November 16, 2011
- An Inquiry into the State of Labour Relations in Canada
- The Precariat
- Our Times Birthday Bash and CAW Local 1285: 1961-2011, 50th Anniversary Magazine
- Our Father of Management Consultants … bit of a scam?
- UCLA Campus Demonstration Featuring Robert Reich
- Rave On John…
- Why do Women Judges Matter?
- Women Lead to Greater Corporate Social Responsibility
- A Questionable Education
- Law Students for Hire
- Perception Is Reality
- Home Offices are not for Everyone
- Making the Employment Insurance System Work
- LERA: Advancing Workplace Relations
- Book of the Week
An Inquiry into the State of Labour Relations in Canada
From the Queen’s University IRC website:
The Queen's IRC is pleased to announce the launch of our survey, "An Inquiry into the State of LR in Canada.”The purpose of this study is to explore the current and changing state of the LR profession in Canada, based on the perspectives of LR practitioners…”
We anticipate that this online survey should take approximately 20 minutes to complete. The survey is divided into two sections. In the first section, we ask demographic questions that will help us to understand the varied roles and responsibilities of LR professionals. In the second section, we ask your perspectives on the LR profession.”
An Inquiry into the State of Labour Relations in Canada survey – click here and scroll down to Begin Survey
The Precariat
“Guy Standing, professor of economic security at the University of Bath, visited the Osgoode Hall Law School to discuss his recent book The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class . His work introduces the concept of the “precariat” – a globally growing group of people trapped in precarious work such as a series of short-term jobs. This precarious work leads to precarious lives, denying individuals stable occupational identities, the opportunity to develop careers, and social and regulatory protection.” Professor Standing contends that the tenuous position of these individuals may give rise to social instability.
Conversations on Work & Labour, November 14, 2011: Conversation: Guy Standing and “The Precariat”
Watch the video!!! Sociological Images: The “Precariat,” the New Working Class by Lisa Wade, Mar 5, 2011, at 03:12 pm
Google Precariat Guy Standing and you will get lots of great results.
Our Times Birthday Bash and CAW Local 1285: 1961-2011, 50th Anniversary Magazine
Our Times, Canada's independent, bi-monthly labour magazine, is 30 years old this year, and they are throwing a party to celebrate three decades of stories about workers' rights and social justice. Please join the celebration on December 3, 2011 at the Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street in Toronto.Our Times 30th Birthday Bash
Congratulations! A really lovely 50th Anniversary commemorative magazine. Contact Caw Local 1285, President Leon Rideout, for your copy.
Our Father of Management Consultants … bit of a scam?
“Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success. As it happens, Stewart did the same things during his seven years as a management consultant; fudging, lying, and inflating, he says, are the profession’s stock-in-trade. “
New Yorker, October 13, 2009: Not So Fast: Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life? by Jill Lepore
UCLA Campus Demonstration Featuring Robert Reich
“Drawing thousands to Sproul Plaza on Tuesday November 15, 2011, Occupy Cal’s general strike featured a day rally and march with a 5pm general assembly and a speech by Robert Reich. These videos start with the construction of the Occupy Cal encampment at the beginning of the day and show snapshots of events throughout the day.”
The Daily Californian News, November 16, 2011: Video Series: November 15 Occupy Cal Strike – Robert Reich video recommended
UCLA Faculty Association Wednesday, November 16, 2011: Campus Demonstrations: Recent & Back in the Day
Rave On John…
“All good and fair in a capitalist system. Right on. But – and you can take this to the bank – Canadian commercial broadcasters do not operate in a free-market capitalist system. They are protected by countless regulations in place to ensure Canadian broadcasting continues to exist. They’re coddled. Go figure. Go tell the Occupy Toronna crowd they’re barking at the wrong crowd of rich slickers when they bray at Bay Street. Go occupy some broadcasters. “
Globe and Mail, November 7, 2011: What recession? Profits, greed and gifting thrive in TV land, John Doyle
Why do Women Judges Matter?
“Only eight women have been appointed to the federal judiciary this year, compared to 41 men. Figures for 2010 were only slightly less skewed, with 13 women and 37 men being given judgeships.
Globe and Mail, November 11, 2011: Appointments of female judges slump under Harper's Tories by Kirk Makin
Globe and Mail, November 11, 2011: Gender Imbalance: Representation of female judges in Canadian courts
Why do Women Judges Matter
“We explore the role of sex in judging by addressing two questions of long-standing interest to political scientists: whether and in what ways male and female judges decide cases distinctly—“individual effects”—and whether and in what ways serving with a female judge causes males to behave differently—“panel effects.””
"Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." Christina L. Boyd, Lee Epstein, and Andrew D. Martin. 2010 (also published in the American Journal of Political Science. 54(2): 389-411) with links to appendix and data on this page
Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging -- provides links to current US news coverage of the subject
International Law and Women on the bench
“After providing statistics on women's participation on eleven of the world's most important courts and tribunals, the article argues that under-representation of one sex affects normative legitimacy because it endangers impartiality and introduces bias when men and women approach judging differently. Even if men and women do not think differently, a sex un-representative bench harms sociological legitimacy for constituencies who believe they do nonetheless.”
