Full bibliography

New Brunswick nursing history is a little-known but significant story, and it helps us to understand women's paid work and how women organized to protect their interests in this occupation. While the profession's history demonstrates the importance of professional ideals, the New Brunswick, case also illuminates the struggle between these ideals and nurses' growing sense of dissatisfaction with wages and working conditions. In the mid-1960s in New Brunswick as elsewhere in Canada, nurses began to explore collective bargaining as a solution to poor wages and conditions and as a means to express concern for deteriorating patient care. This study examines the early stages of unionization among New Brunswick hospital nurses in 1965-1969. The evidence for this study is drawn from archival collections, interviews, newspapers, journals and secondary sources. Particular emphasis is placed on the pioneering efforts of the Social and Economic Welfare Committee (SEWC) of the New Brunswick Association of Registered Nurses (NBARN) and their efforts to educate members, lobby government, obtain outside expert advice and generally guide nurses towards a sense of collective identity that fostered a willingness to take collective action. By the end of the decade, nurses were included in a new Public Service Labour Relations Act, an outcome of the Royal Commission on Employer-Employee Relations in the Public Services (known as the Frankel Commission) which, among other features, greatly expanded the civil service and consequently the number of government employees with collective bargaining rights. Despite the fact that the new PSLRA had not yet been proclaimed, nurses in mid-1969 negotiated their first (if unofficial) collective agreement using the tactic of mass resignation to force a settlement. This thesis places the NBARN's early explorations of collective bargaining in the context of the political, economic and labour landscape of the 1960s.