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Dans un important arrêt rendu en 2007 dans l’affaire Health Services and Support, la Cour suprême du Canada a reconnu pour la première fois que la liberté d’association énoncée à la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés protégeait la «capacité des syndiqués d’engager des négociations collectives sur des problèmes reliés au milieu de travail». Pour conclure ainsi, la Cour trouve appui dans le droit international du travail. Avec cette décision, la Cour renverse sa position établie une vingtaine d’années plus tôt voulant que la négociation collective ne soit pas une activité bénéficiant d’une protection à titre de droit fondamental. Suite à ce changement de paradigme, nombre d’auteurs ont été d’avis que la constitutionnalisation du droit de négociation collective pourrait avoir des effets sur la validité de différentes mesures législatives et sur l’interprétation des lois encadrant les régimes de relations de travail. De plus, la négociation collective étant historiquement indissociable de la grève, il y avait tout lieu de croire que la protection de la Charte pourrait être étendue au droit de grève. Par la suite, en 2011, la Cour suprême a rendu la décision Fraser portant sur l’accès à un régime de représentation collective, précisant la portée du droit de négociation collective tel qu’envisagé dans Health Services. Le présent mémoire recense la jurisprudence qui a abordé la protection constitutionnelle de la négociation collective en droit public canadien et en droit privé québécois depuis l’arrêt Health Services afin d’identifier ses effets sur la validité des restrictions au droit de grève, sur la validité des restrictions au contenu des négociations et sur l’imposition de conditions de travail, sur la validité des exclusions de certaines catégories de travailleurs des régimes de représentation collective, et sur l’interprétation des dispositions de ces régimes. Les résultats de la recherche nous permettent de conclure que la constitutionnalisation du droit de négociation collective a engendré un certain volume de contestations de la part d’organisations syndicales. Ces procédures ont porté fruit dans des situations où l’atteinte aux droits était similaire aux précédents de la Cour suprême ainsi que dans un cas lié au droit de grève. Les effets plus vastes envisagés dans la recension de la littérature ne se sont pas matérialisés. Par ailleurs, nos résultats en droit privé indiquent que la constitutionnalisation du droit de grève n’a pas eu d’impact sur l’interprétation des régimes de relations industrielles. Enfin, le recours ou non au droit international par les tribunaux n’a pas d’effet sur nos résultats.

This study is about the ongoing transformation of neoliberal public policy, precarious work, and public sector unions' struggles against demands for austerity. Situated in long-term historical perspective, I examine to what extent changes in the nature and content of government intervention, social welfare provision, and restructuring of the public sector are structurally-induced, the products of historical and contemporary circumstances, the result of mismanagement, or some combination of other factors. I argue that in addition to reducing the compass of social services, recent expenditure restraint measures have targeted unionized workers in order to lower wages and reduce benefits across the sector. Case studies include original analyses of striking workers at the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, collective bargaining between teaching assistants and contract instructors and Carleton University, and striking civic workers at the city of Toronto. Together the cases break new ground in understanding how neoliberalism is being reconstructed and redeployed in light of the Great Recession and the consequences this has had on public sector workers and services. The three jurisdictions in this study - municipal, provincial, and federal - represent three scales of neoliberal restructuring in Canada. While all three governments have resorted to some form of austerity, the methods used to reduce the deficit and move toward balanced budgets have been differential and multifaceted. These include service delivery restructuring, increasing use of public-private-partnerships, privatization, new user-fees, and/or consumption taxes, as well as public sector worker layoffs, workplace intensification, and the selling of Crown assets. I contend that such measures seek to shift the burden of recession onto the public sector by reducing social services provisioning and seeking concessions from unionized public sector workers. In fact, the state has taken a leading role in narrowing the field of free collective bargaining, suspending trade union rights, and implementing an aggressive program of dispossession. Absent the collective capacities to stop let alone reverse these measures, public sector unions have reached an impasse. Unable to translate militancy into an alternative ideological perspective and a coherent political and economic program, they continue to desperately hang onto previous gains that look increasingly insecure and fragile. I argue that in order for unions to regain their once prominent role in the pursuit of social justice and workplace democracy, they will need to take the risks of organizing working class communities and fighting back while they still have some capacity to do so - else they risk continuing the decades-long labour impasse and union decline. In my view, this necessarily requires an explicitly anti-capitalist perspective, with the aim being to develop both alternative policies and an alternative politics rooted in the working class.

