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[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

In conventional histories of the Canadian prairies, Native people disappear from view after the Riel rebellions. In a fresh departure from traditional studies, Frank Tough examines the role of Native people, both Indian and Metis, in the economy of northern Manitoba from 1870 to the Depression. He argues that they did not become economically obsolete but rather played an important role in the transitional era between the mercantile fur trade and the emerging industrial economy of the mid-twentieth century. Tough reconstructs the traditional economy of the fur trade era and examines its evolution through reserve selection and settlement, scrip distribution, and the participation of Natives in the new resource industries of commercial fishing, transportation, and lumbering. His analysis clearly shows that Native people in northern Manitoba responded to the challenge of an expanding market economy in rational and enterprising ways, but that they were repeatedly obstructed by government policy. --Publisher's description. Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--York University. Contents: 1. 'To Look for Food Instead of Fur': Local Economies -- Indian Bands and Company Posts -- 2. 'The Only Remedy Is the Employment of Steam': Reorganizing the Regional System -- 3. 'Dependent on the Company's Provisions for Subsistence': The Decline of Kihchiwaskahikanihk (York Factory) -- 4. 'To Be Shut Up on a Small Reserve': Geographical and Economic Aspects of Indian Treaties -- 5. 'Lands Are Getting Poor in Hunting': Treaty Adhesions in Northern Manitoba -- 6. 'Terms and Conditions as May Be Deemed Expedient': Metis Aboriginal Title -- 7. 'Go and Pitch His Camp': Native Settlement Patterns and Indian Agriculture -- 8. 'Nothing to Make Up for the Great Loss of Winter Food': Resource Conflicts over Common-Property Fisheries -- 9. 'A Great Future Awaits This Section of Northern Manitoba': Economic Boom and Native Labour -- 10. 'They Make a Comfortable Living': Economic Change and Incomes. Includes bibliographical references (pages 334-363) and index.

Canadians might expect that a history of Canada's participation in the Cold War would be a self-congratulatory exercise in documenting the liberality and moderation of Canada set against the rapacious purges of the McCarthy era in the United States. Though Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse agree that there is some evidence for Canadian moderation, they argue that the smug Canadian self-image is exaggerated. Cold War Canada digs past the official moderation and uncovers a systematic state-sponsored repression of communists and the Left directed at civil servants, scientists, trade unionists, and political activists. Unlike the United States, Canada's purges were shrouded in secrecy imposed by the government and avidly supported by the RCMP security service. Whitaker and Marcuse manage to reconstruct several of the significant anti-communist campaigns. Using declassified documents, interviews, and extensive archival sources, the authors reconstruct the Gouzenko spy scandal, trace the growth of security screening of civil servants, and re-examine purges in the National Film Board and the trade unions, attacks on peace activist James G. Endicott, and the trials of Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman. Based on these examples Whitaker and Marcuse outline the creation of Canada's Cold War policy, the emergence of the new security state, and the alignment of Canada with the United States in the global Cold War. They demonstrate that Canada did take a different approach toward the threat of communism, but argue that the secret repression and silent purges used to stifle dissent and debate about Canada's own role in the Cold War had a chilling effect on the practice of liberal democracy and undermined Canadian political and economic sovereignty. --Publisher's description

In many industrialized countries over the past twenty years, including Canada, the supply of "good" jobs for those with low formal education has declined relative to demand. While the contributors to this volume do not agree on which labor policies are best, they share a common dissatisifaction with the current way of doing things. --Publisher's description. Includes separate bibliographies at the end of most chapters.

Most scholars and business people have traditionally regarded industrial relations in the United States and Canada to be so different from practices in other liberal democracies as to render comparison of little practical utility. Fundamental differences, such as the influence of "pure and simple" business-like philosophy on the American and Canadian labor movements in contrast to the socialist agenda of trade unions in other industrialized countries, have prompted observers to question the value of comparative analysis. Roy Adams, however, challenges this view by constructing a theoretical framework within which the comparison of industrial relations across the advanced liberal democratic world may be made comprehensible. --Publisher's description.

