Don Wells

McMaster University | McMaster · School of Labour Studies and Dept. of Political Science

By examining the families and supporting social structures of Mexican 'temporary' migrant workers in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), this paper explains how these transnational families modify their structures in a neoliberal context. We discuss how migrants and their family members respond to changes associated with circular...

Under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), migrant workers come to Canada for up to eight months each year, without their families, to work as temporary foreign workers in agriculture. Using a ‘whole worker’ industrial relations approach, which emphasizes intersections among work, family and community relations, this article assess...

Of all the global justice movements over the past twenty years, the anti-sweatshop movement best exemplifies popular transnational resistance to neoliberal attempts to impose 19th century forms of class domination on the world’s workers. And if any one industry best exemplifies the global ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards through the dynamic...

The offshoring of production from the global North to the South has been crucial to the ‘race to the bottom’ in global labour standards. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies of Northern transnational corporations—particularly their ‘corporate codes of conduct’—have received much attention for their putative function of limiting this r...

International trade agreements have been widely criticized for their failure to promote effective regulation of international labor rights and standards. This article assesses the singular exception to this failure: the US Cambodia Textile Agreement (UCTA). The article evaluates evidence of the impact of this international trade agreement on labor...

THE EMERGENCE OF internationalized production in the context of weakening state regulation of labour rights and of increasing employer dominance in industrial relations systems raises significant questions about the nature and future of worker representation. A crucial issue is the transferability of company-specific models of worker voice across n...

The conflict in 2001 at the Kukdong (now Mexmode) maquila garment factory is one of the rare cases of success in the wider struggle for independent unionism in Mexico. The success of the struggle, which has attracted scholars interested in the campaigns against sweatshop labour conditions and on behalf of labour internationalism, has been attribute...

The shift of economic production from higher labour standard regimes in the global North to lower standard regimes in the South is undermining enforcement of global labour standards. Responding to criticisms from the ‘anti-sweatshop’ movement, consumers and governments, many transnational corporations (TNCs) have adopted codes of conduct to regulat...

The industrial relations system at Magna International is an example of an integrated, coherent, non-union human resource management strategy. It includes significant mechanisms of worker voice and conflict resolution as substitutes for union representation. Potential labour-management conflicts associated with Taylorized labour processes are often...

In recent years ethical purchasing policies have been promoted as potentially effective and promising ways of combatting global inequality and oppressive labour practices in developing countries. These initiatives have been launched on university campuses with the hope of opening a new front for improving labour rights under conditions of neo-liber...

“High performance” management systems in unionized workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist industrial relations system in Canada. Increasing interfirm and intrafirm competitiveness, combined with restratification of internal and external labour markets, promote a deepening of “core” workforce dependency on employers. Microco...

This article questions the widespread view that the Canadian and US labour movements are diverging with respect to their strategic orientations (militant vs cooperativist) towards labour-management relations. Focusing on the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), the leading example of militant, social unionism in Canada, the article analyses the CAW's movem...

Focusing on the origins of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in Canada during the 1940s, this study analyzes the evolution of a work-centred, "rank and file" model of unionism into a top-down model of economistic unionism centred on collective bargaining and the stabilization of labour-management relations in the workplace. In order to attain org...

The only way Ford is going to get union protection in his plants ... is to have the UAW transformed into a strongly centralized organization exerting iron discipline over its con-stituent locals and over its rank and file. Business Week 79, June 1941. Canadian Fordism and the New Unionism AFTER WORLD WAR n, Canada's political economy was stabilized...

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Accelerating flows of remittances are dwarfing global development aid. Thisstudy deepens our understanding of remittance impacts on the families ofworkers who come to Canada annually for several months under the SeasonalAgricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Interviews with SAWP workers, theirspouses, adult children and teachers in Mexico deepen our...