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of working women when they announce their pregnancies, take maternity leave, transition back to work, and utilize flexible work policies. Using a qualitative methodology, transcripts of in-depth interviews were analyzed utilizing a life history approach. Key findings of the study are that women perceive more negative responses to the announcement of their pregnancies than positive ones. In terms of maternity and parental leave policies, all the participants had access to these benefits. Women found issues with financial adequacy, administration, and duration of these policies. Mothers found that financial support from the Canadian government was inadequate to allow them to take the full duration of the 52-week maternity and parental leave for which they were eligible. In addition, employer “top-up” payments were limited and administrative details of maternity leave were often not discussed fully with pregnant workers. When women returned to work, they found that workplaces did not offer resources such as a phased-in return to work or personnel to help them re-engage with their prior work projects. Women discussed the challenges of managing their dual roles of worker and mother and found that managers and coworkers put them in a mommy mould which lessened the quality of their assignments. New mothers found that they had difficultly juggling their work and home responsibilities, finding time for themselves, and receiving increased domestic support from their spouses. While some workplaces offered women flexible workplace policies, not all mothers chose to access them as they found these policies often negatively impacted their career progression. Other issues were a lack of flexible workplace policy transparency, inconsistent manager support, and difficulty maintaining a flexible schedule. Findings have major implications for an improved response from managers upon pregnancy announcement, improved dialogue among employers about increasing “top up” maternity leave pay to new mothers, developing a formal transition plan for new mothers returning to the workplace, and expanding the use of flexible workplace policies.

This study examines twenty radio programs created by the local CSN union at Price-Kénogami in the Saguenay, Quebec, on community radio station, CHOC FM. The program began during a period of profound change in the pulp and paper industry in Quebec that was marked by protracted labour conflict at this plant. The union envisaged a program that would inspire rank-and-file workers' labour activism and broadcast pro-labour news and information to the wider community. Yet if union executives hoped to insert working-class interests into the public sphere and carve out a space for class-based conversations about labour and social justice, their aspirations were never fully realized. Instead of broadening the circle of active union members and creating a class-based counter-public, the weekly CSN broadcasts became the exclusive reserve of union activists. Radio shows legitimized the actions of union executives and increased the latter’s sense of the union’s momentum. In mirroring Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, the CSN broadcasts privileged the voices of a selected few union executives. When the bitter strike of 1980-81 divided workers at Abitibi-Price (formerly Price-Kénogami), union radio hosts refused to even comment on the position of the dissidents. The CSN union broadcasts neither allowed for spirited internal debate nor did they help create effective channels through which to intervene in the public sphere. Rather, labour programming on CHOC remained an extension of the union, which seemed content with using the weekly broadcasts as an inward-looking space for self-reflection.

This dissertation examines the rise of teachers’ union militancy in Ontario through a case study of the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) and the Ontario Public School Teachers’ Federation (OPSTF) between 1970 and their amalgamation into the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) in 1998. It uses the archival records of the two unions, relevant legislation, media records, personal collections, and interviews to explore how these two professional organizations became politicized, militant labour unions able to engage with the state and the trustees of boards of education. The Introduction situates the public education project within nation building in a capitalist-democracy and outlines the theoretical influences informing the dissertation. Chapter 1 follows the two unions during the 1970s as they developed into labour unions. The 18 December 1973 one-day, province-wide, political strike achieved the right to strike and established a unique labour regime for teachers. Chapter 2 examines the advance of the unions during the 1980s as they developed labour militancy. At the same time, neo-liberalism was ascending and the post-war social accord was coming to an end resulting in attacks on unions and cuts to social programs. How gender affected the elementary teachers’ unions between 1970 and 1990 is developed in Chapter 3. The FWTAO campaigned for women’s equality on a platform of liberal feminism while the OPSTF followed a unionist path in an effort to convince women teachers to join them. Chapter 4 scrutinizes the effect of neo-liberal ideology on education during the 1990–1995 Bob Rae NDP government and the impact the Social Contract had on teachers. The development of teacher resistance to the neo-liberal state is explored in Chapter 5. Alliances with other labour organizations during the Days of Action campaign culminated in a two-week, province-wide strike in the fall of 1997 against the Mike Harris Conservative government. The Conclusion brings together the findings of the dissertationand suggests future research exploring teacher union strength in the Canadian context.

