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This thesis examines the history of female immigrant domestic labour in Canada from a socialist feminist perspective. Over the past hundred years, Canadian immigration policy with respect to domestic workers became increasingly regressive with the shift in the racial composition of foreign female domestics. The women's movement contributed to this change as gains in Canadian women's public rights did not effectively challenge the dominant social paradigm of women's roles, and so left intact the public-private divide and the sexual division of labour to which were allied biases of race and class. The women's movement thus became an unwitting participant in the formulation of regressive immigration policies which rebounded on the women's movement itself, reinforcing its internal divisions.

The 1920s is generally seen as a period of defeat for Canadian labour. With the rise of monopoly capital, strike activity and union membership steadily declined in the face of wage cuts, new technologies and corporate welfare schemes. The continental alliance of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (TLC) that, for the most part, provided labour's leadership during this crisis, proved ineffective. By 1927 a secessionist movement challenged the legitimacy of the AFL/TLC alliance. In March of that year, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railroad Employees (CBRE), gathered with the One Big Union (OBU), the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL), and communist-influenced unions, including the Mine Workers' Union of Canada and the Lumber Workers' Industrial Union, to form the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL). It is the focus of this thesis to bring the Congress front and centre and to provide an alternative interpretation of its effort to build a national labour movement in the 1920s--one that was neither opportunistic, anti-communist, nor right-wing. Instead, this thesis supports the contention that the ACCL was a counter-hegemonic, working-class initiative that aimed to improve the political representation and material conditions of the Canadian worker.

In 1924, the General Hospital at Kingston, Ontario, began a process of rationalisation, following Taylorist principles of scientific management. In concurrence with the restructuring of other N orth American hospitals, and with the advice given in professional literature, the Governors of K.G.H. secured the services of R.F. Armstrong, a civil engineer. His mandate was to facilitate the transformation of K.G.H. into an efficient, economical modem health institution which would attract not just indigent patients, but also upper-class, paying clients. Part I of this paper analyses the process by wrhich rationalisation was wreaked upon student nurses in the K.G.H. Nurse Training School, considering these women not primarily as students but as an unpaid labour force. I argue that administrators employed a combination of paternalism and scientific management in an attempt to conform student-wrorkers into an 'ideal nurse labourer', as defined by historically specific discourses of gender, class, and Canadian nation/race which converged in the image of the Nurse. Balancing this 'top-down' approach, Part II of the paper attempts to reconstruct student-workers' experiences of and responses to nursing training. Using nurses' cultural productions and oral interview's, I explore the concept of 'everyday resistance' in the contexts of the Nurses' Home and the hospital workshop, arguing that the continual supervision and surveillance endured by student-workers did not preclude successful attempts to wrrite their own script for their experience of nursing. To the contrary, nurses-in-training developed a culture of mutuality which provided them with the resources to resist and ameliorate the most repressive and totalising aspects of hospital labour and residence life. The result of this reconsideration of nursing training is an increased understanding of student nurse labourers as individuals with hopes and expectations of their own, rather than simply dutiful, obedient daughters in the hospital 'family' who accepted their subordination to the 'ethic of service'.

Cape Breton, the site of major strikes during the 1920s, remained a hotbed of political radicalism and trade union militancy for many years. In the 1930s the Communist Party had considerable influence, and most of the coal miners joined the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia, a CP-led breakaway from the United Mine Workers of America. Ideological opposition to the columnists was spearheaded by the Catholic-inspired Antigonish Co-operative Movement, but this did not prevent the communist leader, J. B. McLachlan, from getting substantial votes in elections. The change of communist policy to the "united front" weakened the party's influence, although communists and the officers of the re-united miners' union were able to help the Sydney steelworkers finally establish a union, and to successfully press the provincial government to pass the 1937 Trade Union Act. Left and right in Cape Breton were also able to work together during the 1937 provincial election. The unity line of the communists, along with the impact of the Antigonish movement on Catholic voters, prepared the way for the UMW affiliation to the CCF in 1938, and during the CCFers won the local seats in both the federal and provincial legislatures. However, the CCF could never win elections elsewhere in the Maritimes, and the move of CCF policies to the right in the post-war years only served to gradually undermine its support in Cape Breton. In the UMW the dissatisfaction of the miners with their bureaucratic officers brought about the 1941 slowdown, one of the most costly wartime industrial disputes, and productivity fell. The union policies advocated by the CCF (and the CP during the war), helped end opposition to the mechanization of the mines. Following defeat in the 1947 strike, the miners had to accept modernization on the company's terms, although this meant the loss of jobs. The steelworkers' union won a national strike in 1946, but thereafter was unable to hold wage rates for Sydney at a level equal to those paid in Ontario steel plants. The militancy and radicalism of the miners and steelworkers of earlier years had almost completely disappeared by 1950. Dramatic anti-communist episodes in both the steelworkers' and miners' unions in the 1949-50 period marked the triumph of union bureaucrats and Cold War politicians over radicalism in Cape Breton.

