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The dominant representation of domestic work in the literature is quite negative, with uncaring employers, sexual, verbal, and physical abuse, and underpaid and overworked employees. However, the interviews conducted for this micro-study present an intriguingly different image. Young, immigrant Mennonite women who had come to Canada during the Second World War moved during the post-war period from their rural homes in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, into the city of Vancouver. There, they were employed in domestic work and spent Thursday afternoons at the Maedchenheim, or girls’ home, with their peers. This thesis examines the disconnect between their accounts of domestic work and those of other domestics, with particular attention to how ethnoreligious understandings of gender, community, and survival informed my narrators’ memories and retellings of their experiences. It also explores whether the shift from a rural to an urban environment changed these women’s perceptions of their gender identity.

This dissertation traces a shift in the Communist Party of Canada, from the 1929 to 1935 period of militant class struggle (generally known as the ‘Third Period’) to the 1935-1939 Popular Front Against Fascism, a period in which Communists argued for unity and cooperation with social democrats. The CPC’s appropriation and redeployment of bourgeois gender norms facilitated this shift by bolstering the CPC’s claims to political authority and legitimacy. ‘Woman’ and the gendered interests associated with women—such as peace and prices—became important in the CPC’s war against capitalism. What women represented symbolically, more than who and what women were themselves, became a key element of CPC politics in the Depression decade. Through a close examination of the cultural work of two prominent middle-class female members, Dorothy Livesay, poet, journalist and sometime organizer, and Eugenia (‘Jean’ or ‘Jim’) Watts, reporter, founder of the Theatre of Action, and patron of the Popular Front magazine New Frontier, this thesis utilizes the insights of queer theory, notably those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, not only to reconstruct both the background and consequences of the CPC’s construction of ‘woman’ in the 1930s, but also to explore the significance of the CPC’s strategic deployment of heteronormative ideas and ideals for these two prominent members of the Party.

From the late 19th to the late 20th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. As asbestos was used more and more in building materials and household appliances, its harmful effect on human health, such as asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, became apparent. The dangers surrounding the mineral led to the collapse of the industry in the 1980s. While the market demand and medical rejection of asbestos were international, they were also experienced in the mining and processing communities at the core of the global industry. In the town of Asbestos, Quebec, home of the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world, we can see how this process of market boom and bust shaped a fierce local cultural identity. This dissertation examines the global asbestos industry from a local perspective, showing how the people of Asbestos, Quebec had international reach through the work they did and the industry they continue to support today. This thesis explores how the boundaries between humans and the environment were blurred in Asbestos as a strong cultural identity was created through the interaction between people and the natural world. This work advances our understanding of the interdependence of the local-global relationship between resource industries and international trade networks, illustrating the ways it shapes communities and how communities shape it. Bringing bodies of land, human bodies, and the body politic of Asbestos, Quebec into the history of the global asbestos trade helps demonstrate how this local cultural identity grew to influence national policy and global debates on commodity flows, occupational health, and environmental justice.

Since well before the official endorsement of "peace, order and good government" in the British North America Act of 1867, Canada has understood itself as a peace keeping and socially-progressive collective. Both before and after the BNA Act, Canadian poets critiqued as well as celebrated this persistent national mythology, offering their poetry as social commentary and as impetus to change. This thesis considers the shifting understanding of the role of Canadian poets in shaping the nation and in establishing social justice. After tracing a history of theoretical understandings of social justice with specific attention to the arrival and evolution of such theory within Canada, the thesis reads poetry from before Confederation to the end of the Second World War in relation to its political and social moment. The first chapter investigates Canadian poetry from its beginnings to 1900, and through consideration of the poems of Alexander McLachlan, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Archibald Lampman, among others, charts the persistent concern with what the historian Ian McKay calls "imagining otherwise;" that is, the desire to discover in Canada a place with the potential to envision alternatives, free from the hierarchies and injustices of the old world. These poets use the space of their work to reimagine labour and to explore the benefits of cooperation, and they persistently return to the role of the poet in crafting the just state they imagine. The second chapter turns to the Canadian modernist understanding of literary inheritance and re-creation Through a focus on F.R. Scott, the chapter considers the nation's artistic response to the Depression, as well as the influence of America's Federal One program, which extended employment to the nation's artists. The third chapter investigates modernist collectives in greater detail, reading the artistic and critical output of such artistic collaborations as Masses, Contemporary Verse, Preview and First Statement as challenges to the Canadian definition of artistic responsibility. Across the time periods considered, this thesis investigates ways in which poets balance idealism and pragmatism, commitments of form and content, and concern for the welfare of the individual and the wellbeing of the collective.

