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The lumberjack – freewheeling, transient, independent – is the stuff of countless Canadian tales and legends. He is also something of a dinosaur, a creature of the past, replaced by a unionized worker in a highly mechanized and closely managed industry. In this far-ranging study of the logging industry in twentieth-century Ontario, Ian Radforth charters the course of its transition and the response of its workers to the changes. Among the factors he considers are technological development, changes in demography and the labour market, an emerging labour movement, new managerial strategies, the growth of a consumer society, and rising standards of living. Radforth has drawn on an impressive array of sources, including interviews and forestry student reports as well as a vast body of published sources such as The Labour Gazette, The Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada, and The Canada Lumberman, to shed new light on trade union organization and on the role of ethnic groups in the woods work force. The result is a richly detailed analysis of life on the job for logging workers during a period that saw the modernization not only of the work but of relations between the workers and the bosses. --Publisher's description

Bob White, president of the Canadian Auto Workers, is without a doubt the single most influential figure in the Canadian labour movement. Respected by workers and business leaders alike. White has become a major voice in national; affairs. All his life he has bargained hard, and more often that not, won.

Research studies for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Developments Prospects for Canada. Contents: The role of law in labour relations / Joseph M. Weiler -- The use of legislation to control labour relations: the Quebec experience / Fernand Morin and Claudine Leclerc -- Urban law and policy development in Canada: the myth and reality / S.M. Makuch.

Working people seldom make it into the history books, and when they do the picture is seldom flattering. Too often, ordinary Newfoundlanders have been cast as a race of cap-doffers and forelock-tuggers. In this book Bill Gillespie confrnts the myth. He tells the story of that most important of working class institutions - the trade union. And as the story unfolds, a new cast of characters is introduced to our written history. They are the men and women who struggled within an economic system they did not control to improve the lives of their families and their class. Gillespie records their losses and their victories, their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Ultimately he records their success. It is the story of how Newfoundlanders surprised even themselves and turned their tiny country into the most unionized corner of North America. --Publisher's description

These essays introduce readers to the changing and complex character of class struggle in Canada. Individual essays focus on specific features of Canadian class struggle: regional differences, the role of gender, the character of trade union leadership to the specific nature of conflict in particular industries; and the general features of national periods of upheaval such as the year 1919 and the World War II period. [Of the eight essays, two are original to the volume, while the others are abridged or revised versions of articles that previously appeared in publications such as Labour/Le Travail and New Left Review.] --Publisher's description

Women's activism in unions has increased dramatically in the last decade, creating a sense of renewed vitality and excitement in the trade union movement. Union Sisters is a attempt to document the struggles and victories of the movement of union women as well as to provide some direction to women and unions as they fight to defend the interests of working people. --Introduction

In 1983 and 1984 the Canadian Studies Program of the Secretary of State funded four lecture series at Canadian universities on the history of the Canadian working class. This volume presents many of the lectures in a published version. Ranging from east to west and covering two centuries of Canadian labour history, the volume includes a selection of essays by some of Canada's leading social historians including Michael Cross, David Frank, Ross McCormack, Bryan Palmer and Joy Parr. Outstanding participants in the making of Canadian labour history Eugene Forsey and H. Landon Ladd have also contributed. Directed at a popular audience these fourteen lectures provide a major survey of Canada's labour past. --Publisher's description

The Regina Riot, which erupted in that city's Market Square on July 1, 1935, was the climax of a strike by relief camp workers which had begun in British Columbia on April 4. After lingering two months in Vancouver, the participants struck out east by freight train, on to Ottawa, where they intended to tell the Government of Canada that the situation of the unemployed had become intolerable. The origins of the Strike, the Trek, and the Riot -- the character of those events -- are what this book is all about. It is a narrative, composed from federal, provincial and municipal records, from news reports, from interviews with participants, from sworn testimony, from photographs, from maps, from sawn-off baseball bats. It is the story of an event which figured prominently, at the same instant, in the history of the Canadian worker, in the history of the Canadian radical, in the histories of two Canadian cities and in the history of R. B. Bennet's Depression years government. --Publisher's description

Contents: 1881-1914: The Age of the Craftsman -- 1914-1919: "No More Defeats" -- 1920-1930: Dress Rehearsal for a Depression -- 1930-1940: Reaching the Breaking Point -- 1940-1960: A System on Trial -- 1960-1984: New Strengths, New Challenges.