SSRN, February 28, 2011: Sex on the Bench: Do Women Judges Matter to the Legitimacy of International Courts? By Nienke Grossman University of Baltimore - School of Law
Yale Law Journal: 2005: Female Judges Matter: Gender and Collegial Decision making in the Federal Appellate Courts by Jennifer L. Peresie
Women Lead to Greater Corporate Social Responsibility
“A new study conducted by researchers at Catalyst and Harvard Business School suggests that what’s good for women is good for business and also for society as a whole. Companies with more women at the top may be better practitioners of corporate social responsibility. Prior Catalyst research has shown that such companies also financially outperform, on average, those with fewer women in senior leadership roles.”
Catalyst, November 2011: Gender and Corporate Social Responsibility: It’s a Matter of Sustainability (4 pages, PDF)
A Questionable Education
“Perhaps it’s not a crisis.... Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas.”
New York Review of Books ,November 24, 2011: Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? by Anthony Grafton
Law Students for Hire
A chart of Toronto’s largest Law firms comparing four years of summer hire numbers --“so far there appears to be a wide variation in hiring patterns; some firms have added to their summer-hire rosters for 2012, others are reporting lower numbers compared to last year.”
Precedent: the new rules of style and law, November 16, 2011: The Precedent Summer Job Watch 2012 – which firms are hiring students this summer?
Perception Is Reality
“To achieve desired organizational outcomes, it’s important to have not only the right HR practices but the right employee perceptions of those practices. Within the service organization studied, employees were more engaged when they believed HR practices were motivated by the organization’s concern for high-quality service and employee well-being.”
CAHRS Research Link, July 2011: Perception Is Reality: How Employees Perceive What Motivates HR Practices Affects their Engagement, Behavior and Performance (7 pages, PDF)
For a complete listing of publications available on CAHRS Research Link see: Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) ResearchLink, a publication from the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS), providing HR practitioners with concise, high-level overviews of research by Cornell ILR School's HR Studies faculty.
Home Offices are not for Everyone
“Before concluding that the end of 9-to-5 is really here, it’s worth considering the postscript to the Chinese telecommuting experiment. Given its smashing success, the company decided to roll out the home-office setup to the entire company. Surprisingly, only about one-half of the employees agreed to the deal, and many of those involved in the original experiment decided that they’d had enough, preferring the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life and a fixed beginning and end to each work day. The home office isn’t for everyone. “
Slate Magazine, November 9, 2011: Is Telecommuting a Good Idea? anew study finds that working from home makes sense. Sometimes.
NPR News, March 2010: The End Of 9-To-5: When Work Time Is Anytime, by Jennifer Ludden
Making the Employment Insurance System Work
“A new report from the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto says the $22-billion EI system is out of step with the modern workplace. Canada should have a simpler and more equitable EI regime, with common eligibility standards and identical benefits, concludes a Mowat task force that spent months consulting Canadians and researching. A recent C.D. Howe Institute study urged similar reforms.” [Globe and Mail]
Mowat Centre, University of Toronto, November 15, 2011: Making it Work (122 pages, PDF)
Making it Work, Mowat Centre EI TaskForce website – with links to background papers
C.D. Howe, November 2, 2011: Mending Canada’s Employment Insurance Quilt: The Case for Restoring Equity (16 pages, PDF)
Globe and Mail, November 15, 2011: Employment insurance system unjust and inefficient
LERA: Advancing Workplace Relations
“The summer 2011/winter 2012 issue of Perspectives on Work (Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2) is actually a double policy forum issue including June’s Policy Forum on Future of Public-Sector Unions as well as a Policy Forum on Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. “ [from the LERA: Labour and Employment Relations website]
Perspectives on Work, vol. 15, Summer 2011/Wintwe 2012: Public Sector Labor Relations: A System Struggling to Adjust to the Financial Crisis, by Robert McKersie (3 pages PDF)
Perspectives on Work, vol. 15, Summer 2011/Wintwe 2012: Fiscal Crisis and the Future of Public Unions, by Barry Bluestone
Perspectives on Work, vol. 15, Summer 2011/Wintwe 2012: The Globalization of Service Work: Comparative Institutional Perspectives on Call Centers by Rose Batt
Book of the Week
The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class, by Guy Standing. London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 198 p. ISBN 9781849663526 (hardcover) http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7673349
Neo-liberal policies and institutional changes have produced a huge and growing number of people with sufficiently common experiences to be called an emerging class. In this book Guy Standing introduces what he calls the Precariat - a growing number of people across the world living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or protective regulations relevant to them. They include migrants, but also locals.
Standing argues that this class of people could produce new instabilities in society. They are increasingly frustrated and dangerous because they have no voice, and hence they are vulnerable to the siren calls of extreme political parties. He outlines a new kind of good society, with more people actively involved in civil society and the precariat re-engaged. He goes on to consider one way to a new better society -- an unconditional basic income for everyone, contributed by the state, which could be topped up through earned incomes.
This is a topical, and a radical book, which will appeal to a broad market concerned by the increasing problems of labour insecurity and civic disengagement.
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