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In October 1890, Eugene T. Kingsley’s life changed irrevocably while working as a brakeman on the Northern Pacific Railway when he was injured in a fall between two rail cars. While recuperating in hospital after the amputation of both legs, he began reading the works of Karl Marx. Joining a popular socialist movement, his activism eventually brought him to Vancouver, B.C. where he founded the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). Kingsley, known as a passionate orator, went on to become one of the most prominent socialist intellectuals of his day. Class Warrior is a collection of Kingsley’s writing and speeches that underscores his tremendous impact on Canadian political discourse. --Publisher's description. Contents: Foreword: E. T. Kingsley: Canadian Marxism’s “Old Man” / Bryan D. Palmer -- Introduction: Re-evaluating the British Columbia School of Socialism: E. T. Kingsley, Disablement, and the “Impossiblist” Challenge to Industrial Capitalism in Western Canada / Benjamin Isitt and Ravi Malhotra. Part 1: Selected Writings of E. T. Kingsley. Part 2: Selected Speeches of E. T. Kingsley. Part 3: The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery. Part 4: On the World Situation. Appendix: Partial Record of E. T. Kingsley’s Public Speeches and Lectures; Kingley's Speeches.

The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George." On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two gay men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor. --Publisher's description

This book takes its title from the phrase for “I work” in Lunaape, the traditional language of Munsee Delaware people, and was inspired by the work of the Munsee Delaware Language and History Group. Written for the descendants and communities of children who attended Mount Elgin and intended as a resource for all Canadians, Nii Ndahlohke tells the story of student life at Mount Elgin Industrial School between 1890 and 1915. Like the school itself, Nii Ndahlohke is structured in two sections. The first focuses on boys’ work, including maintenance and farm labour, the second on girls’ work, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry. In Nii Ndahlohke readers will find a valuable piece of local, Indigenous, and Canadian history that depicts the nature of “education” provided at Canada’s Indian residential schools and the exploitation of children’s labour in order to keep school operating costs down. This history honours the students of Mount Elgin even as it reveals the injustice of Indian policy, segregated schooling, and racism in Canada. --Publisher's description

Canada's major cities have faced the humanitarian disaster of homelessness for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare a massive deficit in social programs and widespread inattention to human rights. Are municipal public services designed to essentially produce displacement? Or can we do something to end the growing problem of urban homelessness in Canada? In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe illuminate this infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography. Contributors to the book, including those with lived experience of homelessness in Toronto, report on the realities of the situation and how people responded: by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, and by rising up against encampment evictions. The book provides particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic. This collection of first-hand accounts shows how people are fighting back for homes. It also mourns the hundreds of preventable deaths that resulted from an unjust shelter system and the lack of a national housing program. Offering rich stories of care, mutual aid, and solidarity, Displacement City provides a vivid account of a national tragedy. -- Publisher's description

Canada’s largest and most famous example of class conflict, the Winnipeg General Strike, redefined local, national, and international conversations around class, politics, region, ethnicity, and gender. The Strike’s centenary occasioned a re-examination of this critical moment in working-class history, when 300 social justice activists, organizers, scholars, trade unionists, artists, and labour rights advocates gathered in Winnipeg in 2019. Probing the meaning of the General Strike in new and innovative ways, For a Better World includes a selection of contributions from the conference as well as others’ explorations of the character of class confrontation in the aftermath of the First World War. Editors Naylor, Hinther, and Mochoruk depict key events of 1919, detailing the dynamic and complex historiography of the Strike and the larger Workers’ Revolt that reverberated around the world and shaped the century following the war. The chapters delve into intersections of race, class, and gender. Settler colonialism’s impact on the conflict is also examined. Placing the struggle in Winnipeg within a broader national and international context, several contributors explore parallel strikes in Edmonton, Crowsnest Pass, Montreal, Kansas City, and Seattle. For a Better World interrogates types of commemoration and remembrance, current legacies of the Strike, and its ongoing influence. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate that the Winnipeg General Strike continues to mobilize—revealing our radical past and helping us to think imaginatively about collective action in the future. --Publisher's description

Income inequality has skyrocketed in Canada over the past decades. The rich have become richer, while the average household income has deteriorated and job quality, plummeted. Common explanations for these trends point to globalization, technology, or other forces largely beyond our control. But as Jobs with Inequality shows, there is nothing inevitable about inequality. Rather, runaway inequality is the result of politics and policies, and what governments have done to aid the rich and boost finance, and what has not done to uphold the interests of workers. Drawing on new tax and income data, John Peters tells the story of how inequality is unfolding in Canada today by examining post-democracy, financialization, and labour market deregulation. Timely and novel, the book explains how and why business and government have rewritten the rules of the economy to the advantage of the few, and considers why progressive efforts to reverse these trends have so regularly run aground. -- Publisher's description

