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Labour/Le Travail is the official, semi-annual publication of the Canadian Committee on Labour History. Since it began publishing in 1976, it has carried many important articles in the field of working-class history, industrial sociology, labour economics, and labour relations. Although primarily interested in a historical perspective on Canadian workers, the journal is interdisciplinary in scope. In addition to articles, the journal features documents, conference reports, an annual bibliography of materials in Canadian labour studies, review essays, and reviews. While the main focus of the journal's articles is Canadian, the review essays and reviews consider international work of interest to Canadian labour studies. Many of Labour's articles are illustrated and each issue is book length, averaging 350 pages per issue.

Montreal-born Moishe Wolofsky was a nineteen year-old unemployed university drop-out in 1930 when he and his friend Dick Steele took a job aboard an ocean vessel, beginning a journey that would change his life forever. Out of money, they stumbled into Russia and took jobs in a tractor factory. There, they became dedicated communists. Dragged back to Canada by his father, the well-known Jewish publisher, Herschel Wolofsky, he soon began a career as an organizer for the Communist Party of Canada. By then Moishe Wolofsky had become Bill Walsh. Still a very young man, he led the drive to organize the rubber workers in Kitchener and subsequently the auto workers in Windsor. Jailed and interned along with several hundred other Communists, upon his release Walsh fought overseas in Holland and Belgium. After the war he took a staff position with the United Electrical Workers in Hamilton, a job he retained for over two decades. After years of conflict with UE President C.S. Jackson, Walsh was forced to quit his job and subsequently the Communist Party. In the late 60s, he began a new career in labour arbitration. This is the story of how a young idealist became a Red and helped build industrial unionism in Canada. But it is also a story of romance and adventure. Walsh actively participated in many of the 20th century's historic events. Everything he did was touched with an intensity. He was a brilliant strategist and an extraordinary teacher. Because he never held high office either in politics, in uniform, or in any of the unions he was associated with, his contributions have gone unheralded. This book provides an inside, bottom-up look at some of the most important episodes in our trade union history as well as an insight into the functioning of a venerable communist-led union. --Publisher's description

C.S. Jackson was the labour leader that the establishment loved to hate. Tough, intelligent, courrageous, and incorruptible, he was one of the founders of industrial unionism in Canada in the 1930's. He served as the head of the Canadian division of the United Electrical Workers for 43 years. During that time he battled with some of the world's largest corporations, with powerful politicians who had him interned, and with most of the leadership of the Candianlabour movement. Long-associated with the Communist Party, Jackson and the UE were victimized by the Cold War, expelled from teh Candian Congress of Labour, and subjected to red-baited raids conducted by unions under more moderate political leadership. But in the Cold War, which disfigured both Canadian society and the Candian labour movement, he gave as good as he got. This biography demonstrates that Jackson thrived on conflict and challange and rarely shrank from a confrontation - in either his public or private life. Making extensive use of interviews conducted with Jackson and his associates, it provides an intimate portrayal of one of the most controversial and successful radical labour leaders in Canadian history. --Publisher's description

In this further volume of autobiography, BC labour and human rights lawyer John Stanton returns to his career in the law. After reviewing his childhood, education, and early political experiences in Vancouver during the Depression years, he discusses some of his most important cases. These include: the defence of Fergus McKean, a BC communist leader who was interned during World War II; an exceptional criminal libel suit prosecution in Cold War BC; and an account of his relations with the Mine Mill and Smelter Workers. --Publisher's description

Confrontation, Struggle and Transformation is the story of working women and men in the St. Catharines area from the mid-1800s to the present. The study explores the labour movement's fight to survive and thrive in the Niagara region. Thanks to extensive quotations from interviews, archival sources and local newspapers, the story unfolds, in part, through the voices of the people themselves: workers who fought for unions, community members who supported them and employers who opposed them. --Publisher's description

In October 1976 one million Canadian workers walked off the job to protest the wage controls imposed by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In a memorable personal account of this historic general strike, Saint John labour activist George Vair recalls how workers in one New Brunswick city mobilized to defend themselves and their unions and defeat the unpopular program. --Publisher's description

The authors' careful analysis of labour and working-class organizations in Brandon is aimed at reconstructing and disclosing aspects of the history of class and class relations. While other western Canadian cities, Winnipeg, for example, have received much deserved attention by historians, studies of other cities, such as Brandon, in the early 20th century help to provide a more well-rounded understanding of working-class life in Canada during this period. In the tradition of the new labour history Black and Mitchell pay close attention to the unique development of class relations in the community of Brandon, while placing that community in a broader, national context. This work includes a careful consideration of the working class in Brandon, the particular obstacles and challenges workers there faced, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of class relations in Canada. --Publisher's description

