Your search

Recounts the story of labour from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. A masterful overview that encompasses all regions of the country, the book paints a vivid portrait of labour's varied past, covering the birth of craft unionism prior to World War I, the setbacks of the interwar years, and the post-World War II breakthrough that gave unions a permanent, if still constrained, place in the national economy. In its analysis of the more recent past, the book ranges just as widely, discussing everything from the organization of public sector employees in the sixties to the anti-free-trade coalitions of the eighties and the massive layoffs of the nineties. --Publisher's description

Class has been a controversial category of historical analysis. Historians and social theorists have often attacked its relevance, but even those who find it a helpful way of understanding the past (and present) have had to deal with challenges from new theoretical perspectives, especially from those sensitive to gender and race. They have also had to recognize that there is no direct link between the material situation of members of a social class and their consciousness of their social situation. Diverse discourses emerge to give meaning to social experience, and are adopted, adapted, or rejected to varying degrees. This paper suggests that, after three decades of debate, we should now consider class formation as a fluid, dynamic process of social differentiation through which people’s lives are shaped by the pressures, constraints, and opportunities of their situation in relation to the means of production, the divisions of labour within patriarchy, and the racial distinctions in particular societies; but also one in which people negotiate their own understandings of the world and act on them. To illustrate this process at work, the paper discusses the lives of one working-class family in suburban Toronto from the 1940s to the 1970s and their engagement with new postwar social developments. They not only shaped distinctively working-class forms of gender, suburbanism, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, popular culture, meritocracy, and consumerism; but also wove all of those into a distinctively working-class identity.

Industrial capitalism was established in Canada in two distinct phases, as was the case in other Western countries. The ‘first industrial revolution’ — as it has been called — began in Canada around 1850 and 1860 and flourished in the 1880s due to the National Policy that was in effect at the time. The ‘second industrial revolution’ began in the early 20th century and was the result of a much more sophisticated capitalist economy, which saw the emergence of new and complex technologies and means of production, as well as corporate giants in the steel, automotive, paper and chemical industries, to name but a few. Although this second phase of industrial capitalism had a significant impact on the working conditions of thousands of men and women in Canada, recent historiography, despite being abundant in the field of labour history, has largely ignored the phenomenon of mass production that characterised this second phase. The author retraces part of this history through a study of the steel industry in Hamilton, Ontario, one of the three major centres of this industry in Canada. He examines the rise of the Steel Company of Canada and its predecessors between 1895 and 1930, the transformations that took place in steelworking methods at the time, and the labour relations that developed within this corporation in its Hamilton. --Translation of website summary in the French language

Recently the Toronto Star ran a story about a lavish new lakefront housing development in the eastern suburbs of Toronto owned by one of the Bronfman companies. Under the quaint name of “Port Union Village,” the developer is resurrecting the long-forgotten history of a tiny port that had existed on the spot in the nineteenth century in order to sell a myth of rural gentility in the 1990s. What the story failed to explain was that the new houses were rising on the site of the infamous Canadian Johns- Manville Company, where from the 1940s to the 1970s several hundred workers worked with asbestos. By 1980 43 CJM employées were dead of asbestos-related diseases. The company’s long suppression of information about these hazards became a national scandai before it collapsed into bankruptcy beneath a flood of lawsuits. The Star was thus complic- it in suppressing the memory of a significant industrial workplace, of the organized reistance of the men who worked there and the workplace culture that sustained them, and of their life with family and neighbours beyond the factory walls. For the residents of this new suburb, there never was a working-class expérience here (they might start asking questions when they find the asbestos in their backyard gardens).The Ontario Worker’s Arts and Heritage Centre exists so that this kind of historical white-washing and collective amnesia will not continue to take place. --Introduction

Historian Craig Heron introduces the 1945-48 memoir of Alfred Edwards, who worked at National Knitting MIlls, a textile mill in Hamilton, Ontario. Edwards, who had been a union activist prior to WWII, describes the changes in the relations of production that he observed upon his return to the plant from military service. He also discusses the decision of the shop union to join the Textile Workers Union of America, the struggle for local control in a bureaucratized international union, and the conflict between social democratic and communist unions at the Canadian Congress of Labour convention in Toronto in 1947.

