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[H]istorian Craig Heron tells the story of Canada's workers from the mid-nineteenth century through to today, painting a vivid picture of key developments such as the birth of craft unionism, the breakthroughs of the fifties and sixties, and the setbacks of the early twenty-first century. This new edition has been completely updated, including a substantial new chapter that covers the period from 1995 to 2011. In this chapter, Heron describes the rise of globalization and the restructuring of the private sector that began in the nineties and continues today. The results have been catastrophic for Canadian working people as plants closed and union activities were curtailed. As the political right succeeded in dominating public debate during this period, workers suffered ever greater losses: fewer and more precarious jobs, rising unemployment, stagnating wages, and increases in poverty. Only with the crash of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement has space for the political left and labour begun to open up once again. [This] is the definitive book for anyone who is interested in understanding the origins, achievements, and challenges of labour and social justice movements in Canada.--Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The Real Dope: Social, Legal, and Historical Perspectives on the Regulation of Drugs in Canada," edited by Edgar-André Montigny.

The author reflects on his involvement with the Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. Discusses historians' efforts to reach a wider audience, the use of artifacts and primary sources, and the competing arenas of historical interpretation. Concludes that working people could be involved with planning, development and organization of a presentation, and that presentations should be, at least to some extent, empowering.

The article reviews the book, "The CIO, 1935-1955," by Robert H. Zieger.

The article reviews the book, "Industrial Relations under Liberal Democracy: North America in Comparative Perspective," by Roy J. Adams.

In this indispensable study of Canadian industrialization, Craig Heron examines the huge steel plants that were built at the turn of the twentieth century in Sydney and New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and Trenton, Hamilton, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Presenting a stimulating analysis of the Canadian working class in the early twentieth century, Working in Steel emphasizes the importance of changes in the work world for the larger patterns of working-class life. Heron's examination of the impact of new technology in Canada's Second Industrial Revolution challenges the popular notion that mass-production workers lost all skill, power, and pride in the work process. He shifts the explanation of managerial control in these plants from machines to the blunt authoritarianism and shrewd paternalism of corporate management. His discussion of Canada's first steelworkers illuminates the uneven, unpredictable, and conflict-ridden process of technological change in industrial capitalist society. As engaging today as when first published in 1988, Working in Steel remains an essential work in Canadian history. --Pubisher's description

The article reviews the book, "America's Assembly Line," by David E. Nye.

Using Hamilton's local history to tell the wider story of the North American working-class, Lunch-Bucket Lives investigates how workers dealt with the profound changes in their lives between the 1890s and the 1930s, as wage-earners, family members, and participants in various social networks. Heron takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods - settlement patterns and housing, marriage, child care, domestic labour, public health, schooling, charity and social work, popular culture, gender identities, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and politics in various forms - presenting a comprehensive view of working-class life in the first half of the twentieth century. --Publisher's description

The article reviews and comments on two books: "Against the Tide: The Story of the Canadian Seamen's Union," by Jim Green, and "Everything That Floats: Pat Sullivan, Hal Banks, and the Canadian Seamen's Unions of Canada," by William Kaplan.

This article reviews the book, "Steel at the Sault: Francis H. Clergue, Sir James Dunn, and the Algoma Steel Corporation, 1901-1956," by Duncan McDowall.

This article reviews the book, "Steel and Steelworkers: The Sons of Vulcan," by Charles Docherty.

Between 1880 and 1920 the dominant ideology of independent working-class politics east of the Rockies was labourism, a brand of reformism which resembled but remained distinct from other ideological currents on the Canadian left. It was the political expression of skilled workers, who set out to win over wider support in the working class. It remained, in essence, a form of working-class liberalism, which had existed as Radicalism on the left wing of the Liberal Party but which took on an independent life in Canadian politics as industrial conflict heated up. For a brief period at the end of World War I, labourists allied with Marxist and ethical socialists to produce the visionary political dimension in the unprecedented post-war upsurge of the Canadian working class. The political movement and its ideology quickly declined in the early 1920s, however, along with the craftsworkers who had propelled it for half a century.

This article reviews the book, "Canada: A History in Photographs," by Roger Hall and Gordon Dodds.

This article reviews two books: "Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema," by Peter Morris, and "John Grierson: A Documentary Biography," by Forsyth Hardy.

