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Canada's trade unions have long claimed a prominent place in the struggle for social democracy. From the earliest years of that struggle, the labour movement's press has been on the front lines. Radical Rag tells the colourful story of those pioneer days, recounting the war for social justice fiercely waged through the pages of labour's weekly newspapers.... --Publisher's description on book cover

This collection of essays offers a comprehensive examination of the working class experience in British Columbia and contains essential background knowledge for an understanding of contemporary relations between government, labour, and employees. It treats workers' relationship to the province's resource base, the economic role of the state, the structure of capitalism, the labour market and the influence of ethnicity and race on class relations. --Publisher's description

Contents: Section 1. The era of industrialization. Ethnicity and class, transitions over a decade: Ontario, 1861-1871 / A. Gordon Darroch and Michael Ornstein -- Women and wage labour in a period of transition: Montreal, 1861-1881 / Bettina Bradbury -- The 1907 Bell Telephone strike: Organizing women workers / Joan Sangster -- Industry and the good life around Idaho Peak / Cole Harris -- Through the prism of the strike: Industrial conflict in Southern Ontario, 1901-14 / Craig Heron and Brian D. Palmer. Section 2. World War I and its aftermath. Munitions and labour militancy: The 1916 Hamilton Machinists' Strike / Myer Siemiatycki -- Company town/labour town: Local government in the Cape Breton Coal Towns, 1917-1926 / David Frank. Section 3. The rise of modern unionism. Strike in the single enterprise community: Flin Flon, Manitoba, 1914 / Robert S. Robson -- The 1943 steel strike against wartime wage controls / Laurel Sefton MacDowell. Section 4: Overviews. Unionization versus corporate welfare: The "Dofasco Way" / Robert Storey -- Labour and working class history in Canada: Prospects in the 1980s / Gregory S. Kealey -- Through the looking glass of culture: An essay on the new labour history and working class culture in historical writing / David J. Bercuson -- Further reading.

In 1980...[the author] was approached by Nanaimo's Coal Tyee Society to write a book based on 105 interviews of Vancouver Island coal miners and their families. Nanaimo coal mines had closed 30 years before and the city had been home to some of the most important coal mines in the world, along with the one of largest explosions in history, the 1887 Nanaimo mine explosion. The miners wanted their oral histories preserved. Bowen compiled those oral histories in her first book, Boss Whistle, and later book, Three Dollar Dreams. --From Wikipedia article on Lynne Bowen

This important book makes a major contribution to the free trade debate. It is the first study to examine the impact of free trade on specific groups of workers, and to analyze the effect on the service sector. --Publisher's description on book cover

The shocking true story of Canada’s most powerful and feared labour leader. His supporters called him a tough and effective leader; his opponents called him a vicious thug. For nearly two decades, Hal C. Banks ruled the nation’s waterfronts with an iron fist. As head of the communist-busting Seafarers’ International Union, he carved out his fiefdom with a combination of intimidation, blacklisting and brutality. Now, award-winning investigative reporter Peter Edwards brings the complete, shocking story of Hal C. Banks to print for the first time. From ex-con on the San Francisco waterfront to Canada’s most powerful labour boss – with influence that reached onto Parliament Hill itself – here is the unexpurgated truth behind the myths of a larger-than-life warlord whose name still incites fear and controversy even years after his death… and whose ability to break the law and get away with it is an outrageous and fascinating testament of evil in our time. --From author's website

"I will soon be in the dubious position of being the top labor man in all of Canada," Hal Chamberlain Banks wrote home in April 1949, "but let me tell you that I now know that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." Hal Banks, an ex-convict and representative of the Searfarers' International Union of North America, was by nature a boastful man, but there was more than a little truth to what he wrote. Financed by the shipping companies and assisted by the federal government, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Canadian National Railways Police, Banks, along with a small army of SIU strongmen imported from the United States, had, in a matter of months, waged and won a violent battle against the long-established national Canadian Seaman's Union. With only a few companies outside the SIU's orbit, Banks controlled the collective bargaining rights of almost every seaman employed on the Canadian flag fleet and, with an iron fist, would do so for more than a decade. Eventually Banks's activities would be investigated by a commission of inquiry and, facing imprisonment, he would be forced to flee Canada in disgrace. In 1949 the situation was much different. ...How and why Banks and the SIU arrived in Canada is the first part of this story. --Author's preface

