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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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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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