La One Big Union (OBU) a marqué l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier au Canada. Associée au courant du syndicalisme industriel révolutionnaire, l’OBU s’est développée au Québec dès 1919, tout particulièrement à Montréal. Ce mémoire nous permettra mieux comprendre les stratégies d’implantation du syndicat dans la province jusqu’en 1929, en nous attardant sur ses objectifs et ses moyens d’action. Notre recherche mettra en lumière la culture politique de l’organisation et de ses militants, ses périodes d’avancées et de reculs, de même que ses rapports parfois conflictuels avec le reste du mouvement ouvrier.

This thesis provides a multi-method – historical, quantitative, qualitative, and jurisprudential – socio-legal case study of the unionization of agricultural workers in British Columbia. Agricultural employees have access to the Labour Relations Code of British Columbia. A historical examination of exclusion of agricultural workers from labour relations legislation from 1937 to 1975 explores the rationale behind labour relations laws and the political context of the legislative exclusion. Next, economic aspects of BC’s agricultural sector are described, with a focus on employment characteristics and the regionalised nature of agricultural production. Finally, this thesis explains the legal aspects of an ongoing campaign by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to unionize migrant and resident agricultural workers. The union organizing campaign shows how legal labour relations processes operate in relation to migrant workers in a sector with low rates of unionization and high rates of precarious and low-paid, dangerous work.

Work in the same-day courier sector is a precarious form of employment. Workers in this sector are also treated as self-employed and hired as independent contractors. The relationship with the firm for which they work, however, is hardly distinguishable from an employment relationship. Messengers are among a growing number of workers in Canada who can be labeled as disguised employees. To explore the phenomenon of disguised employment, I use a case study approach informed by critical political economic theory and a purposive approach to labour and employment law to examine work in the same-day courier sector in Toronto with a focus on a subpopulation of workers in this sector: bike messengers. I examine the causes and consequences of self-employment in the same-day courier sector, analyze messengers' work and argue that their employment status entails misclassification. In an increasingly market-mediated society we are witnessing a proliferation of unprotected work relationships with disguised employment being one manifestation of this development. Fortunately, some unions are trying to organize workers in disguised employment relationships. In this dissertation, I also examine an attempt by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers to organize workers in Toronto's same-day courier sector. I explore the processes and implications of organizing disguised employees and examine how organizing these workers relates to and can inform the project of union renewal in Canada. Gaining employee status, however, is no guarantee of successful organizing. The same-day courier sector is highly competitive and is dominated by small, decentralized employers. Organizing in such a sector is a formidable task. Under the collective bargaining regime, unions have to organize workers workplace by workplace. However, this is proving to be ineffective in highly competitive sectors dominated by small employers, and organizing efforts will likely only result in limited success. As I argue, unions can develop innovative strategies and tactics to organize workers. However, with the many structural obstacles unions face, these strategies and tactics can often fall short of their goals. To facilitate unionization in the same-day courier sector, the collective bargaining regime needs to be overhauled to mandate, or at least promote, multi-employer bargaining.

Temporary foreign workers have been employed – or simply used – throughout history. Their plights have gained some attention across the globe in recent decades. Canada as a major receiving country of these workers and the Philippines as a prolific sending country of workers are selected as case studies to examine whether measures taken internationally, nationally and locally are adequate to protect these workers, especially those in low-skilled occupations. Based on prior research on the workers’ well-being, the answer is no in at least five areas: recruitment, matching of qualifications, abuse, housing, and family separation. Suggestions are made to address these specific areas. In addition, it is argued that, in order to protect the workers, civil society should also be involved and expanded rights should be given to the workers.

