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It is argued that Canada's leading primary steelmakers supported the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Canada and the US because of their belief that steel markets were increasingly continental and because of their ideological adherence to the neoconservative agenda of corporate business and the Federal Progressive Conservative government. Steelworkers and their union, the United Steelworkers of America, opposed the FTA because of the loss of jobs that would ensue with its implementation and because of its larger "right wing" economic and political direction. While, to this point, it is difficult to differentiate the specific impact of the FTA from factors associated with industrial restructuring in the steel industry as a whole, the FTA is increasingly the central economic and political factor in the deepening crisis of the steel industry in Canada. The rationale for the steel industry's backing of the free trade initiative lay mainly in the economic benefits which owners and top-level managers believed would accrue to their companies.

The advent of a modern workmen’s compensation system in Ontario in the mid-1910s was a moment of significant gain for injured workers. With the passage of the 1915 Workmen’s Compensation Act (WCA), injured workers would no longer have to rely on an uncertain, even hostile, judge and jury system to receive some form of compensation from their employers. The WCA was, however, a gendered, i.e., discriminatory, statute. As the paper outlines, the 1915 WCA statutorily enshrined the assumptions of the day that women’s paid work was of less value than that of men’s. The situation remained uncontested until the 1970s, when a vibrant and politically influential injured workers’ movement (IWM) emerged and, in small but important ways, began to challenge the gendered and racialized dimensions of the worker’s compensation system. As it happened, the victories secured at this juncture by the IWM that impacted on women – both as injured workers and as wives, mothers, and widows of injured workers – proved to be more symbolic than material. For while a 1982 change in the name from “Workmen’s” to “Workers Compensation Act” was symbolic of a formally gender neutral statute (continued with the passage of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act in 1997), women workers injured over the past two decades report that their claims are being processed by WCB officials who downplay the severity and the legitimacy of their injuries, on the one hand, and who circumscribe rehabilitation and job training programs with gendered notions that their jobs are secondary in importance to that of male members of their households, on the other hand. No longer totally ignored, injured women workers now confront a neo-liberal, increasingly welfarized workers’ compensation system whose formal gender neutrality does not address entrenched labour market inequalities or the regulatory and processual discrepancies between laws and their application.

The article reviews the book, "Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal," by Sanford M. Jacoby.

This paper centres on the struggles over job ownership between labour and management that have been integral to the shaping and reshaping of the Canadian steel industry over the course of the 20th century. In the first phase of industry development (1900-1940s), management had virtual control over the structuring of jobs. The second phase (1940s-1970s) saw the arrival of industrial unionism and the establishment of seniority and grievance systems which gave workers employment security and, over time, a sense of job ownership. The third phase (1980s) has been a period of crisis in which steel management in Canada has embarked on a restructuring campaign -- a critical feature of which is their determination to recapture job ownership through the introduction of new technologies, job amalgamations, and the implementation of teams. If steel management succeeds in wresting job ownership back from its workers, the paper concludes, then conditions will return to the pre-union period where management created and destroyed jobs as they desired.

This article examines the contest between the United Steelworkers of America and management at Dominion Foundries and Steel (Dofasco) for the loyalty of Dofasco workers. Situated in the 1930s and 1940s during the rise and consolidation of industrial unionism in Canada, the article traces the development at Dofasco of a corporate welfare, human relations approach to management that effectively challenged and ultimately defeated the drive for unionization. At the same time Dofasco pursued a consistent and oftentimes ruthless policy of dismissing union organizers and activists from within its workforce. Both strategies combined to produce what this paper terms the "Dofasco Way." The centrepiece of the "Dofasco Way" was the successful operation of a profit-sharing Fund. For only the profit-sharing Fund brought together both elements of the "Dofasco Way": loyalty and fear among the workers. Loyalty was created because the Fund provided security. Fear was created through threats to terminate the Fund should the company ever be organized. In the end, however, it was the programmes designed to produce loyalty that led to the Dofasco workers' rejection of unionism.

Assesses the Windsor conference versus the London meeting of the previous year, as well as the meaning of the Windsor conference for blue-collar workers. Concludes that the Windsor conference, with its sessions on industrial conflict and on the past and futue of the Canadian working class, was more firey; and that academic work, including theory, must also be relevant and accessible to workers and their struggles.

The article reviews the book, "Code White: Sounding the Alarm on Violence Against Health Care Workers," by Margaret M. Keith and James T. Brophy.

The article reviews the book, "The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada," by Bob Barnetson.

The article reviews the book, "Biography of an Industrial Town, Terni, Italy, 1831–2014," by Alessandro Portelli.

The article reviews the book, "Dying for Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America," edited by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz.

This paper examines the evolution of industrial unionism in Canada during the 1930s and 1940s through a comparative analysis of events at the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) and Dominion Foundries and Steel (Dofasco).

In the mid-1970's, workers and local union activists at Bendix Automotive in Windsor, Ontario, became aware that the brake shoes they manufactured contained asbestos and that the dust that regularly filled the air in sections of the company's two plants contained asbestos dust. Workers and local United Automobile Workers (UAW) union activists at Bendix pressured the company and the Ontario government to clean up and eliminate asbestos from their workplace. In the midst of this struggle Bendix management announced that, for solely economic reasons, it was closing down its operations in Windsor. The shutdown highlighted the tensions and contradictions confronting workers and unions in the area of health and safety. While Bendix workers wanted their workplace to be safe and healthy, they also needed their jobs. At the same time, local and national union UAW officials, while trying to secure a safe and healthy working environment for their members, confronted the possibility of the plant shutting down if they pushed too hard on asbestos. In the end, the ability of Bendix to close down its operations, with minimal legal and no statutory sanctions, demonstrated the power of corporate capital and the conflicting and constrained nature and extent of workers' choices under capitalism in the arena of worker health and safety.