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Finding affordable, quality child care is a challenge for many Canadian families. In some areas of British Columbia, expectant mothers place their children on daycare waiting lists months before they are born. Yet, despite the demand, recent efforts to achieve a universal child care program have stalled. As Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma demonstrates, this is nothing new: child care policy in British Columbia has matured in the shadow of a persistent political uneasiness with working motherhood. Charting the growth of the child care movement in this province, Lisa Pasolli examines the arrival of Vancouver’s first crèche in 1912, the teetering steps forward during the debates of the interwar years, the development of child care policy, the rebellious advancements of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, and the maturation of provincial and national child care politics since the mid-70s. In addition to revealing much about historical attitudes toward women’s roles at home and in the workplace, Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma celebrates the efforts of mothers and advocates who, for decades, have lobbied for child care as a central part of women’s rights as workers, parents, and citizens.... --Publisher's description

This book informs debates about worker participation in the workplace or worker voice by analysing comparative historical data relating to these ideas during the inter-war period in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. The issue is topical because of the contemporary shift to a workplace focus in many countries without a corresponding development of infrastructure at the workplace level, and because of the growing ‘representation gap’ as union membership declines. Some commentators have called for the introduction of works councils to address these issues. Other scholars have gone back and examined the experiences with the non-union Employee Representation Plans (ERPs) in Canada and the US. This book will test these claims through examining and comparing the historical record of previous efforts of five countries during a rich period of experimentation between the Wars. --Publisher's description.

The third edition of Social Determinants of Health focuses on the socio-economic conditions that shape the health of individuals and communities. This edited collection includes contributions from top academics and high-profile experts from across the country. The chapters take a public policy approach that sees the mainsprings of health emerging from the social distribution of resources. The collection as a whole integrates insights from the health sciences, the sociology of health, and the political economy of health. This revised edition has been well updated and includes a greater focus on the political pathways and mechanisms that explain how the social determinants of health come to be distributed amongst the population; early childhood development in Canada in relation to other developed nations; Indigenous health and its determinants; public policy and the social safety net; and the growing network of civil society organizations addressing the inequitable distribution of the social determinants of health. --Publisher's description

Driven from their homes in Russia, Poland, and Romania by pogroms and poverty, many Jews who came to Canada in the wave of immigration after the 1905 Russian revolution were committed radicals. A Future Without Hate or Need brings to life the rich and multi-layered lives of a dissident political community, their shared experiences and community-building cultural projects, as they attempted to weave together their ethnic particularity—their identity as Jews—with their internationalist class politics.--Publisher's description

Since the 1980s, the world’s working class has been under continual assault by the forces of neoliberalism and imperialism. In response, new labor movements have emerged across the Global South—from Brazil and South Africa to Indonesia and Pakistan.Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization is a call for international solidarity to resist the assaults on labor’s power. This collection of essays by international labor activists and academics examines models of worker solidarity, different forms of labor organizations, and those models’ and organizations’ relationships to social movements and civil society. --Publisher's description.

This book investigates the labour history of a people who have not been involved in the twentieth-century labour movement in large numbers: North American Mennonites. It explores their historically-constructed attitudes toward organized labour and unions, which it attempts to understand on its own terms. Although Mennonites are typically associated with rural life, they in fact became very involved as workers in specific locations in both traditional Mennonite enclaves in Ohio, Indiana, Ontario, and Manitoba, and those to which they migrated in the twentieth century, such as British Columbia and California. Mennonites in these locales found employment both as field workers for large agri-business operations (for example, the orchards and packing plants of the San Joaquin Valley in California) and as factory hands in manufacturing firms (such as the automotive factories in southern Ontario). The late twentieth century experiences of North American Mennonites in these settings caused them to confront and reassess their attitudes toward unions. A study of these Mennonites--united by transnational ties of ethnic and religious identity yet shaped, at times, in distinct ways by their differing geographic locations, immigration histories and ethnic origins, denominational ties, and class positions--provides insights into how and why the majority of North American Mennonites have rejected labour unions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The oral histories of the 113 Mennonites interviewed provide insight into why many working North Americans are not union supporters, and how people in general negotiate tensions between their commitments to faith and conscience and the demands of their employment. An important aim of the book is to bring labour historians and historians of religion into conversation. --Publisher's description

