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Oshawa Autoworkers: Social Integration and Oppositional Class Consciousness Among the Unionized Workers of General Motors

Resource type
Author/contributor
Title
Oshawa Autoworkers: Social Integration and Oppositional Class Consciousness Among the Unionized Workers of General Motors
Abstract
Many social theorists (Goldthorpe, Lipset, Giddens, Hout, Brooks and Manza) have portrayed members of the Western industrial working-class as accommodative and resistant to a class-based social revolution. They suggest that an affluent proletariat has seen its oppositional class-consciousness subverted and transformed by the 'cash nexus' into various forms of social integration. With reference to Mann's (1973) measures of class-consciousness typologies and Livingstone and Mangan's (1996) study of Hamilton steelworkers, I explore expressions of working-class consciousness among organized workers at one of Canada's largest industrial union locals, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 222 at General Motors, in Oshawa, Canada. I accomplish this via an examination of the existence and degree of working-class imagery, class identity, and oppositional working-class consciousness among this group of workers on the basis of measured responses to a survey questionnaire (N=102), in-depth interviews, and participant observation. My thesis asserts that Oshawa autoworkers' material advantage is insufficient to transform their proletarian consciousness. I have found that among Oshawa autoworkers there is a shared view of Canadian society as class-based, a clear working-class self-identification and measurable forms of oppositional working-class consciousness.
Type
Ph.D., Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University
University of Toronto
Place
Toronto
Date
2005
# of Pages
271 pages
Language
English
Short Title
Oshawa Autoworkers
Accessed
1/7/15, 9:46 PM
Library Catalog
ProQuest
Rights
Copyright UMI - Dissertations Publishing 2005
Citation
Roth, R. N. (2005). Oshawa Autoworkers: Social Integration and Oppositional Class Consciousness Among the Unionized Workers of General Motors [Ph.D., Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto]. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/11758/1/MQ29173.pdf