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This social history traces the English-language Canadian labour press from 1842 to 1900. It focuses on the role labour newspapers played in battling the appalling social conditions of Victorian Canada,and analyzes their successes and failures in trying to improve the lives of working-c1ass Canadians. Although the original theoretical framework called for a survey of the effects of labour journalism on the passage of progressive social legislation, little such legislation appeared on statute books before 1900.The thesis therefore attempts to show how the papers presented social issues in housing, health, welfare, employment,social security and several other key social development areas,through the use of anecdotal evidence and, the critical assessment of the opinions of historians. The underlying theoretical assumption of the thesis was that labour papers would provide a progressive view on all social issues.Although this image did not always prove true, the thesis does unearth evidence of the role of the labour press in the development of a mass working-clas sconsciousness and the creation of a unique working-class culture.The thesis further attempts to show how labour editors of the late 1800s were the pioneers of a radical intellectual and journalistic tradition which found expression in the weekly journals that represented the fledgling Canadian labour movement.
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[E]xamines a Communist union’s struggle to survive in the post-Second World War environment of anti-Communism and anti-trade unionism that marked one of the most violent periods in the history of the Canadian labour movement. In 1943, Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Trail, British Columbia, was nearing the end of a six-year battle for certification as the legal bargaining agent for about 4,000 smelter workers. After it achieved that goal the following year and for the next decade, it faced new battles with the employer, the powerful Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S) with its paternalistic president S.G. Blaylock. The local also faced an array of other opponents: a workforce suspicious of a Red-tainted union with a radical past, a company union that had been established by Blaylock after the First World War, a company-loyal newspaper, and a divided community situated in the rural West Kootenay district near the Canada- United States border. Among the local’s most vigorous adversaries were the local churches, the federal government with its secret service police, and the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL). By the 1950s, it had been purged from the CCL, shunned by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and victimized by cold warriors bent on its destruction. To survive it needed to win the support of a substantially immigrant workforce with a strong alternative culture to the dominant Anglo-Saxon one. It had to address the concerns of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women war workers who had been hired at lower wages to replace enlisted men. And it fell into the middle of an ideological clash between the region’s two dominant left-wing political parties. Its greatest strength and potential weakness was an unabashed Stalinist named Harvey Murphy. He had been a fugitive from justice and was incarcerated in a war-time internment camp as a threat to national security, but he became an influential leader of the provincial labour movement and an outspoken advocate of workers’ rights who was hated by some and respected by others. “Divided Loyalties” begins with a victory, but Local 480’s survival for the duration of the twelve-year period of this study was far from assured.
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Resource type
- Thesis (2)
Publication year
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Between 1900 and 1999
(1)
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Between 1980 and 1989
(1)
- 1984 (1)
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Between 1980 and 1989
(1)
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Between 2000 and 2024
(1)
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Between 2010 and 2019
(1)
- 2017 (1)
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Between 2010 and 2019
(1)