Your search

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

This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction - defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate - and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies. --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

During a time of significant demographic, geographic, and social transition, many women in early nineteenth-century Montreal turned to prostitution and brothel-keeping to feed, clothe, protect, and house themselves and their families. Beyond Brutal Passions is a close study of the women who were accused of marketing sex, their economic and social susceptibilities, and the strategies they employed to resist authority and assert their own agency. Referencing newspapers, parish registers, census returns, coroners' reports, city directories, documents of Catholic and Protestant institutions, police books, and court records, Mary Anne Poutanen reveals how these women confronted limited alternatives and how they fought against established authority in the pursuit of their livelihoods. She details these women's lives not only as prostitutes but also as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters who reconstructed the bonds of kinship and solidarity. An insightful history of prostitution, Beyond Brutal Passions explores the complicated relationships between women accused of prostitution and the society in which they lived and worked. A social history exploring the intersections between those accused of prostitution, their neighbours, families, clients, and criminal justice. --Publisher's summary (WorldCat record)

The story of the Bell Canada union drive and the phone operator strike that brought sweeping reform to women’s workplace rights. In the 1970s, Bell Canada was Canada’s largest corporation. It employed thousands of people, including a large number of women who worked as operators and endured very poor pay and working conditions. Joan Roberts, a former operator, tells the story of how she and a group of dedicated labour organizers helped to initiate a campaign to unionize Bell Canada’s operators. From the point of view of the workers and the organizers, Roberts tells an important story in Canada’s labour history. The unionization of Bell Canada’s operators was a huge victory for Canada’s working women. The victory at Bell established new standards for women in other so-called “pink-collar” jobs. --Publisher's description

The crucible of North American neo-liberal transformation is heating up, but its outcome is far from clear. [This book] examines the clash between the corporate offensive and the forces of resistance from both a pan-continental and a class struggle perspective. This book also illustrates the ways in which the capitalist classes in Canada, Mexico and the United States used free trade agreements to consolidate their agendas and organize themselves continentally. The failure of traditional labour responses to stop the continental offensive being waged by big business has led workers and unions to explore new strategies of struggle and organization, pointing to the beginnings of a continental labour movement across North America. The battle for the future of North America has begun. --Publisher's description

Substantially revised and updated for a new generation of labour studies students, this third edition of Building a Better World offers a comprehensive introductory overview of Canada's labour movement. The book includes an analysis of why workers form unions; assesses their organization and democratic potential; examines issues related to collective bargaining, grievances and strike activity; charts the historical development of labour unions; and describes the gains unions have achieved for their members and all working people. -- Publisher's description. Contents: What is a union? (pages 1-5) -- Understanding unions (pages 6-18) -- Early union struggles in Canada (pages 19-45) -- From Keynesianism to neoliberalism: Union breakthroughs and challenges (pages 46-70) -- Unions in the workplace (pages 71-91) -- Unions and political action (pages 92-111) -- How do unions work? (pages 112-137) -- What difference do unions make? (pages 128-143) -- Who belongs to unions? Who doesn't and why? (pages 144-163) -- The future of unions: Decline or renewal? (pages 164-189) -- References (pages 190-204) - Index (pages 206-216).

This concise and readable book provides non-specialist readers with all the information they need to understand how capitalism works (and how it doesn’t). Economics for Everyone, now in its second edition, is an antidote to the abstract and ideological way that economics is normally taught and reported. Key concepts such as finance, competition and wages are explored, and their importance to everyday life is revealed. --Publisher's description

Solitudes of the Workplace focuses on experiences of marginalization, uncertainty and segregation created by the hierarchical structures of categories in universities and by gendered identities. Studying a wider range of women’s roles in universities than prior research, the experiences of support staff, senior administrators, researchers, non-academic administrators, and contract teachers are added to those of faculty and students. The essays show how attempts to introduce new knowledge are manoeuvered and the resistance this process can encounter, as well as the ways in which institutional policies can blur and change identities. Addressing longstanding issues such as the entanglement of gender and the assessment of merit, attention is also given to how new identities are claimed and successfully projected. Essays presenting workers' points of view reveal the confusion that occurs when official policy and everyday knowledge conflict, when processes like tenure and other status changes create troublesome realities, and when it becomes routine to experience status denigration. Within the social order of the university and its existing boundaries, gender issues of past decades sometimes surface, but all too often remain an unspoken presence. Solitudes of the Workplace is a revealing look at the isolating experiences and inequities inherent in these institutional environments. --Publisher's description.