Competitive pressure and desire for success drive enterprises in general to involve in knowledge acquisition and dissemination activities that are becoming increasingly significant in the rapid changing and globalising economic world. In addition, with the increased mobility of information and the global labour force, knowledge and experience can be transferred instantaneously around the globe; thus, any advantage gained by one company can be eliminated by comparative improvements overnight. Therefore, the only comparative advantage a particular company will face will be its process of innovation – combining market and technology know-how with the resourceful talents of knowledgeable labour to solve a constant stream of competitive problems- and its ability to derive value from information. In this context, internal and external knowledge acquisition, intra-firm knowledge dissemination and management decisions taken in response to the significant information generated and subsequently filtered became the key factors of entrepreneurial success. This thesis explores how market orientation, learning orientation and entrepreneurial orientation systematically contribute to and are sources of competitive advantage in growth-oriented SMEs. The objective of this study was to investigate the likelihood of a growth-oriented enterprise established in Atlantic Canada to be involved in knowledge acquisition and dissemination activities and to succeed conditional on numerous internal and external factors. A ‘mixed-methods’ research approach was used in this study, comprised of: 1) a web-based questionnaire to study the knowledge management process and other aspects of entrepreneurial success and 2) ‘semi-structured’ interviews with a sample of the responding entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that knowledge management practices: external acquisition, intra-firm dissemination and responsiveness, do vary across the levels of entrepreneurial performance among the Atlantic Canadian SMEs investigated in the study. Having a market orientation and investing in human resources of the firm were found to be critical drivers of innovation leading to potential competitive advantage.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of wooden sailing vessels became the single most important employer in Québec City. Thousands of people worked as shipwrights in the shipbuilding industry, but ship carpenters were the backbone of the trade. These workers displayed an extraordinary capacity for mobilization, being responsible for some of Canada's earliest labour organizations, starting in 1840 with the Société amicale et bienveillante des charpentiers de vaisseaux de Québec. This study demonstrates that ship carpenters' impressive capacity for organization was the result of the trade's remarkable ethnic homogeneity, as no less than 90% of ship carpenters were French Canadian, and most lived together in the working class suburb of Saint Roch. This homogeneity allowed ship carpenters to avoid the bitter internecine conflict that plagued the early labour movement, and allowed them to become part of the vanguard of the Canadian working class.

Historians who have examined the BC socialist and labour movement have generally overlooked the First World War period, assuming that the left uniformly opposed the war. In reality, close attention to archival sources and newspapers has revealed that the war created a crisis of commitment for BC leftists between their commitment to socialist internationalism and thus opposition to the war, and their support for the British Empire and the war it was engaged in. Eventually, the need for socialist internationalism to protect ethnic Canadian socialists led the BC Federation of Labour to elect a new anti-war leadership coalition. This coalition built several new organizations, including the Federated Labour Party and the One Big Union, as well as led the general strikes in Vancouver and Winnipeg in 1918 and 1919. This study is the first to demonstrate the central importance of socialist internationalism to the success of the post-war left.

