Jason Foster

Athabasca University · Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies

In this article, we explore temporary foreign workers’ (TFWs) access to and experiences with formal and informal supports in Canada. Our study utilized a participatory action research design and four overlapping phases of data collection: individual interviews with current and former TFWs, focus groups, individual interviews with settlement service...

This article argues that while workplaces are safer today than they were 50 years ago, the degree to which this change is due to Canada’s occupational health and safety (ohs) system is unclear. Examining the literature and reflecting upon the authors’ own experiences with workplace safety, the article suggests that fundamental flaws embedded in the...

This is a fact sheet examining how new legislation (so-called Bill 32) in Alberta, Canada requiring individual members to opt-in for the payment of dues used for "non-core" activities will affect trade union donations to charities and community organizations. A survey of unions operating in Alberta examined how their donation patterns will change u...

In this qualitative study, researchers conducted interviews with 11 participants who had entered Canada through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and who had since loss status. To understand the lived experiences of participants, this article deploys a theoretical framework of transnationalism centring the concept of precarious status. Findings...

This article examines how the pandemic related work from home experience differed between two groups of university workers: those for whom working at home was new and those with experience working predominantly from home. Survey responses collected from approximately 6,000 employees from seven universities in Canada are analyzed to measure producti...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a migration of workforces to work from home. A key issue for academics was the implications for the ability to carve out ‘thinking time’ to engage in what we term sustained knowledge work, the type of work essential for producing research. We administered an employee survey to academics from seven Australian and seve...

Canada is one of the few nations which grant citizenship to anyone born within its borders, a policy known as birthright citizenship. This policy creates the possibility that migrant workers with precarious residency status can be parents of children who hold claim to Canadian citizenship. This article examines the effect that citizen children have...

In recent years the issue of migrant workers with precarious status has increased in importance in Canada, in large part due to economic and policy changes that have led to greater numbers of migrant workers remaining in the country post permit expiry. This study tracks the employment experiences of low-skilled migrant workers who arrived through t...

In the summer of 2020 the Alberta government introduced Bill 32: Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act (2020). This 82-page omnibus bill proposed sweeping changes to a handful of employment-related and labour related legislation. Some of the most significant amendments were to Alberta Labour Relations Code, the law that regulates union-empl...

This report examine the lives of undocumented migrant workers living in Alberta, Canada. It discusses the results of a research study of 32 undocumented workers living in northern Alberta. It outlines the circumstances that led to their loss of status and describes their work and living conditions. It also explores their reasons for staying and the...

This study confirms and refines prior estimates of under-claiming of workers’ compensation benefits and suggests that under-claiming negatively affects the utility of workers’ compensation data in injury prevention efforts. A 2017 online poll (N = 2,000) queried the injury and workers’ compensation experiences of Alberta workers. Approximately 21.5...

This study sought to determine whether newspaper reports affect workers’ beliefs about workplace injury in the western Canadian province of Alberta. This issue is important because prior research has identified that Canadian newspaper reports profoundly distort the frequency and type of workplace injuries that occur as well as which workers experie...

Fear of retaliation poses a significant barrier to workers exercising their employment rights and claiming statutory benefits. This study of 2000 workers in the western Canadian province of Alberta found modest overall levels of worker fear (16%) of retaliation. Much higher fear levels (>40%) are reported in the most dangerous workplaces. Fear leve...

This article outlines a union renewal case study with unexpected circumstances. It examines a local that underwent significant renewal in a context where renewal would normally not be expected. It did so by significantly altering its practices while retaining a stable leadership and highly centralized structure. This unexpected renewal is explained...

Background How the media frames and presents a subject influences how society sees and responds to that issue. Analysis This study uses frame analysis to examine how Canadian English language newspapers portrayed workplace injuries between 2009 and 2014. Three frames emerge: Under Investigation, Human Tragedy, and Before the Courts. There is also a...

Media reports profoundly misrepresent the nature of workplace injuries and fatalities in Canada. This study uses a new dataset comprising 409 urban and rural newspaper reports in western Canada to confirm the over-representation of fatalities, injuries to men, acute physical injuries, and injuries in blue-collar occupations found in earlier explora...

Workplace injuries happen every day and can profoundly affect workers, their families, and the communities in which they live. This textbook is for workers and students looking for an introduction to injury prevention on the job. It offers an extensive overview of central occupational health and safety (OHS) concepts and practices and provides prac...

