The Canadian Working Class and Industrial Legality, 1939-1949

With few expections trade union histories, even those emanating from the broad left, trace the development of the union movement through a series of hard-won victories codified in modern collective bargaining law. This thesis joins with more recent critical approahcees to industrial legality in a fundamental quesstioning of the effect of progressive legal victories. American scholarship especially has begun to probe the limitations imposed by a framework of rigid legal rules that work as much to circumscribe the expression of workers' interests as they do to promote them. In an attempt to understand this two-sidedness of industrial legality, the first chapter of the thesis embarks on a theoretical examination of law, paying particular attention to the meaning of the base/superstructure configuration. The chapter builds on the original writings of Marx and Engels - which never fully developed a theory of 'law' - bringing their concepts into the context of twentieth-century capitalism and highlighting the role of class struggle. In this way, the law is revealed as growing out of, and sharing, the essential values that constitute cpaitalist accumulation - values that elevate property and the procewss of production and accumulation above the aspirations of the working class. The second chapter traces the development of industrial legality in Canada, situating it in terms of class formation, class struggle, and the role of the state. This is a synthetic account of the formative years of Canadian industrial legislation, setting the stage for the analysis of collective agreements that follows. Chapter 3 explores the developing content of collective agreements forged in the 1940s through a sample of 120 contracts signed between employers and the Steelworkers, Packinghouse Workers, and Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Of particular interest is the effect of management rights clauses, union security and seniority clauses, and grievance procedures. Finally, the last chapter will consider the dilemmas facing unions that now find themselves caught in the web of legality, with alienated memberships and the possibilities for class-action severely circumscribed.

OCLC: 24215238