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All miners and smelter workers know the folly of going on strike when their employer holds a stockpile. In 1958 the International Nickel Company had enough nickel on hand to guarantee sales for at least six months. Despite this, fourteen thousand miners and smeltermen in Sudbury, Ontario, downed their tools and struck against the corporate titan of the mining industry. Standing Up to Big Nickel is a comprehensive portrait of a pivotal strike by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a union that has inspired exceptional levels of solidarity among its members. The Cold War and the resulting instabilities in the Canadian labour movement form the backdrop to Elizabeth Quinlan’s engrossing analysis. The union straddled the line, she shows, between its historical commitment to working-class struggle and the newly restrictive legal landscape of the postwar era. Retrospective accounts by surviving union members, leaders, family, and community members bring to life the history of a distinctive group of workers who sweated over smelter furnaces and toiled underground in perilous conditions. Quinlan traces the events before, during, and after one of Canada’s greatest strikes in both magnitude and duration. Featuring biographical sketches and scenes based on archival and documentary data, Standing Up to Big Nickel captures an intensely dramatic juncture in Canadian labour history.
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Discusses the efforts of the Sudbury local of the Mine-Mill union in the post-World War II era to develop a distinct political-cultural community including through a multi-purpose union hall, dance school, and theatre company. Concludes that Mine-Mill's social and cultural programming was eclipsed by Cold War anti-Communism and the bitter battle with the United Steelworkers of America to represent the workers.
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The article pays homage to the socialist labour activist Hugh Lukin Robinson (1916-2012), who worked at the United Nations and was research director of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers from 1952-62.
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One manifestation of the 'new managerialism' in the Canadian health care system is the increase in workplace bullying. An occupational group especially susceptible to workplace bullying is Continuing Care Assistants (CCAs) who provide personal care to long-term care home residents and individuals in their own homes in Saskatchewan. These foot soldiers of end-of-life care have no professional society or regulatory agency to advocate for their occupational status and the social value of the work they perform. The paper argues that workplace bullying cannot be understood unless it is related to the social structure from which it derives. One underlying cause of bullying among CCAs is the reorganization of their work under current health care reforms. Potential solutions to workplace bullying must start with transformative processes rooted in an understanding of these larger contextual forces.
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