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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

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

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.

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.

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.

Discusses the

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