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Globalization has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s and up to today's anti-globalisation movement. Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today's front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London's Docklands - and how they're being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. --Publisher's description

This book examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, the author connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era. By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the first-hand accounts of former sleeping car porters, the author shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism. Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, she historicizes Canadian racial attitudes and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there. --Publisher's description

The story of the expansion of European civilization into the wilderness continues to shape perceptions of how Aboriginal people became part of nations such as Canada. This groundbreaking study subverts this narrative of progress and modernity by examining Canadian nation building from the perspective of a northern community and its residents. Drawing on decades of research and fieldwork, Patricia McCormack argues that Fort Chipewyan--established in 1788 and situated in present-day Alberta--was never an isolated Aboriginal community but a plural society that stood at the crossroads of global, national, and indigenous cultures and economies. The steps that led Aboriginal people to sign Treaty No. 8 and accept scrip in 1899 and their struggle to maintain autonomy in the decades that followed reveal that Aboriginal peoples and others can - and have - become modern without relinquishing cherished beliefs and practices. --Publisher's description. Contents: Writing Fort Chipewyan history -- Building a plural society at Fort Chipewyan: a cultural Rababou -- The fur trade mode of production -- The creation of Canada: a new plan for the Northwest -- Local impacts: state expansion, the Athabasca District, and Fort Chipewyan -- Christian missions -- The ways of life at Fort Chipewyan: cultural baselines at the time of treaty -- Treaty no. 8 and the Métis script: Canada bargains for the North -- The government foot in the door -- Fort Chipewyan and the new regime -- Epilogue: Facing the future -- Appendix: Personal testimony from Fort Chipewyan residents and related persons: memoirs and interviews.

Ce livre dresse un portait pénétrant de la complexité des valeurs, des attitudes et des croyances relatives au travail de la population active québécoise. Quelle importance et quelle signification revêt le travail aujourd’hui ? Le travail est-il de plus en plus un lieu de réalisation de soi ou n’est-il qu’une valeur en perdition, voire un simple moyen en vue de financer la vie à l’extérieur du travail ? Quel est le modèle de travail idéal auquel aspirent les travailleurs et quelles sont leurs attitudes envers les nouvelles normes et pratiques de gestion mises de l’avant par les employeurs au cours des deux dernières décennies ? Plus fondamentalement, de quelle manière l’identité personnelle est-elle reliée ou dissociée du rôle professionnel ? Issu d’une vaste enquête auprès d’un millier de travailleurs québécois, ce livre montre que le travail est toujours une valeur importante, mais que la réalisation de soi et la quête d’équilibre entre la vie privée et la vie professionnelle sont des aspirations de plus en plus partagées par les individus. Les grands schèmes de valeurs et d’attitudes par rapport au travail mis au jour dans l’ouvrage témoignent de changements culturels récents ainsi que de la diversité des situations de travail vécues. À des degrés divers, ces schèmes convergent vers les exigences du modèle productif contemporain ou s’en distancient : ils contribuent à l’émergence d’un nouveau monde du travail. Cet ouvrage a été réalisé par une équipe de recherche de l’Université Laval et de l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique, sous la direction de Daniel Mercure et de Mircea Vultur, avec la collaboration de Marie-Pierre Bourdages-Sylvain, Charles Fleury et Lilian Negura. --Publisher's description

Interrogating the New Economy is a collection of original essays investigating the New Economy and how changes ascribed to it have impacted labour relations, access to work, and, more generally, the social and cultural experiences of work in Canada. Based on years of participatory research, sector-specific studies, and quantitative and qualitative data collection, the work accounts for the ways in which the contemporary workplace has changed but also the extent to which older forms of work organization still remain. The collection begins with an overview of the key social and economic transformations that define the New Economy. It then illustrates these transformations through examples, including essays on wine tourism, the regeneration of mining communities, the place of student workers, and changes in the public service workplace. It also addresses unions and their responses to the restructuring of work, as well as other forms of resistance. --Publisher's description