Low-wage work and precarious employment are among the most urgent issues of our time. Canadian Labour Policy and Politics serves as essential reading for undergraduates who need to understand the politics of inequality in Canada’s labour market. This comprehensive textbook traces the rise of these pressing problems, reveals the resulting inequalities, and outlines the solutions for a sustainable future. Written by leading experts and practitioners, the text demonstrates how and why laws and public policy – intended to protect workers – often leave workers vulnerable with little economic or social security. Based on up-to-date data and international comparisons, chapters provide readers with real-world examples and case studies of how globalization, labour laws, employment standards, COVID-19, and other challenges affect workers on and off the job. Canadian Labour Policy and Politics also engages students in defining a far-reaching policy agenda for developing greater economic equality, political inclusiveness, and a green recovery in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Accessible and clearly written, it is a must-read for students as well as researchers, practitioners, activists, and policymakers. Key features include chapter summaries and outlines, suggestions for further reading, and glossaries. Students and scholars of Canadian politics and public policy, labour studies, political economy, and sociology will find this an invaluable addition to their bookshelves. The volume is a core text for second-, third-, and fourth-year level university labour and inequality courses. The fresh and insightful overview of Canada’s labour market and policies will also be essential reading for government policymakers, NGO representatives, union researchers and practitioners, and journalists. --Publisher's description

In 1977, Bonnie Robichaud accepted a job at the Department of Defence military base in North Bay, Ontario. After a string of dead-end jobs, with five young children at home, Robichaud was ecstatic to have found a unionized job with steady pay, benefits, and vacation time. After her supervisor began to sexually harass and intimidate her, her story could have followed the same course as countless women before her: endure, stay silent, and eventually quit. Instead, Robichaud filed a complaint after her probation period was up. When a high-ranking officer said she was the only one who had ever complained, Robichaud said, "Good. Then it should be easy to fix." This timely and revelatory memoir follows her gruelling eleven-year fight for justice, which was won in the Supreme Court of Canada. The unanimous decision set a historic legal precedent that employers are responsible for maintaining a respectful and harassment-free workplace. Robichaud's story is a landmark piece of Canadian labour history--one that is more relevant today than ever. --Publisher's description

In 1938, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) came to organize the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) in Trail, British Columbia. Six years later it was recognized as the legal representative of more than 5,000 workers at a smelter owned by the powerful Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S). Smelter Wars aims to unfold the historic struggle of the working people who built the city of Trail. The book recounts the various difficulties of the rural community, providing glimpses into the political and social life in the smelter city, as well as the turbulent years marked by economic depression, war, and Cold War intolerance. Ron Verzuh draws upon archival and periodical sources, including the mainstream and labour press, to explore the CIO's complicated legacy in Trail as it battled a wide range of antagonists: a powerful employer (CM&S), a company union, local conservative citizens, and Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) leadership. More than a history of a union, Smelter Wars is a cultural study of a community that has been shaped by decades of corporate welfare. --Publisher's description

Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood - the set of people near and surrounding the family - through an examination of work bees in Southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The "bee" was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour's farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn-raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families' daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life. -- Publisher's description

The Canadian population is aging, bringing with it an increasing number of social and economic challenges. With the aging of the workforce, the reconceptualization of older workers and retirement, the increasing share of women in the labour force, the elimination of mandatory retirement, the fluctuating economy, and the changes to the pension system, barriers to employment for older workers, such as ageism, need to be of central concern. Ageism at Work examines the subjective experiences of older workers in Canada and explores how they negotiate ageism and manage their interactions in the employment setting. Further, this book looks at the intersection between age and gender and the pervasiveness of gendered ageism in the labour market. Finally, this book examines employers' attitudes toward older workers quantitatively, while also exploring their firsthand accounts about them through qualitative inquiry. Understanding how ageism plays out in the labour market, how it intersects with sexism, and its consequences on a personal level are critical to moving the discussion on discrimination and human rights forward in Canada. --Publisher's description