The struggle to establish a progressive American-based industrial union, United Packinghouse Workers of America, in Edmonton's four major packinghouses during World War Two sparked the ""awakening"" of a social conscience in many workers who embraced the goals of strengthening the labour movement and promoting working-class political activism. The impact of this working-class community on electoral politics, however, was limited to a significant degree by notions of gender difference. The most successful politician to come out of an Alberta packinghouse was Ethel Wilson, a seamstress in the laundry department at Edmonton's Burns plant, who rose through municipal and provincial politics to become a cabinet minister in the anti-union Social Credit government of Ernest Manning, while a number of packing men were unable to achieve electoral success. Drawing on a wide array of sources, including oral interviews, union and government records, and newspapers, I argue that notions of gender difference intersected with class and ethnicity to handicap packing men and women in distinctive ways linked to a national system of pattern bargaining that gave them unprecedented trade union power during the decades following World War Two. During these years workers tended to support male leaders who could be aggressive, even bullying and dictatorial. This masculinist leadership style was most effective in confrontations with the powerful companies that comprised Canada's ""meat trust,"" particularly Canada Packers, and with the province's increasingly right-wing provincial government, but it often marginalized progressive voices in the union and excluded women almost entirely from the most powerful leadership positions. Conversely, in community politics, the aggressive image of packing masculinity was a liability that did not handicap Ethel Wilson, who was able to achieve success by downplaying her union credentials and trading on an image of respectable white Anglo-Canadian femininity.

Many Filipino immigrants have moved to Canada as professionals, with high levels of English fluency and education. However, first and second generation Filipino-Canadians are still relatively disadvantaged in the labour market. Despite these negative collective outcomes, individual trajectories differ greatly, with many individuals achieving high levels of education and desirable employment. My research examines how social surroundings can facilitate or impede pathways to post-secondary education and employment by shaping aspirations and providing connections to the labour market. The research also analyses how gendered childrearing approaches, employment aspirations, peer norms and available role models result in distinct gendered experiences. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with adult children of Filipino immigrants in the Vancouver area who have attended post-secondary education and are employed. It will explain how, in most cases, trajectories are strongly influenced by the social networks in the spaces of the home, neighbourhood, education system and the Philippines.

This study examines the experiences of highly educated South Asian immigrant women working as home-based entrepreneurs within ethnic enclaves in Toronto, Canada. The importance of their work and experiences need to be understood in the context of two processes. On the one hand, there is the neoliberal hegemonic discourse of “enterprising self” that encourages individuals to become “productive”, self-responsible, citizen-subjects, without depending on state help or welfare to succeed in the labour market. On the other hand, there is the racialized and gendered labour market that systematically devalues the previous education and skills of non-white immigrants and pushes them towards jobs that are low-paid, temporary and precarious in nature. In the light of the above situations, I argue that in the process of setting up their home-based businesses, South Asian immigrant women in my study negotiate the barriers they experience in two ways. First, despite being inducted into different (re)training and (re)learning that aim to improve their deficiencies, they continue to believe in their abilities and resourcefulness, thereby challenging the “remedial” processes that try to locate lack in their abilities. Second, by negotiating gender ideologies within their families and drawing on community ties within enclaves they keep at check the individuating and achievement oriented ideology of neoliberalism. They, therefore, demonstrate how the values of an “enterprising self” can be based on collaboration and relationship rather than competition, profit or material success. The concept of “negotiation”, as employed in this thesis, denotes a form of agency different from the commonly perceived notions of agency as formal, large-scale, macro organization or resistance. Rather, the concept is based on how women resort to multiple, various and situational practices of conformity and contestation that often can blend into each other.