Cross-national studies have detected a correlation between oil-dependent economies and authoritarian rule, a pattern particularly evident in Africa and the Middle East. Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy in Canada sets out to test the “oil inhibits democracy” hypothesis in the context of an industrialized nation in the Global North. In probi...

Public perceptions of workplace injuries are shaped by media reports, but the accuracy of such reports is unknown. This study identifies differences between workers' compensation claims data and newspaper reports of workplace injuries in Canadian newspapers and media sources. This study applies quantitative content analysis to 245 Canadian English-...

This study examines how five unions in the Canadian province of Alberta responded to a sudden influx of temporary foreign workers (TFWs), as part of Canadian employers’ increased use of migrant workers in the mid-2000s. The authors find three types of response to the new TFW members: resistive, facilitative and active. Furthermore, these responses...

This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government ML...

In this paper, drawing on ANTi-History (Durepos and Mills 2012), we set out to recover the New Deal and some of its leading figures for the field of management and organizational studies. In so doing we do not simply seek to add New Deal studies to existing histories of MOS but rather our aim is to show how MOS histories have served to narrowly def...

Textbooks are an important element in teaching management in higher education because of their assumed ability to disseminate key theories and debates in a seemingly objective fashion. However, a number of studies have questioned not only the scientific character of the textbook but also of management theory itself. More recent studies suggest that...

Considering a series of oil-driven economic booms, the use of inter-provincial and international migrant labour has become an important part of labour market policy in the Canadian province of Alberta. The increased use of temporary foreign workers is controversial. Narrative analysis of legislators’ statements in the legislature and the press betw...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is threefold. First, to argue for a more historically engaged understanding of the development of management and organization studies (MOS). Second, to reveal the paradoxical character of the recent “historical turn,” through exploration of how it both questions and reinforces extant notions of the field. Third, to e...

Federal government policy changes in the early 2000s led to the rapid expansion of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program by increasing the number of eligible occupations. Before the expansion few trade unions in Canada had interaction with TFWs, but with the new rules, and the high profile political debate that ensued, unions were forced...

This paper explores the Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) drawing on the concept of “social cohesion,” a concept that was prominent in federal political discourse in the late 1990s. Social cohesion has value in highlighting the social impacts of shifts in policy at individual, group, and societal levels. Our case studies of temporary...

The rapid expansion of the oil sands in northern Alberta in the early 21st century led to the use of significant numbers of temporary foreign workers. These foreign workers became a part of the region's so-called "shadow population." This paper examines how the presence of foreign workers affects conceptions of community and social cohesion through...

Carrie Lane’s original plan for A Company of One was to write a situated historical ethnography of a specific group of workers: information technology workers in Dallas, Texas at the turn of the 21st century. This would have been a modest but admirable subject. However, along the way the dot.com crash struck, leading Lane into a much more complex a...

The purpose of this article is to explore and critically evaluate how the concept of “worker” is produced in management textbooks. In other words, we seek to reveal hitherto underanalyzed discourses regarding workers and the employment relationship. Further, we seek to track the evolution of these discourses over time, linking the evolving construc...

During the mid-2000s the number of temporary foreign workers (TFWs)present in Canada increased dramatically, more thantripling in eight years. Thebulk of the increase was due to an expansion of theTemporary Foreign WorkerProgram (TFWP) to include lower-skilled occupations. The stated reason for theexpansion was to address short-term labour shortage...

As the Canadian province of Alberta has adopted neoliberal prescriptions for government, it has increasingly attributed workplace injuries to worker carelessness. Blaming workers for their injuries appears to be part of a broader strategy (which includes under-reporting injury levels and masking ineffective state enforcement with public condemnatio...

The purpose of this article is to explore the experiences of Temporary Foreign Workers in health care in Alberta, Canada. In 2007–2008, one of the regional health authorities in the province responded to a shortage of workers by recruiting 510 health-care workers internationally; most were trained as Registered Nurses (RNs) in the Philippines. Howe...

Europe’s model of tripartite “social dialogue” has long been elusive in North America, yet unions continue to look at the model as a possible path toward greater policy influence. Is social dialogue possible in a North American context? Is it in the interests of the North American labor movement? This article examines two cases studies from the Can...

New research into the political attitudes and behaviours of union activists challenges traditional beliefs about the prospects for politicizing unionists in Canada. A study of union activists in Alberta finds two significant results. First union activists are more politically active than the average Canadian. This contradicts conventional wisdom ab...

Thesis (M.A.)--McMaster University, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-91).