This report is a fully updated and concise discussion of leading cases in workplace violence (including physical and mental harrassment) and the various laws that apply to them, including human rights, health & safety, workplace insurance and the Criminal Code of Canada. This edition will help you to identify what constitutes violence, what obligations are created by the common law and what employers need to do to protect their workers and themselves. --Publisher's description

The increased participation of women in the labour force was one of the most significant changes to Canadian social life during the quarter century after the close of the Second World War. Transforming Labour offers one of the first critical assessments of women's paid labour in this era, a period when more and more women, particularly those with families, were going 'out to work'. Using case studies from across Canada, Joan Sangster explores a range of themes, including women's experiences within unions, Aboriginal women's changing patterns of work, and the challenges faced by immigrant women. By charting women's own efforts to ameliorate their work lives as well as factors that re-shaped the labour force, Sangster challenges the commonplace perception of this era as one of conformity, domesticity for women, and feminist inactivity. Working women's collective grievances fuelled their desire for change, culminating in challenges to the status quo in the 1960s, when they voiced their discontent, calling for a new world of work and better opportunities for themselves and their daughters. --Publisher's description

As one of the most difficult periods of the twentieth century, the Great Depression left few Canadians untouched. Using more than eighty interviews with women who lived and worked in Toronto in the 1930s, Breadwinning Daughters examines the consequences of these years for women in their homes and workplaces, and in the city's court rooms and dance halls. In this insightful account, Katrina Srigley argues that young women were central to the labour market and family economies of Depression-era Toronto. Oral histories give voice to women from a range of cultural and economic backgrounds, and challenge readers to consider how factors such as race, gender, class, and marital status shaped women's lives and influenced their job options, family arrangements, and leisure activities. Breadwinning Daughters brings to light previously forgotten and unstudied experiences and illustrates how women found various ways to negotiate the burdens and joys of the 1930s. --Publisher's description

[E]xplores the precarious margins of contemporary labour markets. Over the last few decades, there has been much discussion of a shift from full-time permanent jobs to higher levels of part-time and temporary employment and self-employment. Despite such attention, regulatory approaches have not adapted accordingly. Instead, in the absence of genuine alternatives, old regulatory models are applied to new labour market realities, leaving the most precarious forms of employment intact. The book places this disjuncture in historical context and focuses on its implications for workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States, and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union. Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analysing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries. --Publisher's description

High unemployment rates, humiliating relief policy, and the spectre of eviction characterized the experiences of many Ontario families in the Great Depression. Respectable Citizens is an examination of the material difficulties and survival strategies of families facing poverty and unemployment, and an analysis of how collective action and protest redefined the meanings of welfare and citizenship in the 1930s.Lara Campbell draws on diverse sources including newspapers, family and juvenile court records, premiers' papers, memoirs, and oral histories to uncover the ways in which the material workings of the family and the discursive category of 'respectable' citizenship were invested with gendered obligations and Anglo-British identity. Respectable Citizens demonstrates how women and men represented themselves as entitled to make specific claims on the state, shedding new light on the cooperative and conflicting relationships between men and women, parents and children, and citizen and state in 1930s Canada. --Publisher's description

[D]ocuments the struggles of immigrant workers and analyses them within the context of neoliberal globalization and the international and national labour markets. Fight Back grew out of collaboration between a group of university-affiliated researchers who are active in different social movements and community organizations in partnership with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal. The book shares with us the experiences of immigrant workers in a variety of workplaces. It is based on the underlying belief that the best kind of research that tells “how it really is” comes from the lived experience of people themselves. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- Context -- Making immigrant workers -- Access to social rights for migrants to Canada: the long divide between the law and the real world -- Seasonal agricultural workers -- Canada's live-in caregiver program : popular among both employers and migrants, but structured for dependency and inequality -- Survival and fighting back.