This thesis explains why in the 1940s, Winnipeg meat packing workers secured sustainable industrial unionism. By tracing the development of the Winnipeg meat packing industry and investigating previously unsuccessful organizational drives, it is suggested that success in the 1940s corresponded to three broad contributing factors. The most significant factor was changing local conditions. With the gradual introduction of mass production techniques to the Winnipeg meat packing industry beginning in the early 1920s, the reorganization of Winnipeg packinghouse work occurred. The large scale introduction of semi-skilled workers changed the face of meat packing, as packinghouse work became deskilled without any significant degree of automation. During this period, craft unionism in the meat packing industry failed on a national pattern. This failure coincided with the 1930s experiment in industrial unionisn by Winnipeg workers'at Western Packers workers. Western Packing's workers' introduction to industrial unionism also provided the successful 1940s drive with links to the Communist Party. An overall strengthening in North America of the labour movement beginning in the 1930s provided the second broad contributing factor to success in the 1940s. With the birth of the CIO in the United States and Canada, Winnipeg meat packing workers gained at the very minimum inspiration. The impact of Wor1d War II accounted for the final contributing factor for success in the 1940s. With a wartime demand creating full employment and the governmentts desire to maintain production, organized labour found itself in a position of unparalleled power. In combination, a spirit of militancy arose among Canada's labour movement. From these conditions, meat packing workers in Winnipeg chose and pursued industrial unionism with great success. By the end of World war II, workers in Winnipeg possessed an effective union organization and had won union shops and wage increases. Ultimately however, the union's national success created a centralized, bureaucratic union movement which consequently provided a loss of local autonomy.

Transition houses are small feminist organizations, providing emergency shelter to women and children who have been abused. They also are workplaces whose social organization divides women as managers and workers. This research, an institutional ethnographic case-study of nine transition houses in one Canadian province, examines how relations between the state and transition house have led to greater institutional power and control over transition house work, by women who are paid managers. This results in a reconstituted struggle for equality between women inside these settings. Mangerialism in the Canadian transition house movement has not been theorized.The argument advanced here is that conflict between workers and managers in transition houses is an inevitable outcome of the on-going struggle to develop feminist praxis within contradictory relations, shaped and influenced by transition house/state relations, dominant managerial discourses, and the exigencies of transition house work. In an attempt to resist and to limit managerial power and control over the labour process and over feminist praxis, transition house workers look for ways to develop their own collective power. Unionization as a vehicle for collective action is an obvious choice and it is one that transition house workers are pursuing.

This study examines the critical years in which the Canadian industrial relations system assumed many of its lasting characteristics. Specifically, it explores the actions of management, unions, and the federal state under the exceptional conditions of the wartime "command economy" and later, with the transition back to a peacetime footing. Frustrated with the inadequacy of existing collective bargaining legislation, and sensing that this period signalled a realignment in the labour-capital relationship, Canadian workers took advantage of special wartime conditions to press home their demands for basic workplace rights framed by a more equitable labour code. The result of this campaign was the establishment of a new legal framework which defined the respective roles for all three groups over the next thirty years. Of particular importance is an investigation of the ambivalent legacy achieved by the Canadian labour movement with its pursuit of the essential rights of free association and collective bargaining. Building on the intense workplace struggles of the war years, labour pushed federal authorities to support mandatory collective bargaining, compulsory wage deductions of union dues, finally entrenching these reforms under the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act (1948).

