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The article reviews the book, "A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change," by E. Sylvia Pankhurst, edited with an introduction by Katherine Connelly,.

In 1971, the word "Texpack" became a flashpoint of political attention, debate, and anger for labour activists across Canada. Many mobilized to support strikers at Texpack's small textile firm in Brantford, Ontario, though some trade unionists from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) turned their backs on the independent Canadian union, the Canadian Textile and Chemical Workers Union (CTCU), leading the strike. The significance of Texpack lay not simply in this stark manifestation of schisms within the house of labour, but rather in the strike's central role as a touchstone for political debates concerning economic and Left nationalism, and what kind of unions best served Canadian workers. This article explores the strike as a microcosm of broader political struggles of the period, particularly questions of nationalism and internationalism of unions. --From introduction

The article reviews the book, "Women and the politics of class," by Joanna Brenner.

Introduces and summarizes the five articles presented for the roundtable that was convened on the 50th anniversary of the founding of National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Takes note of the various themes explored, including labour feminism.

In the 1970s, women in Toronto created the Waitresses Action Committee to protest the introduction of a "differential" or lower minimum wage for wait staff serving alcohol. Their campaign was part of their broader feminist critique of women's exploitation and the gendered and sexualized nature of waitressing. Influenced by their origins in the Wages for Housework campaign, they stressed the linkages between women's unpaid work in the home and the workplace. Their campaign eschewed worksite organizing for an occupational mobilization outside of the established unions; they used petitions, publicity, and alliances with sympathizers to try to stop the rollback in their wages. They were successful in mobilizing support but not in altering the government's decision. Nonetheless, their spirited campaign publicized new feminist perspectives on women's gendered and sexualized labour, and it contributed to the ongoing labour feminist project of enhancing working-class women's equality, dignity, and economic autonomy. An analysis of their mobilization also helps to enrich and complicate our understanding of labour and socialist feminism in this period.

The article reviews the book, "Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor," by Kim Kelly.

This article analyzes a contemporary online exhibit from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives that explores feminist perspectives on labour, trade, and free trade in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s, situating these struggles within broader debates over capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Drawing on archival materials documenting organizing by socialist, Marxist, and labour feminists, unions, and community groups, it highlights how critiques of unpaid domestic work, precarious wage labour, and the Canada–US free trade agreement were intertwined with concerns about sovereignty, social programs, immigration, and human rights in the Global South. The article argues that the exhibit’s explicitly political curatorial stance illustrates the importance of “outsider” and community-linked archives for preserving and interpreting the histories of labour, feminism, and the Left, while tracing how earlier feminist economies prefigure later critiques of global trade bodies such as the WTO and IMF.

This paper traces the rise and fall in Ontario of the Workers Educational Association (WEA), a voluntary association whose main purpose was to organize inexpensive, non-credit night classes taught by university professors for the working class. The Association was an offshoot of the British WEA. ln Ontario the main impetus for establishing an Association in 1918 came from members of Toronto's intellectual elite. One of their aims was to teach labour people "responsible behaviour" at a time when the labour movement seemed to be gaining influence and becoming more radical. Working-class people within the WEA proved less malleable than the academics had hoped, and the Association soon became a workers' organization, largely controlled by some of its working-class members. It offered many liberal arts courses and, in the late 1930s and 1940s, developed innovative labour education and research programmes which proved of lasting benefit to the labour movement. Although continually threatened by the University of Toronto administration, the WEA failed in the 1950s because certain labour leaders, using Cold War tactics, opposed a labour educational institution that they could not control.

Abstracts of papers from no. 86, Fall 2020.

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canadaand the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts fromthe1940s to the1970s.Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentationof the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants,but the legacyof earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.

This article uses a case study of a highly publicized 1970 controversy over Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ flight attendant uniforms—specifically, a switch from mini to midi skirt—as a case study in business-labor relations concerning the regulation of women workers’ bodily appearance. Using company and union records and employing a historical, materialist, and feminist analysis, we trace how notions of aesthetic and emotional labor changed over time in relation to the political economy, gender ideologies, and the agency of workers themselves. The flight attendants’ reluctance to challenge the airline’s sexist advertising indicated how both accommodation and resistance were intertwined in complex ways in the workplace. Their acceptance of more “thigh in the sky” had much to do with a highly regulated and disciplined workplace, an entrenched division of labor on the airplane, and gendered notions of beauty and glamour in the industry, including women’s strategic use of beauty on the job to their own advantage.

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30-year period. Taking a historical, materialist-feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.

Announces the co-editorship of Charles Smith and Joan Sangster for this volume, and gratefully acknowledges the work of former editors as well as funding from OPSEU. The journal is a joint partnership of the Canadian Committee on Labour History and the Canadian Association of Work Studies. Seeks submissions that reflect new directions in the study of the workplace and labour, including analyses of labour and the state, feminist political economy, strikes and workplace conflict, union renewal, new models of worker organizing, environmental justice, Indigenous struggles inside and outside the workplace, global workers’ movements, anti-racism campaigns, lgbtq2s struggles. Also welcomes contributions on the social world of work, e.g., popular and working-class cultures, the gendered and racialized experiences of workers, the intersections between colonialism and labour, and the many permutations of labour in the past and present – informal, paid, unpaid, coerced, voluntary.

Editorial on three conferences held in 2018-19 that examined the past, present and future of the study of working-class history.

Considers the human and financial cost of the 1918-19 flu pandemic versus the Covid-19 pandemic. Pays tribute to the late Leo Panitch, to whom the volume is dedicated. Comments on articles in the issue and notes that they emphasize the importance of all forms of work and organization. Deplores the rise of market-driven universities and the cuts at Laurentian University. Welcomes Kirk Niergarth as co-editor, which helps pave the way for Joan Sangster's retirement as co-editor.

A century of women's work history in Australia and Canada reveals both similarities and contrasts. Women workers in both countries have faced persistent occupational segregation and lower pay, justified by the "family wage" ideal of a male breadwinner and the accompanying perception of women's paid labour as secondary, less skilled and transient. While Canada's female labour force has historically demonstrated a significant proportion of immigrants from countries other than England, Australia's female labour force contained fewer immigrants but revealed a visible minority of Aboriginals who have demonstrated labour militancy in several well-known disputes in this century. Perhaps the most striking differences between the two countries, however, relate to the extent of the Australian state's involvement in wage tribunals and in the compulsory arbitration system, both of which have given women improved wages and "a floor of protection." By contrast, state intervention in Canada was minimal until well into the 20th century when minimum wage laws were passed during and after World War I. Despite these differences there are areas of similarity, particularly in this century as women workers tended to mobilize at roughly the same time, not only in unions and work places but also in neighbourhoods, ethnic communities, rural areas and to some extent in labour and left wing political groups. Modern feminist movements in both countries have waged some successful campaigns to change not only government views and agendas, but also those of trade unions. Thus, while Australian women have perhaps been more successful at "playing the state" depending on the government in power, both groups of women are increasingly faced with the challenge of government retreat from egalitarian policies under the onslaught of a right-wing, corporatist agenda.

Introduced by editors Sangster and Smith, this roundtable offers papers by former students of Panitch on his multifaceted legacy. Themes include Panitch as organic intellectual (Warskett), the fall and future of social democracy (Blanc), money and the critique of capitalism between political sociology and political economy (Konings), Panitch and the practice of socialist mentorship (Maher), and Panitch as a transformative teacher (Ross).