Browse through the database below to explore courses that will fulfill certain degree requirements in the Work & Labour Studies program.
When registering for classes on the Course Timetable website, be sure to carefully read through the "Notes/Additional Fees" section of each course you select.
Pathways in Work & Labour Studies
Pathways provide opportunities for specialized learning through focused course selections, often tied to experiential learning and cooperative education. Program pathways are contextualized learning experiences that incorporate real-world examples, cross-curricular integration and professional experience that provide students with the opportunity to become experts in a particular research field. Pathways assist students in their transition to graduate studies, the workplace and other professional goals. Students can mix and match course selections from any of the four program-specific pathways and select from a variety of types of courses to suit their own interests and learning objectives.
- Labour Law, Power and Policy
- Creative Labour, Culture and the Digital Workplace
- Climate Crisis, Migration and the Future of Work
- Inequality, Global Labour Movements and Workplace Democracy
Students can search for courses in each pathway by using the category search function below.
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AP/SOSC 1510 6.00
The Future of Work
In the past twenty years Canadian patterns of work and employment have been profoundly transformed, putting an end to the employment security that characterised the post- World War II era. But in an era of ...
AP/SOSC 2000 6.00
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Social Inquiry
This course surveys a range of blended approaches to critical social inquiry. Grounded in contemporary research trends developed in such fields as Urban Studies, Development Studies, Health and Society, Work and Labour Studies and African ...
AP/SOSC 2210 6.00
Labour Relations, Restructuring and Resistance
This is a required course for all students majoring or minoring in Work and Labour Studies. This course analyzes labour relations in Canada in a comparative perspective. It reviews the historical development of the labour ...
AP/SOSC 3125 6.00
Women Organizing
Women have a long tradition of organizing to expand their rights, resist oppression, challenge and defend traditional values and to change their societies. This course documents and analyzes the patterns of women's activism using historical, ...
AP/SOSC 3130 6.00
Women and Work: Production and Reproduction
This course investigates the formation of the gender division of labour at work in the home and in the paid workplace. Women’s entry into the paid labour force as low-wage, flexible workers in manufacturing and ...
AP/SOSC 3169 3.00
Occupational Health and Safety
This course explores the relationship between work, labour, global markets and health. It draws on political economy, feminist theory and other theories to consider how ideas about value, productive, and reproductive work interface with power, ...
AP/SOSC 3200 3.00
Legal Regulation of Migrant Workers: Constructed Insecurity and Worker Resistance
This course examines the legal regulation of transnational migrant workers in Canada, with an emphasis on the experiences of low-waged migrant workers from the global south. Drawing on international human rights law, federal and provincial ...
AP/SOSC 3210 6.00
The Working Class in Canadian Society
This course considers the emergence and reconstitution of a working class in Canada over the past 200 years. This process involved both the capitalist restructuring that brought a large class of wage earners into existence ...
AP/SOSC 3211 3.00
Work for Change: Strategic Research, Organizing and Communications
This course equips students to engage with workplace, community and society-wide issues by developing strategic research, advocacy, communications and organizational skills. Participants work individually and in small groups to address typical issues confronting unions and ...
AP/SOSC 3230 3.00
Labour and Globalization: Building Worker Power
Globalization has been a key force in the transformation of work and working conditions around the world. In an increasingly mobile world, this course introduces students to the key debates about globalization, the major forces ...
AP/SOSC 3242 3.00
Sex Work/Sexual Labour
This course explores the organization and experience of sexual labour. Sex work (such as exotic dance, escorting and street sex work), and sex tourism, transactional sex and other sexual-economic-affective arrangements are examined in the context ...
AP/SOSC 3243 3.00
Who Cares? Unpaid Labour and Social Reproduction
Demand for care workers is on the rise - many of the fastest growing jobs are care related, including personal support workers, nurses, technicians and others. This course will help students understand the power, policy ...
AP/SOSC 3280 3.00
Political Economy of Labour in Canada
Crosslisted: AP/POLS 3140 Among today’s hotly contested political and economic debates, what the future of globalization will look like has recently taken centre stage. In what ways has globalization restructured work and living conditions? How ...
AP/SOSC 3290 3.00
Sport, Work and Resistance
This course will critically analyze the actors, institutions and practices that shape working conditions in the world of sport and the various forms of resistance associated with these conditions. Beginning with the economic context of ...
AP/COMN 3313 3.00
Labour in the Communication and Cultural Industries
This course analyzes labour in the communication and cultural industries (including journalism, broadcasting, creative labour and cyber-work) by the examination of the historical constitution, present institutions, and current practices organizing labour in these industries.