Labour Day became a statutory holiday in Canada in 1894, but labour days and craftsmen’s parades had been summer events in several Canadian cities and towns for a number of years. Its creation as an official holiday responded to two demands: one for public recognition of organized labour and its important role, and another for release from the pressures of work in capitalist industry. It was up to unions, however, to produce the parades and shape the day’s events, and this task could prove to be too much for local workers’ movements with limited resources. The tension between celebration and leisure eventually undermined the original grand ideals, as wage-earners and their families began to spend Labour Day pursuing private pleasures rather than participating in a display of cultural solidarity.

For most Canadians today, Labour Day is the last gasp of summer fun: the final long weekend before returning to the everyday routine of work or school. But over its century-long history, there was much more to the September holiday than just having a day off. In The Workers' Festival, Craig Heron and Steve Penfold examine the complicated history of Labour Day from its origins as a spectacle of skilled workers in the 1880s through its declaration as a national statutory holiday in 1894 to its reinvention through the twentieth century. The holiday's inventors hoped to blend labour solidarity, community celebration, and increased leisure time by organizing parades, picnics, speeches, and other forms of respectable leisure. As the holiday has evolved, so too have the rituals, with trade unionists embracing new forms of parading, negotiating, and bargaining, and other social groups re-shaping it and making it their own. Heron and Penfold also examine how Labour Day's monopoly as the workers' holiday has been challenged since its founding, with alternative festivals arising such as May Day and International Women's Day. The Workers' Festival ranges widely into many key themes of labour history - union politics and rivalries, radical movements, religion (Catholic and Protestant), race and gender, and consumerism/leisure - as well as cultural history - public celebration/urban procession, urban space and communication, and popular culture. From St. John's to Victoria, the authors follow the century-long development of the holiday in all its varied forms. --Publisher's description

Discusses the growth of "international" (i.e., American) unions operating in Canada and the impact on the Canadian labour movement of the bitter divide between socialists and communists. Concludes that the growth of US investment in Canada and US domination of many aspects of Canadian life raises important questions for the Canadian left regarding an independent trade union movement.

In The Canadian Labour Movement, historian Craig Heron and political scientist Charles Smith tell the story of Canada's workers from the midnineteenth 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. The fourth edition of this book has been completely updated with a substantial new chapter that covers the period from the great recession of 2008 through to 2020. In this chapter, Smith describes the fallout of the financial crisis, how Stephen Harper's government restricted labour rights, the rise of the "gig economy" and precarious work, and the continued de-industrialization in the private sector. These pressures contributed to fracturing the movement, as when Unifor, the largest private sector union, split from the Canadian Labour Congress, the established "house of labour." Through it all, rank-and-file union members have fought for better conditions for all workers, including through campaigns like the fight for a $15 minimum wage. --Publisher's description

...To go beyond such generalized condemnation and probe deeper into the contours and context of industrial strife, we have examined strike activity between 1901 and 1914 in ten southern Ontario cities that were emerging as major industrial centres. ...Through an examination of this conflict, in which the strike looms large, we can learn much more about class relationships in these early years of a maturing central Canadian capitalism.

The introduction to the memorable collection of photographs of Hamilton workers, All That Our Hands Have Done...announced: "Labour history is a new field. It demands new methods, new sources, new questions and new, mutual relations between researchers and their subjects." --From David Sobel, "Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944-2021," Labour/Le travail, 87 (Spring 2021) 15.

Every day millions of Canadians go out to work. They labour in factories, offices, restaurants, and retail stores, on ships, and deep in mines. And every day millions of other Canadians, mostly women, begin work in their homes, performing the many tasks that ensure the well-being of their families and ultimately, the reproduction of the paid labour force. Yet, for all its undoubted importance, there has been remarkably little systematic research into the past and present dynamics of the world of work in Canada. The essays in this volume enhance our understanding of Canadians on the job. Focusing on specific industries and kinds of work, from logging and longshoring to restaurant work and the needle trades, the contributors consider such issues as job skill, mass production, and the transformation of resource industries. They raise questions about how particular jobs are structured and changed over time, the role of workers' resistance and trade unions in shaping the lives of workers, and the impact of technology. Together these essays clarify a fundamental characteristic shared by all labour processes: they are shaped and conditioned by the social, economic, and political struggles of labour and capital both inside and outside the workplace. They argue that technological change, as well as all the transformations in the workplace, must become a social process that we all control. --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