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This paper examines the history of the British juvenile immigrants, a group of over 100,000 children who arrived in Canada between 1868 and 1939 to work on farms or as domestic workers. There was both a pressing need within Canada for farm workers, and overcrowding in British cities, therefore conditions were right for a mutually beneficial labour exchange between the two nations. British philanthropists encouraged this movement and ensured its continued success over a seventy year period. The societal changes that occurred in Canada during the same period as a result of the reform movement are also traced within this historical examination. The increase in child welfare policies, and the subsequent attitudinal changes in the Canadian public also impacted how the home children were treated and viewed. Through this research, this neglected group of immigrants will be given a more prominent position in Canadian social and immigration history.

In July 2005, six unions withdrew from the central labour federation in the United States, the AFL-CIO. In September 2005, joined by a seventh union, the disaffiliated unions formed a rival labour federation called Change to Win (CTW). On the surface according to Stem, leader of the CTW coalition, what divides the two sides of the split is a disagreement over whether or not to place greater emphasis on organizing new members or altering the political climate in the US in order to facilitate orgamzmg. This thesis explores some of the earlier debates within the union renewal literature in the US and in Canada and exposes many ofthe similarities between the 1995 "New Voices" leadership ofthe AFL-CIO and the CTW leadership. Through a description and analysis of the events that led to the split in the AFL-CIO, the limitations ofthe debates that led to the split are revealed and the strategies for union renewal advanced by the proponents of CTW are critiqued. Drawing on interviews with elected leaders and staff from some of the Canadian sections of the CTW unions, one of the largest Canadian unions, the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress, this thesis examines some of the implications of the split in the AFL-CIO on the Canadian labour movement. As trade unionists in Canada consider different approaches to union renewal, one option is to embrace an approach similar to the CTW approach: greater cooperation with employers and a more "efficient" business unionism. Another approach is union renewal with a socialist character; developing working-class capacities to construct socialist alternatives and renew the labour movement as an instrument of working-class struggle.

L’objet de ce mémoire est la recension et l’analyse des accidents mortels survenus dans les milieux de travail du district judiciaire de Montréal durant la période de 1893 à 1930. À partir des témoignages contenus dans les rapports d’enquête des coroners, nous analyserons les opinions des travailleurs, des contremaîtres, des coroners et des inspecteurs afin de connaître leur point de vue sur les accidents et de vérifier dans quelle mesure ils partagent les valeurs libérales de cette époque. Pour constituer notre corpus d’information, nous avons dépouillé chacun des 1527 dossiers des rapports d’enquête des coroners effectuée entre le premier janvier 1893 et le 31 décembre 1930. Ils constituent notre principale source à partir de laquelle nous établirons l’ampleur des accidents mortels et également analyserons les témoignages recueillis par les coroners, Pour fin d’analyse, nous avons réparti ces données sous les quatre décennies couvertes par notre étude et élaboré des tableaux statistiques établissant la distribution annuelle et décennale de ces accidents de même que l’âge et le sexe des victimes. Nous avons également distribué ces accidents par secteurs d’activités économiques et par catégories d’accidents. Si les employeurs, les contremaîtres et les inspecteurs des manufactures adhèrent aux principes de l’idéologie libérale de l’époque en attribuant aux travailleurs la responsabilité première des accidents de travail, les coroners et les travailleurs considèrent, par contre, dans une forte proportion (72 %) que les causes de ces accidents sont associés à des défaillances des divers éléments des lieux de travail et aux processus de production. Ils sont donc plus enclins à attribuer la responsabilité aux employeurs.

Labour migrants have been routinely categorised within social scientific thought as either abstracted economic entities or as victims of global processes beyond their understanding. A striking majority of attempts to understand processes of migration, especially in regards to "unskilled" Mexican migrant workers, have been informed primarily by macro-level economic approaches, while the social and individual factors at play have been largely pushed to the side. As such, the social lives and individual diversities of these migrants have received meagre academic attention. In acknowledgment of this gap, this current thesis focuses on the lived experiences of Hector-Alberto and Durango, two individuals engaged in a cycle of migration as participants in Canada's managed migration program, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Program. Through an ethnographic description of the everyday experiences of Hector and Durango, three relevant themes are explored: their individual relations to their work, their family, and their co-workers. As such, the present work aims to explore the varied experiences of migration and frame labour migrants as significant social actors rather than abstracted units or victims of social forces. The author encourages an engagement in a broader investigation of the "migrant experience"; to look beyond the idea of transnational migration as simply physical movements across national boundaries, but rather as groupings of processes with profound and diverse meanings to those involved. Perhaps such a perspective would play a role in revealing the complex myriad of interacting processes which combine under the umbrella term of "migration".

