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On 23 June 1919, 5000 workers affiliated with Victoria's Metal Trades Council downed tools in sympathy with Winnipeg workers and as a protest against what they called 'Star Chamber' methods of repression against the working- class leadership. While much has been written on the Winnipeg General Strike and 1919 Canadian labour revolt, the Victoria General Strike is revealing as a contested expression of working-class solidarity, an illustration of the unresolved tension between craft and industrial unionism and different labour leaderships in the west-coast city. Much of British Columbia labour had embraced the One Big Union and its socialist leadership by the spring of 1919, but Victoria's organized workers wavered on the question of striking in sympathy with Winnipeg's working class. While the shipyards were a locus of militancy, influential groups of workers, AFL rather than OBU in orientation, opposed a general strike and undermined the mood of solidarity. Local conditions in different economic sectors shaped the working-class response to the Winnipeg General Strike. This tension provides fresh insight into the development of class consciousness and industrial militancy at the end World War I, breaking new ground in the historiography of Canada's postwar labour revolt.
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The article reviews the book, "Fighting for Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story," by Roger Stonebanks.
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The article reviews the book, "When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike," by Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell.
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The article focuses on the letters wrote by Elgin Neish, a member of the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP), during his seven week trip from Eastern Europe to Beijing, China in 1952. It explains that the letters offered a significant perspective of a radical British Columbia trade unionist during the Cold War as well as important global subjects. It notes that Neish traveled to Beijing to participate in the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference, which reflected on the communist-led peace activism during the Cold War and the relationships between the Canadian and Chinese Communists, from October 2-12.
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This article reviews the book, "The Left in British Columbia: A History of Struggle," by Gordon Hak.
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The 1950 Vancouver convention of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) opened against the backdrop of the Korean War and tense Cold War debates within Canada’s social democratic party. Providing a window into this moment of ideological tension, the gathering demonstrates how leftists sought to forge domestic and foreign policies amenable to the narrow public opinion of the McCarthy era. The convention also illuminates the complex character of British Columbia’s postwar left and the broader intellectual and political milieu of the early Cold War years in Canada – debates over the prohibition of atomic weapons and the relationship between markets and the state that would culminate in the ccf’s Winnipeg Declaration of Principles later in the 1950s. Finally, the Vancouver convention highlights the role of Trotskyists within the ccf, a strategy of ‘entryism’ that has been explored only peripherally in the historiography of social democracy in Canada. The ideological confrontation at Vancouver left the ccf squarely in the hands of ‘moderates,’ shaping ccf strategy and policy for its final decade of political activity, while muting the Canadian left’s independent voice in domestic and international affairs.
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In April 2004, the Hospital Employees' Union (HEU) waged an illegal strike that mobilized sections of British Columbia's working class to the brink of a general sympathetic strike. Influenced by BC's class-polarized political culture and HEU's distinct history, the 2004 strike represents a key moment of working-class resistance to neoliberal privatization. HEU was targeted by the BC Liberal government because it represented a bastion of militant, independent unionism in a jurisdiction that appeared overripe (from the neoliberal standpoint) for a curtailment of worker rights and a retrenchment of public-sector employment. HEU also represented a direct barrier, in the language of its collective agreements and collective power of its membership, to the privatization of health services and dismantling of Medicare. The militant agency of HEU members, combined with anger generated by a constellation of social-service cutbacks, inspired rank-and-file workers and several unions to defy collective agreements and embrace sympathetic strike action. This revealed differentiation in the strategy and tactics of BC's labor leadership, and enduring sources of solidarity in labor's ranks.