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In the 1880s Canadians began to cope with the meaning of their emerging industrial society. During that decade the federal government first investigated industrial conditions and provincial governments passed Canada's first factory legislation. The same period saw the resurgence of an articulate and angry labor movement protesting against the excesses of modern industry. Through the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital we can perhaps gain our best insight into the everyday world of workers and capitalists in late nineteenth-century Canada. The commission gathered evidence in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and talked to thousands of workers, businessmen, and other concerned citizens. This edited version of its investigation includes much of the best testimony; it describes working class living conditions, the emergence of organized labor, and the attitudes of businessmen to industrial capitalism. The testimony takes us with the commissioners on their tour of New Brunswick cotton mills, Capre Breton coal pits, Ontario shops and foundries, and Quebec City wharves; it explores as well the darkest corners of Montreal cigar factories. Industrialists discuss profits, markets, sources of raw material, and problems with labor. But what is perhaps more important, the working people themselves are also heard, men and women who in most historical records appear as little more than cold statistics. The warmth and humanity of these Canadians reflecting on their lives and on the society around them bring the commission documents to life. Aging craftsmen, ten-year-old saw-mill hands, girls from the spindles and looms, describe their workplaces, wages, hours, and aspects of their lives away from the job. These almost unique interviews allow us to enter their intellectual and cultural world – to learn of their past and present and of some of their hopes and aspirations. The Labor Commission reports and testimony are essential for an understanding of the Canadian working class as it was being transformed by the new techniques of industrial production. --Publisher's description

Year by year the trade union movement assumes new significance. [This book] records labour's progress through about 130 years of Canadian history. During these years there were thousands of strikes, negotiations, organizing campaigns, legislative and political struggles. Many of the outstanding events are described here. One of the important features of this book is its outline of how Canadian unions came to form connections with United States unions - the origins, status, and significance of International Unions in Canada. The writer has sought to give an account of trade union evolution as a whole from the period 1827-1959. In addition he has outlined certain continuing spheres of Labour's effort, such as organization of the unorganized, the fight for better conditions, legislative and political action, peace and Canadian independence. -- Publisher's description

Table of contents: Introduction -- Chronology of the Vancouver Strike and the On to Ottawa Trek, 1935. Part 1: Recollections of the On to Ottawa Trek. A Note on Editing, part 1. Prelude to Struggle -- The Origin of the Family -- The Slave Camps -- Strike -- The Trek. Part 2: Documents Related to the Vancouver Strike and the on to Ottawa Trek. A Note on Editing, part 2. The Report of the Macdonald Commission -- The Vancouver Relief Camp Strike -- The On to Ottawa Trek -- The Interview Between the Delegation of Strikers and the Prime Minister and His Cabinet, June 22, 1935 -- Continuing Documents on the Trek -- The Regina Riot -- Debate in the House of Commons . Footnotes for Part 1. Suggestions for Further Reading.

This job very much needed doing, and Dr. Masters has done it in a scholarly, judicial, yet forthright manner. The hysteria engendered by the Winnipeg general strike of 1919, heightened by the singularly unenlightened form that government intervention took, continues to trail clouds of distortion and bitterness. By careful analysis of facts, circumstances, and personalities of the strike leaders, Dr. Masters has cleared away the haze and given us a historical record of the utmost value. --review, Canadian Forum (on paperback book's back cover)

This book presents a remarkable account of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, written by the workers who organized the strike. Their day-to-day description of events was prepared for pro-labour sympathizers across Canada and to counteract anti-strike accounts carried in the mass. It is a particularly lively and informative description of this landmark events. --Publisher's description

Journalists and poets, economists and political historians, have told the story of Canada's railways, but their accounts pay little attention to the workers who built them. The Bunkhouse Man is the only study devoted to these men and their lives in construction camps; a pioneering work in sociology, it is still the best description of what it was like to be a working man in Canada before the First World War. E.W. Bradwin drew on his own experience as an instructor for Frontier College, working alongside his students during the day and teaching at night, to present this graphic portrait of life in the camps from 1903 to 1914. No detached observer, Bradwin played a vigorous role trying to improve the lot of the men--practicing the sociology of engagement advocated by radical sociologists today. Work camps have existed in Canada from early pioneer times to the 1970s and are unlikely to disappear. In the years of Bradwin's study there were as many as 3,000 large camps employing 200,000 men, 5 per cent of the male labour force. Like the settling of the prairies, these camps are a characteristic Canadian phenomenon, but they have never drawn comparable attention. The republication of The Bunkhouse Man, with an introduction by Jean Burnet, makes available once more a work essential to the exploration of Canada's history and social structure. --Publisher's description

An annotated bibliography of about 290 items ranging from books to articles in popular journals intended as an introductory guide for student research of this topic. Knight's bibliography deals with life and work in the company towns, camps and single enterprise communities of Canada and the U.S. during the last eighty years. Within it, there are economic studies , sociological surveys, local histories, but also memoirs and autobiographies that touch on the daily lives of the primary resource workers whose labour built these countries. --Publisher's description. Contents: Nobody here but us (pages 1-14) -- Work camps and company towns. In B.C. (pages 14-38). In Canada (pages 39-58). In U.S. (pages 59-90).

The company town, source of so much of Canada's wealth, was - and is - a place with nowhere to hide. First published in 1971, Rex Lucas's Minetown, Milltown, Railtown is a groundbreaking study of what it's like to live in such communities. Today, with the oil-sands boom and rising commodity prices affecting everything from the value of the Canadian dollar to the balance of power within Confederation, single-industry towns remain as central as ever to the country's economic and social life. Minetown is a compelling portrait not just of Canada's past, but of its present and future, too. Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry is a Wynford Book - one of a series of titles representing significant milestones in Canadian literature, thought, and scholarship. New introductions place each book in a modern context and show its continuing relevance. --Publisher's description (Oxford University Press)

Illustrates the need for reform and reinterpretation of the labour laws of Canada, and Manitoba in particular. -- Publisher's description

Table des matières: Introduction -- Cadre théorique -- Hypothèses. Première partie : 1760-1791. 1- Conquête et bourgeoisie française : Qu’est-ce qu’une bourgeoisie ? -- Conquête et bourgeoisie française --Conséquence pour la société française. 2- Conquête et aristocratie cléricale : Conquête et collaboration -- Élaboration de la politique de conciliation -- Opposition anglo-saxonne à la politique de conciliation -- Volonté de collaboration de l’aristocratie cléricale -- Acte de Québec -- Éléments de la collaboration de l’aristocratie cléricale -- Idéologie de la collaboration -- Portée de la conciliation -- Déclin des seigneurs -- Conclusion. 3- Apparition d'une bourgeoisie anglo-saxonne : Économie 1760-1792 -- L’Acte constitutionnel de 1791. 4- Le peuple : Le régime seigneurial -- Peuple et classe collaboratrice -- Conclusion. Deuxième partie : 1792-1815. Introduction. 1- Petite-bourgeoisie professionnelle : Idéologie nouvelle -- Oppositions de classes et de nations -- Conclusion. 2- Aristocratie cléricale. 3- La bourgeoisie marchande canadienne-anglaise : L’économie -- Les fourrures -- L’agriculture -- Le bois -- La guerre -- Aspect socio-politique -- Conclusion. 4- Le peuple : Conclusion. Troisième partie : 1815-1850. Introduction. 1- Société canadienne-française : Les quatre-vingt-douze résolutions -- Composition, groupes et factions -- Idéologie --Lutte de classe et lutte nationale --Le peuple --Londres. 2- Société canadienne-anglaise 1815-1836 : Économie -- Bourgeoisie marchande canadienne-anglaise -- L’union --Lutte et alliance -- Conclusion 1815-1836. 3- Guerre civile et guerre nationale 1837-1838. Rébellions -- Caractère du phénomène -- La marche de l’union 1838-1840. Conclusion générale -- Aspect théorique -- Bibliographie.

Presents an annotated chronology of strikes and lockouts in Quebec from 1843 to 1900. Includes sources.

Chalk, Sweat and Cheers, A History of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society was published for the Society’s fiftieth anniversary in 1969, following two years of intensive research and assistance from fellow teachers. [The author] was selected to lead the project because, in the words of the Society’s President, of his “long and distinguished teaching career not only as a recognized writer, but a character in the history he relates.” His complex story of the MTS told of the evolution of the Province, the livelihood of teachers, and the fights for a rise in educational standards. It was thorough and detailed, ending with a severe reminder that, despite technological advances and innovations, teachers remain at the core of education. --From author biography at Manitoba Historical Society Archives' website

The writing of this account of the Ontario Public School Men Teachers' Federation has been based on the information contained in the minutes, annual reports, newsletters, correspondence, confidential files, the "Advance," the "Courier," and the author's personal diaries of 1934-69. ....I am grateful especially to those who contributed so much in interviews and by correspondence. The first-hand knowledge of so many teachers and former teachers has been invaluable. --Author's acknowledgements

This important new study in Canadian politics discusses the role of socialism in Canada. By means of comparison between the English-Canadian and the American political importance of socialism in Canada than the United States. In this section Louis Hartz's theory of "fragment" cultures is carried forward and applied to Canada. The remainder of the book is devoted to a detailed historical study of the relationship between the labour movement and the socialist parties in Canada. It starts in the early years of the century and follows the story through to its significant conclusion—the support (and formation) by many Canadian unions of a labour party. The brilliant analysis of Canadian politics in Hartzian terms restores ideology to a place in our political culture, and the meticulous, objective recounting of labour's involved in the formation of the NDP is a timely and valuable contribution to our limited understanding of how Canadian political parties "live and move and have their being." The main sources used by the author were correspondence, minutes, and other materials in the files of the NDP and the Canadian Labour Congress, and personal interviews with labour leaders and socialist politicians. --Publisher's description

A brief ethnographic study done for the National Museum of Canada in 1961-62 focusing on the then continuing economic importance of hunting and trapping for the native people of the region. --Author's description

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation government in Saskatchewan, which was elected in 1944, remains the only government with avowed socialist goals to have come to power in Canada or the United States. In 1949, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote Agrarian Socialism, which has since become a classic, a study of the social background that enabled the movement to succeed in the region that it did. The CCF government, however, remained in power for twenty years. So this new Anchor edition contains not only a new introduction by the author, evaluating his earlier research in terms of later developments, but five new chapters by other sociologists who, taking off from the findings in Agrarian Socialism, studied later developments in Saskatchewan.... -- Publisher's description