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  • This article examines the unionization of local government workers in Ontario during the 1940s and 1950s. While these workers played a central role in consolidating a standard employment relationship across the public sector, the advancement of collective bargaining rights, regular hours of work, and wages and benefits was fractured and spatially uneven. Bringing together theories of state formation with recent debates in labour geography, this article explores the politics of scale in the unionization of local government workers. Through the 1950s, it is argued that local government workers were able to effectively mount campaigns for recognition, develop shared bargaining capacities and establish federated labour organizations across the province, building from their embeddedness in a rapidly expanding metropolitan environment. Moreover, it is shown that the ‘scaling up’ of collective bargaining in this way provoked civic officials to establish new governance structures with the aim of containing the explosive growth of public sector unions. This entailed both the professionalization of labour relations practices and the development of more centralized administrative capacities. In this sense, it is argued that state formation through the 1950s and 1960s advanced through the efforts to normalize the demands of local government workers within a wider economy of service.

  • In confronting the filth and decay of the early 20th century city, civic reformers often undertook ambitious programs that sought to not only eliminate the sources of disease from the urban environment but also to civilize urban dwellers, teaching them to live in pure and morally hygienic ways. Historical studies have tended to focus on the consumption side of this process, looking at how sanitary reformers and public health officials worked to establish fundamentally new understandings of household waste and its disposal, laying the foundation for the "throwaway" society of the 1950s and 1960s. However, they have tended to neglect the parallel efforts to fashion a new kind of city worker. Drawing on Toronto as a case study, this paper examines how the rise of a modern, scientifically managed waste regime in the early 20th century contributed to fundamentally new conceptions of civic employment, premised on the "purification" of the worker from the contaminating influence of neighbourhood-based patronage networks and an informal waste economy. I explore how efforts to expunge filth from urban space were paralleled by struggles to disentangle class from community-based solidarities in the labour process. Moreover, I explore how this contributed to the view that public workers somehow stood apart from the community as an anonymous and uniform service. I conclude by discussing the implications in how we think about city workers and their struggles today.

Last update from database: 8/25/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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