Chronicles Mine Mill's US origins in the Western Federation of Miners, the WFM organization in Western Canada, and the union's arrival in Northeastern Canada, including Kirkland Lake and Sudbury Local 598.

Contains six papers originally presented at the 1981 annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory. These papers cover various aspects of Native economic and social adaptations in the context of the Canadian fur trade in the period ranging from the 17th century up to and including the 20th century. --Publisher's description. Contents: Periodic shortages, native welfare, and the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1930 / Arthur J. Ray -- The first century / Charles A. Bishop -- Economic and social accommodations of the James Bay Islanders to the fur trade / Toby Morantz -- Sakie, Esquawenoe, and the foundation of a dual-native tradition at Moose Factory / Carol M. Judd -- The trade of the Slavey and Dogrib at Fort Simpson in the early nineteenth century / Shepard Krech III -- The microeconomics of Southern Chipewyan fur-trade history / Robert Jarvenpa and Hetty Jo Brumbach.

Contents: Part 1. A Contrasting Regional Perspective: Conrad, Margaret; 'Sundays always make me think of home': time and place in Canadian women's history. Part 2: Native Women: 1. Mitchell, Marjorie and Anna Franklin; When you don't know the language, listen to the silence: An historical overview of Native Indian women in B.C. [First Nations women] -- 2. Ravicz, Marilyn and Diane Battung and Laura Buker; Rainbow women of the Fraser Valley: lifesongs through the generations. Part 3. Asian Women: 1. Adilman, Tamara; A preliminary sketch of Chinese women and work in British Columbia, 1858-1950 -- 2. van Dieren, Karen; The response of the WMS to the immigration of Asian women 1888-1942 -- 3. Doman, Mahinder Kaur; A note on Asian Indian women in British Columbia, 1900-1935. Part 4. Gentlewomen: 1. Gresko, Jascqueline; 'Roughing it in the Bush' in British Columbia: Mary Moody's pioneer life in New Westminister, 1859-1863 -- 2. Pazdro, Roberta; From pastels to chisel: the changing role of BC women artists -- 3. Barber, Marilyn; The gentlewomen of Queen Mary's Coronation Hostel. Part 5. Education: 1. Riley, Barbara; Six saucepans to one: domestic science vs. the home in British Columbia, 1900-1930 -- 2. Stewart, Lee; Women on campus in British Columbia: strategies for survival, years of war and peace, 1906-1920 -- 3. Small, Marion; Postscript: women in whose honour BC schools have been named. Part 6. Unpaid Workers. 1. Weiss, Gillian; The brightest women of our land: Vancouver clubwomen 1919-1928 -- 2. Dennison, Carol; They also served: the British Columbia Women's Institutes in two world wars -- 3. MacQuuen, Bonnie; Domesticity and discipline: the Girl Guides in British Columbia, 1910-1943 -- 4. Ogg, Kathryn; 'Especially when no one agrees': an interview with May Campbell. Part 7. Social Legislation: 1. Davies, Megan; 'Services rendered, rearing children for the state': Mothers' pensions in British Columbia, 1919-1931 -- 2. Matters, Indiana; Sinners or sinned against? historical aspects of female juvenile delinquency in British Columbia. Part 8. Labour and Auxiliaries: 1. Bernanrd, Elaine; Last back: folklore and the telephone operators in the 1919 Vancouver general strike -- 2. Diamond, Sara; A union man's wife: the Ladies Auxiliary Movement in the IWA, the Lake Cowichan experience.[1930s] -- 3. Bannerman, Josie and Kathy Chopik and Ann Zurbrigg; Cheap at half the price: the history of the fight for equal pay in BC. Part 9. Health: 1. Whittaker, Jo Ann; The search for legitimacy: nurses' registration in British Columbia , 1913-1935 -- 2. Bishop, Mary F.; Vivian Dowding: birth control activist 1892 [contraceptive use in British Columbia] -- 3. Lewis, Norah L.; Reducing maternal mortality in British Columbia: an educational process. Part 10. Politicians: 1. Norcross, Elizabeth; Mary Ellen Smith: the right women in the right place at the right time [1863-1933; first woman in any provincial legislature in Canada, first female cabinet minister in the British Empire in 1921 'minister without portfolio' -- 2. Walsh, Susan; The peacock and the guinea hen: political profiles of Dorothy Gretchen and Grace MacInnis. [Dorothy Gretchen Steeves, 1891-1970 and Grace MacInnis 1905-1991; BC's first female member of parliament] -- 3. Proom, Juliette; Tilly Jean Rolston: she knew how to throw a party. [1887-1953, first woman cabinet minster with portfolio in Canada, Education minister in W.A.C. Bennett's first cabinet] -- 4. Carter, Connie and Eileen Daust; From home to house: women in the BC legislature. Part 11. World War Two: 1. Wade, Susan; Joan Kennedy and the British Columbia Women's Service Corps -- 2. Turnbull, Elsie G.; Women at Cominco during the Second World War.

