported employment in 2011/12. Of those employed, 49.7 percent of adolescents and 59.0 percent of young persons reported at least one work-related injury in the previous year. This study also identifies widespread non-reporting of workplace injuries and seemingly ineffective hazard identification and safety training. These results add to the growing evidence that the regulation of teenage employment in Alberta fails to adequately protect these workers from injury
Up Against the Wall: The Political Economy of the New Attack on the Canadian Labour Movement
Full text linkThe Canadian labour movement faces an existential crisis. State and business hostility to unions is not new, but the attack has recently intensified as conservative political forces and major employer groups have embraced the agenda of the US Republican right. Mirroring anti-union US labour law would lead to the precipitous decline of union density in Canada, which is already eroding due to the manufacturing crisis and the long-standing failure of unions to organize in private services. The new attack is more a product of labour movement weakness than strength, and will be most effectively resisted by increasing union density and bargaining power in the private sector
