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The article reviews the book "Harrisburg Industrializes: The Coming of Factories to an American Community," by Gerald G. Eggert.

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.

Women who were activists in the Canadian district of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) during the postwar and cold war era challenge the assumption that class consciousness is incompatible with female gender consciousness. Encouraged by the leadership's espoused commitment to gender equality, and secure in their strategic importance as a quarter of the lYE's membership, women activists not only refused to accept second-class status within the union, but called, in the name of solidarity, for men's active support in the struggle for women's rights. Although their arguments for a gender-conscious analysis of class struggle failed to convince the UE's leadership, their struggle laid the foundation for the working-class feminism that later emerged within the union.

The article reviews the book "Labour's Dilemma: The Gender Politics of Auto Workers in Canada, 1937-1979," by Pamela Sugiman.

Le malaise professionnel — vu comme un conflit entre les valeurs professionnelles et les exigences organisationnelles — a donné lieu à une abondante littérature au cours des quarante dernières années. Le concept est ici repris dans le but d'élaborer un construit qui s'appuie sur les huit principaux points de tension entre les cadres et les professionnels, soit la nature du travail, l'autonomie, la participation à la prise de décision, le style de gestion du supérieur, les conditions de travail, le développement de carrière, la reconnaissance et l'éthique. Construit à partir de questions mesurant tant les attentes professionnelles que les perceptions de réalisation de 2497 professionnels syndiqués du Québec, le construit de 16 indicateurs se révèle cohérent et valide puisqu'il est significativement corrélé avec les attitudes et comportements généralement associés au malaise par les auteurs.

A fact-based award-winning movie telling the history and Truck Drivers' Union-involvement of the first-ever woman elected to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters' General Executive Board in 1991.

The active labor market policy has been used to reduce the duration of unemployment in Sweden. The lifetime employment system has been used to lower the incidence of unemployment in Japan. Emulating Japan and Sweden could prove difficult, since their policies reflect and reinforce employment interests that are very different from Canada's. As a result, neither lifetime employment nor active labor market policy is transferable to Canada without major modifications to suit the stakeholder interests of Canadian unions, employers, and employees.

The article reviews the book, "La sociiologie des entreprises," by Philippe Bernoux.

Recounts the story of labour from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. A masterful overview that encompasses all regions of the country, the book paints a vivid portrait of labour's varied past, covering the birth of craft unionism prior to World War I, the setbacks of the interwar years, and the post-World War II breakthrough that gave unions a permanent, if still constrained, place in the national economy. In its analysis of the more recent past, the book ranges just as widely, discussing everything from the organization of public sector employees in the sixties to the anti-free-trade coalitions of the eighties and the massive layoffs of the nineties. --Publisher's description

Labour Day became a statutory holiday in Canada in 1894, but labour days and craftsmen’s parades had been summer events in several Canadian cities and towns for a number of years. Its creation as an official holiday responded to two demands: one for public recognition of organized labour and its important role, and another for release from the pressures of work in capitalist industry. It was up to unions, however, to produce the parades and shape the day’s events, and this task could prove to be too much for local workers’ movements with limited resources. The tension between celebration and leisure eventually undermined the original grand ideals, as wage-earners and their families began to spend Labour Day pursuing private pleasures rather than participating in a display of cultural solidarity.

Despite the inadequacies of the historiography, a growing number of anthropologists, economists, geographers, sociologists, and historians have taken an interest in native wage earners and independent producers since the publication of Rolf Knight's "Indians at Work" in 1978. This paper will discuss the existing literature (as it relates to our understanding of native labour history), the various methodological approaches involved, the changing nature of sources, and some of the opportunities for research. In doing so, I will demonstrate that there is an emerging consensus that aboriginal peoples not only participated in the capitalist economy during [the] so-called "era of irrelevance," [i.e., since the mid-19th century] but did so selectively in order to strengthen their traditional way of life. Native efforts to incorporate aspects of the capitalist economy into their seasonal round and their resistance to the government's assimilation policy laid the foundation for the future construction of the non-proletarian Amerindian worker. --From author's introduction

