Your search

In authors or contributors
Publication year
  • Based on extensive study of union organizations and activists in Greater Vancouver, this article offers a two-fold critique of the thesis that "new social movements" have supplanted the labour movement as the key collective agents of change in late-modem societies. In the first section we briefly review the claims of new social movement theory and point to some of the analytic difficulties in positing a sharp distinction between "old" unions and "new" social movements. We then present comparative case studies of two pan-union labour organizations active in the Lower Mainland, followed by findings from in-depth interviews with activists in these groups, and comparisons between the political orientations of labour activists and those of activists in new social movements. We find evidence of a labour movement increasingly open to popular struggles outside its own immediate orbit, sensitive to the needs of diverse and marginalized constituencies, tactically prepared if not psychologically predisposed to yield a leading role in any such coalitions, and capable of grasping the connections between social movement activism and everyday life activities. The future of the labour movement very much depends on putting these political sensibilities into practice through a deepening of solidarity with other progressive movements - whose own futures are themselves implicated in labour's prospects.

  • This survey of 179 Registered Nurses at a large acute care hospital deals with connections between the practices in which nurses are engaged in households and workplaces and the consciousness which both informs and arises from those practices. A large majority of respondents was opposed to male prerogatives and in favour of more domestic equality and removing pay inequities for women. On more controversial gender issues and with respect to class politics, respondents' opinions were diverse. Younger, more subordinate, better educated nurses and those with working class spouses and relatively egalitarian domestic arrangements manifested progressive attitudes on class and gender issues, but these statistical relationships were weak. The lack of clear-cut correspondence between social position and consciousness may reflect nurses' contradictory experiences in, for example, cross-class marriages and quasi-professional work situations.

Last update from database: 4/4/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)