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Full bibliography 13,054 resources
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Uranium miners in Elliot Lake went on a wildcat strike in 1974 to protest their occupational health concerns on the job after a spike in cancer cases. They learned that the provincial government had known of the poor working conditions causing their illnesses, but had not informed them of the dangers or acted to improve their situation. As a result of union and political pressure, the Ontario government created the Ham Commission to investigate and make recommendations. Its hearings revealed the industry's scandalous conditions, and its report eventually resulted in the Ontario Health and Safety (OHS) Act in Ontario. It did not cover the miners until 1984, so they worked through their internal health and safety committees to gain improvements in the work environment. Others have discussed this situation in relation to the emergence of the OHS and environmental movements. This paper discusses the events in terms of the mine owners' attitudes towards their employees, the industry's relationship to governments, and the impact of the uranium mining industry (part of the nuclear industry) on the local community and environment.
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Labour landmarks are memorial sites, commemorations, plaques, and burial sites that provide access to the themes and meanings of workers' past experiences. They are instrumental in enshrining workers' "public memories," which are the separate experiences of groups within society, within the larger "collective memory" of the community. A general exploration of the commemorative landscape reveals a number of themes and allows a detailed discussion of several labour landmarks. In the course of this research, 21 separate labour landmarks were identified in the communities of industrial Cape Breton. The majority of these monuments are dedicated to workers in the coal and steel industries. The 1980s saw an expansion in the frequency of labour commemorations, which indicates increased attention to the experiences of workers in Cape Breton. Two monuments in the community of New Waterford reveal the many layers of historical memory in the town. The first is dedicated to victims of the 1917 mine explosion, while the second commemorates the man killed during the 1925 strike. The explosion monument, unveiled in 1922, inserts the public memory of coal miners into the collective memory of New Waterford. The William Davis monument, dedicated in 1985, reveals an existing working-class consciousness in the town and merges individual and public memories of Davis while reflecting on a major event in the town's history. Another monument, dedicated to Sydney's steelworkers, now rests on the site of the former steel plant, and commemorates a century of experience. This memorial is used as an example of how one might "read" a labour landmark to access its themes and meanings, as well as to reach an understanding of the past experiences of workers.
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Analyzes the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on freedom of association, notably B.C. Health Services (2007), in respect to Canada's constitutional relationship with international law.
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In February 1913, when a teacher at Montreal's Aberdeen School made disparaging remarks about her Jewish pupils, five boys called a strike. Hundreds of Jewish children congregated in the park across from the school where they appointed strike leaders, established a negotiating committee, and resolved not to return to class until the teacher apologized. Some of them marched to the Baron de Hirsch Institute and the newspaper office of the Keneder Adler to demand that action be taken. The Aberdeen students showed maturity in their understanding of "the strike" as a strategic response to perceived injustice, their politicization with respect to relations between the Jewish and Anglo-Protestant communities, and class consciousness. The years 1912 and 1913 had been arduous for working-class Jews living along the St-Laurent Street corridor who experienced a lengthy tailors' strike followed by an economic depression. The youthful strikers were acutely aware of the difficulties of being both working class and Jewish. We argue that the collective actions of the Aberdeen School strikers reveal a close connection to the labour activism of their parents and to the downtown Jewish community. Their response to the teacher's anti-Semitic comments is an example of the historical agency of children.
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During the last decade, Canada experienced unequal economic growth. As result, the Canadian government expanded its Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which led to an essential change of its purpose, making it easier for employers to recruit temporary foreign workers for low-skilled jobs. In practice, TFWs are quite vulnerable without access to the same rights and privileges as Canadian citizens or permanent residents. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze whether the Canadian government respects the rights of TFWs through its domestic regulations and if such laws protect the rights of TFWs in practice. The thesis goal is to determine if the economic interest of the Canadian government and employers can be matched with international migrant rights' standards. It investigates international standards related to the protection of human rights, including covenants, international treaties, and human rights committees. This thesis also discusses similar programs governing TFWs in America, Germany, and Australia.
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The article presents research which focuses on the public works workers' strike in Québec in June 1878. It demonstrates the organization of this group of workers who fought against the repressive forces of employers and the government. It discusses Québec's industrial activities during the early 19th century which included forest product exportation and shipbuilding and the eruption of labor strikes and unrest in the U.S. and Canada during the second half of the 19th century and public works seen as secure employment during that time in Québec. It focuses on the construction of new parliamentary buildings in Québec overseen by former conservative minister and entrepreneur Simon-Xavier Cimon and the construction site workers' general strike which lasted from June 3 to June 15, 1878.
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The article reviews the book, "La sueur des autres. Les fils d'Érin et le canal Beauharnois," by Roland Viau.
