Quelle est la valeur du travail?
Passé, présent et futur de la classe ouvrière
et des études sur le travail
50 ans d’études sur le travail
Labour/Le Travail : An Analysis of Changing Themes and Approaches from 1976 to 2025
Alvin Finkel
When will it end? Over 45 years of discrimination against women in occupational health and safety in Québec
Karen Messing
Gender and sex condition the job assignments of Québec women, affecting their exposure to occupational diseases and injuries. Women are streamed into occupations erroneously labelled “light work”, whose risks are seriously underestimated. Since 1979, women’s reproductive specificity has been recognized in occupational health and safety (OHS) law by the right to request job adaptation when conditions are incompatible with healthy pregnancies or breast-feeding. But scientists have produced little information on women’s exposures and outcomes. Administration of OHS prevention has been prioritized by employment sector, and women’s sectors are assigned the lowest priority. Inspections are rare in women’s jobs, inspectors have not insisted on improvement, and tribunals have attributed women’s occupational diseases to menopause or housekeeping activities. In the 1990’s, a coalition of women’s groups, public health officials, and researchers formed to defend the OHS rights of women workers. These efforts met with some success, but the 2021 “modernization” of the OHS laws has not facilitated prevention as much as was hoped. Now it is even proposed to exclude the highly-feminized education and health care sectors entirely from the regulations women fought so hard to improve, and access to pregnancy protection is being rigidified.
What Next for Labour Studies? The Prospects and Challenges of a Partisan Field
Adam King
- Bryan Palmer
Biographies
Alvin Finkel has served as the president of the Alberta Labour History Institute since 2016; he was a founding member of ALHI in 1999. Finkel was book review editor for Labour/Le Travail from 2000 to 2012 and has served on the editorial board continuously since 2000; he is a long-time member of the editors’ advisory committee. He taught History at Athabasca University from 1978 to his retirement in 2014. A prolific and co-author of history texbooks, monographs, book chapters, and articles on labour history and social policy history, his 14 books include 7 editions of the 2-volume History of the Canadian Peoples; Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History; Working People in Alberta: A History; The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta: Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy and Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality.
Karen Messing is an ergonomics researcher in the SAGE team of the CINBIOSE research centre and professor emerita in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research concerns the impact of gender on work activity in low-paid professions and the interface between interface between gender, biology and occupational health; it is carried out in partnership with community groups. She is the author of over 160 peer-reviewed published articles and of Bent Out of Shape: Shame, Solidarity and Women’s Bodies at Work (also published in French and Korean; winner of the 2021 Leo Panitch prize awarded by the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies and of the Foreword Indies Prize in Women’s Studies for 2021, USA), Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn About Work from the People Who Do It, and One-eyed Science: Occupational Health and Working Women. She has been awarded Officer status in the Order of Canada (2019), the William P. Yant Award (2014) from the American Industrial Hygiene Association, “membre d’honneur” of the Société d’ergonomie de langue française (2022) and Fellow of the International Ergonomics Association (2024).
Adam King Adam D.K. King is an assistant professor in the Labour Studies Program at the University of Manitoba. Prior to joining Labour Studies at U of M, he was a senior researcher at the Canadian Labour Congress. He is the co-author, with Mark P. Thomas and Andrew Jackson, of Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues (Canadian Scholars 2025). Adam is the author or coauthor of over a dozen scholarly articles in Labour/Le Travail, Canadian Journal of Labour and Employment Law, Studies in Political Economy, and Global Labour Journal, among others. Adam also writes a weekly column on work and labour issues called « Class Struggle » at The Maple. He is an executive member of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies (CAWLS).