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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
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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.
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This article reviews the book, "Steel and Steelworkers: The Sons of Vulcan," by Charles Docherty.
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This article reviews the book, "Canada: A History in Photographs," by Roger Hall and Gordon Dodds.
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This article reviews two books: "Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema," by Peter Morris, and "John Grierson: A Documentary Biography," by Forsyth Hardy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.