This thesis examines what the two sides of class-- capital and working class --have meant in left parlance, what these meanings imply about class struggle, and how they were put into political practice through Communist Parties and trade unions. Ideas about class and strategies for class struggle continue to be central to the left, as the various ways these are conceptualized give rise to very different answers to some common and persistent questions: Who is legitimately a worker and when? Why, how and with what result are certain struggles delayed or subsumed within others? At what point does self-criticism cross over to counter-revolutionary dissent? And what might continuing schisms over these questions tell us about traditional left organizations? The thesis traces the development of 'the left' from its key conceptual subject, the working class, through its two most widely-adopted organizational strategies in order to examine the poverty of the left's analytical and political traditions, particularly as regards (1) the notion of socialism as an alternative management plan and (2) ideas about capital and working class that stressed the embodiments of power relations rather than those relations themselves, and which were lifted directly from capital's own definitions of productivity. Finally, the thesis argues that insights from long-neglected Marxisms, certain critical post-structuralisms and the political strategies of some emergent anti-capitalist networks together offer the opportunity to produce a more fluid, and more liberatory left, imbued with: (1) an understanding of class as a relationship that does not inhere to individuals or organizations, and (2) a notion of the working class as a permanent resistance that has nothing whatever to do with a particular ideology or strategy; with (3) an analysis which emphasizes situational relationships of power that are at once racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed; and (4) a political approach which draws means and ends together in an emphasis on resistance as the troubling of order, and revolution as a process of refusal.

Through an analysis of qualitative, ethnographic data, I locate the narratives of nine Mexican women married to migrants within the context of capitalist globalization, state policies, and local gender ideologies. In doing so, advocate for a theoretical approach to migration which combines elements of structural theories of migration and network theoretical approaches. These women's narratives position them at the juncture of capitalism and other social relations, and show them to be active agents in migration. Not only is their labour critical to the maintenance of migration patterns and the capitalist relations into which migrants and non-migrants are incorporated, but women's labour is also imbued with social meanings.

For the last 40 years, migrant farm workers from the Caribbean and Mexico have been recruited to work temporarily on Canadian farms under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). In 2002, the pilot Foreign Worker Program (FWP) for low skilled migrant workers was initiated in the province of Quebec and under this program began the recruitment of Guatemalan migrant farm workers. Since the program's start, the number of Guatemalan migrants has nearly tripled and there seems to be a decline in the number of workers hired under the SAWP in Quebec. This paper examines the FWP's development, set-up, consequences and operation alongside the SAWP and shows how the Canadian state is expanding the number and flexibility of temporary worker programs. This paper draws attention to the neo-liberal context of migrant farm labour in Canada, pointing to the ways in which Canada's federal policies governing seasonal agricultural migrants and the agricultural labour market are exploitative and racist.

Since World War II, service work has become the major employment sector in North America. One of the most recognizable forms it takes is in the fast food industry, a multi-billion dollar business with outlets all over the globe. Little has been written about the history of this work, central to the functioning of the global economy and a key part of the move from an industrial economy to a consumer one. This move has changed work by examining BC's White Spot chain, which unlike almost any other has been unionized for over three decades. Drawing on union records an d oral interviews, it analyzes fast food unionism, evaluates organizing in the sector, and draws out workplace dynamics and processes; arguing that labour practices in this sector have been crucial in making work more exploitative.

This thesis explores the wide variety of ways in which radical intellectuals and activists in Montreal used and adapted Third World decolonization theory to build a broad movement of solidarity and anti-colonial resistance from 1963-1972. Beginning in the early 1960s, activists and intellectuals in Montreal began drawing upon the language of Third World decolonization to resituate their understandings of themselves, their society, and the world in which they inhabited. Through their engagement with Third World liberation theory – and the closely related language of Black Power – radical intellectuals in Montreal sought to give new meaning to the old conception of humanism, and they worked to drastically expand the geographical frame of reference in which Quebec politics were generally understood. After analyzing the shifting meaning of decolonization in the period leading up to the late 1960s, this thesis explores the ways in which various groups adopted, built upon, challenged, and shaped the conception of Quebec liberation. Montreal’s advocates of women’s liberation, the city’s Black activists, defenders of unilingualism, and labour radicals were all deeply shaped by the intellectual and urban climate of Montreal, and by ideas of Quebec decolonization. They developed their own individual narratives of liberation, yet linked by the flexible language of decolonization, these narratives all greatly overlapped, forming a vast movement which was larger than the sum of its parts. If the concept of decolonization was extremely powerful, however, it was also highly ambiguous and contradictory, and activists only slowly came to an understanding of the multi-layered nature of colonialism in Quebec. By the early 1970s, the idea of decolonization was slowly abandoned by those advocating radical social change in the city. This thesis makes three interrelated arguments. First, it argues that radicalism in Quebec in the 1960s cannot be understood outside of the larger international context in which it emerged. Second, it attempts to rethink the ways in which different groups and movements during the 1960s interacted and fed upon each other’s analyses and learned from each other. And, finally, by looking at the centrality of Third World decolonization to the development of dissent in Montreal, it hopes to add new perspectives to the growing field of international Sixties scholarship, by insisting that history of the ‘West’ was profoundly shaped by its interactions with the Third World.

This thesis examines the relationship between worker identity and workplace practices from the perspectives of white and Aboriginal women working in a multinational forest company in the northern prairies. Over the course of three manuscripts I demonstrate the salience of ascribed and constructed identities of women to their experiences and representations of forest employment and corporate discourse. Setting the context for the remainder of the thesis, the first manuscript presents an analysis of employment segregation by gender and Aboriginal identity in Canada’s forest sector in 2001 using segregation indices. Results demonstrate that forest employment was vertically segregated by both gender and Aboriginal ancestry in the forest sector in 2001. Men and women of First Nations ancestry were over represented in less-stable and lower paying occupations in woods based forest industries, and both white and First Nations women were over represented in forest services and clerical occupations. To explore women’s perceptions of company practices of diversity management and restructuring, I then analysed interviews with women working in forest processing using critical discourse analysis. In my second manuscript, I demonstrated how women’s representations of diversity management practices were linked to their social identities in terms of Aboriginal identity and class. Yet, as a whole, these representations prompted a questioning of the meaning of difference within diversity management, and of diversity management’s ability to further the interests of marginalised workers. My third manuscript examining representations of restructuring, argues that there is a two way relationship between women’s identities as workers and their representations of restructuring. Whether women reproduced or resisted restructuring was linked to their presented work identities and restructuring and practices in turn were helping to shape women’s worker subjectivities. Results from this thesis demonstrated that how women represent themselves and workplace practices is related to their different experiences in the specific set of social relations of forestry work in the northern prairies.

Policing in Vancouver was transformed by the labour unrest of the interwar period, culminating in a campaign carried out by a new civic regime that assumed power in response to a general strike threat. Complicating the process was that police workers were considered unreliable for policing labour disputes, especially since they unionized under the threat of a general strike in 1918. The challenge of “constituting authority” was therefore to render the police a reliable instrument against working class unrest. This study traces the development of policing through the postwar spate of waterfront strikes to the 1930s anticommunist campaign that carried the struggle into the political arena. Even as police power was being consolidated in the municipal police institution, rank and file police were undermined by tactics long used against other workers, namely labour spies and police specials. Like other workers, police resisted, modifying the process of change as a result.

Global market conditions have led to large corporate bankruptcies in recent years, particularly in the steel sector. Bankruptcy restructuring under the u.s. Chapter 11 or Canadian Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act [CCAA] places employee pensions at risk. In response to concessionary restructuring, the U.s. arm of the United Steelworkers [USW] intervened in several steel sector bankruptcies, developing restructuring solutions that led to partial or near-complete restoration of pensions and collective agreements. In Canada, during Stelco's troubled bankruptcy process between 2004 and 2006, Steelworker locals employed this interventionist method to prevent pension and collective agreement concessions. Scholars, such as Frost and Bacon, implicitly provide a rationale for union intervention into bankruptcy restructuring. They argue that union intervention in general corporate restructuring allows workers a greater voice in the process, leads to optimal results, and prevents union irrelevance. Frost outlines several criteria for maximizing union success during restructuring: the strength of union intra-organizational and external ties; the responsiveness of the union leadership towards the interests of the membership; and the ability of the union to access information and participate at all levels of the process. Many of Frost's recommendations were critical to the success of the USW locals at Stelco in achieving their bargaining and restructuring goals. Unlike in the more cooperative restructuring examples studied by Frost and Bacon, however, Stelco's Canadian locals employed a very assertive stance, since management exhibited initial hostility to union intervention. The union also found it necessary to enlist the help of government. While union intervention in bankruptcies remains a controversial process, it is one possible solution for troubled manufacturing unions, represents an overall USW push towards greater involvement in management, and may even lead towards an exit for labour from the discarded "post-war compromise."

Ce mémoire relate l’expérience du Front d’action politique des salariés à Montréal (FRAP) de 1970 à 1974, un parti municipal émanant directement des milieux syndicaux et populaires. Après avoir présenté les grands traits de la conjoncture sociale, économique et politique de la décennie 1960 au Québec, nous analysons les conditions objectives qui ont favorisé l’émergence du FRAP à Montréal (problèmes sociaux, administration municipale autoritaire, logements insalubres, etc.). Le FRAP est fondé en mai 1970 et présente des candidats contre le maire Jean Drapeau aux élections du 25 octobre suivant. La Crise d’octobre et l’imposition de la Loi des mesures de guerre déroutent le FRAP qui ne fait élire aucun candidat. Les mois et années qui suivent, les groupes sociaux s’éloignent du FRÀP et ce dernier a vainement espéré que les organisations syndicales de la région de Montréal concrétisent l’idée qui avait été à l’origine de sa création, à savoir un parti politique propre aux travailleurs et aux travailleuses. Le FRAP met fin à ses activités au début de l’année 1974 quelques mois avant la naissance d’un nouveau parti municipal, le Rassemblement des citoyens de Montréal (RCM).

This thesis is focused on examining the extent of union-nonunion wage inequality in Canada from 1997 to 2004, using data from the Canada Labour Force Survey collected by Statistics Canada. The research is either directly or indirectly guided by two main measures of union-nonunion wage inequality. The first measure is the wage differential , which examines the difference between the union and nonunion wage after controlling for other relevant factors in a regression model; and the second measure is an account of wage dispersion or wage spread, which effectively explains how internally equitable the union-nonunion wage distribution is in relation to the average wage, after controlling for other relevant factors in a regression model. Each chapter tackles a different hypothesis or subject relating to Canadian union-nonunion wage inequality as investigated from the Canada Labour Force Survey Dataset, and is guided by an effort to explore issues or patterns not previously addressed in the extant literature. The initial analyses found that the union-nonunion wage differential across Canada was normally eleven to sixteen percent from 1997 to 2004. The research also examined three advanced topics in Canadian union-nonunion wage inequality. Analyses of the industry, occupational, and demographic trends in Canada over the past eight years showed that there is some evidence to suggest that demographic changes in union density does affect union-nonunion wage inequality, but this relationship is not conclusive. This research also addressed the unusual finding of higher hourly wages among parttime females. This difference was not present after conducting a more rigorous regression analysis within both sectors. However, it was found that the marginal male wage premium could largely be explained by the combined effects of establishment size among males in the union sector, as well as educational attainment among males in the union sector. Further investigation of some unexpected interaction effects of union status and establishment size and union status and job tenure in relation to the wage, revealed that these combined effects still generated comparative over the nonunion group, but only up to a certain level of tenure or establishment size. Finally, an analysis of whether union density has mattered at all in Canada for promoting higher wages, reveals that the general effects of union density on the wage are relevant only within a certain wage range and within certain industries.

This thesis investigates several issues related to the provisions afforded by aspects of the Canadian welfare state to protect the rights of migrant labour participating in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. In the introduction and literature review, I provide the background of the program and present the nature of the issues that surround it. I also outline the problems that migrant agricultural workers face while participating in the program. These are mainly due to the few provisions that are extended to this secondary sector labour group, a group of workers that is barely visible to Canadian society. In the main part of the thesis, I analyze the two instruments that allow the entry of these workers into Canada and the different pieces of Canadian legislation that are relevant to protecting legitimate rights of any person who works in this country. More importantly, I also present findings derived from interviews with migrant agricultural workers and key informants from advocacy groups and the labour movement regarding those provisions. Based on their in Sights and on the dual market theory, I scrutinize the position of the Canadian welfare state concerning the legitimate provisions migrant workers should be entitled to and how the globalization context influences that position. I conclude with a series of ideas that, in my opinion, could positively affect this labour group's welfare status.

This research investigates the formation and maintenance of power relations within the organization and everyday practices of work and transnational living, and the social and economic impacts among Mexican migrants and their families participating in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Through the analysis of the qualitative data collected through ethnographic case studies in Mexico, 350 hours of participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with 25 migrant workers, 5 farmers and 5 representatives from other state and non-state intermediaries, findings have emerged pertaining to three research themes: power, racialization and transnationalism. This research finds that Mexican migrant workers are consistently located in subordinate power positions in the organization and the everyday practices of the SAWP; and governments, employers, and other intermediaries have significant control over migrants' daily lives and their migration parameters. Racialization processes in both the institutional and everyday practices of the SAWP produce, maintain, and legitimize a system of temporary migration characterized by imbalanced power relations and the unequal allocation of resources and rights through the differentiation of the "Mexican migrant worker" with reference to race and ethnicity. Migrant workers and their families actively participate in transnational practices that are integral to seasonal migration, including the family networks that facilitate entry into the program, the "migration work" performed by women, and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This essential "migration work" involves preparing the family for migration and sustaining the transnational family through managing and/or working within family farms and small businesses, receiving and managing international remittance transfers and telephone calling, managing and utilizing remittances for daily living and development, and performing carework. These findings support the "transnationalization of culture" hypothesis, and indicate that a gendered culture of migration is emerging within the SAWP. It is argued that the SAWP is an exemplar of "time-space compression" in action which leads to the exploitation and subordination of "Mexican migrant workers." Temporary migration systems like the SAWP are seen as recursively related to globalization, where foreign labour dependence and remittance economies are created and perpetuated through globalization and a "migration industry" powered by new information and communication technologies.

Ce mémoire porte sur le syndicalisme québécois dans les années 1960 et 1970 alors qu’il traverse une phase de bouleversement et qu’il radicalise son idéologie. Nous nous penchons plus particulièrement sur le cas de la CSN qui affermit sa critique du capitalisme avec la publication de textes d’orientation socialiste tels que Il n'y a plus d’avenir pour le Québec dans le système actuel et Ne comptons que sur nos propres moyens. Parmi les instances de la centrale, il y a les conseils centraux régionaux dont celui de Montréal, le plus imposant en terme d’effectifs (près de 60 000 en 1968). Rassemblant la frange la plus militante de la centrale, il a pour rôle l’éducation et l’action politique des membres. Le Conseil central des syndicats nationaux de Montréal (CCSNM) se trouve au centre de la tourmente sociale et nationale au cours de ces deux décennies alors qu’il est dirigé par la figure imposante et colorée de Michel Chartrand, président de 1968 à 1978. Dans l’historiographie, le Conseil central de Montréal est souvent considéré comme un haut lieu de la radicalisation syndicale. En analysant son discours et ses actions, nous démontrons qu’il prend effectivement des positions radicales et qu’il défend des opinions nationalistes. Malgré le fait qu’il tente de passer à l’action politique et milite pour la création d’un parti de travailleurs, le Conseil se caractérise principalement par son discours contestataire et sa critique acerbe du capitalisme. Nous verrons qu’il développe une position nationaliste indépendante au cours de la période, en se dissociant du projet du Parti québécois, qu’il juge bourgeois. Bien que les relations entre la CSN et le Conseil soient tendues, ce dernier a tout de même un impact important sur la CSN, particulièrement au niveau de la protection de la langue française et sur la position adoptée par la centrale au référendum de 1980. Le Conseil constitue donc un acteur important de la radicalisation de la société québécoise des années 1960 et 1970 en influençant la CSN, le mouvement syndical ainsi que les milieux de gauche à Montréal.

The historiography of the British Columbia Cooperative Federation differs from that of other provincial CCF groups for its lack of attention to the participation of religious reformers in shaping the party's early history. Yet the first CCF House Leader in the province, Reverend Robert Connell, was a fervent believer in the social gospel and in the goals of ecumenism. His attempts to bring "Christian principles" into politics resulted in a battle between reformers and radicals in the party, ultimately resulting in his departure from political life. The div ision of the BC CCF in 1936 as a result of what has become known as the "Connell Affair" created a loss of momentum for the party which lost its status as Official Opposition in the 1937 provincial election. This event presents a unique opportunity to study the interaction of a social gospel inspired Christian reformer with firmly irreligious supporters of Marxism.