For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos from the town of Asbestos, Quebec, to produce fire-retardant products. Then, over time, people learned about the mineral's devastating effects on human health. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community's survival, the residents of Asbestos developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local/global tensions that defined Asbestos's proud and painful history to reveal the challenges similar resource communities have faced--and continue to face today. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Foreword: the long dying / Graeme Wynn -- Introduction: introducing Asbestos -- Creation stories: Asbestos before 1918 -- Land with a future, not a past, 1918-49 -- Negotiating risk, 1918-49 -- Essential characteristics, 1918-49 -- Bodies collide: the strike of 1949 -- "Une ville qui se deplace," 1949-83 -- Useful tools, 1949-83 -- Altered authority, 1949-83 -- Conclusion: surviving collapse: Asbestos post-1983.

“Building The Power” is a fascinating look into the history of LiUNA Local 1611, documenting the dramatic events and accomplishments of its members since 1937, written by Local 1611’s Strategic Researcher and labour activist Mark Warrior. In 1953, Stacey Warner, while organizing pipeline workers, was threatened with a shotgun by a company thug hired for the sole purpose of intimidation. The police did not take notice. In 1981, the Labour Relations Board ignored the fact that the employer offered union member a $1,000 bribe to change his vote—right at the Labour Relations Board office—when LiUNA Local 1070 was attempting to certify his bargaining unit. Ignoring naked violence had been replaced by ignoring blatant lawbreaking. But the result was not the same. Warner succeeded in organizing the workers. These are examples of the conflict and often dangerous scenarios those in the Labour Movement have faced in their effort to secure workers’ right and fair working wages and safe working conditions. --Website description

Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring escaped slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, many Loyalist families brought slaves with them when they settled in the Maritime colonies of British North America. Once there, slaves used their traditions of survival, resistance, and kinship networks to negotiate their new reality. Harvey Amani Whitfield’s book, the first on slavery in the Maritimes, is a startling corrective to the enduring and triumphant narrative of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad. --Publisher's description

The winter of 1932-33 saw the small interior town of Princeton, BC divided. Charges of outside agitators and charges by mounted provincial police into picket lines of workers, Ku Klux Klan threats and a beating and cross-burning, the kidnapping of legendary labour organizer Slim Evans who was bundled onto the next train out of town (though he returned soon enough) — Princeton's few thousand citizens saw much of the human drama of the Great Depression play out right in their own lives over the course of just a few months. A ten percent paycut, in the depths of the Depression, galvanized the miners working Princeton's three coalmines into unionizing, and they brought in Arthur "Slim" Evans from the Workers Unity League to help them. Meanwhile, north of town, one of the federal government's Relief Camps had opened up, and soon Canadian Labour Defence League organizers were at work there. "Outside agitators" became the by-word as the town's merchants and propertied establishment rallied around the cause — to defeat the "Communist menace" that threatened the prospects of their little town. They were given voice by the colourful local paper the Princeton Star, whose archives provide the source material for much of Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat's engrossing history. Soviet Princeton provides an interesting sidebar as well to Canadian left-labour history, as two years later, one of the main actors in the Princeton drama, Slim Evans, led the On-to-Ottawa Trek of homeless and unemployed protesting the relief camps and their conditions. --Publisher's description

An account of the women working in high-security, dangerous conditions making bombs in Toronto during the Second World War. What was it like to work in a Canadian Second World War munitions factory? What were working conditions like? Did anyone die? Just how closely did female employees embody the image of “Rosie the Riveter” so popularly advertised to promote factory work in war propaganda posters? How closely does the recent TV show, Bomb Girls, resemble the actual historical record of the day-to-day lives of bomb-making employees? Bomb Girls delivers a dramatic, personal, and detailed review of Canada’s largest fuse-filling munitions factory, situated in Scarborough, Ontario. First-hand accounts, technical records, photographic evidence, business documentation, and site maps all come together to offer a rare, complete account into the lives of over twenty-one thousand brave men and women who risked their lives daily while handling high explosives in a dedicated effort to help win the war. -- Publisher's description

