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The article reviews several books including "Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807," by Emma Christopher, "Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution," by Paul A. Glije, and "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age," by Marcus Rediker.

The article reviews the book, "From the Net to the Net: Atlantic Canada in the Global Economy," edited by James Sacouman and Henry Veltmeyer.

By the mid-19th century, the Mi'kmaq of Cape Breton Island, much like the Mi'kmaq on the Nova Scotia mainland, were nearly destitute. The outcome of over two centuries of political, economic, and cultural interaction with Europeans, this condition was exacerbated by the massive influx of Scottish settlers to the island after the end of the Napoleonic Wars -- nearly 30,000 between 1815 and 1838. With their lands occupied and access to customary hunting and fishing grounds severely limited, the island's Mi'kmaw population -- estimated to be about 500 in 1847 -- adopted numerous economic initiatives to stay alive: they pursued agriculture and wage labour, mobilized older skills toward different occupational niches, and maintained, at least to some extent, customary rounds of seasonal resource procurement. This essay examines this evolving pattern of occupational pluralism, and highlights how customary norms, codes, and behaviours provided part of the logic through which the island's Mi'kmaw people made decisions about what to do, economically, to survive. Mid-19th century Cape Breton was a contested place as the forces of immigration and settlement exerted new pressures on Mi'kmaw life. This paper is about that changing context and how the island's indigenous people sought to understand it, negotiate its pressures and possibilities, and blunt its negative effects.

The article reviews the book, "Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920," by Thomas Winter.

The article reviews and comments extensively on the book, "Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline" by Alice Mah.

The article reviews the book, "The Failure of Global Capitalism: From Cape Breton to Colombia and Beyond," by Terry Gibbs and Garry Leech.

The article reviews the book, "A Candle For Durruti," by Al Grierson.

The article reports that the monument honouring the Canadian veterans of the Spanish Civil War is almost completed. On 4 December 1998, Spanish Civil War veterans from Canada, Britain, Demark, Israel, and the United States witnessed the unveiling of a plaque and eight stone columns near the provincial legislature in Victoria, BC.

In the wake of President Roosevelt's New Deal for labour in the us, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) experienced tremendous growth in Oregon and Washington. Fearing the arrival of the IWA in BC, the provincial government enacted the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (ICA) Act as a means to stanch the growth of militant industrial unionism. It was at the company town of Blubber Bay, BC, that the ICA Act was tested for the first rime as capital, labour, and the state struggled over the pith and substance of the new legistation. Drawing on the insights of critical legal theorists and neo-institutionalists, this article examines the multiple ways in which the state, law, and legal process shaped both the formation of the IWA and the nature of class struggle itself. In particular, it illustrates how the expansion of formal collective bargaining, as well as the age-old legal remedies available at common and criminal law, worked together to set limits and erect boundaries on collective working-class action and, in the end, forge a "responsible union."

The article reviews the book, "Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy," by Kim Moody.

The article reviews the book, "Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers' City," by Craig Heron.

