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This study explores employers ’ anti-union strategies in the Niagara Peninsula from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s in order to enhance our understanding of the nature of relations between labour and capital during the period generally described as that of the postwar compromise. Relying on such unexplored archival collections as the papers of the St. Catharines firm, Ontario Editorial Bureau, as well as the collections of the Archives of Ontario and Library and Archives Canada, the study focuses on four main union-avoidance strategies: the establishment of company-dominated unions, anti-union public relations campaigns, corporate welfarism, and company relocation. By illustrating the depth and endurance of Niagara employers’ opposition to unions during the period of supposed compromise between employers, workers and the state the study demonstrates that there was greater continuity than we have supposed between management views of workers’ rights during the period of the postwar compromise and the neoliberalism that characterized subsequent decades.
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During the period of the expansion and consolidation of the fruit and vegetable industry between about 1880 and 1945, seasonal work in the fields, orchards, packing houses and canneries of the Niagara Peninsula was performed by two main groups of marginalized workers: immigrant women and adolescents of eastern and southern European origin, and indigenous families. Contemporaries believed that these groups were inherently suited for the long hours, physical demands and low wages that characterized such work that those with greater options avoided. Such racial classification restricted their access to year-round, better-paid and cleaner work. That it was largely performed by minority groups, in turn, derogated such seasonal labour. During the two world wars, a radically different group of workers entered Niagara’s agricultural workforce: middle-class, Anglo-Canadian girls and women, most often labelled farmerettes. By comparing minority workers and farmerettes in Niagara’s fruit and vegetable industry the study sheds light on a little-studied sector of Canada’s workforce. The willingness of the state and growers to improve working conditions generally deemed perfectly acceptable for “foreigners" and “Indians," for the benefit of farmerettes, illustrates the workings of a racialized hierarchy in Canada’s labour market with great clarity. At the same time, the limit on wages even for the privileged farmerettes simultaneously demonstrates the depth and endurance of gender-based inequality in the workforce.
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[This] study shows that the crisis of war reinforced pre-existing social and economic inequality based on racist views and practices. War-induced anxieties intensified suspicion of "foreigners" -- a term which encompassed large numbers of Canadian-born and naturalized people of Japanese, central, eastern, and southern European descent and Jews -- as unpatriotic, disloyal, radical, and incapable of becoming truly Canadian. The war also brought sharply into focus and even intensified racist assumptions that African Canadians, eastern and southern Europeans, and Native people were suitable only for menial jobs; that Jewish, Chinese, and Japanese Canadians were economically aggressive; and that Jews in particular were given to shady practices. Such racist stereotypes in turn legitimized the ongoing marginalization of these minorities in the workforce. The state colluded in racist practices. To be sure not all state officials or all Canadians were racist, but the pragmatism that informed official complicity with employment discrimination underscores the pervasiveness of racism in wartime Canada. State officials -- some of whom held racist ideas -- were willing to accept employers' and workers" racist preferences because they believed that to do otherwise would create social unrest and disrupt war industries. Moreover, officials found that the relegation of minority groups such as Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, and Native people to menial work offered the important benefit of filling jobs that Canadians with wider options avoided.
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Documents how discrimination against minorities during WWII was much more prevalent than the selective portrayal in the television series, "Bomb Girls."
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Focusing on the Niagara region, this study explains the continued adherence of thousands of Canadian workers to communist-led unions during the Cold War era. It argues that co-operation between communist-led unions and communist-led ethnic clubs and other political and social activists in the pursuit of human rights, social justice, and environmental goals explains why thousands of workers continued to adhere to such unions despite intense red-baiting in the 1940s and 1950s. Reaching out to allies beyond the workplace in solidarity unionism was especially important because of the marginalization of communist-led unions within the Canadian labour movement. The study’s findings reinforce the view that local economic and political conditions played a significant role in shaping communist-led unions in Canada. The study also highlights the contribution of interethnic collaboration among immigrant workers to the development of the Canadian labour movement.