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During the mid to late 1840s, dramatic riots shook the communities of Woodstock, Fredericton, and Saint John. Irish-Catholic immigrants fought Protestant Orangemen, with fists, club, and firearms. The violence resulted in death and destruction unprecedented in the British North American colonies. This book is the first serious historical treatment of the bloody riots and the tangled events that led to them. Scott See shows mid-century New Brunswick roughly awakened from the slumbering provincialism of its post-Loyalist phase by the stirrings of capitalism and by the tidal wave of Irish immigration that followed the potato famine. His main focus is the Loyal Orange Order, the anti-Catholic organization that clashed with the immigrants, many of them impoverished exiles. See presents an extraordinary profile of the Orange Order and concludes provocatively that it was a nativist organization similar to the xenophobic groups active at the time in the United States. Unlike other recent works on the Order, his book emphasizes the importance of the organization's specifically North American concerns, and questions the significance of its connections to Old World sectarianism. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Trends, Patterns and Impact of Strikes," by Y.R.K. Reddy.

Data collected as part of a comprehensive mail survey of unionized Canadian firms conducted in 1991 provided information on industrial relations developments in nearly 1,000 firms across key sectors of the economy in Canada. The survey had 2 related major purposes - to assess the extent of innovations in Canadian firms and their impact on industrial relations. The most common innovation was labor-management committees, followed by flexible work systems and profit sharing. The least common were pay systems, semi-autonomous work groups, and quality circles. Job enrichment was in between. Findings establish the empirical validity of innovations and indicate that industrial relations are indeed in transition. But the data also suggest that this transition is limited. The pragmatic initiatives at the firm-level point towards a change, though far short of a transformation, in Canadian industrial relations.

The article reviews the book, "The Power to Manage? Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative-Historical Perspective," edited by S. Tolliday and J. Zeitlin.

The article reviews the book, "Labor's Capital. The Economics and Politics of Private Pensions," by Teresa Ghilarducci.

The article reviews the book, "Masters to Managers. Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers," ed. by Sanford P. Jacoby.

Examines the authoritarian implications of Canada's internment policy during WWII. Documents the legal machinery by which internments were authorized, the denial of the right of habeas corpus to internees, the policy's rationale, its legality, the release of interned Nazis during the first nine months of the war, the government's 1940 ban of the Communist Party and other organizations that resulted in the internment of communists including union activists, and the politics of the federal justice minister, Ernest Lapointe. The author also describes his impressions of Lapointe, whom he met in Ottawa as a member of a Canadian Youth Congress delegation in May 1938, and the significance of Lapointe's failure as justice minister to recommend disallowance of Quebec's Padlock Law of 1937.

The article reviews the book,"The Bias of Communications," by Harold A. Innis.

It is argued that Canada's leading primary steelmakers supported the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Canada and the US because of their belief that steel markets were increasingly continental and because of their ideological adherence to the neoconservative agenda of corporate business and the Federal Progressive Conservative government. Steelworkers and their union, the United Steelworkers of America, opposed the FTA because of the loss of jobs that would ensue with its implementation and because of its larger "right wing" economic and political direction. While, to this point, it is difficult to differentiate the specific impact of the FTA from factors associated with industrial restructuring in the steel industry as a whole, the FTA is increasingly the central economic and political factor in the deepening crisis of the steel industry in Canada. The rationale for the steel industry's backing of the free trade initiative lay mainly in the economic benefits which owners and top-level managers believed would accrue to their companies.

The article reviews the book, "Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century," by Dorothy Sue Cobble.

The article reviews the book, "Managerial Unionism : Issues in Perspective," by Baldev R. Sharma.

Using data from a large Ontario steel mill, it is argued that grievance outcomes provide a useful proxy to measure bargaining power. Three independent variables are constructed: 1. the match of a complaint with a specific grievable category in the collective agreement (the complaint/grievance match), 2. the general grievance type, and 3. the work site (works division). Various hierarchical log-linear/logit models are fitted to estimate grievance outcomes. The model that best fits the data is one that includes the interaction between the complaint/grievance category match and grievance type as well as the interaction between the complaint/grievance category match and works division. The results show that under most conditions, bargaining outcomes favor management. Under a specific constellation of conditions, however, bargaining outcomes favor labor. Thus it is only under this specific set of conditions that labor has greater bargaining power than management.

In 1967, the government of Canada legislated an innovative mechanism for resolving collective bargaining disputes in the federal public service. Under this legislation, the bargaining agent involved chooses unilaterally whether any impasse in forthcoming negotiations would be resolved by a strike or by arbitration. The dispute resolution choice has been the subject of much controversy, with the debate generally focusing on 2 related issues. First is the question of what factors have influenced the choice of bargaining route and, in particular, the trend away from arbitration. The 2nd issue concerns the impact of the new dispute resolution system on wages. The union's choice between strike and arbitration route is modeled simultaneously with wage determination in the federal public service using the standard self-selection methodology. The model permits exploration of the factors influencing the choice of bargaining route as well as the effect of this choice on wages.

Frances Swyripe here presents the interpretive study of women of Ukrainian origin in Canada. She analyses the images and myths that have grown up around them, why they arose, and how they were used by the leaders of the community. Swyripa argues that ethnicity combined with gender to shape the experience of Ukrainian-Canadian women, as statelessness and national oppression in the homeland joined with a negative group stereotype and minority status in emigration to influence women's roles and options. She explores community attitudes towards the peasant immigrant pioneer, towards her daughters exposed to the opportunities, prejudice, and assimilatory pressure of the Anglo-Canadian world, towards the 'Great Women' evoked as models and sources of inspiration, and towards the familiar baba. In these stereotypes of the female figure, and in the activities of women's organizations, the community played out its many tensions: between a strong attachment to canada and an equally strong attachment to Ukraine; between nationalists who sought to liberate Ukraine from Polish and Soviet rule and progressives who saw themselves as part of an international proletariat; between women's responsibilities as mothers and homemakers and their obligation to participate in both Canadian and community life. Swyripa finds that the concerns of community leaders did not always coincide with those of the grassroots. The differences were best expressed in the evolution of the peasant immigrant pioneer woman as a group symbol, where the tensions between a cultural ethnic consciousness and a politicized national consciousness as the core of Ukrainian-Canadian identity were played out in the female figure. --Publisher's description

The article reviews and comments on "Love of Worker Bees" and "A Great Love," two reprint collections of fiction by the Bolshevik feminist, Aleksandra Kollontai.

The article reviews the book, "Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération," by Paul-André Linteau.

Discusses the visit of the Canadian socialist revolutionary propagandist, John Amos "Jack" McDonald, to New Zealand in 1921. Although invited by the New Zealand Communist Party, McDonald, to the party's dismay, was a catalyst in precipating a split with the nascent West Coast Communist Federation. Documentation of McDonald's seven-month stay, during which he spoke extensively, is drawn from police records, meeting minutes, correspondence, and the labour newspaper, "Grey River Argus."

The article reviews the book, "Pay for Performance : Evaluating Performance Appraisal and Merit Pay," by G.T. Milkovich and A.K. Wigdor.

The article reviews the book,"Limited livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England," by Sonya O. Rose.