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The article reviews the book, "Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People," by J. Peter Campbell.

In this article, I examine the Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC), an independent, grassroots, socialist-feminist union that organized workers in unorganized industries in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. I look at SORWUC’s role in Canadian labour history in general, and its efforts to organize workers in the service industry in particular. My central thesis is that SORWUC’s socialist-feminist unionism and commitment to organizing unorganized workers positioned the union as radically differ­ent from the mainstream labour movement. This difference both helped and hindered the union. Specifically, SORWUC’s experiences organizing workers at Bimini pub and Muckamuck restaurant in British Columbia demonstrate that although its alternative structure and strategies aided organizing and strike efforts, these factors made little difference in the union’s dealings with the labour relations boards and the courts: in both cases, the action or inaction of the state ultimately determined the outcome. Although SORWUC no longer exists, it remains an important historical example of how workers in Canada have been and can be organized. SORWUC thus offers important lessons about service worker organizing, alternative forms of unionization, and the powerful role of the state in labour relations in the postwar period.

This article reviews the book, "Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers," edited by Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger.

The covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted the education system in Canada from March 2020 throughout the 2020–21 school year. It also had disproportionate secondary effects on women in terms of unpaid care, economic loss, and poor mental health. This article explores the lived experience of women educators in the province of Alberta, drawing on interviews and focus groups with 39 educators. Findings indicate that the pandemic not only exacerbated the triple burden that women educators, in particular, bear but added additional layers of responsibility related to public health management, educating children at home, elder care responsibilities, and emotional labour. The essential role women educators fulfilled within the covid-19 response, at work and at home, cost them time, professional development opportunities, mental wellness, and the positive rewards that had drawn them to the educational field. Current concerns around educator burnout and retention may be mitigated by acting on the recommendations of women educators regarding the development of more equitable education systems and social policy.

This thesis examines the Service, Office, and Retail Workers' Union of Canada (SORWUC), an independent, grassroots, socialist feminist union that organized unorganized workers in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. It looks at SORWUC's role in Canadian labour history in general, and its efforts to organize unorganized workers in particular, focusing on SORWUC's efforts to organize workers at a pub and a restaurant in British Columbia. The central thesis of this work is that SORWUC's socialist feminist unionism and commitment to organizing unorganized workers positioned the union as radically different from much of the 1970s Canadian labour movement, and that this difference both helped and hindered the union in its efforts to organize the unorganized. By examining SORWUC from this neglected perspective, this thesis ultimately aims to demonstrate SORWUC's importance to the historiography of class and labour organizing in Canada.

When members of the Office and Professional Workers Organizing Committee (opwoc), employed by the Banque Canadienne Nationale (bcn), set up picket lines at branches in Montreal on 30 April 1942, they began the first strike in the Canadian banking industry. This article analyzes the four-week strike, and the organizing drive that preceded it, as a way of exploring how changes in the relationship between labour, capital, and the state during the Second World War helped or hindered unionization in unorganized industries – areas with limited or non-existent levels of union representation and often predominantly female and racialized workforces. By examining this failed white-collar strike in relation to the substantial increase in labour organizing that occurred in the 1940s and the concomitant changes to the labour relations system, we can consider the effect that these changes had for different types of workers. A closer look at the first Canadian bank strike shows that the changes made to the labour relati...

In this dissertation, I examine union organizing in the Canadian banking industry between 1940 and 1980. By demonstrating that bank workers consistently sought to unionize throughout the twentieth century, I challenge claims that bank employees and other private sector white-collar workers have low rates of unionization because they are not interested in unions or suffer from false consciousness. This research also suggests, however, that many bank workers saw themselves as different from blue-collar industrial workers; the lived reality of bank work as precarious, poorly paid, and rife with gender inequality intersected with ideas about professionalism and aspirations of advancing up the career ladder. Banks, unions, and workers drew on these ideas and experiences in their arguments for and against unionization. I also look at why previous organizing efforts did not establish a strong union presence in the banking industry. Most of these attempts failed, I argue, due to several key issues, including the banks’ anti-union activity, federal and provincial labour board decisions, and labour movement disputes over ideology, jurisdiction, and strategy. The banks consistently opposed unionization and used a variety of tactics to thwart union organizing, both overtly and covertly. The state, in the form of labour legislation and labour boards, provided unions and workers with some means by which to compel the banks to recognize unions, negotiate contracts, and deal with employee grievances; however, state action and inaction more often worked to undermine union organizing. The attitudes and strategies of high-ranking labour movement officials also shaped the outcome of union drives in the banks. Between 1940 and 1980, the mostly male labour leadership repeatedly used top-down organizing strategies and appointed male organizers with no experience of bank work to oversee union drives in a sector with an increasingly feminized workforce; labour leaders’ inability or unwillingness to reflect on this approach and to support grassroots campaigns and alternative strategies hindered bank union organizing. I thus highlight the intersection of gender and class and reveal how these factors have historically shaped the labour movement bureaucracy, union organizing, and the relationship between labour and the state. Author Keywords: banks, gender, labour bureaucracy, trade unions, union organizing, white-collar workers.