Trade unions in Canada are losing their traditional support base, and membership numbers could sink to US levels unless unions recapture their power. Unions, Equity, and the Path to Renewal brings together a distinguished group of union activists and equity scholars who trace how traditional union cultures, practices, and structures have eroded solidarity and activism and created an equity deficit in Canadian unions. Informed by a feminist vision of unions as instruments of social justice, the contributors argue that equity within unions is not simply one possible path to union renewal – it is the only way to reposition organized labour as a central institution in workers’ lives. --Publisher's description

How Canadians rate the prestige of their occupations, and what this says about our understanding of the knowledge economy, social mobility and inequality, and our working selves. "What do you do?" is often the first question posed when strangers meet, as occupation reveals a great deal about both social identity and social standing or "occupational prestige." Sociologists have studied occupational prestige for decades, including a landmark national survey in 1965 by Peter Pineo and John Porter. John Goyder updates Pineo and Porter's work, providing a detailed comparison of their results with a similar national scale survey conducted in 2005. The results challenge the accepted view that prestige ratings are constant over time and across societies. Goyder shows that there have been some surprising changes in these ratings: instead of the expected premium on jobs in the knowledge sector, more traditional occupations - such as the skilled trades, even if they require little education or pay a low wage - have gained the most prestige. There has been a significant decrease in consensus about occupational prestige ratings and the tendency for respondents to upgrade the prestige of their own occupation is much more pronounced in the recent data. Goyder argues that these changes are a sign of the shifting nature of values in a meritocratic society in which increasing income inequality is a growing reality. Results from prestige surveys help in the construction of socio-economic scales for occupations and inform career counselling for young people and negotiations by labour unions and associations. "The Prestige Squeeze" goes beyond this to question the very nature of how we measure social equality and mobility. --Publisher's description

Contents: Canadian labour and employment relations / Daphne G. Taras and Morley Gunderson -- Understanding the unionization decision / Ann C. Frost and Daphne G. Taras -- Labour history and the development of modern capitalism / Richard Marsden -- Unions : membership, structures, actions and challenges / Gregor Murray -- The management of industrial relations / Mark Thompson -- Managing the high-involvement workplace / Anil Verma and Daphne G. Taras -- Social, political, and economic environments / Frank Reid and Rafael Gomez -- Collective bargaining legislation in Canada / Sara Slinn -- The individual employment contract and employment / Geoffrey England -- Collective bargaining : structure, process, and innovation / Richard Chaykowski -- The collective agreement / Anthony Giles and Akivah Starkman -- Strikes and dispute resolution / Morley Gunderson, Bob Hebdon, and Douglas Hyatt -- The grievance arbitration process and workplace / Kenneth Wm. Thornicroft -- Union impact on compensation, productivity, and management of the organization / Morley Gunderson and Douglas Hyatt -- Public-sector collective bargaining / Mark Thompson and Patrice Jalette -- Union-management relations in Québec / Esther Déom and Jean-Noël Grenier with Marie-Pierre Beaumont -- Trade unions and labour relations regimes: international perspectives in a globalizing world / Carla Lipsig-Mummé. Previous eds. published under title: Union-management relations in Canada; Includes bibliographical references and index.

In late 2008, the world’s economy began to tumble at avalanche speed, and at the forefront of the manufacturing collapse were the Big Three automakers: Chrysler, General Motors and Ford. For decades, these companies had been shining stars, providing billions of dollars of new investments and thousands of well-paying jobs. Yet suddenly the heads of these and other manufacturing giants found themselves begging governments for financial packages to save their industries. What the hell happened? Buzz Hargrove, the former head of the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW), retired right before the collapse, but not before witnessing the decades of bad decisionmaking— by federal governments and CEOs—that set the stage for the sudden crisis. No one knows the ins and outs of manufacturing like Hargrove, a man who championed the cause of on-the-line workers but who also earned the immense respect of political and business leaders. In Laying It on the Line, Hargrove explains the crisis from his side of the table, what it means for Canada and how the manufacturing sector can again become this country’s foremost economic driver. Along the way, he shares the behind-the-door dealings with GM, Ford, Air Canada and others, explaining the controversial agreements he reached over his decades as Canada’s chief labour leader. Laying It on the Line is a timely call to arms for industry, governments and indeed all Canadians. --Publisher's description

