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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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The years between 1870 and 1939 were a crucial period in the growth of industrial capitalism in Canada, as well as a time when many women joined the paid workforce. Yet despite the increase in employment, women faced a difficult struggle in gaining fair remuneration for their work and in gaining access to better jobs. Discounted Labour analyses the historical roots of women's persistent inequality in the paid labour force. Ruth A. Frager and Carmela K. Patrias analyse how and why women became confined to low-wage jobs, why their work was deemed less valuable than men's work, why many women lacked training, job experience, and union membership, and under what circumstances women resisted their subordination. Distinctive earning discrepancies and employment patterns have always characterized women's place in the workforce whether they have been in low-status, unskilled jobs, or in higher positions. For this reason, Frager and Patrias focus not only on women wage-earners but on women as salaried workers as well. They also analyze the divisions among women, examining how class and ethnic or racial differences have intersected with those of gender. Discounted Labour is an essential new work for anyone interested in the historical struggle for gender equality in Canada. --Publisher's description. Contents: Pt. I. Image versus reality. 1. Industrial capitalism and women's work -- 2. White collars -- 3. In times of crisis -- Pt. II. Confronting the disjuncture. 4. Social reform and regulation -- 5. Resistance and its limits. Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-175) and index.
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Confrontation, Struggle and Transformation is the story of working women and men in the St. Catharines area from the mid-1800s to the present. The study explores the labour movement's fight to survive and thrive in the Niagara region. Thanks to extensive quotations from interviews, archival sources and local newspapers, the story unfolds, in part, through the voices of the people themselves: workers who fought for unions, community members who supported them and employers who opposed them. --Publisher's description
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