[E]xplores the dynamic political movement that came out of the largest labour protest in Canadian history and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Few have studied the political Left at the municipal level—even though it is at this grassroots level that many people participate in political activity. Winnipeg was a deeply divided city. On one side, the conservative political descendants of the General Strike’s Citizen’s Committee of 1000 advocated for minimal government and low taxes. On the other side were the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Canada, two parties rooted in the city’s working class, though often in conflict with each other. The political strength of the Left would ebb and flow throughout the 1920s and 1930s but peaked in the mid-1930s when the ILP’s John Queen became mayor and the two parties on the Left combined to hold a majority of council seats. Astonishingly, Winnipeg was governed by a mayor who had served jail time for his role in the General Strike. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- The second round --The reign of the furies -- The revolutionary party on the parliamentary map -- A victory for thoseengage in the struggle for better conditions -- For freedom's cause, your bayonet's bright -- A bombshell to many citizens -- Conclusion.

Using Hamilton's local history to tell the wider story of the North American working-class, Lunch-Bucket Lives investigates how workers dealt with the profound changes in their lives between the 1890s and the 1930s, as wage-earners, family members, and participants in various social networks. Heron takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods - settlement patterns and housing, marriage, child care, domestic labour, public health, schooling, charity and social work, popular culture, gender identities, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and politics in various forms - presenting a comprehensive view of working-class life in the first half of the twentieth century. --Publisher's description

Work, Industry and Canadian Society brings to light the social ramifications of work. With a focus on the Canadian workplace, the author team examines how individual, societal, national, and global issues shape this central human activity. In this seventh edition, the text draws upon the growing literature on work and employment, organizations, and management approaches to incorporate recent empirical findings, review new and ongoing theoretical and policy debates, and provide a more international perspective. The authors use their years of experience in research and teaching to compose this comprehensive volume on the past, present and future of work in Canada. --Publisher's description

This fifth volume of the History of the Prairie West Series contains a broad range of articles spanning the 1870s to the present and examines the mostly unexplored place of women in the history of the Canada's Prairie Provinces. From "Spinsters Need Not Apply" to "Negotiating Sex: Gender in the Ukrainian Bloc Settlement," women’s roles in politics, law, agriculture, labour, and journalism are explored to reveal a complex portrait of women struggling to find safety, have careers, raise children, and be themselves in an often harsh environment.

Indigenous North Americans continue to be overrepresented among those who are poor, unemployed, and with low levels of education. This has long been an issue of concern for Indigenous people and their allies and is now drawing the attention of government, business leaders, and others who know that this fast-growing population is a critical source of future labour. Shauna MacKinnon's Decolonizing Employment: Aboriginal Inclusion in Canada's Labour Market is a case study with lessons applicable to communities throughout North America. Her examination of Aboriginal labour market participation outlines the deeply damaging, intergenerational effects of colonial policies and describes how a neoliberal political economy serves to further exclude Indigenous North Americans. MacKinnon's work demonstrates that a fundamental shift in policy is required. Long-term financial support for comprehensive, holistic education and training programs that integrate cultural reclamation and small supportive learning environments is needed if we are to improve social and economic outcomes and support the spiritual and emotional healing that Aboriginal learners tell us is of primary importance. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- Social exclusion, poverty, inequality, and policy in the neo-liberal age -- The labour market, policy, and Canada's aboriginal population -- The Manitoba labour force and the policy environment -- Decolonization: confronting the elephant in the room -- Assessing the impact of neo-liberal training policy -- A continuum of training responses -- Voices from the front lines -- Lessons learned: implications for policy -- Conclusion. Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-204) and index.