Demographic trends both provincially and nationally indicate increasing life expectancy and growing numbers of older adults living with chronic disease and disability. Human resource projections predict that Canada will need to double the number of formal home care workers in order to meet future demands. This demographic change has also resulted in increasing numbers of older adults choosing to remain engaged in the workforce past the traditional age time of retirement. Research on supportive services in the community has identified the issues and challenges of homecare but little has addressed the complex interplay of economic, political, and social factors that have resulted in the health and safety challenges associated with the work provided by home support workers. Using a method of inquiry called Institutional Ethnography, this research explored the meaning of work and health and safety considerations of workers over 50 years old who are providing home support services in Newfoundland. This exploration of health and safety needs and practices, work environments, as well as policies and government systems regulating the employment of workers can be summarized into three threads that describe the everyday work of these aging home support workers: Crossing Boundaries - More Than Just a Job; Making it Work in Unhealthy and Unsafe Work Environments; and Becoming a Home Support Worker: Experience, Orientation, and Training Necessary to do the Work. The findings suggest that decision making practices to engage in risk taking behaviour that impact health and safety in the workplace are influenced by the meaning of work as well as the emotional connections and close, personal relationships with clients. It is anticipated that this research may positively influence the health and safety of aging workers in this sector. This will be achieved through the recommendations for policy and practice that emerged from this research including the development and implementation of a risk assessment tool for home support workers, clear standards on education, orientation, and training, wage parity with the acute care sector, and more clarity on title, roles, and responsibilities of home support workers.

The number of people with less than permanent migration status in Canada has increased in recent decades. While such people often have social and economic ties to Canada, and live and work within its territory, they do not have legal permanent membership by way of permanent residence or citizenship, and experience differential access to legal rights and entitlements. This dissertation examines the role of migration status in the lives of people who identify themselves as having “uncertain” migration status. In this study, I draw on interviews with migrants and representatives of migrant-serving agencies as well as legal and policy texts, deploying Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography as a methodology to ground the dissertation both analytically and structurally in the interview data. This study enlarges the understanding of the nature and effects of migration status as it is enacted in local institutional sites. Using the construct of “precarious migration status” as a theoretical frame, I focus specifically on the nature and effects of precarious migration status. I explore the effect of precarious migration status on working life and on migrants’ interactions with state institutions governing health care, education, and income security. I conclude that precarious migration status has a deleterious effect on the employment relationship itself as well as access to worker protections, even though the law creates no formal barrier to such protections on the basis of status. With regard to social state, individuals with precarious status are often formally excluded in the text of the law as well as through various exclusionary policies and practices within local institutional sites. I conclude that institutional sites in which precarious migration status functions to exclude should be understood as forms of enforcement. I further conclude that human rights and anti-discrimination strategies through Charter and provincial human rights statutes, while valuable, are unlikely to improve inclusion for precarious migrants, while contestation of membership at the level of local institutions has greater potential to do so.

On 25 February 1932 some 6000 protestors descended on Vancouver for a “Hunger March” organized by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to demonstrate for better conditions for workers, both employed and unemployed, across the nation. Although Hunger Marches were organized throughout Canada, Vancouver’s march was by far the largest and certainly the most successful. This study presents a thorough examination of the circumstances surrounding the Hunger March and explains what made the event such a unique success in this city. The event’s success derives from the Vancouver CPC ‘s ability to take advantage of the large mass of transients who came into the city in the early part of the Great Depression and then to funnel their discontent into mass agitation. The following study shows how the Hunger March is symbolic of the Vancouver CPC’s revolutionary pragmatism during the Third Period,

“The relation between an employer and an isolated employee or worker is typically a relation between a bearer of power and one who is not a bearer of power. In its inception it is an act of submission, in its operation it is a condition of subordination, however much the submission and the subordination may be concealed by the indispensable figment of the legal mind known as the 'contract of employment'.” Otto Kahn-Freund , Labour and the Law (London: Stevens, 1977) This study examines the legal evolution of the common law of employment contracts in Ontario between the 1890s and the 1970s. It focuses on the changing relationship between notions of property and contract in employment, as visible through the judicial discourse of reported common law cases. I argue that between the 1890s and the end of the 1970s Ontario saw the emergence and consolidation of two different conceptual paradigms for regulating work at common law. The common law of employment contracts was framed and reframed over different eras of the 20th century through what the courts understood of the nature of the exchange between the parties, the property interests involved and the legal tools necessary to manage that exchange. Contrary to the traditional narrative in the field, the courts of Ontario first conceptualized employment as an exchange as of the turn of the 20th century. This first paradigm emerged in tandem with the province’s second industrial revolution, and sought to regulate the discretionary nature of white collar professional work. The second paradigm was entrenched in the 1960s and 1970s. It is over these years that workers in Standard Employment Relationships (SER) first began to bring employment-related claims to the common law courts, a few decades after it emerged as the paradigmatic form of work around which Ontario’s labour market and employment laws were fashioned over the mid-century. The basic premises of the SER, of long-term employment, job security and internal career advancement, fundamentally changed the psychosical and economic terms of employment. But faced with workers’ claims for recognition of these new terms in law, the courts instead chose to entrench a limited legal framework which denied job security as an enforceable contract term.