De 2016 à 2019, les comités unitaires sur le travail étudiant (CUTE) ont mené une lutte contre l'exploitation du travail étudiant et pour la rémunération des stages. La mobilisation a touché 60 000 étudiant·e·s et, pour une première fois dans l'histoire du mouvement étudiant québécois, des milliers de stagiaires se sont mis·e·s en grève. Préfacée par George Caffentzis et Silvia Federici, cette anthologie retrace les temps forts d'une lutte étudiante et féministe singulière pour un salaire étudiant. Cet ouvrage s'apparente à une autopsie d'une mobilisation. Celle de la grève des stages lancée au Québec en 2016 et qui aura culminé en 2019 par l'obtention de la création de bourses dans seize programmes liés aux domaines de l'éducation, de la santé et des services sociaux, au sein des écoles de formation professionnelle, des cégeps et des universités. Une victoire sans précédent pour le mouvement étudiant depuis une quarantaine d'années. Or, pour les militantes et les militants qui ont vécu cette lutte de l'intérieur, les revendications dépassaient la simple rémunération des stages. Dans une perspective féministe, on invitait plutôt les grévistes à redéfinir le mouvement étudiant lui-même englué dans des rapports de pouvoir, à reconnaitre les études comme une forme de travail, à décentraliser les mouvements contestataires, à l'éclatement des méthodes du mouvement étudiant traditionnel. C'est que les stages ne se piquettent pas comme des cours. C'est que les stages reproduisent une forme d'aliénation propre au monde salarié, dans des domaines majoritairement constitués de femmes, sauf qu'il s'agit d'un travail gratuit, invisible. À travers les différents chapitres constitués de textes, de tracts et d'affiches qui proviennent des agissantes et agissants des Comités unitaires pour le travail étudiant (CUTE), on replonge dans la toute première grève des stages du Québec. De la fondation des CUTE aux tentatives de ralliement des autres branches de la gauche étudiante, en passant par l'organisation d'une grève qui s'articule de manière régionale et non nationale,--et qui arrive tout de même à faire écho à l'international,--jusqu'à la grève elle-même et tout ce qu'elle implique de sacrifices, de tensions et d'apprentissages. Pour nourrir les mouvements à venir, il était primordial pour les autrices de colliger les expériences et les témoignages de cette grève unique en son genre. -- Publisher's description

Born in 1907, Ida Martin spent most of her life in Saint John, New Brunswick. She married a longshoreman named Allan Robert Martin in 1932 and they had one daughter. In the years that followed, Ida had a busy and varied life, full of work, caring for her family, and living her faith. Through it all, Ida found time to keep a daily diary from 1945 to 1992. Bonnie Huskins is Ida Martin's granddaughter. In Just the Usual Work, she and Michael Boudreau draw on Ida's diaries, family memories, and the history of Atlantic Canada to shed light on the everyday life of a working-class housewife during a period of significant social and political change. They examine Ida's observations about the struggles of making ends meet on a longshoreman's salary, the labour confrontations at the Port of Saint John, the role of automobiles in the family economy, the importance of family, faith, and political engagement, and her experience of widowhood and growing old. Ida Martin's diaries were often read by members of her family to reconstruct and relive their shared histories. By sharing the pages of her diaries with a wider audience, Just the Usual Work keeps Ida's memory alive while continuing her abiding commitment to documenting the past and finding meaning in the rhythms of everyday life. --Publisher's description

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America’s leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer’s work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures. Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer’s contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer’s career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer’s participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer’s politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history. --Publisher's description

Hamilton’s industrial age is over. In the steel capital of Canada, there are no more skies lit red by foundries at sunset, no more traffic jams at shift change. Instead, an urban renaissance is taking shape. But who wins and who loses in the city’s not-too-distant future? Is it possible to lift a downtrodden, post-industrial city out of poverty in a way that benefits people across the social spectrum, not just a wealthy elite? In Shift Change, author Stephen Dale sets up “the Hammer” as a battlefield, a laboratory, a chessboard. As investors cash in on a real estate gold rush and the all-too-familiar wheels of gentrification begin to turn, there’s still a rare opportunity for both old-guard and newcomer Hamiltonians to come together and write a different story--one in which Steeltown becomes an economically diverse and inclusive urban centre for all. What plays out in these pages and at this very moment is a real-time case study that will capture the attention and the imagination of anyone interested in equitable redevelopment, housing activism, and social justice in the North American city. -- Publisher's description

One of the world’s largest sellers of footwear, the Bata Company of Zlín, Moravia has a remarkable history that touches on crucial aspects of what made the world modern. In the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, the company Americanized its production model while also trying to Americanize its workforce. It promised a technocratic form of governance in the chaos of postwar Czechoslovakia, and during the Roaring Twenties, it became synonymous with rationalization across Europe and thus a flashpoint for a continent-wide debate. While other companies contracted in response to the Great Depression, Bata did the opposite, becoming the first shoe company to unlock the potential of globalization.As Bata expanded worldwide, it became an example of corporate national indifference, where company personnel were trained to be able to slip into and out of national identifications with ease. Such indifference, however, was seriously challenged by the geopolitical crisis of the 1930s, and by the cusp of the Second World War, Bata management had turned nationalist, even fascist.In the Kingdom of Shoes unravels the way the Bata project swept away tradition and enmeshed the lives of thousands of people around the world in the industrial production of shoes. Using a rich array of archival materials from two continents, the book answers how Bata’s rise to the world’s largest producer of shoes challenged the nation-state, democracy, and Americanization. -- Publisher's description

