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[E]xamines the role and influence of Canadian manufacturers and executives working for the Canadian government, known as the dollar-a-year men, in mobilizing the Canadian economy for war production. Based chiefly on primary source research this thesis examines contracting methods, the bureaucratic structure of the Department of Munitions and Supply, and the degree to which the Department reacted to events. This thesis demonstrates that the dollar-a-year men's strategy for industrial mobilization was initially focused on maximizing production at almost any cost, and only started focusing on cost efficiency in late 1942 and early 1943. It is also demonstrated that the current historiography is lacking and that C.D. Howe played a far different role than the historiography describes.
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Taking a telescopic view of the multifaceted struggles of the workless prior to Black Tuesday challenges the myopic picture of the Great Depression as the sudden, unexpected eruption of unemployment protest. Out of all proportion to their size and political strength, radical unemployment agitators between 1875-1928 proved to be vital protagonists in forcing relief measures, thrusting socialist values into public discourse and inspiring working-class resistance during economic crises and at times when the labour movement was at its weakest. This dissertation examines hundreds of unemployment protests in urban centres across Canada during the 1872-1896 long depression, and the economic slumps of 1907-1909, 1912-1915 and 1921-1926. These protests and the organizations of the workless challenged three distinct but overlapping stages in the evolution of the liberal-capitalist state: producer, progressive, and authoritarian. Although always vulnerable and contingent, the mobilized workless responded with innovation to the evolution of liberal capitalism and, by gravitating towards the developing socialist alternative, gained greater coherence and uniformity as they moved from the local and spontaneous “les Misérables” (1875-1896) to an ad hoc “Organized Mob” (1907-1915) to a militant and sporadically nationally-organized “Unemployed Army” (1919-1935). This study contends that the persistence of a moral economy, the strategies of disruption, and working-class anguish and indignation were key resources for the radical and socialist organizers of the unemployed. Sensitive to the ways in which a culture of whiteness and masculinity often precluded greater solidarity amongst the workless, this dissertation also traces the ways unemployed diaspora socialists, socialist feminists and their allies encouraged a more diverse and inclusive movement. Far from reactionary or apathetic, the mobilized unemployed were every bit as important to the vitality of the left as unions or political parties – their struggles were crucial elements in the development of Canada’s earliest socialist experiments. Similarly, Canadian social policy history is unintelligible without an acknowledgment of the fundamental role that unemployment movements played in wresting concessions from the liberal order and as disruptive agents in the shaping of the welfare state.
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This dissertation examines workplace issues and events that shaped men’s health, and the healthcare services in support of them, in northern Ontario’s resource extraction industries. Between 1890 and 1925 there were important transformations in the hardrock mining sector including: technological innovations and refinements of the materials and devices used to extract ores; the healthcare mandated and legislatively prescribed but challenging to deliver to frontier workspaces; and how the complex interactions of the men, their work, their communities, wartime demands and collective bargaining combined to construct new definitions of masculinity. Using quantitative data from the Ontario Bureau of Mines on the numbers of annual accidents and fatalities, a clearer understanding emerges that reveals how workingmen’s bodies were understood over time. Together with newspaper accounts, the reports of coroners’ juries, personal papers, doctors’ memoirs and popular histories, the role of work and workplace conditions clarifies how health was managed or how it suffered as the exploitation of the provinces natural resources began in earnest. The impact of World War One caused a wholesale change in the scale and importance of the mines and the men that worked them. This was seen in their solidarity, strength and successful strike immediately after the war and in fewer accidents and fatalities. The pace of change, however, faded in the post-war era. The gains that were made were kept and men’s health and safety never again saw the alarming losses as those enumerated here.
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This thesis explores the precarious nature of backstage work within the live music industry. Live music is replacing recorded music as the economic core of the music industry. Live music is a unique sector, in that it is valued for its ephemerality. Given the ephemerality of concerts, new frameworks are required to understand technical and logistical production of live music. Labour arrangements in live music reflect sweeping trends in the labour market. Backstage workers are employed in flexible, contract and contingent arrangements leading to precarious livelihoods. This thesis argues that labour precaritization in the live music industry is part of an accumulation strategy by suggesting that employers exploit the affective, emotive and cathartic nature of live music to reduce wages and extract surplus from workers. Essentially, workers are willing to accept a psychic wage in lieu a living wage. This arrangement can be called `lifestyle labour' in that workers are willing to accept lifestyle components as part of their wage.