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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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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. Contents: On the job in Canada / Craig Heron and Robert Storey (pages 3-46) -- Dimensions of paternalism: Discipline and culture in Canadian railway operations in the 1850s / Paul Craven and Tom Traves (pages 47-74) -- Work control, the labour process, and nineteen-century Canadian printers / Gregory S. Kealey (pages 75-101) -- Contested terrain: workers' control in the Cape Breton coal mines in the 1920s / David Frank (pages 102-123) -- Keeping house in God's country: Canadian women at work in the home  / Veronica Strong-Boag (pages 124-151) -- Skill and gender in the Canadian clothing industry, 1890-1940 / Mercedes Steedman (pages 152-176) -- Mechanization, feminization, and managerial control in the early twentieth-century Canadian office / Graham S. Lowe (pages 177-209) -- Work and struggle in the Canadian steel industry, 1900-1950 / Craig Heron and Robert Storey (pages 210-244) -- Logging pulpwood in Northern Ontario / Ian Radforth (pages 245-280) -- On the waterfront: longshoring in Canada / John Bellamy Foster (pages 281-308) -- Life in a fast-food factory / Ester Reiter (pages 309-326) -- Autoworkers on the firing line / Don Wells (pages 327-352).

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