Your search
Results 14 resources
-
The article reviews the book, "Industrial Relations under Liberal Democracy: North America in Comparative Perspective," by Roy J. Adams.
-
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.
-
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.
-
"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
-
The article reviews the book, "The CIO, 1935-1955," by Robert H. Zieger.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.