Contact info

For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Liaison Librarian for Labour Studies by email moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

Essay  

Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.

Selected reference works

It is useful to start by obtaining an overview of a topic by consulting scholarly encyclopedias, handbooks or even textbooks.  These assist with identifying key authors, debates and resources.

• Handbook of the Politics of Labour, Work and Employment
• Handbook on the international political economy of gender 
• New Forms of Employment: Current Problems and Future Challenges
• Routledge companion to employment relations
• Routledge handbook of feminist economics
• Sociology of work : an encyclopedia 

Find journal articles

Finding articles: Advanced search techniques [video]  - This three-minute video introduces some advanced search techniques, demonstrated in Academic Search Premier. 

Use the databases below for find scholarly articles on labour topics. Each database indexes several hundred journals  so searching them provides you with relevant articles for those disciplines.  For articles not available in full-text within the database, use the "Get@SFU" icon to search for a copy.

Limit your search to "academic", "scholarly" or "peer-reviewed."

Women and Canadian databases

• Women's Studies International  - Key database for issues related to women or gender
• Sociological Abstracts : Sociological aspects of twenty-nine broad topics, including anthropology, business, collective behaviour, community development, disaster studies, education, environmental studies, gender studies, etc.
• CBCA Complete  - Canadian Business and Current Affairs (CBCA) - indexes trade & scholarly journals;management, accounting, finance, marketing, industries, country profiles, labour
• Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - for public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.

Business, economic and legal databases

• Business Source Complete
• A good place to start your search for academic or practitioner articles. BSC also contains industry and market reports, company profiles, country economic reports, and more. 
• ECONLIT : Your best place to start with any research in Economics
• Westlaw Next Canada  Current Canadian legal information, including cases, legislation, law reports, and journal articles. 

Included within this platform are: 

• Canadian Encyclopedic Digest -  is a legal encyclopedia in which legal topics are summarized. Important cases and/or legislation relating to each topic are included in the extensive footnotes.
• Canadian Abridgment Digest (CAD) - summarizes Canadian legal cases into a short paragraph or two, allowing for quick reviews of their relevance.  All abridged cases are organized by a classification system, allowing you to locate similar cases at once.

Find books in the Library

Library Catalogue search guide 

The Library Catalogue provides access to books, journal articles, videos, government documents and much more.  To limit the search results to "books", use the filter (left-hand column in search results) to "resource type" of "books."

Search the SFU Library Catalogue, either the Basic or the Advanced search

Note: In the searches below, search results can be limited by "Resource type" such as "books or by "Subject"

• (feminis* OR gendering OR engender*) AND econom*
• (feminis* OR gendering) AND (work OR labor OR labour OR jobs OR employ*) AND (econom* OR financ* OR capital* OR global*)
• (labor OR labour) AND (policy OR policies) AND canad*
• (women OR female* OR gender*) AND (labor OR labour) AND (race OR class* OR ethni* OR "visible minor*") AND canad*
• (indigen* OR aborig* OR "First Nations") AND (employ* OR jobs OR work OR labor OR labour) AND canad*
• ("equal pay" OR "pay equity" OR "gender parity" OR "gender gap" OR "wage equality" OR "wage gap*" OR "wage discrimina*") AND canad*

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Use pulldown menu and select, "Source Types" as "Books"

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Selected books

• Are You with Us?
• Canada's Colour Coded Income Inequality
• Canadian way? : the role of labour in Canada's prosperity : roundtable summary report / Public Policy Forum
• Cartographies of Race and Social Difference
• COVID-19 and job displacement : thinking about the longer term
• Contemporary work and the future of employment in developed countries
• Decolonizing employment : Aboriginal inclusion in Canada's labour market
• Earnings Inequality and the Gender Pay Gap in Canada
• Enslaving temporary migrant women : Canada's shifting immigration policies
• Equity, diversity, and Canadian labour
• Families apart : migrant mothers and the conflicts of labor and love
• Gender and work in today's world : a reader
• Gender Injustice: An International Comparative Analysis of Equality in Employment
• Gender work ; feminism after neoliberalism
• Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work
• Global woman : nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy [print]

  Global currents in gender and feminisms : Canadian and international perspectives
• A history of feminist and gender economics
• Inclusive Futures : Indigenous Engagement in Canada's Workforce
• Labor and the class idea in the United States and Canada
• Liberating economics : feminist perspectives on families, work, and globalization
• Liberating temporariness? Vosko, Work, and citizenship in an age of insecurity : migration, work, and citizenship in an age of insecurity
• Local Labor Markets in Canada and the United States
• Modern labour activism
• Persistent Inequality : Ontario’s Colour-coded Labour Market
• Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History
• Recent changes in the composition of minimum wage workers
• Regulation and inequality at work : isolation and inequality beyond the regulation of labour
• Unfree labour? : struggles of migrant and immigrant workers in Canada
• Why gender matters in economics
• Work and labour in Canada : critical issues [print]
• Women and work : feminism, labour, and social reproduction
• A Work in Progress : Measuring Wage Gaps for Women and Minorities in the Canadian Labour Market
• Working women in Canada : an intersectional approach

Selected "subject headings"

Browse by subject ("Browse" tab is at the top, when using "Catalogue Search"]
Limit by subject" (in search results, check the left-hand column)

