Equity, Diversity & Canadian Labour

In recent years, the Canadian labour movement has undergone fundamental change in response to demands for greater inclusion and representation by women, visible and sexual minorities, and people with disabilities. Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour explores the specific challenges put to outmoded attitudes and practices, charting the efforts made by organized labour in Canada towards addressing discrimination in the workplace and within unions themselves. While there has been a fair amount of progress in this regard, persistent impediments to equity and uneven responsiveness within and across diversity issues remain.

This collection of original essays brings together contributors from a variety of academic backgrounds - women's studies, political science, sociology, industrial relations - and from the labour movement itself to examine union policies, practices, and cultures with respect to diversity issues. The first comprehensive analysis of Canadian labour's response to challenges on gender, race, disability, and sexual orientation issues since the 1980s, the book aims to highlight the structural and cultural developments that have taken place within the labour movement around equality rights, and to provide a forum for debates about the extent to which union democracy has been reshaped as a result of equity activism.

Gerald Hunt is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Human Resources Management and Organizational Behaviour in the School of Business at Ryerson Universty.

David Rayside is a professor in the Department of Political Science and an associate of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of  Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States.