In the digital games industry women are statistical and cultural outliers. Using a cultural studies lens, this thesis examines the experiences of women game-makers in order to more deeply understand the attitudes of female game-workers, and to ascertain whether work in the male dominated gamed industry can be ‘good work’ for women. When compared to other cultural sectors, female game workers face unique barriers to sustaining careers in this high status industry. Gender stereotypes keep many women from fully participating in games industry culture which in turn discriminates against any worker who does not fit in to the ‘might is right’ mindset. Female game workers are getting mixed signals from an industry that appears to desire gender diversity in order to attract the growing ranks of female gamers, but is resistant to change sexist and discriminatory work practices that continue to alienate women.

Contrary to government official discourses that present the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) as a ‘human and just’ labour migration model, in this paper, the SAWP is presented as a migrant labour regime that functions as labour apartheid system of discipline and control, which is in place to satisfy the needs of capitalist development in the Canadian agricultural industry. By identifying the parallels and similarities of the differential treatment of Black migrant workers under South African apartheid with the differential treatment to which migrant farm workers are subjected under the SAWP, I explore how coercive migrant labour regimes of work function today in the context of heightened neoliberal hegemony and state multiculturalism. Through empirical evidences and theoretical claims, I identify main constitutive elements and forms of governance that cause workers to living and experiencing apartheid conditions; I explain how these forms of governance actually work on the ground, and how are they embodied, lived and contested by migrant farm workers participating in the program. I also delve in workers’ politics and their expressions of resistance and contestation to such system as they speak directly to the ways they experience apartheid conditions and the particular forms of how racism is inflicted over them. The SAWP presents an interesting opportunity to closely examine the ways in which colonialism works, how it is manifested today through labour and immigration schemes, and how these regimes are contested and challenged through migrant farm workers’ political subjectivities. In this respect, this paper paves the way for future movement-related research study of seasonal agricultural workers, which can generate collective insight and knowledge to support the organizing efforts of the precarious migrant workers in Canada.

My dissertation project examines women’s family lives, career trajectories, and status attainment. I draw on the concept of the work-family interface to highlight how work and families operate as contextual layers that cross-over in shaping definitions and appraisals of mothers as workers and workers as mothers. Utilizing data on married mothers’ complete working histories, I demonstrate that job exits due to motherhood negatively impact women’s occupational status attainment (SES), but I also show that women face penalties when changing jobs involuntarily and also due to personal reasons not tied to the maternal role. Importantly, in each instance, I demonstrate that these effects operate independently of the non-employment durations they engender, offering broad support for the status characteristics framework which points to the role of employer appraisals of women’s work commitment in shaping their SES outcomes. I also bring families back into the discussion of the work-family interface via the construction of a family-level framework that draws on mothers’, fathers’ and children’s attitudes about maternal employment as a platform for the development of discrete family configurations. I reveal a wide array of family attitude configurations that underscore that maternal employment continues to be contested moral terrain in some families while it is ii supported in others. In particular, I show that in egalitarian families—where maternal employment is not seen as a risk to ‘good’ mothering—mothers report more positive experiences of family and marital relations, less housework and more paid work, and higher earnings. I argue that family contexts represent an important yet understudied contextual reality that is more than the sum of individual views and which have unique consequences for women’s family lives and status trajectories.

Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation.