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In [this book], experts on foreign domestic workers and workers-turned-activists document how the Canadian system has institutionalized unequal treatment of citizen and non-citizen workers. Since the 1940s, rights of citizenship for immigrant domestic workers in Canada have declined while the number of women recruited from Third World countries to work in Canadian homes has dramatically increased. The analysis...is both theoretical and practical, framing ideologies of privacy, maternalism, familialism, and rights, as well as examining government policy, labour organizing, and strategies to resist exploitation. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis -- Foreign domestic worker policy in Canada and the social boundaries of modern citizenship / Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis -- From mothers of the nation to migrant workers / Sedef Arat-Koc -- An affair between nations: international relations and the movement of household service workers / Patricia M. Daenzer -- Little victories and big defeats : the rise and fall of collective bargaining rights for domestic workers in Ontario / Judy Fudge -- The work at home is not recognized: organizing domestic workers in Montreal / Miriam Elvir -- We can still fight back: organizing domestic workers in Toronto / Pura M. Velasco.

Chronicles the 26 collective agreements signed by unions with the International Nickel Company (Inco) in Sudbury from 1944 to 1997. Describes the strikes and production shutdowns of 1958, 1966, 1969, 1975, 1978 , 1982, and 1997. Also includes a list of mining fatalities from 1890 to 1997.

[This book] offers a progressive approach to the sociology of work and labour. Each chapter tackles an essential contemporary labour issue and includes original research from top scholars across Canada. The first of four parts is devoted to the contemporary turmoil of working Canadians caused by the upheaval in the manufacturing and service industries. Part Two discusses the tremendous impact of technology on the labour force. Specific case studies raise universal questions. ...Part Three examines issues specific to women in the new and changing workplace. The intrinsic conflict of work and family is established as the context for examining the division of labour inside and outside the family. ...Chapters in the final part examine the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the new realities of unemployment, underemployment, and under-qualification. --Publisher's description (abridged). Contents: Introduction: Debating the future of work (pages 1-5). Part 1. Canadian working lives in turmoil: The traditional workplace transformed (7). Lost horizons, leisure shock: good jobs, bad jobs, uncertain future / Daniel Glenday (8-34)-- From cars to casinos, from work to workfare: the brave new world of Canadian employment / Jamie Swift (35-52)-- The casualization of the labour force / Dave Broad (53-73). Part 2. The new workplace: technology, telework and restructuring (75). Technology and the deskilling of work: the case of passenger agents at Air Canada / Vivian Shalla (76-96 )-- The impact of teleworking on Canadian employment / Kay Stratton Devine, Laurel Taylor, and Kathy Haryett (97-116) -- Health care, hospitals, and reengineering: the nightingales sing the blues / Jerry P. White (117-142). Part 3. Tradition confronts the new employment: women, work, and family (143) -- Always working , never done: the expansion of the double day / Norene Pupo (144-165)-- The part-time solution: toward entrapment or empowerment? / Ann Duffy (166-188). Part 4. Negotiating the margins: unemployment and training (189). Changes in the patterns of unemployment: the new realities of joblessness / Patrick Burman (190-216) -- Living in the credential gap: responses to underemployment and underqualification / David W. Livingston (217-239) -- Editors' conclusion: The jobs crisis: looking ahead (240-43).

A recounting of the lives of the leaders and organisers who were arrested and charged at the climax of the Winnipeg General Strike and how their efforts helped give birth to an active, organised Prairie labour movement that spread across the nation. --Publisher's description

An examination of the impact of the fast food industry on work and family life. Ester Reiter worked full-time at a Burger King outlet for ten months gathering information for this study. In Making Fast Food she shares her experiences and analyses the profound effect the fast food industry has had on women's work, youth employment, the labour movement, the family, and the community. Family life, for example, has changed dramatically in the last forty years as many activities that were traditionally part of the home have been replaced by services available in the marketplace. The second edition includes an epilogue that brings the study up to date. Reiter examines the way the fast food model is being adopted in other areas, such as health, and explores unionization in fast food businesses. --Publisher's description. Artwork by Richard Slye. Contents: The market moves into the family and the family moves into the market -- The restaurant industry in Canada -- The fast food invasion -- Burger King: a case study -- Working in a Burger King outlet -- Modern times in the hamburger business -- Martialling workers' loyalty -- Is this the work situation of the future?