This latest collection in our State Trials series, the fourth, looks at the legal issues raised by the repression of dissent from the outset of World War One through the 1930s and the Great Depression. Topics covered include enemy aliens, conscription and courts-martial in World War I, the trials following the Winnipeg General Strike, sedition laws and prosecutions generally and their application to labour radicals in particular, the 1931 trial of the Communist Party leaders, and the religious-political dissent of the Doukhobors. All regions of the country are covered, and special attention given in one essay to Quebec’s repression of radicalism. The volume focusses attention on older manifestations of contemporary dilemmas: what are the acceptable limits of dissent in a democracy, and what limits should be placed on state responses to perceived challenges to its authority. --Publisher's description

In the mid-1980s, the Abella Commission on Equality in Employment and the federal Employment Equity Act made Canada a policy leader in addressing systemic discrimination in the workplace. More than twenty-five years later, Employment Equity in Canada assembles a distinguished group of experts to examine the state of employment equity in Canada today. Examining the evidence of nearly thirty years, the contributors – both scholars and practitioners of employment policy – evaluate the history and influence of the Abella Report, the impact of Canada’s employment equity legislation on equality in the workplace, and the future of substantive equality in an environment where the Canadian government is increasingly hostile to intervention in the workplace. They compare Canada’s legal and policy choices to those of the United States and to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and examine ways in which the concept of employment equity might be expanded to embrace other vulnerable communities. Their observations will be essential reading for those seeking to understand the past, present, and future of Canadian employment and equity policy. --Publisher's description.

In [this book], Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians involved in the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadians from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and metis combining Canadian and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers in this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the Pacific Northwest was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today's Canada its Pacific shoreline. In the generations that followed, Barman argues, descendants did not become Metis, as the term has been used to describe a people apart, but rather drew on both their French Canadians and indigenous inheritances to make the best possible lives for themselves and those around them. --Publisher's description. Contents: Pt. 1. French Canadians And The Fur Economy. To Be French Canadian -- Facilitating the Overland Crossings -- Driving the Fur Economy -- Deciding Whether to Go or to Stay. Pt. 2. French Canadians, Indigenous Women, And Family Life In The Fur Economy. Taking Indigenous Women Seriously -- Innovating Family Life -- Initiating Permanent Settlement -- Saving British Columbia for Canada. Pt. 3. Beyond The Fur Economy. Negotiating Changing Times -- Enabling Sons and Daughters -- To Be French Canadian and Indigenous -- Reclaiming the Past. Includes bibliographical references (pages 404-430) and index.

Income inequality has risen rapidly over the past three decades. In Canada it is now at its highest level since 1928. One of the root causes: the consistent chipping away of labour rights. The labour movement has been left unable to maintain membership levels and incapable of narrowing the income gap through collective bargaining, with profound implications for Canadians. Labour rights are human rights. They provide a powerful democratic counterweight to the growing power of corporations and the wealthy, and are key to a functioning democracy. Unions Matter affirms the critical role that unions and strong labour rights play in creating greater economic equality and promoting the social wellbeing of all citizens. --Publisher's description

[This book] traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins of human rights legislation, demonstrating how governments inhibit the application of their own laws, and how it falls to social movements to create, promote, and enforce these laws. Focusing on British Columbia – the first jurisdiction to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex – Clément documents a variety of absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. The province was at the forefront of the women’s movement, which produced the country’s first rape crisis centres, first feminist newspaper, and first battered women’s shelters. And yet nowhere else in the country was human rights law more contested. For an entire generation, the province’s two dominant political parties fought to impose their respective vision of the human rights state. This history of human rights law, based on previously undisclosed records of British Columbia’s human rights commission, begins with the province’s first equal pay legislation in 1953 and ends with the collapse of the country’s most progressive human rights legal regime in 1984. This book is not only a testament to the revolutionary impact of human rights on Canadian law but also a reminder that it takes more than laws to effect transformative social change. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- "No Jews or dogs allowed": anti-discrimination law -- Gender and Canada's human rights state -- Women and anti-discrimination law in British Columbia, 1953-69 -- Jack Sherlock and the failed Human Rights Act, 1969-73 -- Kathleen Ruff and the Human Rights Code, 1973-79 -- Struggling to innovate, 1979-83 -- Making new law under the Human Rights Code -- The politics of (undermining) human rights : the Human Rights Act, 1983-84 -- Conclusion.