This article examines the efforts of feminist unions to organize childcare workers in 1970s Vancouver, British Columbia, and highlights the entrenched opposition to union organizing by women considered to be “just babysitters.” These workers’ efforts challenged the “love-versus-money” divide that hampered women’s organizing efforts in the care sector. Vancouver childcare workers, working in alliance with parents, insisted on the public importance of their traditionally private work. In doing so, they connected their fight for better working conditions with the fight for universal childcare. They linked women’s struggles in the workplace to calls for the redistribution of society’s caregiving responsibilities away from families and the market and toward the state. Government intransigence prevented meaningful childcare policy reform, but workers’ efforts highlighted a key moment in Vancouver’s feminist and labor history when the fair treatment of care workers was linked to the liberation of all women.

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canadaand the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts fromthe1940s to the1970s.Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentationof the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants,but the legacyof earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.

This article uses a case study of a highly publicized 1970 controversy over Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ flight attendant uniforms—specifically, a switch from mini to midi skirt—as a case study in business-labor relations concerning the regulation of women workers’ bodily appearance. Using company and union records and employing a historical, materialist, and feminist analysis, we trace how notions of aesthetic and emotional labor changed over time in relation to the political economy, gender ideologies, and the agency of workers themselves. The flight attendants’ reluctance to challenge the airline’s sexist advertising indicated how both accommodation and resistance were intertwined in complex ways in the workplace. Their acceptance of more “thigh in the sky” had much to do with a highly regulated and disciplined workplace, an entrenched division of labor on the airplane, and gendered notions of beauty and glamour in the industry, including women’s strategic use of beauty on the job to their own advantage.

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30-year period. Taking a historical, materialist-feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.

Provides an illustrated overview of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and its significance today for working-class organizations and socialism. Contents: Introduction: Revisiting the workers' revolt in Winnipeg / Sean Carleton and Julia Smith (p. 23) -- 1919: Recovering a a legacy / Bryan D. Palmer (pp. 24 - 31, 40) [https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/1919-recovering-a-legacy] -- 1919: A graphic history of the Winnipeg General Strike [reproduction of the cover and illustrations from the book by the Graphic History Collective and David Lester] (pp. 32, 36-37) --  Red flags: Reflections on racism and radicalism / Owen Yoews (pp. 33-35, 40) [https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/red-flags-reflections-on-racism-and-radicalism] -- From 1919 to the fight for $15: Working-class organizing in Winnipeg today / Emily Leedham (pp. 38-30) [https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/from-1919-to-the-fight-for-15-working-class-organizing-in-winnipeg-today].

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America’s leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer’s work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures. Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer’s contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer’s career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer’s participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer’s politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith -- Part I. Labour. Bryan D. Palmer, Labour historian / Alvin Finkel -- Bryan D. Palmer, social historian / Ted McCoy -- Labour history’s present: An account of Labour/Le Travail under Bryan D. Palmer / Kirk Niergarth. Part 2. Experience, discourse, class. Bryan D. Palmer and E. P. Thompson / Nicholas Rogers -- On polemics and provocations: Bryan D. Palmer vs. liberal anti-Marxists / Chad Pearson -- Bryan Douglas Palmer, Edward Palmer Thompson, John le Carré (and me): Workers, spies, and spying, past and present / Gregory S. Kealey. Part 3. Politics. Palmer’s politics: Discovering the past and the future of class struggle / Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin -- The hippopotamus and the giraffe: Bolshevism, Stalinism, and American and British Communism in the 1920s / John McIlroy and Alan Campbell -- The June days of 2013 in Brazil and the persistence of top-down histories / Sean Purdy -- Old positions/new directions: Strategies for rebuilding Canadian working-class history / Sean Carleton and Julia Smith -- Afterword: Rude awakenings / Bryan D. Palmer -- Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer -- List of contributors.