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  • Canadian labour and working-class history has, to a great extent, been bedevilled in its attempts to understand national trends by the cleavages of gender, region, industry, race, language, and culture. This article argues that one possible way out of this impasse lies in foregrounding the particular relationship between colonial exploitation and class exploitation in our settler colonial economy, both in terms of class formation and in the ongoing project of social reproduction. The adoption of a "settler order framework" seeks to build on important recent works attempting to understand Indigenous peoples' participation in the ranks of those who toil, struggle, and dream of freedom from capitalism, by integrating the fundamental reality of settler workers' ongoing theft of Indigenous land and resources into the story of the Canadian working class.

  • Tracing the history of gendered working-class responses to deindustrialization in the Montréal neighbourhood of Saint-Henri reveals that many of the local political initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s were connected to longer-term working-class efforts to navigate shifting patterns of capital accumulation extending back to the 1940s. The gendered tradition of territory-based organizing in this community encouraged women workers’ shop-floor militancy and was foundational for new forms of local political advocacy around issues like health care and housing. In deindustrialization’s moment, the concerns of a precariously employed, feminized working-class population spurred a crossover of industrial struggle with survival-focused reproductive labour issues, centred around a grassroots organization called the popir (Projet d’organisation populaire, d’information, et de regroupement). This pattern of gendered working-class militancy and solidarity persisted throughout the 1980s and shaped resistance to Saint-Henri’s subsequent gentrification at the turn of the new millennium.

Last update from database: 10/18/24, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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