Drawing on the manuscript records of the Department of Crown Lands, its published reports, and case law, this thesis examines the illegal occupation of rural land, known as squatting in the Eastern Townships of Quebec in the period 1838 to 1866. By 1838, demographic pressure in the seigneuries, inflated land prices due to speculation, and inaccessible public land granting practices had made squatting a commonplace strategy for land acquisition. The responses to squatting of the Department of Crown Lands, the Legislature and the judiciary are analysed for what they implied about ideas of property in Lower Canada. While the Department of Crown Lands' policy of pre-emption affirmed that squatters held rights to public land because they laboured to cultivate and improve it, the legislature refused to acknowledge that squatters could acquire such rights on private land; nine out of ten bills intended to ensure ejected squatters a systematically determined remuneration for improvements made by them on the private property of absentees failed to pass into law during the period. Most were rejected by the Legislative Council which defended the interests of landed wealth. Lower Canadian courts, meanwhile, struggled to sort out laws relating to squatting. Ultimately they found that while squatters on private property owned their improvements, they had no right to the land itself. Thus the judiciary applied a bifurcated concept of property to rural land in Lower Canada despite the prevalence of liberal theories of absolute property rights during the nineteenth century.

ln acknowledging and incorporating significant episodes of the past into the present landscape, monuments can provide the inhabitants of a place with an interactive heritage: a heritage based on the fusion of past and present, deepening a sense of place by providing the means to possess a common identity, that is to belong to a fellowship of place. The intent of this practicum was the development of a contextually based monument which relies on an integration of elements and contextual relationships to convey its meaning. With this goal in mind, the evolution of the monument was studied in order to gain a better understanding of it as a theoretical concept and valid functional element. The intent of this study was the development of programmatic guidelines for a contextually based monument. The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 provided the perfect subject for the design of a commemorative monument which would be based on an application of the developed program. Site selection for this specific commemorative monument was based on the applicability to historical criteria and thematic issue derived from a study of the Winnípeg General Strike. ln addressing and defining each of the requirements, the design has achieved its purpose in illustrating the practical application of a theoretical concept, the contextual monument.

One tenet of labour process theory is the contention that, when confronted by degraded work, people will resist through militant behaviour or in other ways. However, that "resistance hypothesis" has been tested rarely. Canadian postal workers have manifested some considerable militancy, for instance through legal and wildcat strikes and through frequent recourse to the grievance mechanism. Too, their work has been subjected to technological change often pointed to as a prime example ofjob degradation. But not all aspects of postal work have been subjected to technological change. Thus, postal workers constitute a test ofthe "resistance hypothesis:" if degraded work provokes militancy, then ceteris paribus postal workers involved in automated work will be more militant than those who are not. In this study, a group of postal workers employed in "Cancity" in 1985-6 (N=152) were surveyed regarding their attitudes and experiences. Factor analytic techniques were used to construct a scale of attitudinal militancy, and hierarchical set analysis - summarised using dummy variable path coefficients - was used to examine the causal links between this outcome and logically prior factors, including job degradation, employment history, and achieved and ascribed statuses including sex. The results indicate that job degradation does have an impact on attitudinal militancy, but that this impact is modest at best, and weakens as other influences are taken into account.

This thesis documents the employment history of Sne-nay-muxw women. The Sne nay-muxw, a Coast Salish peoples, live on the southeast coast ofVancouver Island close to the city ofNanaimo. Nanaimo was established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1852 as coal mining town. Coal dominated the economy until the early 20th century when forestry related production became important. Today a service economy has eclipsed both the primary and secondary industries. Within these economies a distinct gender, race and class segregation structured Sne-nay-muxw women’s employment opportunities. This study examines the nature of this segregation, the Sne-nay-muxw domestic economy and the gender ideology that promoted both women’s inclusion and exclusion in. wage labour. A central question posed in this thesis is why Sne-nay-muxw women today perceive their traditional roles to be within the home despite their historical participation in the labour force. Feminist anthropology provides the theoretical and methodological approach used for this study. It is accepted that women’s experiences in the labour force are different not only from men but also from other women based upon relational inequalities ofrace and class. Historical data was collected from a variety of sources; published and unpublished government reports, missionary accounts, letters and journals. Nineteen women and eight men were interviewed in the community for both historic and contemporary accounts of employment experiences. History reveals that during the mining economy Sne-nay-muxw women were excluded from working in the mines and limited to employment as domestic servants. The introduction of Chinese labour, decreasing coal demands and increased technology forced many women to migrate with their families to the canneries on the Fraser river and the hop fields in Washington state. In the forestry related production economy, Sne-nay-muxw women’s opportunities were limited despite the expansion of employment for women in the service sector. State policies and inferior education were significant factors in this exclusion. At this time Sne-nay-muxw women continued to migrate with their families to the fish camps on Rivers Inlet and the berry fields in Washington state. In the last two decades the service economy has dominated in Nanaimo. Sne-nay-muxw women have found increasing job opportunities on and off reserve in administration, management and professional service delivery programs. While this employment is part of the wider trend for women in the service economy, Sne-nay-muxw women’s opportunities remain segregated by gender, race and class. Women’s participation in the labour force is shown to be linked to the organization of their domestic economy. Before 1920 this economy incorporated both subsistence production and farming with seasonal wage labour. After this time the Sne-nay-muxw became increasingly dependent upon wage labour. However, extended family and kinship networks have remained important for support and cooperation. This form ofhousehold organization did not constrain women’s participation in the labour force. Today extended families remain the central organizing principle in Sne-nay-muxw lives. Sne-nay-muxw women’s identity and opportunities for education and employment remain linked to their membership in these families. Shifts in women’s participation in the labour force is shown to be accompanied by acceptance of a domestic ideology. During the mining economy when women actively sought wage labour, they acquired domestic skills needed for wage labour but did not accept an ideology that promoted their dependency upon men. Historical evidence indicates that they retained a significant degree of autonomy in their lives. With men’s increased security of employment in the forestry economy, the idealized role ofwomen as housewives was promoted. Families that were able to realize women’s exclusion from the labour force gained status and prestige in the community. Finally, in the service economy, the Sne-nay-muxw gender ideology includes women’s participation in the labour force to occupations linked to their domestic and nurturing roles.