This study examines the changing mentalité as well as the shifting accumulation and political strategies of Canada's big bourgeoisie during the transformative period from 1917 to 1947. Engaging literatures from a range of disciplines and subfields within history, the study pursues biographical case studies of five leading business and political figures from different regions and associated with different sectors of the economy. The group includes Howard P. Robinson (1874-1950), Charles Dunning (1885-1958), Sir Edward Beatty (1877-1943), Sam McLaughlin (1871-1972), and C.D. Howe (1886- 1960). In an era when American investment surpassed British investment for the first time and created a new dependency for the country's economic elite, the crisis of the old political economy of the National Policy period became apparent as business leaders and institutions struggled to maintain their economic and political power. This challenge became more pronounced with the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of social democratic and socialist alternatives, including a strong labour movement. For members of the economic elite whose residual worldview was associated with finance capital, compromise on key issues was difficult and some members questioned the efficacy of democratic governance in a time of economic crisis, but the eventual political defeat of this response cleared the way for ideological and political adjustments. The tendency of the scholarly literature to focus on the themes of economic dependency and political continuity in this period has concealed the more complex story told in this study: of finance capital's political failure and the eventual triumph of a form of managerial capitalism that accepted government intervention without ceding ideological ground.

In nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ontario, dairywomen toiled daily with cows and manure, sour milk and greasy butter, yet without improved apparatus, agricultural education, or male support. On the provincial family farm, milking, cream-separating, and butter-making chores included various time-consuming steps, physical labour, and an array of task-specific objects. This thesis analyses agriculture, and dairying in specific, as it began the transition from traditional to industrial, and consequently from female to male. -- This dissertation touches on particular topics relevant to farmwomen's labour, including: agricultural education and improvement through science; public debate and perception surrounding gendered work; the government's role in promoting industrialization and thus defeminization; the concept of the dairyqueen in technological advertising; and, in particular, real farmwomen. These dairying 'sisters' include the well known, like Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, Laura Rose, and Eliza Jones, and the unknown, such as Mary Newsam and the Hallen sisters, while focusing on Lamira Billings and her daughters Sabra and Sally. -- This qualitative study reveals that by employing common dairy tools as a dominant, primary source, there are alternative perspectives from which to consider rural women's experiences. Analysis of material culture objects, like milking stools and pails, butter bowls and scotch hands, shallow separating pans and tin creamer cans, also allows for exploration of the tensions between projected male ideals and tangible female work - a question central to understanding gender and labour within a social history context. In addition to technologies, sources like The Farmer's Advocate, the photographs of Reuben Sallows, and early dairy advertisements, add to our understanding of the concerns surrounding dairywomen's labour during the period discussed. -- Historians have suggested that dairy work was removed from the female sphere before the turn of the twentieth century in Ontario. Male agriculture authorities, scientific experts, and government officials, indeed initiated a conscious devaluation of farmwomen's work, oriented toward the defeminization of dairying. Rather than being removed from dairy work, however, Ontario's farmwomen continued separating cream and making butter between 1813 and 1914, habitually and simply equipped with their two hands, their mother's knowledge, and their grandmother's tools.

Since the late nineteenth century, clerical work has transformed from a small cluster of respected occupations dominated by men to a rapidly changing group of occupations 90 percent of which are held by women. Due to bureaucratization and the feminization of clerical work, clerical jobs are assumed to be routinized and simple, and clerical workers deemed easily replaceable. With further changes to the occupation caused by technology and globalization, clerical workers today have become increasingly vulnerable to unemployment, precarious employment and underemployment. In this research, an Ontario-wide survey with approximately 1200 respondents (including 120 clerical workers) and in-depth interviews with 23 Toronto clerical workers were combined to explore the employment situation of Ontario clerical workers. It is apparent that clerical workers are underemployed along all measured conventional dimensions of underemployment, including credential, performance and subjective as well as work permanence, salary levels and job opportunities. Relational practice is a largely unexamined aspect of clerical work that is often essentialized as a female trait and seldom recognized as skilled practice. In this dissertation, I argue that relational practice is critical to the successful performance of clerical roles and that relational practices are not innate but rather learned skills. I explore some ways in which clerical workers acquire these skills. I conclude by noting that recognizing and valuing relational skills will make the value of clerical workers more apparent to their employers, potentially reducing for clerical workers both their subjective sense of underemployment and their vulnerability to job loss.

