Your search

In the late 1970s, feminist historians urged us to “rethink” Canada by placing women’s perspectives and experiences at the centre of historical analysis. Forty years later, feminism continues to inform history writing in Canada and has inspired historians to look beyond the nation and adopt a more global perspective. This exciting new volume of original essays opens with a discussion of the debates, themes, and methodological approaches that have preoccupied women’s and gender historians across Canada over the past twenty years. The chapters that follow showcase the work of new and established scholars who draw on the insights of critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and transnational history to re-examine familiar topics such as biography and oral history, paid and unpaid work, marriage and family, and women’s political action. Whether they focus on the marriage of Governor James Douglas and his Metis wife, Amelia; representations of saleswomen in department store catalogues; or the careers of professional women such as international child activist Charlotte Whitton and Quebec social work professors at Laval University, the contributors demonstrate the continued relevance – and growth – of history informed by feminist perspectives, and they open a much-needed dialogue between francophone and anglophone historians in Canada.-- Publisher's description

Fernand Daoust est surtout connu pour avoir été un dirigeant central de la Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ) pendant vingt-quatre ans. Or, cela est le fruit d'un véritable parcours du combattant dans le mouvement ouvrier. Le syndicaliste est né en 1926 dans des conditions très modestes et élevé dans une famille monoparentale. Sa curiosité, sa soif de connaissance et sa détermination l'ont entraîné bien au-delà des activités auxquelles ses origines le destinaient. Dans cette première partie de sa biographie, qui couvre les années 1926-1964, nous l'accompagnons dans le Montréal de la grande dépression, nous assistons à ses premiers engagements nationalistes pendant la crise de la conscription, à sa découverte des idéologies progressistes et à son entrée dans le mouvement syndical, malgré les dures conditions imposées aux syndicalistes par le régime Duplessis. Nous le voyons découvrir la nécessité de l'action politique et pressentons le futur dirigeant syndical. Accédant aux études universitaires à force de courage et de persévérance, son horizon intellectuel s'élargit. C'est tout naturellement qu'il choisit le syndicalisme pour y développer et approfondir son engagement social et politique. En faisant sienne l'idéologie socialiste, qui inspire les courants les plus dynamiques du syndicalisme québécois, le jeune syndicaliste ne renie cependant pas ses racines. Son socialisme s'incarne dans une nation spécifique, celle du Québec. Il n'était pas d'accord avec une majorité de syndicalistes de gauche de l'époque, qui qualifiaient de rétrogrades les aspirations nationales québécoises. Au contact des idées de gauche, le nationalisme de droite, dans lequel il avait baigné à l'adolescence et auquel il n'avait jamais totalement adhéré, a fait place à un nationalisme progressiste, précurseur de celui qu'allait épouser une proportion grandissante de la population québécoise.

Extensively revised throughout and including a chapter of new material, Rebel Life chronicles the life of labour organizer, revolutionary, anarchist and labour spy Robert Gosden. Mark Leier's revisions incorporate new information about Gosden's career that has come to light since the first edition was published in 1999. Canada's west coast was rife with upheaval in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. At the centre of the turmoil is Robert Gosden, migrant labourer turned radical activistヨturned police spy. In 1913, he publicly recommends assassinating Premier Richard McBride to resolve theminers' strike. By 1919, he is urging Prime Minister Robert Borden to "disappear" key labour radicals to quelch rising discontent. What happened?Rebel Life plumbs the enigma that was Gosden, but it is much more: an introduction to BC labour history: a trove of rarely seen archival photograph, and sidebars rich with historical arcana; and, with its chapter describing the research that unearthed Gosden's story, Rebel Life is a rich resource for instructors, students, and trade unionists alike.

Climate change is having an increasingly significant impact on work in Canada, and the effect climate change has, and will continue to have, on work concerns many Canadians. However, this fact has not been seriously considered either in academic circles, in the labour movement nor especially by the Canadian government. Climate@Work addresses this deficit by systematically tackling the question of the impact of climate change on work and employment and by analyzing Canada’s conservative silence towards climate change and the Canadian government’s refusal to take it seriously.--Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction. Section 1: Contexts.Changing Patterns in the Literature of Climate Change and Canadian Work: The Research of Academics, Government and Social Actors / Elizabeth Perry -- Climate, Work and Labour: the International Context / Carla Lipsig-Mummé --International Trade Agreements and the Ontario Green Energy Act: Opportunities and Obstacles / Stephen McBride & John Shields. Section 2: Sectors. The Impact of Climate Change on Employment and Skills Requirements in the Construction Industry / John O’Grady -- Climate Change and Labour in the Energy Sector / Marjorie Griffin Cohen & John Calvert -- The Transportation Equipment Industry / John Holmes, with Austin Hracs -- The Forestry Industry / John Holmes -- Tourism, Climate Change and the Missing Worker: Uneven Impacts, Institutions and Response / Steven Tufts -- Climate Change and Work and Employment in the Canadian Postal and Courier Sector / Meg Gingrich, Sarah Ryan & Geoff Bickerton. Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-196).

This book seeks to explain unionization to my generation; to my friends who distrust civil society organizations as much as they distrust government; to my unemployed friends who are living from contract to contract and who would kill for a stable, unionized job; for the workers who have never had the benefit of being represented when facing injustice at work; for the workers who would rather not think of what would happen if they were injured on the job. It’s a reminder to unionized folks that many of the truths that they take for granted are not obvious to others and that the labour movement must change how it reaches out to its members, its communities and to non-unionized workers if it hopes to grow. It’s a call to action for activists to share their stories, debunk the existing right-wing, anti-union rhetoric, re-engage in their communities, and build a movement that can defeat neoliberal policies and their political proponents. --From author's introduction

When dealing with Indigenous women’s history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singular story of decline and loss. In Indigenous Women, Work, and History, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum rejects both of these long-standing conventions by presenting case studies of Indigenous domestic servants, hairdressers, community health representatives, and nurses working in “modern Native ways” between 1940 and 1980. Based on a range of sources including the records of the Departments of Indian Affairs and National Health and Welfare, interviews, and print and audio-visual media, McCallum shows how state-run education and placement programs were part of Canada’s larger vision of assimilation and extinguishment of treaty obligations. Conversely, she also shows how Indigenous women link these same programs to their social and cultural responsibilities of community building and state resistance. By placing the history of these modern workers within a broader historical context of Aboriginal education and health, federal labour programs, post-war Aboriginal economic and political developments, and Aboriginal professional organizations, McCallum challenges us to think about Indigenous women’s history in entirely new ways. --Publisher's description. Contents: Sweeping the Nation: Indigenous women and domestic labour in mid-twentieth-century Canada -- Permanent solution: the placement and relocation program, hairdressers, and beauty culture -- Early labour history of community health representatives, 1960-1970 -- Gaining recognition: labour as activism among Indigenous nurses -- Wages of whiteness and the Indigenous historian.

In the critical decades following the First World War, the Canadian political landscape was shifting in ways that significantly recast the relationship between big business and government. As public pressures changed the priorities of Canada's political parties, many of Canada's most powerful businessmen struggled to come to terms with a changing world that was less sympathetic to their ideas and interests than before. Dominion of Capital offers a new account of relations between government and business in Canada during a period of transition between the established expectations of the National Policy and the uncertain future of the twentieth century. Don Nerbas tells this fascinating story through close portraits of influential business and political figures of this period - including Howard P. Robinson, Charles Dunning, Sir Edward Beatty, R.S. McLaughlin, and C.D. Howe - that provide insight into how events in different sectors of the economy and regions of the country shaped the political outlook and strategies of the country's business elite. Drawing on business, political, social, and cultural history, Nerbas revises standard accounts of government-business relations in this period and sheds new light on the challenges facing big business in early twentieth-century Canada. --Publisher's description. Contents: Part 1: Big Business from Triumph to Crisis. Provincial Man of Mystery: Howard P. Robinson and the Politics of Capital in New Brunswick -- Charles A. Dunning: A Progressive in Business and Politics -- The Dilemma of Democracy: Sir Edward Beatty, the Railway Question, and National Government. Part 2: Continentalism and the Managerial Ethic. -- Stewardship and Dependency: Sam McLaughlin, General Motors, and the Labour Question -- Engineering Canada: C.D. Howe and Canadian Big Business -- Conclusion -- Après le déluge -- Endnotes.

For decades, public sector unions in Canada have been plagued by austerity, privatization, taxpayer backlash and restrictions on union rights. In recent years, the intensity of state-led attacks against public sector workers has reached a fevered pitch, raising the question of the role of public sector unions in protecting their members and the broader public interest. Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity examines the unique characteristics of public sector unionism in a Canadian context. Contributors to this multi-disciplinary collection explore both the strategic possibilities and challenges facing public sector unions that are intent on resisting austerity, enhancing their power and connecting their interests as workers with those of citizens who desire a more just and equitable public sphere. --Publisher's description

During the middle third of the 20th century, workers in most industrialized countries secured a substantial measure of job security, whether through legislation, contract or social practice. This "standard employment contract," as it was known, became the foundation of an impressive array of rights and entitlements, including social insurance and pensions, protection against unsociable working conditions, and the right to bargain collectively. Recent changes in technology and the global economy, however, have dramatically eroded this traditional form of employment. Employers now value flexibility over stability, and increasingly hire employees for short-term or temporary work. Many countries have also repealed labor laws, relaxed employee protections, and reduced state-provided benefits. As the old system of worker protection declines, how can labor regulation be improved to protect workers? In Rethinking Workplace Regulation, nineteen leading scholars from ten countries and half a dozen disciplines present a sweeping tour of the latest policy experiments across the world that attempt to balance worker security and the new flexible employment paradigm. Edited by noted socio-legal scholars Katherine V.W. Stone and Harry Arthurs, Rethinking Workplace Regulation presents case studies on new forms of dispute resolution, job training programs, social insurance and collective representation that could serve as policy models in the contemporary industrialized world. The volume leads with an intriguing set of essays on legal attempts to update the employment contract. For example, Bruno Caruso reports on efforts in the European Union to "constitutionalize" employment and other contracts to better preserve protective principles for workers and to extend their legal impact. The volume then turns to the field of labor relations, where promising regulatory strategies have emerged. Sociologist Jelle Visser offers a fresh assessment of the Dutch version of the 'flexicurity' model, which attempts to balance the rise in nonstandard employment with improved social protection by indexing the minimum wage and strengthening rights of access to health insurance, pensions, and training. Sociologist Ida Regalia provides an engaging account of experimental local and regional "pacts" in Italy and France that allow several employers to share temporary workers, thereby providing workers job security within the group rather than with an individual firm. The volume also illustrates the power of governments to influence labor market institutions. Legal scholars John Howe and Michael Rawling discuss Australiaʹs innovative legislation on supply chains that holds companies at the top of the supply chain responsible for employment law violations of their subcontractors. Contributors also analyze ways in which more general social policy is being renegotiated in light of the changing nature of work. Kendra Strauss, a geographer, offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of pension systems and calls for a new model that offers "flexible pensions for flexible workers. With its ambitious scope and broad inquiry, Rethinking Workplace Regulation illustrates the diverse innovations countries have developed to confront the policy challenges created by the changing nature of work. The experiments evaluated in this volume will provide inspiration and instruction for policymakers and advocates seeking to improve worker's lives in this latest era of global capitalism. --Publisherʹs description

In the early part of the Dirty Thirties, the Canadian prairie city was a relatively safe haven. Having faced recession before the Great War and then again in the early 1920s, municipalities already had relief apparatuses in place to deal with poverty and unemployment. Until 1933, responsibilty for the care of the urban poor remained with local governments, but when the farms failed that year, and the Depression deepened, western Canadian cities suffered tremendously. Recognizing the severity of the crisis, the national government intervened. Evolving federal programs and policies took over responsibility for the delivery of relief to the single unemployed, while the government simultaneously withdrew financing for all public works projects. Setting municipal relief administrations of the 1930s within a wider literature on welfare and urban poor relief, Strikwerda highlights the legacy on which relief policymakers relied in determining policy directions, as well as the experiences of the individuals and families who depended on relief for their survival. Focusing on three prairie cities—Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg—Strikwerda argues that municipal officials used their power to set policy to address what they perceived to be the most serious threats to the social order stemming from the economic crisis. By analyzing the differing ways in which local relief programs treated married and single men, he also explores important gendered dynamics at work in the response of city administrators to the social and economic upheaval of the Depression. Probing the mindset of local elites struggling in extraordinary circumstances, The Wages of Relief describes the enduring impact of the policy changes made in the 1930s in the direction of a broad, national approach to unemployment—an approach that ushered in Canada’s modern welfare system. --Publisher's description

Manufacturing Mennonites examines the efforts of Mennonite intellectuals and business leaders to redefine the group's ethno-religious identity in response to changing economic and social conditions after 1945. As the industrial workplace was one of the most significant venues in which competing identity claims were contested during this period, Janis Thiessen explores how Mennonite workers responded to such redefinitions and how they affected class relations. Through unprecedented access to extensive private company records, Thiessen provides an innovative comparison of three businesses founded, owned, and originally staffed by Mennonites: the printing firm Friesens Corporation, the window manufacturer Loewen, and the furniture manufacturer Palliser. Complemented with interviews with workers, managers, and business owners, Manufacturing Mennonites pioneers two important new trajectories for scholarship - how religion can affect business history, and how class relations have influenced religious history. --Publisher's description

This book follows the life and intellectual journey of Joseph Baruch Salsberg, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who became a major figure of the Ontario Left, a leading voice for human rights in the Ontario legislature, and an important journalist in the Jewish community. His life trajectory mirrored many of the most significant transformations in Canadian political and social life in the twentieth century. Award-winning historian Gerald Tulchinsky traces Salsberg’s personal and professional journey – from his entrance into Toronto’s oppressive garment industry at age 14, which led to his becoming active in emerging trade unions, to his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party of Canada and the Workers’ Unity League. Detailing Salsberg’s time as an influential Toronto alderman and member of the Ontario legislature, the book also examines his dramatic break with communism and his embrace of a new career in journalism. Tulchinsky employs historical sources not used before to explain how Salsberg’s family life and surrounding religious and social milieu influenced his evolution as a Zionist, an important labour union leader, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, and a prominent member of Toronto’s Jewish community. --Publisher's description

Despite being dubbed "the world's oldest profession," prostitution has rarely been viewed as a legitimate form of labour. Instead, it has been criminalized, sensationalized, and polemicized across the socio-political spectrum by everyone from politicians to journalists to women's groups. Interest in and concern over sex work is not grounded in the lived realities of those who work in the industry, but rather in inflammatory ideas about who is participating, how they wound up in this line of work, and what form it takes. In Selling Sex, Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love present a more nuanced, balanced, and realistic view of the sex industry. They bring together a vast collection of voices - including researchers, feminists, academics, and advocates, as well as sex workers of differing ages, genders, and sectors - to engage in a dialogue that challenges the dominant narratives surrounding the sex industry and advances the idea that sex work is in fact work. Presenting a variety of opinions and perspectives on such diverse topics as the social stigma of sex work, police violence, labour organizing, anti-prostitution feminism, human trafficking, and harm reduction, Selling Sex is an eye-opening, challenging, and necessary book. --Publisher's description

Le 12 juin 1843 restera dans la mémoire comme le « Lundi rouge » : un jour funeste, où plusieurs ouvriers irlandais affectés au creusement du canal Beauharnois trouvent la mort pour avoir réclamé de meilleures conditions de travail. Plus de deux mille « canaliers » en grève illégale subissent la charge des troupes de la garnison qui les dispersent avec une violence démesurée devant l’hôtel où logent leurs patrons – feux, sabres et chevaux contre pelles, pioches et gourdins. Cet événement tragique marque à ce jour le conflit de travail le plus sanglant de l’histoire du Canada. L’indignation générale contraint le gouvernement à instituer une des premières enquêtes publiques du pays. Une enquête biaisée, comme le démontre brillamment Roland Viau qui examine de nouvelles pièces au dossier en faisant revivre le quotidien des familles irlandaises installées le long du canal. Il aboutit à des constats troublants, révélant l’arbitraire des tribunaux envers ces travailleurs migrants honteusement exploités et méprisés, et met à jour l’existence d’une société secrète qui préfigure le mouvement syndical. --Publisher's description

Although the 1960s are overwhelmingly associated with student radicalism and the New Left, most Canadians witnessed the decade's political, economic, and cultural turmoil from a different perspective. Debating Dissent dispels the myths and stereotypes associated with the 1960s by examining what this era's transformations meant to diverse groups of Canadians - and not only protestors, youth, or the white middle-class.With critical contributions from new and senior scholars, Debating Dissent integrates traditional conceptions of the 1960s as a 'time apart' within the broader framework of the 'long-sixties' and post-1945 Canada, and places Canada within a local, national, an international context. Cutting-edge essays in social, intellectual, and political history reflect a range of historical interpretation and explore such diverse topics as narcotics, the environment, education, workers, Aboriginal and Black activism, nationalism, Quebec, women, and bilingualism. Touching on the decade's biggest issues, from changing cultural norms to the role of the state, Debating Dissent critically examines ideas of generational change and the sixties. --Publisher's description