C.S. Jackson was the labour leader that the establishment loved to hate. Tough, intelligent, courageous, 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 Candian labour movement. Long-associated with the Communist Party, Jackson and the UE were victimized by the Cold War, expelled from the Canadian Congress of Labour, and subjected to red-baiting 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 study of the clothing industry in Canada, historian Mercedes Steedman examines how the intricate weaving together of the meanings of class, gender, ethnicity, family, and workplace served, often unconsciously, to create a job ghetto for women. Although 'girls', as working women were labelled, comprised a significant majority of garment workers - 80 percent in 1881, at the very beginnings of industrialization; 68 percent in 1941, when the percentage of women in all industrial sectors in Canada was only just over 15 percent - their roles were circumscribed both in the workplace and in the trade union bureaucracy. When strikes occurred, women were at the front of picket lines, gaining sympathy and favourable media coverage for the workers' cause. But when negotiations among union leaders, management, and government officials took place, women were conspicuous by their absence, and the subsequent agreements and job classifications invariably left them with lower wages and marginal status - in an industry where they were numerically dominant and often valued as the better workers. In "Angels of the Workplace," Professor Steedman presents a history of both the garment industry and the role of women in it. The rise of left-wing unionism held out some hope for a more equitable work environment, but by the 1930s a 'new unionism' that focused on labour-management co-operation - and on maintaining male hegemony on the shop floor and at the bargaining table - had formalized gender discrimination in the needle trades for the rest of the century. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: Across the Great Divide -- The Industrial Fields of Activity: Send Forth Your Daughters -- Worlds Apart: Women and Unions in the Needle Trades, 1890-1920 -- From Shop-Floor Action to New Unionism: The War Years and After -- Taking a Stand: Civil War in the Needle Trades -- 'A Real Man's Fight': Clothing Battles in the Depression Years -- When the Boys Get Together: Orchestrating Consent -- After the Acts: Setting the Standards, Putting on the Pressure -- Conclusion: 'This Group of Girls and Men .... '

Based on in-depth oral interviews with local residents, and rich archival sources, We Lived A Life and Then Some relates the common person’s struggle to overcome harsh working conditions and government neglect. The unique culture of the hardrock mining town of Cobalt is exposed through the eyes of retired miners, young welfare mothers, and grade-school children. Angus and Griffin reveal why, in spite of great adversity, Cobalt remains a distinctive and cohesive working-class community. --Publisher's description

Historien reconnu à l'échelle internationale, Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson a été un précurseur par sa réinterpretation de l'histoire des peuples de Canada. Ses ouvrages se tiennent une place tout à fait singulièredans l'historiographie canadienne. Intelluelle d'envergure, il a su allier l'excellence scientifique à la responsibilité sociale ; tout au longue une carrière de plus de soixante années, il a conservé ce profil de militant et d'historien engagé. Sa recherche, toujours inspirée des problèmes de société, a été animée par des valeurs de justice, de solidarité et de liberté. Cet ouvrage auquel participent quatorze collaborateurs qui veut faire connaître le plus important historien Marxiste du Canada. Il vise égalment rétracer la trajectoire militante et le cheminement intellectuel progressiste qui a laissé derrière lui une œuvre fort imposante. --Description de l'éditeur

This ground-breaking collection demonstrates the research interests of a new generation of scholars. Stressing such themes as gender, race and class, the book is compelling evidence that Western Canadian history is far more complex and subtle than its depiction in the traditional literature. The contributors emphasize the way society has been made, and the extent to which it was - and is - the product of human agency rather than possessing an intangible existency beyond the interaction of groups of people. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Elizabeth Jameson -- The Seven Oaks Incident and the Construction of a Historical Tradition, 1816 to 1970 / Lyle Dick -- The Exploitation and Narration of the Captivity of Theresa Delaney and Theresa Gowanlock, 1885 / Sarah A. Carter -- Tonto's Due: Law, Culture, and Colonization in British Columbia / Tina Loo -- Clearcutting the British Columbia Coast: Work, Environment and the State, 1880-1930 / Richard A. Rajala == Workers and Intellectuals: The Theory of the New Class and Early Canadian Socialism / Mark Leier -- "A Bachelor's Paradise": Homesteaders, Hired Hands, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1880-1930 / Cecilia Danysk -- The Limitations of the Pioneering Partnership: The Alberta Campaign for Homestead Dower, 1909-1925 / Catherine Cavanaugh -- Schooling, White Supremacy, and the Formation of a Chinese Merchant Public in British Columbia / Timothy J. Stanley -- "The Past of My Place": Western Canadian Artists and the Uses of History / Jeremy Mouat -- Western Canadian History: A Selected Bibliography.

[E]xamines thoroughly the ecological, economic, political, legal, and social influences that drive public, private, and parapublic sectors into intense and often bitter disputes over employment conditions. --From publisher's description

Recounts the story of labour from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. A masterful overview that encompasses all regions of the country, the book paints a vivid portrait of labour's varied past, covering the birth of craft unionism prior to World War I, the setbacks of the interwar years, and the post-World War II breakthrough that gave unions a permanent, if still constrained, place in the national economy. In its analysis of the more recent past, the book ranges just as widely, discussing everything from the organization of public sector employees in the sixties to the anti-free-trade coalitions of the eighties and the massive layoffs of the nineties. --Publisher's description

[P]rovides an historical background to native labour in BC from the Gold Rush to the beginning of the Great Depression. It counters the common misconception that native people responded to European settlement and industrial development by retreating to a reserve existence. Evidence amassed from logging, transport, construction, longshoring, commercial fishing and canning, and a host of other industries shows that native Indians played a significant role in British Columbia's economy from the moment the first European explorers appeared off the coast. --Publisher's description. A massively documented history of Native Indian wage labour in British Columbia from initial European settlement in the mid 19th century to the beginning of the great depression. The first and as yet only historical study of Native Indian workers in Canada, it challenges many of the romantic misconceptions which have developed over the years. An expanded version of a title originally published in 1978. --Author's description

Discusses the origins and history of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, a progressive organization founded in 1918 as the Ukrainian Temple Labour Association.

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

An important new critique of Marx's labour theory of value. Using the fishing industry in British Columbia as a case study, Alicja Muszynski explores how Marx's labour theory of value can be applied to a specific industry and the creation of a specific labour force. She reworks Marx's theory in order to incorporate race and gender as principles that not only created a proletarianized labour force but also legitimized the payment of low wages to particular groups. Cheap Wage Labour is the first analysis of shore work and shore-workers in British Columbia from the 1860s to the mid-1980s. Muszynski provides an interpretation of the events that led to the creation of a cheap wage labour force of shoreworkers, shows how they organized within the framework of the fishermen's union (the UFAWU), and explains how as a consequence their numbers steadily shrank until today they represent only a small portion of the labour force. She looks at factors contributing to the destruction of First Nations culture and economy, such as the displacement of aboriginal peoples from key fishing sites and from working in the salmon canneries, and examines the structure and patterns of Chinese and Japanese immigration and the development of the capitalist class and the white working class. Cheap Wage Labour situates the history of B.C. shoreworkers within the much larger and complex historical enterprise of industrialization, patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism and provides keen insights into the current fisheries crisis on the West Coast. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Problematic -- Marx's Labour Theory of Value: A Critique -- Patriarchy and Capitalism -- The First Nations, Property Rights, and Salmon Canning -- The Dialectics of Cheap Wage Labour -- Organized Resistance: The United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union -- -- State, Labour, and Capital -- Conclusion: Marx's Labour Theory of Value Reconsidered -- Appendix: J.H. Todd & Sons Ltd.

n the Skin of a Lion is a love story and an irresistible mystery set in the turbulent, muscular new world of Toronto in the 20s and 30s. Michael Ondaatje entwines adventure, romance and history, real and invented, enmeshing us in the lives of the immigrants who built the city and those who dreamed it into being: the politically powerful, the anarchists, bridge builders and tunnellers, a vanished millionaire and his mistress, a rescued nun and a thief who leads a charmed life. This is a haunting tale of passion, privilege and biting physical labour, of men and women moved by compassion and driven by the power of dreams—sometimes even to murder. --Publisher's description

[This book] is a collection of essays that surveys the burgeoning field of gender history in a Canadian context. Spanning a period from seventeenth century to the 1960s, and covering the regions of Canada, the selections focus on different historical representations and pratices of feminity and masculinity. Historians in the field examine neglected dimensions, and challenge previous interpretations of Canada's past, highlighting the importance of gender relations to our understanding of racism, sexuality, national identity, popular culture, class conflict, government policy, and family in Canadian history. --Publisher's description. As one of the most difficult periods of the twentieth century, the Great Depression left few Canadians untouched. Using more than eighty interviews with women who lived and worked in Toronto in the 1930s, Breadwinning Daughters examines the consequences of these years for women in their homes and workplaces, and in the city's court rooms and dance halls. In this insightful account, Katrina Srigley argues that young women were central to the labour market and family economies of Depression-era Toronto. Oral histories give voice to women from a range of cultural and economic backgrounds, and challenge readers to consider how factors such as race, gender, class, and marital status shaped women's lives and influenced their job options, family arrangements, and leisure activities. Breadwinning Daughters brings to light previously forgotten and unstudied experiences and illustrates how women found various ways to negotiate the burdens and joys of the 1930s. --Summary, Toronto Workers' History Project (email)

A compassionate look at the effect of industrialization on the individual lives of sailors, Sager argues that sailors were not misfits or outcasts but were divorced from society only by virtue of their occupation. The wooden ships were small communities at sea, fragments of normal society where workers lived, struggled, and often died. With the coming of the age of steam, the sailor became part of a new division of labour and a new social hierarchy at sea. Sager shows that the sailor was as integral to the transition to industrial capitalism as any land worker. --Publisher's description