Labour Before the Law: The Regulation of Workers' Collective Action in Canada, 1900-1948

In this study of the relations between workers and the state, Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker examine the legal regulation of workers' collective action from 1900 to 1948. They analyze the strikes, violent confrontations, lockouts, union organizing drives, legislative initiatives, and major judicial decisions that transformed the labour relations regime of liberal voluntarism, which prevailed in the later part of the nineteenth century, into industrial voluntarism, whose centrepiece was Mackenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907. This period was marked by coercion and compromise, as workers organized and fought to extend their rights against the profit-oriented owners of capital, while the state struggled to define a labour regime that contained industrial conflict. The authors then trace the conflicts that eventually produced the industrial pluralism that Canadians have known in more recent years." "The book is simultaneously & history of law, aspects of the state, trade unions and labouring people, and their interaction within the broad and shifting terrain of political economy. The authors are attentive to regional differences and sectoral divergences, and they attempt to address the fragmentation of class experience. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction. Part 1: The Emergence of Industrial Voluntarism. Courts and Conciliation: The Norms of Responsible Unionism, 1900-1906 -- Accommodation and Coercion: The Rise of Industrial Voluntarism, 1907-1914 -- Industrial Voluntarism Suspended, 1914-1918 -- The Post-War Confrontation and the Restoration of Industrial Voluntarism, 1919-1925 --Industrial Voluntarism in a Prosperous Interregnum, 1925-1929. Part 2: Towards a New Regime of Industrial Legality. Industrial Voluntarism in Distress: The Early Depression Years, 1929-1935 -- Canada's New Deals for Labour, 1936-1939 -- The Exhaustion of Industrial Voluntarism, 1939-1942 -- Recognition and Responsibility: The Achievement of Industrial Pluralism, 1943-1948 -- The Hegemony of Industrial Pluralism --Notes (pages 316-381) -- Index.