This dissertation focuses on the work-for-pay exchange between aboriginal people and immigrants of European stock--the two most prominent cultural groups in the early history of British Columbia--and follows the patterns of this exchange from its origins through to the 1970s. It examines both the material and the rhetorical construction of the "Indian" as a part of British Columbia's labour force, a process described as racialization, and emphasizes, as well, the transformation of meaning inherent in cross-cultural exchange. It is a province-wide analysis, the core of which is a micro-history of one aboriginal group, the Songhees people, who live in the area now occupied by Victoria, the capital city. This examination challenges the long-standing view that aboriginal people were bystanders in the economic development and industrialization of British Columbia outside, and after, the fur trade. From the establishment of the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1849, through Confederation with Canada in 1871 and to the 1885 completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, aboriginal people comprised the majority of the population in present-day British Columbia, and the majority of the work force in agriculture, fishing, trapping and the burgeoning primary industries. This dissertation charts the subsequent decline in participation of aboriginal people in the capitalist economy from 1885 to 1970. Using a micro-historical study and close attention to aboriginal voices it offers a set of explanations for the changing proportions of work, both paid and unpaid, and state welfare payments. The micro-history reveals that the Songhees people engaged in two distinct but connected economies and were already familiar with forms of labour subordination prior to the European introduction of a capitalist economy. The Songhees participation in paid labour for Europeans was facilitated by these existing forms of labour organization and depended on the co-existence of their other economies; the Songhees used earnings from capitalist paid labour to expand their non-capitalist economies. After 1885, new state policies repressed the non-capitalist aboriginal economics and therefore diminished the underlying motivation for aboriginal participation in capitalist work. At the same time, an influx of labour-market competition and a variety of racialized laws and practices restricted the Songhees' ability to get work. Increasingly they were left with seasonal, low-skill and low-wage labour, a niche that maintained them so long as it was combined with a subsistence economy and involved the full participation of adult and adolescent family members. In the late 1940s and 1950s this pattern too was remade. Legal restrictions dramatically limited the subsistence economies; technological change curtailed the demand for seasonal labour in the canning, fishing and agricultural sectors, particularly affecting aboriginal women workers; and, compulsory schooling regulations began to reduce labour available to the family economy. At the same historic moment when the combined wage and subsistence economies ceased to be able to support them, the state extended some existing social welfare programs, such as Old Age Pension, to Indians, and expanded other programs, including Family Allowance, to all Canadians. In examining the patterns of aboriginal-non-aboriginal exchange relations over the long-term, this dissertation argues that high rates of unemployment and welfare-dependency among contemporary aboriginal communities are relatively recent historical phenomena, with observable roots and causes.

