Welfare Hot Buttons provides one of the first comparative assessments of contemporary social policy change in three Western countries: Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Sylvia Bashevkin probes the fate of single mothers on social assistance during the period when three "third way" political executives were in office – Bill Clinton (US), Jean Chrétien (Canada), and Tony Blair (Great Britain) – and argues that despite seemingly progressive campaign rhetoric, the social assistance policy realities under each of these three leaders were in crucial respects more punitive and restrictive than those of their neo-conservative predecessors in the 1980s. Bashevkin addresses even more contentious issues in her study, including the question of whether Anglo-American welfare states are being eclipsed by what she views as newly emergent duty states. In her comparative approach and in her substantive analysis, Bashevkin makes an original and critical contribution to the existing body of literature on social policy.

Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how people without housing, people living in poverty, and unemployed people have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a historian of the working class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History traces the history of social policy in Canada from the period of First Nations’ control to the present day, exploring the various ways in which residents of the area known today as Canada have organized themselves to deal with (or to ignore) the needs of the ill, the poor, the elderly, and the young. This book is the first synthesis on social policy in Canada to provide a critical perspective on the evolution of social policy in the country. While earlier work has treated each new social program as a major advance, and reacted with shock to neoliberalism’s attack on social programs, Alvin Finkel demonstrates that right-wing and left-wing forces have always battled to shape social policy in Canada. He argues that the notion of a welfare state consensus in the period after 1945 is misleading, and that the social programs developed before the neoliberal counteroffensive were far less radical than they are sometimes depicted. Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History begins by exploring the non-state mechanisms employed by First Nations to insure the well-being of their members. It then deals with the role of the Church in New France and of voluntary organizations in British North America in helping the unfortunate. After examining why voluntary organizations gradually gave way to state-controlled programs, the book assesses the evolution of social policy in Canada in a variety of areas, including health care, treatment of the elderly, child care, housing, and poverty.

Neoliberal calls for welfare state reforms, especially cuts to public pensions, are a contentious issue for employees, employers, and national governments across the western world. But what are the underlying factors that have shaped the response to these pressures in Canada and Australia? In Beyond the Welfare State, Sirvan Karimi utilizes a synthesis of Marxian class analysis and the power resources model to provide an analytical foundation for the divergent pattern of public pension systems in Canada and Australia. Karimi reveals that the postwar social contract in Australia was market-based and more conducive to the privatization of retirement income. In Canada, the social contract emphasized income redistribution that resulted in strengthening the link between the state and the citizen. By shedding light on the impact of national settings on public pension systems, Beyond the Welfare State introduces new conceptual tools to aid our understanding of the welfare state at a time when it is increasingly under threat.

Drawing on the field of cultural historical psychology and the sociologies of skill and labour process, Contested Learning in Welfare Work offers a detailed account of the learning lives of state welfare workers in Canada as they cope, accommodate, resist and flounder in times of heightened austerity. Documented through in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis, Peter Sawchuk shows how the labour process changes workers, and how workers change the labour process, under the pressures of intensified economic conditions, new technologies, changing relations of space and time, and a high-tech version of Taylorism. Sawchuk traces these experiences over a seven-year period that includes major work reorganisation and the recent economic downturn. His analysis examines the dynamics between notions of de-skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling, as workers negotiate occupational learning and changing identities.

This book is about poor women, many of them single mothers, Aboriginal, or both, who have defied the odds to become apprenticing carpenters. To do so they have juggled child-care schedules, left abusive partners, and kicked drug habits to participate in a unique intensive retraining program. Through the voices of the women participants and their instructors, Margaret Little analyzes the program to reveal the struggles and triumphs of low-income women. She demonstrates that there is a desperate need for retraining programs that provide real opportunities for economic independence. She also argues that, in an era of workfare and time-limited welfare, such programs are an effective strategy for welfare reform.

Highlighting women's activism in Halifax after the Second World War, Mothers of the Municipality is a tightly focused collection of essays on social policy affecting women. The contributors – feminist scholars in history, social work, and nursing – examine women's experiences and activism, including those of African Nova Scotian 'day's workers,' Sisters of Charity, St. John Ambulance Brigades, 'Voices' for peace, and social welfare bureaucrats. The volume underscores the fact that the 1950s and 60s were not simply years of quiet conservatism, born-again domesticity, and consumption. Indeed, the period was marked by profound and rapid change for women. Despite their almost total exclusion from the formal political arena, which extended into the tumultuous 1970s, women in Halifax were instrumental in creating and reforming programs and services, often amid controversy. Mothers of the Municipality explores women's activism and the provision of services at the community level. If the adage "think globally; act locally" has any application in modern history, it is with the women who fought many of the battles in the larger war for social justice.