The primary objective of this paper is to delineate a typology or hierarchy of public feasts in mid 19th-century Saint John and Halifax in order to show how we can use food and drink as markers of class and as instruments in the process of class formation. I will be considering such questions as: why did people in different classes partake of "victuals" and "spirits?" How does this reflect their different priorities and social practices at mid century? Emphasis will be placed on public secular feasts -- that is, the banquet, ox roast, institutional repast, and tea and coffee soirée -- which were held to commemorate royal and patriotic anniversaries. It is only through these local micro-studies that we can effectively "get at" the meanings associated with food and drink.

The "textbook" description is that members of defined benefit plans bear no investment risk, in sharp contrast to members of defined contribution plans. Three sources of empirical evidence are used to support the proposition that employees do bear at least some of the investment risk associated with pension fund performance. Poor fund performance leads to larger employer contributions to maintain the defined benefit obligation and this in turn leads to lower levels of other forms of compensation. It is concluded that risk-shifting does occur, in at least some plans, and that the textbook distinction is overstated.

Joan Sangster's "Beyond Dichotomies" (left history, 3.1, Spring/Summer 1995) is a polemic on the relationship between women's history and gender history. As such, it tends to bring out issues and highlight debates but, at the same time, it sometimes inevitably simplifies and potentially misrepresents in order to address important points. As friends and colleagues, we would like to take issue with some of the assertions and suggestions made in Sangster's piece. We think it is important to debate these issues and we hope to make a contribution. Such issues are central in feminist historical debates internationally and, while individuals who write Canadian women's history and gender history have clearly borrowed from the intemational literature, there has been no sustained Canadian "debate," at least not in print. --Introduction

Discusses and provides examples of documentation of Italian radicals in Canada at the Casellario Politico Centrale (Rome), the files of which were extensive during the Fascist dictatorship in Italy (1922-43) since the regime wanted to identify and monitor its opponents. Argues that these materials may be used to write the history of the Italian left/anti-Fascism in Canada as well as contributing to studies of Canadian labour/immigration history and the international anti-fascist movement.

The article reviews the book "Continuities and Discontinuities: The Political Economy of Social Welfare and Labour Market Policy in Canada," edited by Andrew F. Johnson, Stephen McBride and Patrick J. Smith.

This chapter seeks to move the discussion of labour and politics beyond the contest of political ideologies in the movement and the constraints of the liberal democratic state. To explain the different political histories of the Australian and Canadian movements we use a model with three dimensions: the changing balance between labour and politics; the different social forces that labour seeks to represent; and the different conceptions of politics that labour holds. After a discussion of the literature on labour and politics in the two countries, the paper applies this model to distinguish two periods, a formative period up to the early 1920s, in which labour entered politics. and the period from the 1920s to the 1950s when parties or governments took politics into the labour movement. The model enables us to characterize the politics of the Australian Labor Party as a form of class-based labourism, with significant moments of working-class socialism. We characterize the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party as a form of populist socialism. The paper concludes with some insights gained from using a common model in a comparative exercise.

Discusses the history and historiography of the Swiss labour movement with reference to defining events such as the 1848 civil war, the 1918 general strike, the growth of the political left, and the student radicalism of the 1960s. Concludes that although substantial scholarship has emerged since the 1960s, there is still much work to be done, such as women in the labour movement and studies that integrate the rich and varied history of the working class, including the relationship with Swiss bourgeois society.

Employee shirking, where workers give less than full effort to the job, has typically been investigated as a construct subject to organization-level influences. Neglected are individual differences that could explain why employees in the same organization or work-group might shirk. Using a sample of workers from the health care profession in the US, a new study sought to address these limitations by investigating subjective well-being (a dispositional construct), job satisfaction, as well as other individual-level determinants of shirking. Results indicate that whites shirk significantly more than nonwhites, and that subjective well-being, job satisfaction, and age have significant, negative effects on shirking. The implications of these results are discussed.

The article reviews the book "The Infernal Machine," by Larry Hannant.