This collection of essays stems from a joint conference held at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth by the Committee on Canadian Labour History and the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History. An Introduction by David Montgomery places the essays in a broader international perspective. Contributors from Wales include John Williams, Christopher Turner, Merfyn Jones, Dot Jones, and Deian R. Hopkin. Canadian essays are by Craig Heron, Robert Babcock, Bruno Ramirez, Allen Seager, Linda Kealey, Varpu Lindstrom-Best, and Gregory S. Kealey. The volume includes photographs, maps and tables. --Publisher's description. Contents: The rise and decline of the Welsh economy, 1890-1930 / John Williams -- Labour and industrial capitalist development in the North Atlantic Region, 1880-1920 / Robert Babcock -- The second Industrial Revolution in Canada, 1890-1930 / Craig Heron -- Conflicts of faith? / Christopher Turner -- Serfdom and slavery / Dot Jones -- Of men and stones / Merfyn Jones -- Migration and regional labour markets, 1870-1915 / Bruno Ramirez -- No special protection--no sympathy / Linda Kealey -- Miners'struggles in Western Canada, 1890-1930 / Allan Seager -- Canadian mining towns / Varpu Linstrom-Best -- The parameters of class conflict / Gregory S. Kealey -- The great unrest in Wales, 1910-1913 / Deian R. Hopkin. Papers from a conference of Committee on Canadian Labour History and Llafur, the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, held in April 1987 near Newtown in Mid-Wales.

An original adventure in public history — a tour of 50 sites where families, workers, unions and communities have recognized the place of workers in 20th-century New Brunswick history. Ten short chapters, with explanatory notes, illustrations and a map. // Une aventure originale en histoire publique — une tournée de 50 lieux où des familles, des travailleuses et des travailleurs, des syndicats et des communautés ont reconnu la place des travailleuses et des travailleurs dans l’histoire du Nouveau-Brunswick du 20e siècle. Dix courts chapitres, des notes explicatives, des illustrations et une carte. --Publisher's description

This volume presents the inaugural issue and articles from The Woman Worker, the official newspaper of the Canadian Federation of Women's Labor Leagues, during its 1926 to 1929 run. Edited by prominent Communist Party of Canada leader Florence Custance, The Woman Worker's objective was to "champion the Protection of Womanhood, and the cause of the Workers generally." In this collection, Hobbs and Sangster have provided an introductory chapter examining the evolution The Woman Worker, its editor Florence Custance, the Communist-led Women's Labor Leagues, and, more generally, the socio-economic and political context of the mid to late 1920s. Each chapter includes an introduction and suggestions for further reading. Chapters include women and wage work, protective legislation, feminism and social reform, peace and war, women and the sex trade, marriage, the family and domestic labour, and the local Women's Labor Leagues at work. --Publisher's description

A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War is one man's bittersweet account of fighting with the International Brigades against the forces of General Francisco Franco in Spain from 1936 to 1939. Douglas Patrick (Pat) Stephens was born in Armenia in 1910 and emigrated with his family to Canada in 1926. Like countless others, his dream of finding a new and more prosperous life was severely shaken by the onset of the Great Depression, and he turned to the Communist Party of Canada in an attempt to combat the political and economic deterioration which had gripped much of the world. Franco's attempt to overthrow by military force the republican government of Spain seemed to Pat Stephens the ideal opportunity to put his political convictions into action. Through his connections in the Communist Party, he became one of some 1400 Canadians, and 40,000 International Volunteers in all, who went to Spain. Many of the volunteers, including the Canadians, went to Spain against the laws and the wishes of their governments. Many of them never came back. Stephens' memoir, dictated to his wife Phyllis Stephens shortly before his death in 1987, puts a very human face on this strange and complex war. It is a portrait of political and moral conviction tinged by creeping disillusionment. It is also a compelling depiction of the strength, frailty, doubt, and courage which can result from the sometimes incongruous intersection of the personal and the political. A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the conflict which immediately preceded World War II, and of Canada's role in that conflict. -- Publisher's description

This book sets out to present the economic and social writings of Colin McKay, a pioneer Marxian sociologist and economist in Canada (and no relation to the author), and to place McKay in the context of the international socialist tradition. The manuscript takes the form of an extensive biographical essay, five substantive sections that present and examine McKay's thought both thematically and chronologically, and a concluding essay that places McKay's thought in the context of contemporary discussions with regard to the "decline of Marx" in the late 20th century. Colin McKays's life and work determines the scope of the manuscript, but since this "life and work" extended to subjects as varies as the limitations of Kantian philosophy and the design of North Atlantic schooners, the book is rather less narrow than it might appear at first. --Publisher's description

The late "Lefty" Morgan, a British Columbia railway engineer, outlines his philosophy of workers' control in this fascinating volume. The volume has a scholarly introduction by University of New Brunswick anthropologist, Gail Pool, and University of Toronto PhD student in anthropology, Donna Young. They situate Lefty politically and historically and locate Lefty's work in current debates about workers' control. --Publisher's description