This dissertation examines Canada's constitutional question through the lens of the labour movements in both English Canada and Quebec. The existence of two distinct labour movements in Canada has meant that political struggles that have typified national politics are also in evidence in labour politics. The sovereignty-association partnership agreement between the Canadian Labour Congress and the Quebec Federation of Labour provides a good example of the pervasiveness of this dynamic and discourse. The dissertation examines this relationship specifically, and the constitutional politics of labour organizations in English Canada and Quebec, more generally, with a view to explaining how Canada's constitutional questions have been reflected in the politics of organized labour.

[This thesis is] a labour history of Russian Mennonites employed in three Mennonite-owned factories in Manitoba: Friesens Corporation of Altona, Loewen Windows of Steinbach, and Palliser Furniture of Winnipeg. Each of these businesses had a primarily Mennonite workforce at their founding, and eventually became the largest employers in the community in which they were established. This comparative microhistory makes a significant contribution to the literature: though approximately one-quarter of North American Mennonites are working-class, few scholarly works have investigated their experiences. The history of immigration of these Mennonites is important in understanding their adaptation to North American capitalism. Immigrants had common experiences of some aspects of settlement, such as language acquisition and finding employment. Immigrants exhibited a variety of responses to government efforts to promote assimilation, and demonstrated different attitudes toward job security and expectations for their children, in part because of their diverse prior experiences of war, religious conservatism, and prejudice in their country of origin. The result was the development of an increasingly urban and heterogeneous Mennonite community in Manitoba, which perhaps contributed to the failure to develop a strong sense of class consciousness among them. The historical development of Mennonite religious thought in the twentieth century is connected to the geographical shift of North American Mennonites from rural to urban environs. This move necessitated a re-assessment of Mennonite religious beliefs, particularly of their understandings of 'Gelassenheit ', to nonresistance, and 'agape' love. The Christian's responsibility to the world came to be stressed at the expense of traditional values such as submission to the community and separation from the world. Religious belief had a role in restraining the behaviour of both workers and owners, encouraging the former to accept work discipline, and limiting the latter in their conspicuous consumption. In a case study, Barthes' semiological approach is used to demythologize an advertising campaign at Loewen Windows as a means of examining the linkages between religion and capitalism. The role of religion differentiated the operation of paternalism at these businesses from their non-Mennonite counterparts. Though Mennonite workers rarely expressed their views in class-conscious ' language', the 'content' of their remarks, particularly with respect to the labour process and their autonomy, points to the existence of a class division in these factories. The nature of their employment as factory workers affected not only their job mobility and security, the speed of their work, their sleeping patterns and social lives, but also their identity. Class differences between Mennonite employers and employees clearly existed; class consciousness on the part of workers is less evident. With the transformation of Friesens Corporation, Loewen Windows, and Palliser Furniture from small family businesses to large corporations, the relationship between Mennonite workers and their employers was reinterpreted. Employers made use of Mennonite religious motifs to craft a common ethos, but increased ethnic diversity in the workforce at Palliser Furniture, together with objective class differences between workers and owners at all three companies, resulted in some splits in the unity of the Mennonite workplace. The interplay of competing interests nonetheless resulted in redefinitions of ownership rights and their meaning for workers with respect to profit sharing and employee share ownership, as well as several unsuccessful attempts to unionize. The tension between Burkholder's emphasis on social responsibility, as exhibited by labour's demands for economic justice, and Hershberger's insistence on avoidance of confrontation was evident in the struggle of Manitoba Mennonites with their response to labour activism in the 1970s. Pacifism often had been dismissed as passivity in the past; now the adherence to the principle of nonviolence could be seen as an excuse for accepting economic exploitation. Mennonite support for cooperatives and credit unions could have translated into support for labour unions, but in late twentieth-century Manitoba, it did not. Though North American Mennonites' attitudes toward unions may have undergone change during this period, they continued to avoid becoming members. The conclusion explores whether Mennonite involvement in industrial capitalism is (or can ever be) in any way distinct from that of secular participants. Are there theological resources within Mennonitism that can mount an effective challenge to the negative results of global capitalism? This work is a modest attempt to contribute to the debate, both within the Mennonite community and without, regarding the possibilities for social and economic transformation. It is also an attempt to argue for the relevance of the consideration of religion in scholarly discourse in general, and historical study in particular.