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The article reviews the book, "Foucault: His Thought, His Character," by Paul Veyne, translated by Janet Lloyd.
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"Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers' Movement," by David Camfield, is reviewed.
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Explores the variable relationship between organized labour and Aboriginal politics, such as the construction of the Voisey's Bay nickel mine in traditional Inuit territories in Labrador. Concludes that unions need to engage substantively with Aboriginal struggles as workers and peoples.
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The article reviews the book, "One Company, Diverse Workplaces:The Social Construction of Employment Practices in Western and Eastern Europe," by Marta Kahancova.
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[The author's] contribution ensures that workers have a voice in this collection, not as members of large bureaucratic unions, but as wild-cat strikers challenging the labour leadership’s power. --From editors' introduction.
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The article reviews the book, "Harvest Pilgrims: Mexican and Caribbean Migrant Farm Workers in Canada," by Vincenzo Pietropaolo.
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This paper focuses on measuring how much the work values and attitudes of young Quebec workers differ from those of older workers. We analyze the three core dimensions of the work relationship, i.e. the centrality of work, its principal finality, and attitudes towards the dominant managerial norms. We build our analyses on the data from a 2007 survey questionnaire administered to 1,000 workers representative of the Quebec labour force aged 18 years or more and not in full-time study. According to our study, although worker values and attitudes do not diverge significantly among the age groups surveyed, young people tend to attach less importance to work than do older workers and their aspirations towards work are not as high. Nevertheless, their adherence to the dominant managerial norms slightly exceeds that of their elders. Consequently, branding young people on the basis of their work values and attitudes fails to reflect observed reality, at least insofar as the centrality and finality of work and attitudes about managerial norms are concerned. For each of the target dimensions, employment status and level of training apparently outweigh age class as determinants shaping values and attitudes.
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The article reviews the book, "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class," by Jefferson Cowie.
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The article reviews the book, "American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935," by Jon R. Huibregtse.
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This article explores how women forest workers’ perceptions of restructuring are related to their work identities. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 29 women working in subsidiaries of a multinational forest company in northern Saskatchewan, I describe how women workers selectively drew on traditional mill worker and flexible worker identities to legitimize and delegitimize restructuring. Women's understandings of themselves as workers were shaped by their paradoxical relationships to standard forest processing work. Some women with previous experience working in low‐waged service industries adopted worker subjectivities that legitimized restructuring and valued flexibility, individual empowerment, and mobility. Other women delegitimized restructuring, referencing traditional characterizations of forest work that valued community stability, collective resistance, and security. Many women, however, neither consistently legitimized nor delegitimized restructuring throughout their interviews. This last group's ambiguous portrayal of work and restructuring demonstrates the identity dilemmas faced by new entrants to declining industrial sectors. Restructuring interrupted women's narratives of having found a “good job” in forestry and prompted the renegotiation of their understandings of mill work. This article contributes to our understanding of restructuring in resource industries by drawing attention to how worker identities, gender, and industrial change are interrelated.
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The article reviews the book, "The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America," by Erik S. Gellman and Jared Roll.
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During the Second World War, women's participation in Canada's 'total war' effort meant increased domestic responsibilities, volunteering, enlisting in the armed forces, and joining the civilian workforce. Women's labour force participation more than doubled throughout the war, with more women working alongside and in place of men than ever before. This created a situation that could challenge the traditional sexual division of labour, and so women's labour became a subject for discussion in the public sphere. Through a comparative content analysis of the commercial and alternative (labour) press, this study examines representations of women's labour in wartime in the context of women's mobilization into the war effort through to subsequent demobilization near war's end. It first considers the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the historical study of news media and women and then offers original empirical research to demonstrate that when women's labour did emerge as a subject in the Canadian press, gender, not labour, was prioritized in the news. This was symbolically and systematically leveraged both within and across the commercial and alternative press, which reinforces stereotypical values about women and their labour and upheld the patriarchal status quo. In the end, while there were surface-level changes to the nature of women's paid labour during the war, the structures of female subordination and exploitation remained unchallenged despite women's massive mobilization into the workforce. By setting media representations against the wartime realities of women's labour told through archival records and secondary literature, this dissertation argues that news media generally presented a 'history ' of women's labour that did not reflect the lived reality or the political economic and social significance of women's labouring lives. This not only coloured how women's labour was represented in the news, but it can also shape the history that scholars construct from the newspaper. In contributing to feminist media and media history scholarship, this dissertation offers empirical evidence that challenges dominant ways of thinking about women's history in terms of the domestic sphere and furthers an understanding of women's wage labour as a provocation to such historical public-private divisions. This may, in turn, inspire histories that more fully and equitably capture women's experiences.
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