The Working Centre in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, is a widely recognized and successful model for community development. Begun from scratch in 1982, it is now a vast network of practical supports for the unemployed, the underemployed, the temporarily employed, and the homeless, populations that collectively constitute up to 30 percent of the labour market both locally and across North America. Transition to Common Work is the essential text about The Working Centre--its beginnings thirty years ago, the lessons learned, and the myriad ways in which its strategies and innovations can be adapted by those who share its goals. The Working Centre focuses on creating access-to-tools projects rather than administrative layers of bureaucracy. This book highlights the core philosophy behind the centre's decentralized but integrated structure, which has contributed to the creation of affordable services. Underlying this approach are common-sense innovations such as thinking about virtues rather than values, developing community tools with a social enterprise approach, and implementing a radically equal salary policy. For social workers, activists, bureaucrats, and engaged citizens in third-sector organizations (NGOs, charities, not-for-profits, co-operatives), this practical and inspiring book provides a method for moving beyond the doldrums of "poverty relief" into the exciting world of community building. --Publisher's website. Contents: Part 1: The Working Centre takes root -- Introduction: beyond us and them -- Building community: the Working Centre's roots -- Liberation from overdevelopment -- Part 2: Community engagement -- The Virtues -- St. John's Kitchen: redistribution through cooperation -- Searching for work at the Help Centre -- The nuts and bolts of an alternative organization -- Part 3: Toward a philosophy of work -- Ethical imagination: the Working Centre's approach to salaries -- Community tools -- Small is beautiful: re-embedding reciprocal relationships in daily work -- Conclusion: transition to common work -- Map of the Working Centre buildings and projects -- Map of the Working Centre locations in downtown Kitchener -- A thirty-year chronology of the Working Centre -- People of the Working Centre.

Global warming is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the twenty-first century. Environmental polices on the one hand, and economic and labour market polices on the other, often exist in separate silos creating a dilemma that Work in a Warming World confronts. The world of work - goods, services, and resources - produces most of the greenhouse gases created by human activity. In engaging essays, contributors demonstrate how the world of work and the labour movement need to become involved in the struggle to slow global warming, and the ways in which environmental and economic policies need to be linked dynamically in order to effect positive change. Addressing the dichotomy of competing public policies in a Canadian context, Work in a Warming World presents ways of creating an effective response to global warming and key building blocks toward a national climate strategy. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction / Stephen McBride and Carla Lipsig-Mummé -- International constraints on green strategies : Ontario's WTO defeat and public sector remedies / Scott Sinclair and Stuart Trew -- Unions and climate change in Europe : the contrasting experience of Germany and the UK / John Calvert -- Gendered emissions : counting greenhouse gas emissions by gender and why it matters / Marjorie Griffin Cohen -- Canadian labour's climate dilemma / Geoffrey Bickerton and Carla Lipsig-Mummé -- Renewable energy development as industrial strategy / Mark Winfield -- (Re)building sustainable infrastructure : implications for engineers / Kean Birch and Dalton Wudrich -- Construction and climate change : overcoming roadblocks to achieving green workplace competencies / John Calvert -- Labour and the greening of hospitality : raising standards or union greenwashing? / Steven Tufts and Simon Milne -- Cities, climate change, and the green economy / Stephen McBride, John Shields, and Stephanie Tombari -- Renewable energy, sustainable jobs : the case of the Kingston, Ontario Region / Andrea Megan MacCallum, Lindsay Napier, John Holmes, and Warren Edward Mabee.

It is commonplace today to suggest that gender is socially constructed, that the roles women and men fulfill in their daily lives have been created and defined for them by society and social institutions. But how have men and women negotiated and navigated the gender roles that have been thrust upon them? With Gendered Pasts, Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell have collected eleven engaging essays that seek to answer this question in a wide-ranging exploration of specific gendered dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian history.The contributors cover all manner of topics related to gender and history across Canada, including: female vagrancy; gambling, drinking, and sex; the role of the miner's wife; the portrayal of gay men; and the sharply defined role of nurses. Unusual in its breadth, Gendered Pasts is essential to the understanding of the various threads and themes in Canadian gender history. Previously published by Oxford University Press, . --Publisher's description

“The Dignity of Every Human Being” studies the vibrant New Brunswick artistic community which challenged “the tyranny of the Group of Seven” with socially-engaged realism in the 1930s and 40s. Using extensive archival and documentary research, Kirk Niergarth follows the work of regional artists such as Jack Humphrey and Miller Brittain, writers such as P.K. Page, and crafts workers such as Kjeld and Erica Deichmann. The book charts the rise and fall of “social modernism” in the Maritimes and the style’s deep engagement with the social and economic issues of the Great Depression and the Popular Front. Connecting local, national, and international cultural developments, Niergarth’s study documents the attempts of Depression-era artists to question conventional ideas about the nature of art, the social function of artists, and the institutions of Canadian culture. “The Dignity of Every Human Being” records an important and previously unexplored moment in Canadian cultural history. --Publisher's description