An anthropological assessment of working conditions in one of the most hazardous and physically demanding industries in Canada, Risks, Dangers, and Rewards in the Nova Scotia Offshore Fishery describes the hidden cost paid by workers in the Nova Scotia offshore fishery, a cost measured not in dollars and cents but in deaths and injuries. According to Labour Canada, workers in the offshore fishery are more likely to be injured than workers in mining, construction, or forestry. Yet until recently these casualties at sea have been largely ignored by government and labour organizations. Risks, Dangers, and Rewards in the Nova Scotia Offshore Fishery describes the hidden cost paid by workers in the Nova Scotia offshore fishery, a cost measured not in dollars and cents but in deaths and injuries. In this comprehensive study Marian Binkley documents the level of risk and assesses the general health and stress level of workers in the Nova Scotia offshore fishery. She considers shipboard working environment; stress; accidents, injuries, and general health; safety awareness; job satisfaction and family life; and the impact on working conditions of government resource policies and companies' scientific management strategies. Using statistical analysis, participant observation, surveys, and interviews, Binkley establishes that factors such as technological developments, management changes, and home and community life affect the immediate work experience of fishers and can increase the dangers of an already hazardous occupation. --Publisher's description

For twenty years, labour and working-class history has emphasized the struggle for workplace control between skilled craftsmen and factory owners in Ontario's major industrial cities. This preoccupation not only has left the great majority of the province's working people in the shadows of history, but has isolated labour history from such other 'new histories' as women's history, ethnic history, and the history of mobility. This collaborative volume argues for a more nuanced account of the diversity of working people's experience in the nineteenth century. It presents detailed studies of a broad range of occupations and institutions that figured prominently in workers' lives. These include the more common jobs - farm labour, housework, lumbering - and the more pervasive institutions - the church, the law, the family - as well as new accounts of industrial labour in small-town factories and on the railways. The themes explored include class formation, the nature and meaning of work, labour relations, and the character of economic and social change in nineteenth-century Ontario. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Paul Craven (pages 3-12) -- Rural labour / Terry Crowley (pages 13-104) -- Labour and the law / Jeremy Webber (pages 105-203) -- The Shantymen / Ian Radforth (pages 204-277) -- Religion, leisure, and working-class identity / Lynne Marks (pages 278-334) -- Labour and management on the Great Western Railway / Paul Craven (pages 335-411) -- The home as workplace / Bettina Bradbury (pages 412-478) -- Factory workers (pages 479-589) - Picture credits (page 595) -- Index (pages 597-622).

Years before women were allowed to read the news on television, Grace Hartman was on television making the news. In 1954, to help pay the mortgage on her family’s new suburban home, Grace Hartman took a job with the Township of North York. Hartman soon became active in her union, where she dedicated herself to improve the worker’s lot. Twenty-one years later Hartman was still a worker, but no longer a secretary for North York: she was president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest union in Canada. Hartman was the first woman to lead a major labour organization anywhere in North America. [This book] is the story of a labour activist who served two months in jail at the age of 62 for defying a court order and asserting her members’ right to strike. It is the story of a visionary feminist who helped found the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, who stood up to Pierre Trudeau over wage and price controls because she saw that her sisters would bear their brunt. It is the story of a lifelong and committed social activist who fought tirelessly, both inside and outside the labour movement, for women’s rights and progressive causes. --Author's description

A notable addition to the growing body of work that examines art and work as social constructs, Art and Work traces the development of commercial illustration and the graphic arts industry in Canada from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Beginning with the origins of the graphic arts industry in Britain, Angela Davis describes the development of technology, commercial organization, and professionalization of artists in Canada. She focuses on the artists involved in the creation and reproduction of a "popular" art form. The evolution of commercial illustration and the graphic arts industry, Davis asserts, had a dramatic impact not only on the popular press and advertising but also on illustrators, engravers, photo-engravers, and lithographers, who still considered themselves to be artists but found that they were now working in an industrial atmosphere similar to that of other workers. Art and Work reveals that the foundations of Canadian art and popular culture rest not only on the European traditions of "fine" art but also on the commercial art produced in the early graphic arts houses. --Publisher's description

