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Recently the Toronto Star ran a story about a lavish new lakefront housing development in the eastern suburbs of Toronto owned by one of the Bronfman companies. Under the quaint name of “Port Union Village,” the developer is resurrecting the long-forgotten history of a tiny port that had existed on the spot in the nineteenth century in order to sell a myth of rural gentility in the 1990s. What the story failed to explain was that the new houses were rising on the site of the infamous Canadian Johns- Manville Company, where from the 1940s to the 1970s several hundred workers worked with asbestos. By 1980 43 CJM employées were dead of asbestos-related diseases. The company’s long suppression of information about these hazards became a national scandai before it collapsed into bankruptcy beneath a flood of lawsuits. The Star was thus complic- it in suppressing the memory of a significant industrial workplace, of the organized reistance of the men who worked there and the workplace culture that sustained them, and of their life with family and neighbours beyond the factory walls. For the residents of this new suburb, there never was a working-class expérience here (they might start asking questions when they find the asbestos in their backyard gardens).The Ontario Worker’s Arts and Heritage Centre exists so that this kind of historical white-washing and collective amnesia will not continue to take place. --Introduction
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The article reviews the book, "Industrial Relations under Liberal Democracy: North America in Comparative Perspective," by Roy J. Adams.
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"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
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The article reviews the book, "The CIO, 1935-1955," by Robert H. Zieger.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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