In 1923, after nearly three decades of class conflict on the Vancouver waterfront, the Shipping Federation of British Columbia, an umbrella organization of shipping, stevedoring, and warehousing interests, undertook a far-reaching agenda of welfare capitalism. Drawing on wider currents of progressive reform which were cresting in the interwar period, and inspired by the example set by its counterpart in Seattle, the Shipping Federation created new joint political structures, adopted a range of paternalist initiatives, and decasualized the waterfront workplace. From its vantage point, this was a "good citizens" policy, and it was designed to: build bridges across the class divide, gain greater control of the work process, stave off the intervention of unions and the state, and, in the end, mould a more efficient and compliant waterfront workforce. The creation and implementation of this reform agenda, the ways in which white and aboriginal waterfront workers negotiated the politics of paternalism and labour market reform, and the long-term ramifications of this dynamic are at the core of this thesis. -- Welfare capitalism shaped patterns of life and labour on the waterfront significant ways: informal ways of regulating the workplace atrophied; labourism was revived; and some waterfront workers acquired a reasonable standard of living. The trade-off at work, here, was this: only those employees who divested themselves of more radical political sensibilities, and adhered to waterfront employers' broader vision of an efficient, decasualized workplace, could hope to secure a living wage and fulfill their obligations as breadwinners, husbands, and citizens. For aboriginal longshoremen, most of whom were from the Squamish First Nation, this bargain was especially difficult to negotiate for it came freighted with the additional challenges associated with being "Indian" in a white society. Unlike their white counterparts who passed muster, they were marginalized from the waterfront during this time as decasualization's new time-work discipline conflicted with their more traditional sensibilities and ongoing need to work at a variety of tasks to ensure material and cultural survival. -- Straddling labour history, aboriginal history, and the burgeoning literature on law and society, this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of welfare capitalism that conceptualize it as either a failed experiment in industrial democracy, or a drag on the emergence of the welfare state. In doing so, it re-positions welfare capitalism in the context of the wider return to normalcy following the Great War, and the powerful reform impulses that took aim at family, citizen, and nation. Rather than forestalling the welfare state, this citizen-worker complex--which manufactured a new sense of entitlement amongst white waterfront workers--was part of a broader cultural shift that would, after the trials of the Great Depression and challenge posed by the Communist Party of Canada, eventually underwrite the state's very expansion. On a broad level, then, this analysis illustrates how the prevailing liberal-capitalist order was successfully rehabilitated after the Great War and 1919, and how, in the long-term, it successfully contained, by consent and coercion, those forces which were antithetical to the prevailing economic and political status quo.

This essay examines Aboriginal longshoremen, most of whom belonged to the Squamish First Nation, on Burrard Inlet, British Columbia, from 1863 to 1939. Beginning with a consideration of the Squamish adaptation to wage labour in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, this essay analyses the ways in which Aboriginal workers negotiated the daily demands of waterfront work. Their encounter with the work process, labour politics, welfare capitalism, and class conflict are studied in depth. Despite intense competition from non-Aboriginal workers for limited job opportunities, Aboriginal longshoremen worked on Burrard inlet for a long period of time; in addition to the daily demands of waterfront work, this essay also explores the strategies that Squamish dockers adopted to protect their positions on the waterfront. Often mentioned in the scholarly literature, but never studied in a systematic way, the 'Indian'waterfront provides a window into the importance of waged work to Aboriginal people on Burrard Inlet and the sophisticated ways that the Squamish responded to Canadian colonialism and capitalism.

After the First World War, many Canadians were concerned with the possibility of national regeneration. Progressive-minded politicians, academics, church leaders, and social reformers turned increasingly to the state for solutions. Yet, as significant as the state was in articulating and instituting a new morality, outside actors such as employers were active in pursuing reform agendas as well, taking aim at the welfare of the family, citizen, and nation. Citizen Docker considers this trend, focusing on the Vancouver waterfront as a case in point.After the war, waterfront employers embarked on an ambitious program - welfare capitalism - to ease industrial relations, increase the efficiency of the port, and, ultimately, recondition longshoremen themselves. Andrew Parnaby considers these reforms as a microcosm of the process of accommodation between labour and capital that affected Canadian society as a whole in the 1920s and 1930s. By creating a new sense of entitlement among waterfront workers, one that could not be satisfied by employers during the Great Depression, welfare capitalism played an important role in the cultural transformation that took place after the Second World War.Encompassing labour and gender history, aboriginal studies, and the study of state formation, Citizen Docker examines the deep shift in the aspirations of working people, and the implications that shift had on Canadian society in the interwar years and beyond. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: "A good citizen policy" -- Welfare capitalism on the waterfront -- Securing a square deal -- "The best men that ever worked the lumber" -- Heavy lifting -- "From the fury of democracy, good Lord, deliver us!" -- Conclusion: from square deal to new deal. Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-234) and index.

