Who should code your conduct? Trade union and NGO differences in the fight for workers' rights

The debate over workplace codes of conduct has created tensions between trade unions and human rights NGOs. These tensions result from the inherent structural differences between interest‐driven trade unions and ideals‐driven human rights NGOs. The differences play themselves out in how these actors pursue social justice in a globalised economy. Human rights NGOs tend to see codes of conduct as a method to prevent violations, akin to their traditional work on legal reform and human rights monitoring. Trade unions assess codes for their potential to help empower workers, especially to help ensure freedom of association, which will lead to the realisation of participatory rights. In our understanding of human rights as a means of empowerment for vulnerable groups, we argue that the trade union perspective on human rights is a good long‐term approach. Short‐term successes, such as improving working conditions through outside patronage, seem useful only to the extent they serve this long‐term goal.     

The man who envied women

Boredom is a permeating, trespassing force – an intensity not necessarily recognized as such. This essay approaches the aesthetics of political failure, and in particular, the cinematic intensities of boredom as affective expressions of post-traumatic malaise. Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), one of only three Chinese narrative films to represent the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, draws upon an aesthetics of banality to dramatize the epistemological limits and resultant trauma of 6/4, a historical event subsequently repressed in mainland Chinese media. Refusing melodramatic catharsis, the film’s stalling and stupefying effects perform both the amnesiac circumstances surrounding 6/4, as well as the compassion fatigue that followed. Even more surprisingly, Lou’s overuse of sex, a dull instrument by the film’s end, constitutes Summer Palace’s privileged sight/site of boredom. Indeed, sex, rather than constituting the censored obscene act, stands in for something far more offensive. Summer Palace frenetically pivots around an open secret, the historical memory of Tiananmen, as nervous sensation is composed within and without the text, centering on women’s bodies. Drawing on close textual analyses, this essay contends that the excessive contours and shapes of the memorial wound in Summer Palace take on the particularly anxious forms of dull sex in a messy Square.     

Canadian Federalism, The Charter of Rights, and the 1984 Election

The federal election of 1984 may prove to be a critical eventin the evolution of Canadian federalism. The election createda political climate favorable to a restructuring of the Canadianpolitical agenda away from the "territorial politics" that hasdominated it for several decades, toward a politics of national,non territorial issues. Such a transformation of the politicalagenda had been sought by the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau,which saw the new Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as amechanism for promoting a more national politics. The climateof intergovernmental confrontation that characterized the Trudeauera, however, may very well have undermined the Charter's nationalunity potential. Ironically, that potential is more likely tobe realized under the Mulroney Conservatives than it would havebeen under a continuation of the Trudeau regime.