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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'.

The article reviews the book, "On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-1939," by O. Nigel Bolland.

The article reviews the book, "Autowork," edited by Robert Asher and Ronald Edsforth.

Since the passage of the first anti-discrimination laws in North America, the number of groups of classes protected has slowly expanded to include the disabled. British Columbia is the only jurisdiction in Canada in which obesity per se has been found to be a covered disability. All other Canadian jurisdictions that have explicitly addressed the issue require claimants to prove that their obesity is a disabling condition and has an underlying involuntary medical cause. Despite the reticence of various human rights agencies, there is ample legal basis for including obesity as a covered disability under human rights law.

[E]xamines labour process developments within Canada and Australia during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. In contrast to traditional labour process studies, which have focused upon the development of sophisticated forms of managerial control within modern industry, this comparative analysis stresses the much simpler forms of labour control that existed within Canadian and Australian rural and urban workplaces. The paper explores the reasons underlying differences in labour process developments, and argues for the need to broaden labour process analysis in order to take account of spatial and geographic variations in working life.

Benchmarking is being used extensively in management's drive to achieve ‘world class’ levels of performance. The majority of benchmarking studies have little if anything to say about working conditions or the tradeoffs between productivity improvements and the conditions of working life. This article is based on a study which focuses on working conditions as described by workers, raising questions about the tradeoffs betwcen work reorganization and the quality of working life under Lean Production. The results, based on a survey of 1670 workers at 16 different companies, suggest that work life under Lean Production has not improved. Compared with workers in traditional Fordist style plants, those at Lean companies reported their work load was heavier and faster. They rcported work loads were increasing and becoming faster. They reported it was difficult to change things they did not like about their job and that it was becoming more difficult to get time off. While our survey results suggest that working in traditional Fordist plants is far from paradise, they also suggest that working in Lean plants is worse. At a minimum, our results should be viewed as a wake-up call to those who have painted a positive picture of work under Lean Production.

English/French abstracts of articles published in the issue.

List of recent publications by the Committee.

The article reviews the book, "Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation," by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey.

Based on in-depth oral interviews with local residents, and rich archival sources, We Lived A Life and Then Some relates the common person’s struggle to overcome harsh working conditions and government neglect. The unique culture of the hardrock mining town of Cobalt is exposed through the eyes of retired miners, young welfare mothers, and grade-school children. Angus and Griffin reveal why, in spite of great adversity, Cobalt remains a distinctive and cohesive working-class community. --Publisher's description

This article chronicles the prosecution of two Chinese men under a 1912 Saskatchewan statute forbidding “Chinese” men from employing “white” women. The “Act to Prevent the Employment of female labour in Certain Capacities” was motivated largely by anti-immigration and racist attitudes, and white workers' concerns about the competitive pricing of Chinese goods and services. Its effect was to bar Chinese business owners from hiring the cheapest labour available in the province.

Historien reconnu à l'échelle internationale, Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson a été un précurseur par sa réinterpretation de l'histoire des peuples de Canada. Ses ouvrages se tiennent une place tout à fait singulièredans l'historiographie canadienne. Intelluelle d'envergure, il a su allier l'excellence scientifique à la responsibilité sociale ; tout au longue une carrière de plus de soixante années, il a conservé ce profil de militant et d'historien engagé. Sa recherche, toujours inspirée des problèmes de société, a été animée par des valeurs de justice, de solidarité et de liberté. Cet ouvrage auquel participent quatorze collaborateurs qui veut faire connaître le plus important historien Marxiste du Canada. Il vise égalment rétracer la trajectoire militante et le cheminement intellectuel progressiste qui a laissé derrière lui une œuvre fort imposante. --Résumé de l'éditeur

A question of concern to researchers in many advanced industrialized economies is whether new human resource management practices fit comfortably with the existing collective bargaining relationship in unionized establishments. Analysis of the current research, based on the 1990 national Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, indicates that an index of human resource management practices is negatively related to management reports of the quality of the existing employee-management relationship in unionized establishments, in contrast to the position in nonunion establishments. This finding is consistent with some existing case study research which indicates that human resource management practices are marginalizing the union-collective bargaining role in unionized organizations. Yet a case study of the paper industry indicates that such marginalization does not occur if the existing relationship is more of a joint problem solving one.

Discusses the papers on the labour history of Australia and Canada presented in the volume. Argues that more attention should have been paid to the factors that enabled union incorporation in Australia half a century in advance of Canada as well as to the labour aspects of both countries' export economies. Compares the Argentinean experience (the author is a Latin America specialist) with that of Canada and Australia. Concludes that, in the era of the neoliberal new world order, comparative studies like these are valuable since the labour movement is vital to the health of democracy.