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Although the service work occupies on increasingly central position in the Canadian labour market, its legacy of activism has largely been forgotten by scholars. This paper begins a reclamation of that legacy by analysing the bitter 1961-1962 strike at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Canada's most luxurious lodgings. The unsuccessful battle of mostly immigrant workers against a powerful corporation anticipates the multinational consolidation of and asymmetrical struggle in the industry over the next four decades. The paper evaluates strategies used by service workers, explores the different historical dynamics of service-work trade unionism, analyses the cultural contests which sprang up around such a powerful symbolic action, and seeks to explain what lessons have been learned by current Toronto hotel activists. It represents one starting point in the important work of understanding service work activism, and the economic, political, and cultural battles around class, gender, ethnicity, and consumption in Canada.

The article reviews the book, "Stronger Together: The Story of SEIU," by Don Stillman.

The article reviews the book, "The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers," by Michael Perelman.

When “workplace violence” was identified as a pressing social problem in the 1980s and 1990s, experts and policymakers focused on the violence of individuals and the psychological causes of that violence, instead of considering the structural factors associated with the dynamics of class relations and the workplace that produced violence. Yet, workplace violence existed long before the 1980s. This paper investigates three high-profile incidents of workplace violence in the automotive industry of Detroit and Windsor in the 1970s. It explores how these incidents were understood and how such understandings were created and contested, highlighting the pivotal role played by radical legal practice in these contests. It demonstrates that workplace violence often stemmed from factors such as the labour process, racism, and union conflict, and that the success of radical legal practice in raising these issues depended on both the specifics of the crime itself and the political and historical context in which it took place.

This article reviews the book, "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" by Walter Scheidel.

Going postal. We think of the rogue employee who snaps. But in [this book] Jeremy Milloy demonstrates that workplace violence never occurs in isolation. Using violence as a lens, he provides fresh and original insights into the everyday workings of capitalism, class conflict, race, and gender in the United States and Canada of the late twentieth century, bringing historical perspective to contemporary debates about North American violence. [The book] is the first full-length historical exploration of the origins and effects of individual violence in the automotive industry. Milloy’s gripping analysis spans 1960 to 1980, when North American auto plants were routinely the sites of fights, assaults, and even murders. He argues that the high levels of violence were primarily the result of workplace conditions – including on-the-job exploitation, racial tension, bureaucratization, and hypermasculinity – that made fear and loathing a shop-floor reality long before mass shootings attracted media attention in the 1980s. Workplace violence is typically the domain of management studies and psychology, but while we pass legislation and adopt best practices, the problem continues. Milloy’s explosive book reveals that workplace violence has been a constant aspect of class conflict – and that our understanding needs to go deeper. Blood, Sweat, and Fear will interest everyone concerned with the causes of workplace violence, and in particular scholars and students of labour history, sociology, sociological criminology, masculinity studies, and studies of race and of violence. --Publisher's description. Contents: Dripping with blood and dirt: confronting the history of workplace violence under capitalism -- Fights and knifings are becoming quite commonplace: Dodge main, 1965-80 -- The way boys and men took care of business: Windsor Chrysler plants -- The constant companion of all that earn their living here: workers, unions, and management respond -- Chrysler pulled the trigger: the courts and the press -- Out of the back streets and into the workplace: the discovery of workplace violence in the 1980s and 1990s.

The article reviews the book, "Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom," by Daniel J. Clark.

Violence in the workplace has attracted widespread scholarly and media attention in the United States and Canada since the 1980s. Governments and corporations on both sides of the border have identified this violence as a serious problem affecting the health and safety of workers. However, there is still much that is unknown about workplace violence. Is the problem of workplace violence more serious than it was today? How has it changed over time? What are the factors that have produced violence at work? How have workers, management, and governments defined violence at work? How have they approached the problem? This dissertation historicizes the phenomenon of workplace violence, investigating on-the-job violence in the North American automotive industry between 1960-1980. It embeds violence at work in its economic, political, and cultural contexts and investigates how violence shaped the North American workplace and identities of class, gender, and race on the job. A comparative, transnational approach is central to this study. If we seek to understand the structural factors causing workplace violence, the national context cannot be ignored. This is especially true when considering the US and Canada, two countries which are extraordinarily integrated economically but often contrasted socially and culturally. My research has uncovered a significant history of violence in the automotive workplaces of Detroit and Windsor, and shows that national and local contexts were crucial in determining the level of violence. Violence was a regular element of shop-floor culture and workplace conflict in both countries, but was different in each. In Detroit, violence at work reached epidemic levels and was a major factor in the crisis that gripped the city's auto plants in the 1960s and 1970s. This was not the case in Windsor. Yet in both cities workplace violence became a major concern outside the factory when work-related murders seized national headlines and challenged citizens to understand these tragedies. The thesis demonstrates that, though the patterns and levels of violence were different in each place, violence was no aberration, no freak occurrence, but an ongoing phenomenon that influenced the labour process and workplace culture in both Detroit and Windsor.

Since World War II, service work has become the major employment sector in North America. One of the most recognizable forms it takes is in the fast food industry, a multi-billion dollar business with outlets all over the globe. Little has been written about the history of this work, central to the functioning of the global economy and a key part of the move from an industrial economy to a consumer one. This move has changed work by examining BC's White Spot chain, which unlike almost any other has been unionized for over three decades. Drawing on union records an d oral interviews, it analyzes fast food unionism, evaluates organizing in the sector, and draws out workplace dynamics and processes; arguing that labour practices in this sector have been crucial in making work more exploitative.

From mining to sex work and from the classroom to the docks, violence has always been a part of work. This collection of essays highlights the many different forms and expressions of violence that have arisen under capitalism in the last two hundred years, as well as how historians of working-class life and labour have understood violence. The editors draw together diverse case studies, integrating analysis of class, age, gender, sexuality, and race into the scholarship. Essays span the United States and Canadian border, exploring gender violence, sexual harassment, the violent kidnapping of union organizers, the violence of inadequate health and safety protections, the culture of violence in state institutions, the mythology of working-class violence, and the changing nature of violence in extractive industries. The Violence of Work theorizes and historicizes violence as an integral part of working life, making it possible to understand the full scope and causes of workplace violence over time. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction: Accounting for violence / Jeremy Milloy -- The perils of sex work in Montreal: seeking security and justice in the face of violence, 1810-1842 / Mary Anne Poutanen -- The rules of discipline: workers and the culture of violence in progressive-era reform schools / James Schmidt -- The "new solution": anti-labour kidnapping, D.B. McKay, and the legacy of the second Seminole War / Chad Pearson -- Billy Gohl: labour, violence, and myth in the early twentieth-century Pacific Northwest / Aaron Goings -- Slow violence and hidden injuries: the work of strip mining in the American west / Ryan Driskell Tate -- The murder of Lori Dupont : violence, harassment, and occupational health and safety in Ontarion / Sarah Jessup -- "By the nuimbers" : workers' compensation and the (further) conventionalization of workplace violence / Robert Storey -- Gender violence in the hospitality industry: panic buttons, pants, and protest / Emily E. LB. Twarog.