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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
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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
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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.