The IWA, while closely linked to BC, has played a crucial role in nearly every province in Canada, from the Queen Charlotte Islands to Grand Falls, Newfoundland. The IWA in Canada is a definitive history of the union that follows its progress and setbacks throughout the past century. Its predecessors, the Industrial Workers of the World, the One Big Union, and the Lumber Workers' Industrial Union are examined, as are the historical tensions between craft and industrial unionism, the drive to organize the "timber beasts", and the pioneering role of communist activists. Today, the legendary militancy of IWA members is being brought to bear on the legalistic negotiations, environmental movements, and evolutions in governmental forest policy that continue to pose challenges. Generously illustrated with historical and present?day photographs, and enriched by numerous interviews with founding unionists, The IWA In Canada also features capsule histories of each local. In-depth analysis of specific issues and events such as the mysterious death of Viljo Rosval and Jon Voutilainen, the fight for relief in the Great Depression and the Loggers' Navy can be found in sidebars that enhance the text throughout. --Publisher's description.

The emergence, dominance, and alarmingly rapid retreat of modernist industrial capitalism on Cape Breton Island during the “long twentieth century” offers a particularly captivating window on the lasting and varied effects of deindustrialization. Now, at the tail end of the industrial moment in North American history, the story of Cape Breton Island presents an opportunity to reflect on how industrialization and deindustrialization have shaped human experiences. Covering the period between 1860 and the early 2000s, this volume looks at trade unionism, state and cultural responses to deindustrialization, including the more recent pivot towards the tourist industry, and the lived experiences of Indigenous and Black people. Rather than focusing on the separate or distinct nature of Cape Breton, contributors place the island within broad transnational networks such as the financial world of the Anglo-Atlantic, the Celtic music revival, the Black diaspora, Canadian development programs, and more. In capturing the vital elements of a region on the rural resource frontier that was battered by deindustrialization, the histories included here show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively. --Publisher's description

Documents the exposure of Jack Esselwein, also known as Sergeant John Leopold, who, as an undercover operative of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, joined the Communist Party of Canada. His identity was revealed after a series of police raids on August 11, 1931, which led to the arrest of a number of leading Communists, including Tim Buck. Esselwein testified at the trial in November 1931 whereby the Communists were convicted and sentenced to penitentiary terms under the notorious section 98 of the criminal code. They had already discovered that Esselwein was a police spy. The Toronto Daily Star report (published November 13, 1931) on Esselwein's unmasking is included in the article.

In July 1997, the CAW-backed workers at nine Vancouver Starbucks outlets became the first "barristas" in North America to secure a collective agreement with the trendy, Seattle-based international coffee giant. On the first anniversary of that historical union drive, Labour/Le Travail spoke with 25-year-old-Laurie Banong, Starbucks employee and union activist, about organizing young service sector workers, working with the CAW, and what trade unionism means to her. --Editors' introduction

The notebook opens with "Representations of a Radical Historian," a review of "You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train," a documentary on Howard Zinn by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller (78 minutes, colour, (Brooklyn 2004)). In the second part, entitled "System Failure: The Breakdown of the Post-War Settlement and the Politics of Labour in Our Time," Bryan D. Palmer presents a revised version of an "educational and agitational address" given to the Alberta Federation of Labour's membership forum on 7 May 2004 in the aftermath of the British Columbia hospital and long-term care workers' strike.

Since the 1970s, the closure of mines, mills, and factories has marked a rupture in working-class lives. The Deindustrialized World interrogates the process of industrial ruination, from the first impact of layoffs in metropolitan cities, suburban areas, and single-industry towns to the shock waves that rippled outward, affecting entire regions, countries, and beyond. Seeking to hear the “roar ... on the other side of the silence,” scholars from France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States share their own stories of ruin and ruination and ask others what it means to be working class in a postindustrial world. In Part 1, they explore the ruination of former workplaces and the damaged health and injured bodies of industrial workers. Part 2 brings to light disparities of experiences between rural resource towns and cities, where hipster revitalization often overshadows industrial loss. Part 3 reveals the ongoing impact of deindustrialization on working people and their place in the new global economy. Together, the chapters open a window on the lived experiences of people living at ground zero of deindustrialization, revealing its layered impacts and examining how workers, environmentalists, activists, and the state have responded to its challenges. --Publisher's description