Combining contemporary articles with historical documents, this engaging reader examines the rich history of Canada's Aboriginal peoples. The 30 articles - half of which are original to this volume - explore a diverse range of topics, including spirituality, colonialism, self-identity, federal policy, residential schools, labour, and women's rights. With in-depth coverage of events and processes from the earliest times through to the modern day, [the reader] offers students a new appreciation for the long and complex history of Canada's First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. --Publisher's description

Understanding the ways in which people save for their retirement is an urgent issue. So much has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, especially in the area of the provision of pensions and retirement income. Around the world, greater and greater responsibility is being allocated to individuals while governments discount their contributions to social security and employers retreat from the provision of supplementary retirement income. This book explores the behavioral revolution and its implications for understanding financial decision-making and saving for the future. Recognizing the profound implications of this research program, it goes beyond issues of risk aversion, framing, and decision-making to consider how social identity and the resources due to people by virtue of their place in society figure in savings behavior. It gives considerable attention to the context of the environment in which people make financial decisions, arguing that this allows a better understanding of the coexistence of sophistication and naivety apparent in patterns of retirement saving. Utilizing databases from the UK, the book provides an empirical foundation to its theoretical arguments, demonstrating how an integrated approach to individual financial decision-making is necessary if we are to address the apparent shortfall in many people's planning for the future. The book concludes by setting the agenda for the design, governance, and regulation of pension savings schemes consistent with delivering cost-effective solutions to pension adequacy. In these ways, it sets forth a strategy for rethinking individual behavior as well as the design of retirement income systems. --Publisher's description

Governments are formal political institutions, places of work for thousands of women and men, and powerful social, cultural, and economic sites that shape the lives of all people. This collection demonstrates how anthropologists enrich our understandings of government by exploring the labor of those who govern, and how the dynamics of culture are at the heart of government actions that justify, modify, and reproduce political action. By assembling original, ethnographically-grounded research in legislatures, executives, and bureaucracies, this volume illuminates and unpacks the structures, practices, and values of government actors in local, regional, and national contexts. It will be of interest to scholars and students in anthropology, as well as sociology, political science, policy studies, and labor studies. --Publisher's description

During the Second World War, the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Canada grew from a handful of members to more than a quarter-million and from political insignificance to a position of influence in the emergence of the welfare state. What was it about the "good war" that brought about this phenomenal growth? And how did this coming of age during the war affect the emerging CIO? Labour Goes to War analyzes the organizing strategies of the CIO during the war to show that both economic and cultural forces were behind its explosive growth. Labour shortages gave workers greater power in the workplace and increased their militancy. But workers’ patriotism, their ties to those on active service, memories of the First World War, and allegiance to the "people’s war" also contributed to the CIO’s growth - and to what it claimed for workers. At the same time, union organizers and workers influenced one another as the war changed lives, opinions, expectations - and notions of women’s rights. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material, Wendy Cuthbertson illuminates this complex wartime context. Her analysis shows how the war changed lives, opinions, and expectations. She also shows how the complex, often contradictory, motives of workers during this period left the Canadian labour movement with an ambivalent progressive/conservative legacy. --Publisher's description

During the Great Depression, the conflicting interests of capital and labour became clearer than ever before. Radical Canadian workers, encouraged by the Red International of Labour Unions, responded by building the Workers' Unity League – an organization that greatly advanced the cause of unions in Canada, and boasted 40,000 members at its height. In Raising the Workers' Flag, the first full-length study of this robust group, Stephen L. Endicott brings its passionate efforts to light in memorable detail. Raising the Workers' Flag is based on newly available or previously untapped sources, including documents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Security Service and the Communist Party's archives. Using these impressive finds, Endicott gives an intimate sense of the raging debates of the labour movement of the 1930s. A gripping account of the League's dreams and daring, Raising the Workers' Flag enlivens some of the most dramatic struggles of Canadian labour history. -- Publisher's description