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Despite acute labour shortages during the Second World War, Canadian employers—with the complicity of state officials—discriminated against workers of African, Asian, and Eastern and Southern European origin, excluding them from both white collar and skilled jobs. Jobs and Justice argues that, while the war intensified hostility and suspicion toward minority workers, the urgent need for their contributions and the egalitarian rhetoric used to mobilize the war effort also created an opportunity for minority activists and their English Canadian allies to challenge discrimination. Juxtaposing a discussion of state policy with ideas of race and citizenship in Canadian civil society, Carmela K. Patrias shows how minority activists were able to bring national attention to racist employment discrimination and obtain official condemnation of such discrimination. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Jobs and Justice offers a new perspective on the Second World War, the racist dimensions of state policy, and the origins of human rights campaigns in Canada. --Publisher's description
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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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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.
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From factory workers in Welland to retail workers in St. Catharines, from hospitality workers in Niagara Falls to migrant farm workers in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Union Power showcases the role of working people in the Niagara region. Charting the development of the region's labour movement from the early nineteenth century to the present, Patrias and Savage illustrate how workers from this highly diversified economy struggled to improve their lives both inside and outside the workplace. Including extensive quotations from interviews, archival sources, and local newspapers, the story unfolds, in part, through the voices of the people themselves: the workers who fought for unions, the community members who supported them, and the employers who opposed them. Early industrial development and the appalling working conditions of the often vulnerable common labourer prompted a movement toward worker protection. Patrias and Savage argue that union power – power not built on profit, status, or prestige – relies on the twin concepts of struggle and solidarity: the solidarity of the shared interests of the working class and the struggle to achieve common goals. Union Power traces the evidence of these twin concepts through the history of the Niagara region's labour movement. --Publisher's description
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