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Chinese Canadians are one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. In the 2021 census, more than 1.7 million people reported being of Chinese origin. Despite their importance to the Canadian economy, including the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), many European Canadians were historically hostile to Chinese immigration. A prohibitive head tax restricted Chinese immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1923. From 1923 to 1947, the Chinese were excluded altogether from immigrating to Canada. (See Chinese Immigration Act)....

The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, known also as the Chinese Exclusion Act, banned the entry of virtually all Chinese immigrants for 24 years. Although migration into Canada from most countries was controlled or restricted in some way, only Chinese people were singled out completely from entering on the basis of race....

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was the largest strike in Canadian history. Between 15 May and 25 June 1919, more than 30,000 workers left their jobs. Factories, shops, transit and city services shut down. The strike resulted in arrests, injuries and the deaths of two protestors. It did not immediately succeed in empowering workers and improving job conditions. But the strike did help unite the working class in Canada. Some of its participants helped establish what is now the New Democratic Party....

Recognized on the first day of May every year, International Workers’ Day, or May Day, commemorates the struggles of workers around the world through the labour movements and the political left. Although established in Canada since the beginning of the 20th century, this day is not deemed a statutory holiday, as opposed to Labour Day, celebrated on the first Monday in September.

The Canadian worker has been a neglected figure in Canadian history. Workers have contributed in many ways to the development of Canadian society, but the history of working people — their families, communities and work places — has only gradually become part of our view of the past and an important component of understanding how we came to occupy our present. --Introduction. Contents: Early historiography -- Postwar scholarship -- 1970s-1980s -- Class and labour -- Scholarship proliferates -- New interpretation and debate -- Working women and gendered class relations -- Labour history at the current juncture.

Coal miners at Bienfait, Saskatchewan, had joined the militant Mine Workers' Union of Canada in 1931. In September of that year they went on strike to win recognition of their union as a prelude to pressing demands for a restoration of wages cut by the local coal operators. --Introduction

On September 29, 1931, almost 400 striking coal miners clashed with local police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in the streets of Estevan, Saskatchewan. The battle lasted less than an hour but left three men dead and twenty-three seriously injured. It was Canada's worst day of labor-related violence since "Bloody Saturday" in Winnipeg (June 21, 1919), and before long Estevan's day of infamy became known simply as "Black Tuesday."

For six weeks in the early summer of 1919, Winnipeg, then the largest city in the Canadian Prairies, was shut down by a general strike. More than 30,000 of the city's workers walked off their jobs in a test of strength that was to prove the focal point of a labor explosion that was national and international in scope. The strike was provoked by the refusal of employers to recognize and bargain with the metal and building trades federations of unions. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council organized a poll of its affiliates' members, and a general strike was approved by a vote of 11,112 to 524. The response to the strike call on May 15 was overwhelming. Not only did organized workers respond solidly, shutting down factories, newspapers, telephones, and streetcars, but thousands of unorganized workers joined them. The city fell silent....

In 1944 the first social democratic government in North America was elected in the province of Saskatchewan. The new government of Premier Tommy Douglas intended to introduce plans to insure both medical and hospital services immediately following the election; however, because of financial limitations, it decided instead to establish a provincewide system of hospital insurance. The Saskatchewan Hospital Insurance Plan, established in 1947 and funded mainly from provincial tax revenue, provided free inpatient hospital care for all residents of the province. ...on July 1, 1962, the date the Medical Care Insurance Plan was to go into effect, more than 90 percent of the province's doctors withdrew their services. This strike, although relatively short–it only lasted twenty-three days–was very bitter....

In early April 1935 hundreds of dissatisfied, disillusioned men walked out of federally run relief camps throughout British Columbia and descended on Vancouver in a bold attempt to reverse their dead-end lives and bring about some kind of "work for wages" program. No one wanted to deal with the men, least of all Conservative prime minister R. B. Bennett, who believed that the Communist Party of Canada had orchestrated the protest. As the stalemate dragged on week after numbing week, the men decided to go to Ottawa and lay their grievances directly before the government....

Labor protests accompanied the rise and maturation of industrial capitalism in Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continued in new forms afterwards. As the employment relationship became more common, workers sought to improve their economic position and the condition of their workplaces through collective action and protest, which in turn led to the birth of a more formal Canadian labor movement. -- Introduction

A strike is the withholding of labour by workers in order to obtain better wages or working conditions. A lockout is the opposite, being the temporary shutdown of a business by an employer to compel employees to accept certain conditions. Both have been important in establishing the working conditions of Canadians over the last two centuries....

Collective bargaining is a method of jointly determining working conditions between one or more employers on one side and organized employees on the other....

Discusses the historic strike in which three miners were killed. Describes the strike's origins, how workers organized, the bloody confrontation with the police, and the subsequent settlement.

The first labour organizations in Canada appeared in the early 19th century, but their growth and development really occurred in the early decades of the 20th century. During most of the 19th century labour unions were local, sporadic and short-lived....

Labour relations refers to the relations between employers and employees. They are affected by a number of factors, including labour organizations, collective bargaining, labour market, government policy, the structure of the economy, labour law and technological change....

Traditionally, reference to women in the labour force has focused on women in the paid labour force. Yet in Saskatchewan's agricultural-based economy, as in many other Canadian communities, economic development relied greatly on women's unpaid labour. --Introduction

Working-class history is the story of the changing conditions and actions of all working people. Most adult Canadians today earn their living in the form of wages and salaries and thus share the conditions of dependent employment associated with the definition of "working class." -- Introduction