Articles

The scale and complexity of change in governments demands a collaborative approach that taps into all available knowledge and expertise. Employees need a more active role in designing and implementing change strategies at the workplace level. This requires new ways for government managers and unions to work together.

Governments want to become ’employers of choice’. Many are striving to be more flexible, knowledge-intensive and learning-based. Reaching these goals requires nothing short of bold new ways of organizing, managing, supporting and rewarding people.

This paper argues that union attitudes and behaviour are important but neglected features of the school–work transition process. Using longitudinal panel data from a study of high school and university graduates in three Canadian cities, we examine how young people’s previous union membership, attitudes and educational, labour market and workplace experiences shape their willingness to […]

Response to the Business Council on National Issues statement on competitiveness, arguing that quality workplaces are critical to this agenda.

The people rhetoric of the ‘Alberta Advantage’ is weak in practice. Needed is a more human resource-intensive economic developement strategy in the province of Alberta. This means creating workplaces where learning, innovation and skill can more fully contribute to productivity and competitiveness.

This article tests the assumption that youth’s work attitudes are changing to reflect the restructured labour markets that often are taken as a characteristic of late-modernity. Comparing 1985 and 1996 cohorts of high school leavers in a Canadian city, we find that occupational aspirations increased significantly since 1985, especially among females, in ways consistent with […]

A key issue in recent debates over the impact of new technologies on work is the polarization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs within the ‘post-industrial’ economy. Two dimensions skill andearnings have been of central concern. Contrary to earlier predictions of more homogenous patterns of either work upgrading or degrading, evidence of polarization reveals far more […]

Contingent work now encompasses more than one in five workers. It is time to move beyond describing the details of this trend by proving the changes it signals in employment relationships. This paper examines the implications of contingent work for workers, employers, unions and professional associations. Based on the author's presentation to the British Columbia […]

The litmus test for a “knowledge economy” is how well students make the school to work transition. Even if schools, technical institutes, colleges and universities meet rigorous standards of excellence fulfilling their mandates – as many do – there is clear evidence that employers are underutilizing the “human capital” embodied in these grads as they […]

It is essential for unions to address the intense pressures for change now found in workplaces. While nowhere near as cataclysmic as futurists would suggest, these forces pose major dilemmas for unions – as well as opportunities. This article suggests that if unions seize the challenges presented by these currents of workplace change, they will […]