This collection of essays provides a generous introduction to the vibrant field of labour and working-class history in Canada's eastern provinces. Organized in four sections covering pre-industrial labour, the industrial revolution, labour's wars of the early twentieth century, and the rise of industrial legality, the book should prove useful in university classrooms and for all readers interested in the history of the region's ordinary people. Concluding chapters address topics of current interest such as public sector unionism, the role of women in the fishery, and the horrors of the Westray mine disaster. The editors provide an introduction, section heads, and suggestions for further reading. The volume is edited by David Frank, Department of History, University of New Brunswick, the former editor of Acadiensis, and Gregory S. Kealey, Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Dean of Graduate Studies. Authors include T. W. Acheson, Rusty Bittermann, Sean Cadigan, Jessie Chisholm, Patricia M. Connelly, Peter DeLottinville, E. R. Forbes, Eugene Forsey, Harry Glasbeek, Linda Little, Martha MacDonald, Robert McIntosh, Ian McKay, D. A. Muise, Nolan Reilly, Eric W. Sager, Anthony Thomson, and Eric Tucker. --Publisher's description

The Canadian Auto Workers union, the CAW, has a long and rich history. Part of the U.S.-based United Auto Workers for almost fifty years, the CAW separated from its American parent in 1985. Today, the Canadian Auto Workers union encompasses members from a broad range of industries. It is also one of the most powerful unions in the country. Yet few people know the union's history, how it acquired its strength, or what accounts for its split with its American parent. This illustrated history provides a fascinating look at the union from its origins to the present. Beginning in the twenties, Sam Gindin describes the early years of the automobile industry and the emergence of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. He looks at the birth of the UAW in 1936, the conflicts that rocked the union in the fifties, the signing of theAutopact in the sixties, and the historic split of the Canadian section from the UAW two decades later. Finally, he considers the issues facing the union and the Canadian labour movement as the century draws to a close. By providing a profile of the CAW as well as the labour and social movements that it helped shape, The Canadian Auto Workers offers us something unusual — an engrossing glimpse of our past, written from a union perspective. --Publisher's description

Workers and Canadian History is a collection of twelve essays by Gregory Kealey, the recognized Canadian leader in the growing field of working-class history. Available for the first time in a single volume, the essays provide an extensive study of various trends and themes in Canadian labour and working-class history, covering debates, major developments in historiography, and key events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kealey provides an overview of the study of workers in Canada as well as in-depth examinations of two of the field's leading scholars, political economist Clare Pentland and Marxist historian Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson. He analyses the development of Canadian labour history in particular and social history in general, and provides detailed empirical studies of the Orange Order in Toronto, printers and their unions, the Knights of Labor, and the Canadian labour revolt of 1919. The collection concludes with three synthetic views of Canadian working-class history focusing on the labour movement, the role of strikes, and attempts by the state to manage class conflict. --Publisher's description. Contents: Part 1: Antecedents. Writing about Labour -- H.C. Pentland and Working-Class Studies -- Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson: Canadian Revolutionary and Marxist Historian. Part 2: Debates. Labour and Working-Class History in Canada: Prospects in the 1980s. -- The Writing of Social History in English Canada, 1970-84. Part 3: Studies of Class and Class Conflict. Orangemen and the Corporation: The Politics of Class in Toronto during the Union of the Canadas -- Work Control, the Labour Process, and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Printers -- The Bonds of Unity: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900 / Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer -- 1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt. Part 4: Overviews. The Structure of Canadian Working-Class History -- Strikes in Canada, 1891-1950 / Gregory S. Kealey and Douglas Cruikshank -- The Canadian State's Attempt to Manage Class Conflict, 1900-48.