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Union Organizing in the Northern Canadian Mining Industry

Mason Fitzpatrick and Suzanne Mills
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.

Social Support, Strain, and Surveillance: Peer Relationships and Representation among Migrant Farm Workers in Canada

Erika Borrelli
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.

Deskilled and Degraded: The Interaction of Precarious Status and Precarious Employment Trajectories for Migrant Workers in Canada

Jason Foster, Mylène Coderre, Giovanni Carranza-Hernandez and Zainab Mahmood
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.

Poisoned Fields, Fated Lives: Destiny Politics in A Time to Rise

Sajdeep Soomal
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.”

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?

Eric M. Tucker
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.

From “Offender” to “Employee”: Canadian Prison Labour and Neoliberal Citizenship

Sandrine Haentjens and Padraic X. Scanlan
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.

Good Enough to Work, Good Enough to Stay: Domestic Work, Feminist Publishing, and the Archive

Rachel Lobo
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.

Unpaid Work and Feminist Alliances across Difference: Three Local Studies of Wages for Housework Organizing in Canada

Margaret Hillyard Little, Lynne Marks, Christine Hughes, Morghan Watson and Cherene Aniyan

Canada’s Women’s Land Army: Wartime Labour and the Power of Visual Evidence

Kelsey Lonie

A Timely Exhibit in a Gem of an Archive: Labour, Feminism, Trade, and Free Trade, Then and Now

Joan Sangster

Democracy’s Decline: What’s Class Got to Do with It?

Dennis Pilon

The Persistent Roots of Racial Capitalism in the Era of Digital Platforms

Anuneeta Chatterjee

Laurie Ellinghausen, Ships of State: Literature and the Seaman’s Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025)

Sean T. Cadigan

Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (London and New York: Verso, 2023)

James Naylor

Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Mona Oikawa, eds., After Redress: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2025)

Jane Komori

David Skinner, A Political Economy of Canadian Broadcasting: Public Good Versus Private Profit (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2025)

Jeff Webb

Harry Glasbeek, Law at Work: The Coercion and Co-option of the Working Class (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2024)

Ali Hammoudi

Camille Champagne-Tremblay et Martin Petitclerc, Place Émilie-Gamelin. 200 ans de cohabitation sociale (Montréal : Écomusée du fier monde, 2025)

Emma LeBoutillier

Shaun Richman, We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2025)

Brandon Webb

Jacob Robbins-Kanter, Royce Koop, and Daniel Troup, eds., The Working Class and Politics in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2025)

Larry Savage

David Wight, Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021)

Matthew Miller

Tom Fraser, Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2025)

Priya Gupta and Kevin Skerrett

Joseph Butwin, Salud y Shalom: Conversations with Jewish Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2025)

Sam Bick

Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2024)

Steven High

Vera Chouinard, Remapping an Ableist World: Disability and Oppression Under Capitalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025)

Caroline Lieffers

Don Hamerquist (author) and Luis Brennan (ed.), A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2023)

Graham Latham

Gregory P. Marchildon, Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025)

Charles Smith

Sean Mills, Eric Fillion et Désirée Rochat (dir), Statesman of the Piano : Jazz, Race and History in the Life of Lou Hooper (Montréal : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023)

Samia Dumais

Andy Friend, Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943 (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 2025)

Kirk Niergarth

Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker, eds., Unjust Transition: The Future of Fossil Fuel Workers (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2024)

Anna Bettini