AP/SOCI 3355 3.00
Social Movements
Topics studied will include the causes, characteristics, processes and consequences of social movements; the appeal, ideology, organizational structure, strategies and tactics of social movements; and the process of becoming committed to a social movement.
AP/SOSC 3380 6.00
Law, Labour and the State
Courts have traditionally viewed the relationships between employers and employees in terms of contracts and have developed a set of doctrines about the rights and obligations of "masters" and "servants" at common law. While legislatures ...
GL/SOCI 3444 3.00
Work in a Warming World: Issues in Work, Labour and Climate Change
Climate change affects work and employment in every region of the world. This course examines how climate change is affecting the way we work, what we produce and where we produce it. It explores how ...
AP/SOCI 3600 3.00
Sociology of Work and Labour
In this course, work will be viewed as a social problem. Topics include the meaning of work, the theory of alienation, evolving patterns of industrialization and labour relations, occupational cultures, the deskilling of work and ...
AP/SOSC 3815 3.00
Inequality and Canadian Labour Market
This is a course that addresses one of the most pressing social, political and economic issues of our age: inequality and its impact on work and workers. The proportion of global wealth owned and controlled ...
AP/SOSC 3980 3.00
Workers' Organizations
This course examines the relationship between unions and democracy in Canada. After placing that relationship in comparative and historical perspective, it examines unions' internal structures, their effectiveness in advancing members' interests, and their capacity to ...
AP/SOSC 3981 3.00
Diversity, Justice and Solidarity at Work
This course examines diversity, justice and solidarity at work, including demands for equity and inclusion, trade union and human rights initiatives. Examples of Canadian and international labour market inequalities are explored, including the strategies adopted ...
AP/SOSC 3982 3.00
Work-Life Balance in a Global Economy
Examines recent transformations in working-time practices and policies, with a focus on Canada. Strategies to redistribute working time and promote work-life balance (e.g. part-time work, homework, wellness programs, parental leaves) are evaluated.
AP/SOSC 3993 3.00
Strategies of Social Research
This is a course in critical social science methodology, designed to improve students' abilities to read and evaluate social research. The major research methods will be studied in the course using exemplary texts and hands-on ...
AP/HIST 4051 6.00
Family, Work, and Community: Canadian Society in the 19th And 20th Centuries
This course explores major themes in the formation of Canadian society through a critical examination of issues and debates aired in recent historical scholarship. Three periods pre-industrial, industrial and post-Second World War provide a temporal ...
AP/POLS 4091 3.00
Marxism, Feminism, Poststructuralism
This course examines key Marxist and feminist debates and collaborations in light of the theoretical and political challenges posed by poststructuralism. Questions of language, culture and identity are explored, with emphasis on the interconnections of ...
AP/SOSC 4210 3.00
Mediation, Arbitration and Conflict Resolution
The course provides students who have academic or experiential background in industrial relations with the opportunity to increase their knowledge of collective bargaining, labour-management relationships and internal union and management decision-making processes through a year-long ...
AP/SOSC 4240 6.00
Labour Studies Work Placement
The purpose of the course is to provide students with first-hand experience regarding the different ways organizations pursue workplace improvements and broader social and political change for all working people. The course has both seminar ...
AP/SOSC 4250 3.00
Special Topics in Work and Labour Studies
Special topics courses vary from year to year and are developed to cover emerging issues or specialized content not represented in the main curriculum. Not all courses are offered each semester. See the most recent ...
AP/SOSC 4252 3.00
Platform Labour and Gig Work in the Global Economy
The course offers the opportunity to critically examine the dynamics of gig and platform work. We examine the historical and economic factors behind the rise of platform work and its relation with the AI (Artificial ...
AP/SOSC 4260 3.00
Global Living Wage Movements
Broadly comparative, this course uses Canada as a focal point and basis of global comparison. It evaluates both the historical and contemporary development of living wage movements, and the economic, social and political features that ...
AP/POLS 4406 3.00
The Contemporary Politics of Work and Labour
An analysis of the ability of late-capitalist political and economic institutions to restructure and project themselves anew, including more flexible forms of production and new political alliances. Forces shaping the contemporary politics of work and ...
AP/POLS 4470 3.00
Working Class Politics in Capitalist Democracies
This course seeks to understand the current parameters of working class politics through a theoretical and historical examination of the relationship between parties, trade unions and the democratic capitalist state.
AP/HIST 4505 6.00
Canadian Labour and Immigration History
The growth and development of the trade union movement and the impact on it of immigration and other policies of the Canadian government.
AP/SOCI 4620 3.00
Work and Workers in a Globalized Economy
Examines changes in the labour process and the relationship between labour and management. We study labour segmentation, marginalization, techniques of control, the impact of new technologies on the labour process, and unions' responses to workplace ...