Canada has one of the highest rates of low-wage work among advanced industrial economies. In a labour market characterized by the ongoing fallout from COVID-19, deepening income inequality, increasingly uncertain job tenure, and steadily diluted union representation, the living wage movement offers a response. Rising Up traces the history and international context of living wage movements across Canada. Contributors to this astute and compassionate collection of essays examine union- and community-based approaches to organizing in marginalized communities, the role of social reproduction, migrant labour, and media (mis)representations, among other key topics. In the 1970s, the balance of political and economic power began to shift in favour of business, as trade unions weakened and governments proved unwilling to check corporate power. By the 2000s, austerity measures had dismantled social services spending, facilitating the growth of precarious, often gendered or racialized low-waged employment. Rapidly increasing wealth and income inequality has followed in the wake of these deteriorating labour market conditions and mounting social disparities.As more and more workers in Canada and elsewhere face permanent low-paid work, Rising Up will stimulate debate about living wages and social inequality, promoting alternatives to a neoliberalized labour market. --Publisher's description

In this inspiring history of a union, labour historian Andy Hanson delves deep into the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and how it evolved from two deeply divided unions to one of the province’s most united and powerful voices for educators. Today’s teacher is under constant pressure to raise students’ test scores, while the rise of neoliberalism in Canada has systematically stripped our education system of funding and support. But educators have been fighting back with decades of fierce labour action, from a landmark province-wide strike in the 1970s, to record-breaking front-line organizing against the Harris government and the Common Sense Revolution, to present-day picket lines and bargaining tables. Hanson follows the making of elementary teachers in Ontario as a distinct class of white-collar, public-sector workers who awoke in the last quarter of the twentieth century to the power of their collective strength. --Publisher's description

When health care workers call a Code White, its an emergency response for a violent incident: a call for help. But its one that goes unanswered in hospitals, clinics, and long-term care homes across the country. Code White exposes a shocking epidemic of violence thats hidden in plain sight, one in which workers are bruised, battered, assaulted, and demeaned, but carry on in silence, with little recourse or support. Researchers Margaret M. Keith and James T. Brophy lay bare the stories of over one hundred nurses and personal support workers, aides and porters, clerical workers and cleaners. The nightmarish experiences they relate are not one-off incidents, but symptoms of deep systemic flaws that have transformed health care into one of the most dangerous occupational sectors in Canada. The same questions echo in the wake of each and every brutal encounter: Is violence and trauma really just 'part of the job'? Why is this going underreported and unchecked? What needs to be done, and how? --Publisher's description. Contents: Foreword / Michael Hurley -- Preface . Part 1: Exposing a Hidden Epidemic. 1. Drawing Back the Curtain -- 2. Under the Scope -- 3. Finding an Abnormality. Part 2: A Forensic Examination. 4. Birth and Decline of the Health Care System -- 5. Birth and Decline of the Long-Term Care System. Part 3: Prescription for Healing. 6. Treatment Strategies -- 7. Rocky Road to Recovery -- 8. Collective Quest for the Cure. Afterword: Health Care Workers during COVID-19 -- Notes.

Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York, by 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be "one of the most dangerous men in Canada." Able to Lead traces Kingsley's political journey from soapbox speaker in San Francisco to prominence in the Socialist Party of Canada. Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt illuminate a figure who shaped a generation of Canadian leftists during a time when it was uncommon for disabled people to lead. They examine Kingsley's endeavours for justice against the Northern Pacific Railway, and how Kingsley's life intersected with immigration law and free speech rights. Able to Lead brings a turbulent period in North American history to life, highlighting Kingsley's profound legacy for the twenty-first-century political left. --Publisher's description. Contents: Kingsley in Context: Labour History, Legal History, and Critical Disability Theory -- Incident at Spring Gulch: Disablement, Litigation, and the Birth of a Revolutionary -- California Radical: Fighting for Free Speech and Running for Congress in the Socialist Labor Party -- Crossing the Line: Kingsley Arrives in British Columbia -- No Compromise: Kingsley and the Socialist Party of Canada -- Kingsley and the State: Clashes with Authority in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada -- The Twilight Years: Kingsley and the 1920s Canadian Left.