Considering the increasing levels of unemployment and underemployment, and the limited evidence concerning the impact of underemployment on health, my study examines the relations between subjective, objective, and time-related underemployment and employees’ health-related quality of life, as manifested through self-rated health, activity limitations and work-related stress. The study compares an expanded model of work-health relations that, along with the factors addressed by control-demand, and social capital theories, includes characteristics of the physical work environment, and employees’ economic class. In addition to the commonly examined factors related to employment and health (control-demand and social capital), my study explores the impact of the work environment (hazards, discomfort and physical demands) and economic class to determine the specific effects of underemployment on an employee’s health-related quality of life. My main argument is that underemployment, in conjunction with lower economic class, higher exposure to a harmful work environment, lack of control over work, and lower social capital, contributes to increased work-related stress and diminishes health-related quality of life. The study applies a mixed methodological approach based on data from the Canadian Work and Lifelong Learning Survey and the US General Social Survey, and qualitative analysis of interviews from the Ontario Survey on Education-Job Requirements Matching. Evidence based on cross-sectional and qualitative data analysis provides consistent findings and confirms the main assumption that high levels of underemployment have a significant effect on employees’ health-related quality of life. The study shows that employees’ economic class, characteristics of work environment and control over work carry the highest associations with health-related quality of life, while underemployment has a significant additive association with health-related quality of life, most importantly with work-related stress.

A fire in Salem, Mass., in 1914 and an explosion in Halifax, N.S., in 1917 provide an opportunity to explore working-class institutions and organizations in the United States-Canada borderlands. In a historical moment in which the state greatly expanded its responsibility to give protection and rescue to its citizens, after these two disasters ordinary survivors preferred to depend on their friends, neighbors, and family members. This dissertation examines which institutions--including formal organizations like unions and fraternal societies as well as informal groups like families and neighborhoods--were most relevant and useful to working-class survivors. Families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Those traditions were put to unusual purposes and extreme stress when the disasters happened. They were also challenged by new agents of the state, who were given extraordinary powers in the wake of the disasters. This dissertation describes how the working-class people who most directly experienced the disasters understood them and their cities starkly differently than the professionalized relief authorities. Using a wide array of sources--including government documents, published accounts, archived ephemeral, oral histories, photographs, newspapers in two languages, and the case files of the Halifax Relief Commission--the dissertation describes how elites imposed a progressive state on what they imagined to be a fractured and chaotic social landscape. It argues that "the people" for whom reformers claimed to speak had their own durable, alternative modes of support and rescue that they quickly and effectively mobilized in times of crisis, but which remained illegible to elites. By demonstrating the personal, ideological, political, and practical ties between New England and Nova Scotia and Quebec, it also emphasizes the importance of studying American and Canadian history together, not only comparatively but as a transnational, North American whole.

Vancouver’s early twentieth century mainstream newspapers captured a feminine culture of the young woman worker caught in a moral paradox of naïveté and willing impropriety. Through images and narratives, the tumultuous social and economic changes of the day were rendered “class-based girl problems.” By contrast, radical labour newspapers represented women workers as “rebel girls” and valiant helpmates to the working class movement. This examination of images and narratives prompts consideration of how these class and gender discourses influenced real women workers. In particular, the telephone operators’ activism during Vancouver’s 1919 sympathetic strike demonstrates how women workers re-created discourses of class and gender in ways that brought greater control and meaning to their lives. While early twentieth century newspapers framed contemporary discourses of class and gender through images and narratives, they were unable to capture the resonance and pertinence of these discourses to the everyday lives of working women.