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Explores the technological changes that transformed the Pacific Coast logging industry during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars and popular historians alike have depicted the introduction of steam power and overhead logging systems as responses to environmental factors. The analysis offered here, presented in the context of the labor process debate, suggests that nature structured, but did not determine, technological innovation. At the beginning of the period under study, the instability of the productive setting dictated that loggers' conceptual and physical skills controlled the pace of production. The adoption of increasingly sophisticated technologies by 1930 had given logging operators unprecedented power in their relationship with both nature and workers. Some new skilled positions had been created, but the overall effect of technological change was to undermine loggers' collective control over the labor process.

The article reviews the book, "The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912," by Ralph E. Luker.

The content of union planning, as well as union leader perceptions of the effectiveness and extent of implementation of their plans are explored. Data were gathered from a survey of all national and international unions in North America. Results indicate that 24.4% of the respondent unions engage in long-range planning, with education, budgeting, and political action being the most frequently cited topics. In terms of actual implementation of plans, resources are critical, as are the support and involvement of the national union president. Unions who represent a higher percentage of part-time employees, and those in the manufacturing, service, and utilities industries are signficantly more likely to have implemented a higher proportion of their plans.

The article reviews two books: "Histoire des Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1775-1990," by Armand Chartier, and "Les Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1776-1930," by Yves Roby.

The article reviews the book, "Homer Stevens: A Life in Fishing," by Homer Stevens and Rolf Knight.

This article uses a case study of an Ontario factory manufacturing clocks and watches to explore the way in which industrial paternalism was used as an industrial relations strategy by both management and workers. Paternalism, in this case an amalgam of 19th-century traditional paternalism and 20th-century welfare capitalism, was premised on unequal economic relations, and on the ideological hegemony of management, but it was also and more importantly a negotiated process in which workers participated in order to secure better working conditions and wages, respect, and dignity.

The article reviews the book, "Labour's War:The Labour Party During the Second World War," by Stephen Brooke.

The article reviews the book, "Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80," by Stanley Nadel.

The article reviews the book, "Close Ties: Railways, Government, and the Board of Railway Commissioners, 1851-1933," by Ken Cruikshank.

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.