Where does a young boy turn when his whole world suddenly disappears? What turns two brothers from an unstoppable team into a pair of bitterly estranged loners? How does the simple-hearted care of one middle-aged nurse reveal the scars of an entire community, and can anything heal the wounds caused by a century of deception? Award-winning cartoonist Jeff Lemire pays tribute to his roots with Essex County, an award-winning trilogy of graphic novels set in an imaginary version of his hometown, the eccentric farming community of Essex County, Ontario, Canada. In Essex County, Lemire crafts an intimate study of one community through the years, and a tender meditation on family, memory, grief, secrets, and reconciliation. With the lush, expressive inking of a young artist at the height of his powers, Lemire draws us in and sets us free. This new edition collects the complete, critically-acclaimed trilogy (Tales from the Farm, Ghost Stories, and The Country Nurse) in one deluxe volume! Also included are over 40-pages of previously unpublished material, including two new stories. This title has been voted by Canada Reads Top 10 title for the decade! --Publisher's description

Wrapped around the stories of these four women, is a mystery. Something''s gone wrong with the Mosquitos being built for the war effort -- they keep crashing in flight tests, for no apparent reason. Is the problem with their design, or are they being sabotaged? By whom? The traitorous Red Finns? The political subversives who have recently escaped from one of the nearby prison camps? Everyone''s on high alert, and "The Factory Voice" keeps abreast of the details. Or at least the rumours. --Publisher's description

Affectionate portrait of John St. Amand (1943-2007) who, under the tutelage of the left-wing labour activist, Madeleine Parent, moved in 1981 from Ontario to Nova Scotia to become a union organizer.

Through painful struggles and changing relationships, Thunder Bay’s working class defined itself during the tumultuous years before World War I. Labour Pains looks at many responses to the harshness of industrialism: trade unionism and labour politics, unrest and violence, the Social Gospel and socialism, mediation and conciliation. Alliances and conflict, many ethnicities and various expressions of class consciousness all contributed to the making of the working class whose members and defenders embraced many remarkable individuals, known and unknown. --Publisher's description. Contents: The beginnings of Thunder Bay's working class [Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario] -- Trade unions, municipal ownership & labour politics : Harry Bryan and the advent of organized labour] -- Dock workers, immigrants and the railways -- Socialism, the social gospel and labour politics [labor] -- The 1909 Freight Handlers Strike -- Who won the 1909 strike? -- Labour, socialists and the 1912 Coal Handlers Strike -- The Justice system, immigrants and waterfront strikes : socialists and violence -- The 1913 Street Railwaymen's Strike -- Reformers and rebels, good deeds and discord -- Appendix A. Labour unions in Port Arthur and Fort William in 1910. Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-174) and index.

The NFU was formed in 1969 through a merger of the Saskatchewan Farmers Union, the Ontario Farmers Union, the Farmers Union of British Columbia, and the Farmers Union of Alberta. In addition to these provincial unions, farmers from the Maritime provinces—not organized into farmers’ unions at the time—also became part of the NFU structure. Prior to ’69, these provincial unions each had worked autonomously in its respective province, but increasingly they were finding themselves at a disadvantage in attempting to work with the federal government. In an effort to solve that problem, the unions created a coordinating body, the National Farmers Union Council, consisting of representatives of the executives of each provincial union and representatives from the Maritime provinces. Over time, the officials and members from the provincial unions and the Maritimes realized that the major policy decisions affecting farmers were being made at the federal level. At a joint meeting of the executives of the provincial unions and others in Winnipeg in March 1968, the executive members passed a motion to strike a committee to develop a constitution for a direct membership national farm organization. The founding convention of the National Farmers Union was held in Winnipeg in July 1969. In the following months the provincial unions were phased out and their assets and liabilities transferred to the national organization. --Publisher's description