In March 1919, more than 230 union representatives gathered in Calgary for the Western Labor Conference. There, they initiated plans for a revolutionary industrial organizatin, the One Big Union, which embodied the internationalist principles of Marxist unionism. Within its first year, the One Big Union (OBU) issued over 70,000 membership cards, and was a powerful symbol of working-class demands for the end of class exploitation. However, given its patriarchal inheritance, the OBU was always something more than just a class organization. It was an attempt by working men to organize around a specific sense of gender identity, which I have called Marxist masculinity, in order to reconstitute the social bases of male power. The first chapter outlines the events surrounding the creation of the OBU in 1919 and the wave of general strikes that swept through Canada that summer. In particular, it sketches the relationship between class politics and a masculine structure of feeling, and how this relationship influenced the OBU's ideology. The second chapter discusses three elements around which Marxist masculinity was constructed. To begin, the experiences of women in the OBU are situated in relation to the organization's policies regarding membership in individual unions and the Women's Auxilliary. As well, it examines the personal lives of OBU leaders and the naturalized assumptions about heterosexuality which governed their politics. The final chapter discusses the purge of Tom Cassidy and Catherine Rose, two dedicated activists fired because of rumours of their sexual involvement. The OBU leadership wanted to prevent a public moral panic around issues of "free love" and was thus determined to have the matter kept quiet. In taking this position, OBU leaders regulated the gender and sexual identities of union members through concepts of proper masculine and feminine socialist behaviour.

In the wake of President Roosevelt''s New Deal for labour in the United States, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) experienced tremendous organizational growth in both Oregon and Washington. Fearing the arrival of the IWA in British Columbia, the provincial government enacted the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (ICA) Act as a means to preserve the industrial peace through state regulation of the class struggle. It was at the company town of Blubber Bay on Texada Island that the Act was tested for the first time in an eleven-month strike [during1938-39] between Local 163 of the IWA and the Pacific Lime Company. With the failure of the legislation to broker a settlement, the union's campaign for recognition was subsequently enveloped by clashes over the common law rights of private property which limited workers' mobility in the community and the criminal laws of unlawful assembly that jailed strike leaders. Through an investigation of the state, company and union this project demonstrates that statutory, criminal and common laws in question were dedicated to the reproduction of capitalist social relations by regulating or eliminating the collective political activities of working people at Blubber Bay and, by extension, the arrival of the IWA in BC. As well, such struggles reveal the fundamentally conceptions of legality put forth by the union. Furthermore, this project illuminates the ways in which the expansion of formal collective bargaining contained class struggle and how the law and legal process shaped the political choices of working people. Indeed, the Blubble Bay conflict provides a window into the role of the state in labour/capital relations; in particular, its capacity through consent and coercion to legitimize its role as arbiter of competing class interests, secure allegiance to the rule of law, and diffuse oppositional challenges to the existing order.

This thesis points to an oversight in the literature about foreign domestic workers. Foreign domestic workers have, too often, been portrayed as one-dimensional victims — a group of powerless women vainly struggling for a respectable place in Canadian society. This portrayal, however, while it can explain their disadvantage along class and gender analyses, assumes a concept of power which dismisses their ability to resist. This thesis argues that foreign domestic workers, although occupying a highly disadvantaged position relative to others in society, are not only victims but actors. This argument acknowledges that their lives in Canada are only part of their grander life histories. When foreign domestic workers are placed at the centre of analysis, as subjects rather than objects, I was able to investigate a multifaceted notion of power. Fifteen foreign domestic workers from the Philippines were interviewed and specific questions were asked about their day to day lives, their background, and their ambitions. Their answers reveal a profound understanding of who they are as women, and as domestic workers. Some clearly understand the connections between the economic crisis in the Philippines and their role in that crisis. The interviews also show that domestic workers contemplated their situations beyond the present, and that they recount their lives in episodes of opportunities as well as constraints. Finally, what is most revealing is the strategies they employ to get through their days. Overall, the interviews with foreign domestic workers illustrate that when they are viewed as active social agents, they articulate power at various levels corresponding with their overlapping social roles and multiple levels of struggle.

This thesis evolved out of an attempt to analyze aboriginal agency and resistance in the aftermath of the Mohawk conflict at Oka, Quebec, which took place in the summer of 1990. However, the existing political economy literature on aboriginal oppression founded in the "staple theory" outlined by Harold Adams Innis does not account for the historical significance of aboriginal resistance in Canada. The thesis undertakes a critique of the inherent assumptions in staple theory--its anthropologism, its fetish of the commodity form, and its geographical determinism--which effectively reduce aboriginal peoples to the position of passive victims in contemporary capitalist society. An alternative historiography is then proposed which considers Canadian economic and political development as the outcome of struggle. The agency of aboriginal peoples is understood in terms of their specific and changing historical position as producers, from the early fur trade to the forging of a capitalist economy and post-colonial state. If the rise of commodity wheat production is the key to the transition to capitalism in Canada, it follows that the aboriginal struggle to retain their land rights was an important obstacle to such development. The aboriginal struggle for land continues to be an obstacle to capitalist expansion; in the current context of economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement, such resistance has international implications. In the current climate of scapegoating and cutbacks which accompany the restructuring process, aboriginal aspirations for land and self-determination also coincide with the aims of other social movements to oppose such attacks. In fact, aboriginal self-determination is central to the broader project for social change in Canada.