[This book] chronicles one of the most bitter crises in French-English relations in Canada: the bilingual air traffic control conflict which arose in the mid-1970s when francophone controllers and pilots attempted to use French, as well as English, in Quebec aviation. [Summary: Worldcat record]

In 1980...[the author] was approached by Nanaimo's Coal Tyee Society to write a book based on 105 interviews of Vancouver Island coal miners and their families. Nanaimo coal mines had closed 30 years before and the city had been home to some of the most important coal mines in the world, along with the one of largest explosions in history, the 1887 Nanaimo mine explosion. The miners wanted their oral histories preserved. Bowen compiled those oral histories in her first book, Boss Whistle, and later book, Three Dollar Dreams. --From Wikipedia article on Lynne Bowen

In the fall of 1939, more than 600 fishermen and fish handlers in the tiny town of Lockeport, Nova Scotia (pop. 1,400) walked the picket line in front of the town's only employers, Swim Brothers and the Lockeport Company. Both fishplants had locked their doors rather than recognize the Canadian Fishermen's Union as the official bargaining agent. The Fishermen's Union was an affiliate of the Canadian Seamen's Union, which had begun organizing along the shore. For eight weeks, as autumn turned to winter, the men, with their wives and families, held firm. It was a bread-and-butter struggle that made national headlines - one of the first attempts by Nova Scotia fishermen and fish handlers to win union recognition. It was one of the first major tests of N.S. Trade Union Act passed in 1937. This is the story of the Lockeport lockout of 1939. --Introduction

An annotated bibliography of left wing novels about the lives of working people during the 20th century. Includes some collections of poetry, drama and short stories as well as a smattering of non-fictional material such as oral and life histories. Includes over 3,000 titles originally in some 50 languages by circa 1,500 authors from over 90 countries. --Publisher's description

On 18 November 1941, the gold miners of Kirkland lake struck for union recognition. The Kirkland Lake strike was a bitter struggle between the mine operators and their employees and became a national confrontation between the federal government and the labour movement over the issue of collective bargaining. Locally, the dispute was affected by the company-town environment and by the mine operators' paternalistic view of labour relations. Through the difficult winter womenths, the community -- polarized by the events -- tried to deal with both the 'political' and social impact of the conflict. The author's father, Larry Sefton, emerged as one of the local leaders of the strike, which itself was a training ground for many future trade unionists. The strike was waged in the special circumstances of the war economy, and was a microcosm of wartime developments, which produced unprecedented union growth, serious industrial unrest, hostile management response, and generally antagonistic labour/government relations. Professor MacDowell shows that, even though the strike was lost, its eventual effect on labour policy gave the dispute its particular significance. To win the strike, government intervention and the introduction of collective bargaining were necessary, yet the only intervention was by the Ontario Provincial Police, who were ordered to assist the mining companies to operate with strike-breakers. The federal government refused to intervene, in spire of virtually unanimous support for the strike by the Canadian labour movement. MacDowell confludes that the strike succeeded in unifying organized labour behind the demand for collective-bargaining legislation. It highlighted the inadequacy of the government's wartime labour poilcy, and ultimately forced the government to authorize collective bargaining, first for Crown companies and then for all industrial workers. Thus, the Kirkland Lake strike was not only an important wartime dispute affecting policy development, but it also established a special legacy for trade unionists as part of the history of their movement. --Publisher's description