The article reviews the books, "Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism," by Michael Burawoy, "Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century," by Richard Edwards, "Working For Capitalism," by Richard M. Pfeffer, and "Case Studies on the Labor Process," edited by Andrew Zimbalist.

This article describes the state of the two largest metal-working crafts in Hamilton at the end of the nineteenth century - the moulders and the machinists; the efforts of their employers to challenge the craftsmen's shop-floor power in order to transform their factories into more efficient, centrally managed workplaces; and the response of the craft workers to this crisis. The analysis of this response emphasizes the ambivalence of the artisanal legacy for the working class: on the one hand, an impassioned critique of the more dehumanizing tendencies of modernizing industry; on the other, an exclusivist strategy which aimed at defending only their craft interests. This experience suggests that the sweeping changes in the work process that accompanied the rise of monopoly capitalism in Canada prompted a highly fragmented response from the working class.

Canadians often consider the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 to be the defining event in working-class history after the First World War. This book, the collaboration of nine labour historians, shows that the unrest was both more diverse and more widespread across the country than is generally believed. The authors clarify what happened in working-class Canada at the end of the war and situate 'the workers' revolt' within the larger structure of Canadian social, economic, and political history. They argue that, despite a national pattern, the upsurge of protest took a different course and faced a different set of obstacles in each region of the country. Their essays shed light on the extent of the revolt nationally while retaining a sensitivity to regional distinctiveness. --Publisher's description. Contents: The Great War, the state, and working-class Canada / Craig Heron and Myer Siemiatycki -- The Maritimes: expanding the circle of resistance / Ian McKay and Suzanne Morton -- Quebec: class and ethnicity / Geoffrey Ewen -- Southern Ontario: striking at the ballot box / James Naylor -- The prairies: in the eye of the storm / Tom Mitchell and James Naylor -- British Columbia and the mining west: a ghost of a chance / Allen Seager and David Roth -- National contours: solidarity and fragmentation / Craig Heron.

The article reviews the book, "Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland," by Stephen Meyer.

Craig Heron is one of Canada's leading labour historians. Drawing together fifteen of Heron's new and previously published essays on working-class life in Canada, Working Lives covers a wide range of issues, including politics, culture, gender, wage-earning, and union organization. A timely contribution to the evolving field of labour studies in Canada, this cohesive collection of essays analyzes the daily experiences of people working across Canada over more than two hundred years. Honest in its depictions of the historical complexities of daily life, Working Lives raises issues in the writing of Canadian working-class history, especially "working-class realism" and how it is eventually inscribed into Canada's public history. Thoughtfully reflecting on the ways in which workers interact with the past, Heron discusses the important role historians and museums play in remembering the adversity and milestones experienced by Canada's working class. -- Publisher's description. Table of contents: Part 1: On the job. On the job in Canada -- Ontario’s first factory workers -- Work and struggle in the Canadian steel industry, 1900-50. Part 2. Workers’ Cultures. Arguing about idleness -- Labour and liquor -- Into the streets. Part 3: Getting organized. Labourism and the working class -- The Great War, the state, and working-class Canada -- Contours of a workers’ revolt. Part 4: A gendered world. Working girls -- Boys will be boys -- Male wage-earners and the Canadian state. Part 5: Doing history. Workers in the camera’s eye -- The labour historian and public history -- The relevance of class.

"What ever happened to the great Canadian labour-history debates of the early 1980s?" a well-informed Argentinian labour historian asked me recently. The gist of my rambling, uncertain response was "Things have become a lot more complex." Bryan Palmer must have had similar thoughts when he sat down to revise and update his nearly ten-year-old history of the Canadian working-class.' The publication of his self-styled "rethinking" of the field gives us all an opportunity to reflect on how the writing of working-class history has evolved and changed since those heady days and what a synthesis of the huge volume of new work ought to look like. It seems appropriate to place Palmer at the centre of such a historiographical review since the 1983 version of his Working-Class Experience was widely seen as the first synthesis of the new working-class history and, indeed, in his long series of books and articles, and through his penchant for confrontation and debate, Palmer has played a major role in defining what the rest of the historical profession (and many others) thought Canadian labour historians were up to. With this new book, he has returned to centre stage. --Author's introduction