The aim of this study was to explore the interrelationship between collective bargaining and pay equity. A qualitative case study methodology was used. Eighty-six interviews were conducted with union and management pay equity negotiators, labour lawyers, Pay Equity Commission Review Officers, and other informants. A collection of documentary evidence supplemented these interviews. The empirical work focused on explaining issues of structure, style and power in pay equity bargaining and the complex intertwinings of the structural properties of gender and class were considered crucial to an explanation of these. The key structural dynamic in the negotiation of pay equity was found to be the degree and effectiveness of a labour-feminist politic combined with employer/state commitment, which are themselves interconnected and represent the transformative face of gender and class power relations. The thesis, in providing a theoretically informed discussion of detailed case study material, contributes towards the debate on the effectiveness of collective bargaining as a vehicle for implementing equal pay policy. It also informs the debate on labour-management cooperation in labour relations, especially in public sector collective bargaining. Because legislated pay equity is bargained within a new set of legal parameters, the study may also aid our understanding of the relationship between collective bargaining and the law. Finally, the thesis attempts to unravel the interwoven complexities of gender and class power relations in the collective bargaining process.

A poor but independent Dominion in the British Empire until 1949, Newfoundland and Labrador is now Canada's poorest province. This thesis argues that capital's uneven development of Newfoundland helps to explain its economic, social, and political troubles in this century. The uneven course of development left Newfoundland with an archaic fishery, enclaves of modern industry dependent on outport labour and external forces, and a state which lacked sufficient resources to save itself or its people during the Great Depression. The uneven pattern of development also impeded the full development of a proletariat which might have challenged the island's dominant interests and created a more equal and prosperous society. The outcome of these "developments" was confederation with Canada and enduring economic and social problems. Focusing on the period 1929-1959, the thesis develops this argument through a study of the pulp and paper industry, one of Newfoundland's major land-based enterprises in this century. It reveals that forest capital's reliance on seasonal outport labour in its woods operations propped up merchant operations in the inshore fishery. Merchant capital profited from fishers' work in the woods as wages paid debts and purchased fishing and consumption supplies. Throughout the period, the Newfoundland state defended forest capital's interests, and not incidentally the course of uneven development. It did so because the industry's mills and company towns were among the few successes of a national policy to diversify an economy dependent on the export of a single staple. Forest capital exploited fabled interior resources and employed thousands in its mills and woodlands which reduced pressure on an unproductive fishery and on a state often burdened with heavy relief bills. Although Newfoundland loggers confronted the combined power of capital and the state, they struggled to resist their exploitation and to improve the lives of their households and communities. In this way, they challenged the course of development in Newfoundland. During the 1930s, loggers staged strikes and joined Newfoundland's first loggers' union. In 1940, disruptive class conflict ended when forest capital and the state spearheaded the creation of the Woods Labour Board. The Board, which included representatives of capital, labour, and the state, inaugurated a conservative period of class collaboration, and continuous production until the tumultuous 1959 International Woodworkers of America strike. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Board helped forest capital accumulate profits in an industry dominated by Fordist-like production forces in the mills and primitive production forces in the woods. The Board's downward pressure on wages and conditions, union representatives separated from their members, and a work force dominated by outport fishers who continued to require seasonal wages, explains the 1959 conflagration. The dissertation concludes that the loggers' 1959 defeat by the combined forces of capital and state followed an historical pattern determined by the uneven pattern of development. This pattern, therefore, helps to explain enduring poverty in outport Newfoundland and the difficulties workers faced to challenge the conditions of their existence.

Recent studies of labour have clearly established that the capitalist state is very involved in the recruitment, relocation and retention of migrant labour forces. Most of the literature tends to analyze migrant labour within the broader social, political and economic context of expanding capitalism. Consequently, studies tend to focus on how the use of migrant labour is profitable to capitalism because it is cheap and easy to exploit. Such studies, however, neglect the ways in which the state actually intervenes in the labour market in order to facilitate the flow of migrant workers to places of employment. Therefore, this thesis explores the relationship between the migration of labour, the state and the reserve army of labour through an analysis of the Native migrant work force in the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta.