Through case studies of newspaper carriers, rural route mail couriers, personal care workers, and freelance editors - four groups who have led pioneering efforts to organize - the authors provide a window into the ways political and economic conditions interact with class, ethnicity, and gender to shape the meaning and strategies of working men and women and show how these strategies have changed over time. They argue that the experiences of these workers demonstrate a pressing need to expand collective bargaining rights to include them.

University of Toronto

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Judy Fudge is the Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria. She has been widely published in law, history, and industrial relations journals, and she has co-authored and co-edited several books, including Labour Before the Law: The Legal Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, with Eric Tucker), Privatization, Law and the Challenge to Feminism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, with Brenda Cossman), Precarious Work, Women and the New Economy: The Challenge to Legal Norms (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2006, with Rosemary Owens). She is a member of the Inter-University Research Centre on Globalization and Work, and in 2009 she received the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights for her research project “Labour Rights as Human Rights: Unions, Women, and Migrants.”

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Eric Tucker, B.A., LL.B., LL.M. is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He has published extensively on the history and current state of labour and employment law. He is the author of Administering Danger in the Workplace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) and co-author of Labour Before the Law: The Legal Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, with Judy Fudge) and Self-Employed Workers Organize (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, with Cynthia Cranford, Judy Fudge, and Leah Vosko). He is also the editor of Working Disasters: The Politics of Recognition and Response (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, 2006).

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