• Canada - Race relations
• Discrimination in employment
• Employees  -- Canada
• Equality -- Canada
• Feminist economics
• Foreign workers -- Canada
• Foreign Workers -- Canada -- Social Conditions
• Immigrant Women
• Immigrants -- employment
• Indigenous women -- Canada -- Statistics
• Labor  -- Canada
• Labor laws and legislation -- Canada
• Labor movement -- Canada
• Labor policy
• Labor policy -- Canada
• Labor unions -- Canada
• Native peoples -- Employment   -- Canada
• Neoliberalism
• Pay equity  -- Canada
• Race discrimination Canada
• Transnational migration
• Transnationalism
• Wages  -- Canada
• Women -- Canada -- Statistics
• Women -- Employment
• Women -- Employment -- Canada
• Women Immigrants -- Employment -- Canada

Government information

Canada

Labour

• Employment and Social Development
  • Labour Program  
    • Canada Labour Code  Consolidates federal statues that relate to labour, facilitating production by controlling strikes & lockouts, occupational safety and health, and some employment standards. The Code only applies to the industries which are under federal legislation.
      • Laws and regulations
        • List of Acts
        • List of Regulations
        • Employment equity
    • Federal labour standards
      • Canada Labour Standards Regulation  Federally consolidated regulations related to respecting hours of work, wages, annual vacations, general holidays, reassignment, maternity leave and parental leave, bereavement leave, group and individual termination of employment and severance pay, work-related illness and injury in federal works, undertakings and businesses.
  • Indigenous Services Canada
    • Aboriginal women in the Canadian Economy  2012
    • Statistics
       
• Canadian Human Rights Act
  • Canadian Human Rights Act - Table of Contents

British Columbia

• British Columbia Employment Standards Act  The provincial legislation that ensures that employees in British Columbia receive at least basic standards of compensation and conditions of employment. The British Columbia Employment Standards Act and Regulation sets out minimum working conditions for all employees covered under provincial labour laws. A number of sectors or industries in British Columbia are subject to specific regulations that only apply to them. Click here to see the regulations for specific industries.
   
• British Columbia Labour Relations Code  The provincial legislation that protects the right of employees in British Columbia to be a member of a trade union and to participate in its lawful activities. The Code further delineates the rights of employees and employers.
   
• Human Rights Protection  "British Columbia has a law to protect and promote human rights. It is called the B.C. Human Rights Code or the Code. The Code helps to protect you from discrimination and harassment." [from the website]  [BC] Human Rights Code

Immigrants

• Citizenship and Immigration Canada
  • Research and Statistics - Find the latest research and statistical information on citizenship and immigration trends,

Statistics

Citing Government documents, Canadian -- APA style | MLA style | Chicago style

• Statistics Canada -  the major statistical gathering agency of the federal government. It publishes the "whole range of statistics on the economic and social activities of the Canadian people".  There are daily, weekly, quarterly, annual and irregular publications. They  also publishes the Census of Canada at five year intervals
   
  • Publications by subject
    • Pre-tabulated data tables under "statistics by subject." 
    • This data can be downloaded (CSV format) into Excel. 
    • In addition to "data", check out the "Analysis" and other reports (see tabs at the top of the data tables).
    • Labour
      • work absences; unionization; unpaid work; and other topics. Also includes geographic and demographic characteristics.
      • the hours they work; commuting patterns; wage and non-wage benefits; job training; labour mobility;
      • how many people are employed or unemployed; the unemployment rate; which industries or occupations people work in;
      • Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, Seventh edition, 2015 (89-503-X)

        • Women in Canada: Women and paid work

           
• BC Statistics   Check out the tabs at the top
  • A - Z
  • Immigration / Migration statistics
  • B.C.'s Key Indicators
  • ​People, Population, Community

​United States

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
  • Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics: Employment, Earnings, Prices, Productivity, and Other Labor Data , 9th ed. - publication based on Bureau of Labor Statistics information, and gathered from various sources

International

• UN Women
  • Use the search engine to search for topics, e.g. "pay"
  • Progress of the world's women 2015/2016
    • Look at their "tables" for comparable data on "workforce participation rates", "paid vs unpaid work for males and females" 
       
• International Labour Organizatin (ILO)
  • Look at tab, "Topics"
  • Standards and Fundamental Principles and rights at work
• World Economic Forum
  • The Global Gender Gap Report (annual)

Directories of websites

• BC Federation of Labour
• Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
• Canadian Labour Congress

Search tips for using the Google or Google Scholar search engines

Government

Use site:gov  to find sources from government websites.  Use quotation marks ("") to search for phrases (words next to each other)

"unpaid work" site: gc.ca  <--- for government of Canada site

When two words are next to each other, Google assumes an "and"

Library guides

• Findind and evaluating resources on the web
• Avoiding plagiarism
• What is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal?
• How to write an annotated bibliography
• More Tutorials (interactive)
• Citation or reference management tools collect your journal article, book, or other document citations together in one place, and help you create properly formatted bibliographies in almost any style — in seconds.
• For help with writing essays, visit the Student Learning Commons resources on Writing for university.
• Guides for Labour Studies,  Political Science

Writing help

For undergraduate students, the Student Learning Commons provides assistance and numerous, helpful guides.

• Academic writing resources
• Library Catalogue search: Academic writing
  • E.g. Writing effective course assignments : a guide to non-degree and undergraduate students
• Book a consultation