Your search
Results 7 resources
-
Thousands of children and youth across the country took to the streets for two weeks in spring 1947 to protest a three-cent increase in the price of chocolate bars. The protest initially generated enthusiastic press coverage and had widespread popular support, but when the National Federation of Labor Youth (nfly), the Communist Party's youth organization, announced its support, anti-communists in the press and the community red-baited the protesters. The campaign quickly lost momentum, which anti-communists attributed to the presence of Communists but was more likely due to their own red-baiting attacks in the press. Some of these protests were spontaneous reactions to a 40 per cent increase in the price of candy bars, while others were led or inspired by nfly. Either way, the countrywide mobilization of thousands of children and youth marks a turning point in the history of Canada's left. Erupting in tandem with a nationwide strike of industrial workers and protests of activist consumers demanding greater economic security and a more responsive state, the children's chocolate bar protest provides a window on this critical moment in the class struggle. The attacks on this popular protest at the moment that the long run of community-based militancy was about to be demonized, delegitimated, and silenced by red-baiting marks a significant milestone in Canada's Cold War. In addition to adding the youngsters' challenge to capital and the state to the history of the popular left, the event contributes to the growing literature on children and youth engaged in political protest, while their creative protest strategies offer a youthful dimension to the study of performance activism.
-
Women who were activists in the Canadian district of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) during the postwar and cold war era challenge the assumption that class consciousness is incompatible with female gender consciousness. Encouraged by the leadership's espoused commitment to gender equality, and secure in their strategic importance as a quarter of the lYE's membership, women activists not only refused to accept second-class status within the union, but called, in the name of solidarity, for men's active support in the struggle for women's rights. Although their arguments for a gender-conscious analysis of class struggle failed to convince the UE's leadership, their struggle laid the foundation for the working-class feminism that later emerged within the union.
-
The article reviews the book "Labour's Dilemma: The Gender Politics of Auto Workers in Canada, 1937-1979," by Pamela Sugiman.
-
The article reviews the book, "Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America," by Emily E. LB. Twarog.
-
A 1964 strike by women workers in Dunnville, Ontario provides an exceptional perspective on the complex ways in which class, gender, and ethnicity unite in the construction of identity. The women strikers drew on left-wing traditions of feisty femininity to claim an identity as real workers and authentic unionists while also embracing multi-ethnic identities that distinguished them from the Anglo-Celtic middle class. Their claims to authenticity challenged pervasive assumptions, including those of their union brothers, who defined labor militancy as implicitly male and distorted memories of the strike. Yet the limits on the women's own constructions of these identities are evident in their inability to perceive the Native women who scabbed during the strike as workers. By contrasting the ways in which identity was claimed, assigned, and contested by different groups of workers, this story problematizes categories of identity that are often used uncritically in labor history.
-
Detailed study, including interviews with the participants, of the United Steelworkers' campaign to organize the workers at a call centre in Sudbury, Ontario, in 1999.
-
Case study of efforts [by the United Steelworkers] to organize Omega Direct Response, a call centre in Sudbury, Ontario. The study shows that, by working together, rank-and-file workers as inside organizers and experienced professional organizers can develop winning strategies that can enable unions to organize hard to organize workplaces. The paper also includes perspectives from a conference on organizing call centres held in Toronto in September 2003. --Editors' introduction
Explore
Resource type
- Book Section (1)
- Journal Article (6)
Publication year
-
Between 1900 and 1999
(2)
-
Between 1990 and 1999
(2)
- 1996 (2)
-
Between 1990 and 1999
(2)
-
Between 2000 and 2024
(5)
- Between 2000 and 2009 (3)
-
Between 2010 and 2019
(1)
- 2019 (1)
-
Between 2020 and 2024
(1)
- 2024 (1)