1983's powerful Solidarity movement, which for a time seemed capable of deflecting the Social Credit government of British Columbia from its neo-conservative course - or even toppling it - instead died with a whimper. In Solidarity: The Rise and Fall of an Opposition in British Columbia, the first book-length account of this pivotal point in the province's history, Bryan Palmer concludes that it was not Social Credit tactics, but the nature of Solidarity's leadership which foreordained the defeat. --Publisher's description

History of Fort Chipewyan, the first European settlement in Alberta, an important fur-trading centre, and a vital base for the exploration of the continent's hinterland. Traces the development of the Fort Chipewyan fur trade from 1778, when Peter Pond entered the region, until 1835, when the rivalry between the North West and Hudson's Bay companies was no longer a factor, and a monopoly in the fur trade had been restored. Provides a vivid portrayal of life in a remote fur trade outpost during this crucial period in Canadian history. --WorldCat summary/Publisher's description

The lumberjack – freewheeling, transient, independent – is the stuff of countless Canadian tales and legends. He is also something of a dinosaur, a creature of the past, replaced by a unionized worker in a highly mechanized and closely managed industry. In this far-ranging study of the logging industry in twentieth-century Ontario, Ian Radforth charters the course of its transition and the response of its workers to the changes. Among the factors he considers are technological development, changes in demography and the labour market, an emerging labour movement, new managerial strategies, the growth of a consumer society, and rising standards of living. Radforth has drawn on an impressive array of sources, including interviews and forestry student reports as well as a vast body of published sources such as The Labour Gazette, The Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada, and The Canada Lumberman, to shed new light on trade union organization and on the role of ethnic groups in the woods work force. The result is a richly detailed analysis of life on the job for logging workers during a period that saw the modernization not only of the work but of relations between the workers and the bosses. --Publisher's description

Bob White, president of the Canadian Auto Workers, is without a doubt the single most influential figure in the Canadian labour movement. Respected by workers and business leaders alike. White has become a major voice in national; affairs. All his life he has bargained hard, and more often that not, won.

Research studies for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Developments Prospects for Canada. Contents: The role of law in labour relations / Joseph M. Weiler -- The use of legislation to control labour relations: the Quebec experience / Fernand Morin and Claudine Leclerc -- Urban law and policy development in Canada: the myth and reality / S.M. Makuch.

Working people seldom make it into the history books, and when they do the picture is seldom flattering. Too often, ordinary Newfoundlanders have been cast as a race of cap-doffers and forelock-tuggers. In this book Bill Gillespie confrnts the myth. He tells the story of that most important of working class institutions - the trade union. And as the story unfolds, a new cast of characters is introduced to our written history. They are the men and women who struggled within an economic system they did not control to improve the lives of their families and their class. Gillespie records their losses and their victories, their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Ultimately he records their success. It is the story of how Newfoundlanders surprised even themselves and turned their tiny country into the most unionized corner of North America. --Publisher's description

These essays introduce readers to the changing and complex character of class struggle in Canada. Individual essays focus on specific features of Canadian class struggle: regional differences, the role of gender, the character of trade union leadership to the specific nature of conflict in particular industries; and the general features of national periods of upheaval such as the year 1919 and the World War II period. [Of the eight essays, two are original to the volume, while the others are abridged or revised versions of articles that previously appeared in publications such as Labour/Le Travail and New Left Review.] --Publisher's description

Women's activism in unions has increased dramatically in the last decade, creating a sense of renewed vitality and excitement in the trade union movement. Union Sisters is a attempt to document the struggles and victories of the movement of union women as well as to provide some direction to women and unions as they fight to defend the interests of working people. --Introduction

In 1983 and 1984 the Canadian Studies Program of the Secretary of State funded four lecture series at Canadian universities on the history of the Canadian working class. This volume presents many of the lectures in a published version. Ranging from east to west and covering two centuries of Canadian labour history, the volume includes a selection of essays by some of Canada's leading social historians including Michael Cross, David Frank, Ross McCormack, Bryan Palmer and Joy Parr. Outstanding participants in the making of Canadian labour history Eugene Forsey and H. Landon Ladd have also contributed. Directed at a popular audience these fourteen lectures provide a major survey of Canada's labour past. --Publisher's description