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Authors/editors Langdon and Cross show that the Canadian left has energy and ideas. They bring together activist writers fighting for a sustainable environment, for quality health care and other key public services, for a community-based economy, and for equality for women and people of colour. All are engaged in real-world work for progressive change. The contributors are organizers, community activists, those who've run provincial governments, and some of Canada's most thoughtful labour leaders. --Publisher's description

The late "Lefty" Morgan, a British Columbia railway engineer, outlines his philosophy of workers' control in this fascinating volume. The volume has a scholarly introduction by University of New Brunswick anthropologist, Gail Pool, and University of Toronto PhD student in anthropology, Donna Young. They situate Lefty politically and historically and locate Lefty's work in current debates about workers' control. --Publisher's description

They came north like a storm surge of humanity, those wartime workers driven by the forces of World War II. Men and women, black and white, civilian and military, they outnumbered and effectively overwhelmed the largely Native population of Canada's northwest. Under harsh and unfamiliar conditions, they built what the war effort needed - airfields, roads, pipelines. Then, like a storm tide when the winds have passed, they receded from the North, leaving both the terrain and themselves forever changed. --Publisher's description

[E]xplores the human dimensions of plant relocation, sordid corporate practices, and ultimately, the corrosive cultural effects of corporate boosterism. A vivid, hard-hitting expose of big business in a small Ontario community. --Publisher's description

Between 1868-1924, 80,000 British children, most of them under fourteen, came to Canada to be apprenticed as labourers and domestic servents. Joy Parr's study of these children, first published in 1980, became a significant resource for courses in women's history, family history, immigration history, and labour history. Out of print for several years, Labouring Children now has a substantial new introduction in which the author examines the historiography of the history of childhood, particularly in the light of recent literature on sexuality and the post-structuralist critique. She also considers recent popular historical views of children and their relationship to professional history. Out of print for several years, Labouring Children now has a substantial new introduction in which the author examines the historiography of the history of childhood, particularly in the light of recent literature on sexuality and the post-structuralist critique.

This book examines the influence of political ideology on the development of cultural identity among Hungarian immigrants in Canada during the interwar years. It traces the politicization of the Hungarian community into two rival camps - the conservative, pro-Hungarian regime camp and the radical, pro-communist camp - and shows that these differing ideologies played an integral part in the development of community institutions and group consciousness." "Hungarian immigrants' status as foreigners and their disadvantageous class position prevented them from gaining power in Canadian society, forcing them to rely almost exclusively on ideologies and institutions within their own communities to better their situation. Focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of immigrant politics, Carmela Patrias places the Hungarian situation within the larger context of immigration history. --Publisher's description

How did an association formed in 1911 for self-help and social purposes become one of the largest and strongest unions in Ontario? [This book] is the story of that transformation: a history of the evolution of government in Canada's largest province, and of the working women and men who built the Ontario Public Services Employees Union. Analysis and anecdotes are woven into a tale of workers coping with a paternalistic employer, repressive laws and internal battles. Their story is an important part of the province's labour and political heritage. --Publisher's description

This book covers 108 years of labour history at the John Inglis factory in Toronto's west end. For years, the Inglis plant was at the bedrock of Canada's manufacturing economy until it was finally closed in 1989. The authors present a critical narrative that looks at union struggles to organize the plant, discusses the gendered segregation of work during WWII, and analyses the importance of Free Trade to the plant's closure. The book includes over 150 archival and contemporary photographs, drawings, and other visual materials. --Publisher's description

This history of the Teaching Support Staff Union is timely since, as TSSU's parent, the Association of University and College Employees, has now existed for twenty years. TSSU is the last remaining independent local of AUCE. though several other locals have joined mainstream unions. The three essays included describe three different eras in the history of AUCE and TSSU, but some of the tensions found in the organization have remained the same over time. For twenty years AUCE has represented, at least to the activists involved in it, an intersection between feminism and trade unionism in British Columbia. Because the principle of local control over union decisions rather than joining a larger union hierarchy has been consistently maintained, AUCE and TSSU have frequently operated from a locally-defined idealistic feminist standpoint. The tensions, broadly painted, have been between feminists and traditional trade unionists (most often male).... --Introduction

In this further volume of autobiography, BC labour and human rights lawyer John Stanton returns to his career in the law. After reviewing his childhood, education, and early political experiences in Vancouver during the Depression years, he discusses some of his most important cases. These include: the defence of Fergus McKean, a BC communist leader who was interned during World War II; an exceptional criminal libel suit prosecution in Cold War BC; and an account of his relations with the Mine Mill and Smelter Workers. --Publisher's description

The growth of the United Auto Workers in Canada dramatically improved the lives of thousands of workers. Not only did it achieve impressive bargaining gains, but the UAW was regarded as one of the most democratic and socially progressive of the major industrial unions in North America. However, workers in the automotive sector, who constituted the largest segment of the UAW membership, witnessed blatant gender inequalities. From 1937 to 1979, UAW leaders did little to challenge these inequalities. Both the union and the workplace remained highly masculine settings in which male workers and bosses played out the gender politics of the times. Pamela Sugiman draws on archival materials and in-depth interviews with workers and union representatives to explore the ways in which the small groups of women in southern Ontario auto plants fought for dignity, respect, and rights within this restrictive context. During the Second World War, women auto workers formed close bonds with one another - bonds that rested largely around their identification as a sex. By the late 1960s, they were drawing on a growing union consciousness, the modern women's movement, and their gender identity, to launch an organized collective struggle for sexual equality. In describing the women's experiences, Sugiman employs the concept of a `gendered strategy.' A gendered strategy incorporates both reasoned decisions and emotional responses, calculated interests and compromises. Within a context of gender and class divisions, workers developed strategies of coping, resistance, and control. Labour's Dilemma reveals how people may be simultaneously agents and victims, compliant and resistant. --Publisher's description

A revised edition of Sociology of Work, this edition features the sociological relationships between English and French Canadians, taking into account the rapidity of social change that has occurred in Quebec and throughout Canada. --Publisher's description

Working Families takes the reader onto the streets of Montreal and into the homes of its working-class families during the years that it became a major, industrial city. Between the 1860s and 1890s the expansion of wage labour changed the bases of family survival. It offered new possibilities and created new points of tension within the families of the emerging working class. Here we meet the men, youth, and children who worked for wages. We see the women who stayed home with their young, cooked and sewed, planted gardens and tended animals, stretching their often meagre family wages into goods and services for survival. We also see the ingenuity and agony of women whose husbands lost their jobs, fell ill, drank up their wages, deserted their families, or died. Working Families explores the complex variety of responses of working-class families to their new lives within industrial capitalist society, and offers new ways of looking at the industrial revolution in Canada. --Publisher's description

Each year, for generations, poor, ill-clad Newfoundland fishermen sailed out "to the ice" to hunt seals in the hope of a few pennies in wages from the prosperous merchants of St. John's. The year 1914 witnessed the worst in a long line of tragedies that were part of their way of life. For two long days and freezing nights a party of seal hunters - one hundred thirty-two men - were left stranded on a ice field floating in the North Atlantic in winter. They were thinly dressed, with almost no food, and with no hope of shelter on the ice against the snow or the constant, bitter winds. To survive, they had to keep moving, always moving. Those who lay down to rest died.... Publisher's description

This is a local study of steelworkers employed at, or aid off from, Stelco’s Hilton Works in Hamilton, Ontario. This local study has been situated in the context of the global restructuring of capitalism. The authors content that more than ever before the dynamics of the whole world economy limit and shape the actions of its past - a process referred to as “globalizing the local.” Restructuring is taking place in response to global demands. As the global net tighten, local regions and industry have less and less autonomy for independent development. Stelco is best conceived as a sit of the worldwide process of capital accumulation. How has this restructuring impacted on local regions and local worked? This question is the focus of this book, often answered in workers’ and management’s own words. --Publisher's description

During the five decades of the transformation of the policies which regulated the importation and placement of immigrant women into household service work, the policy was variously regulated by internal procedures, policy statement, and operational guidelines. This book examines these changes with a focus on understanding how bureaucracy such as Employment and Immigration Canada contributes, through its mandate, to shaping social relationships in the Canadian labour force and society. --Publisher's description

Why do men rape women? This is a question for which there are many political, psychological, and sociological answers, but few historical ones. Improper Advances is one of the first books to explore the history of sexual violence in any country. A study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario, it expands the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence. --Publisher's description

The Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837 has been called the most important event in pre-Confederation history. Previously, it has been explained as a response to economic distress or as the result of manipulation by middle-class politicians. Lord Durham believed it was an expression of racial conflict. The Patriots and the People is a fundamental reinterpretation of the Rebellion. Allan Greer argues that far being passive victims of events, the habitants were actively responding to democratic appeals because the language of popular sovereignty was in harmony with their experience and outlook. He finds that a certain form of popular republicanism, with roots deep in the French-Canadian past, drove the anti-government campaign. Institutions such as the militia and the parish played an important part in giving shape to the movement, and the customs of the maypole and charivari provided models for the collective actions against local representatives of the colonial regime. In looking closely into the actions, motives, and mentality of the rural plebeians who formed a majority of those involved in the insurrection, Allan Greer brings to light new causes for the revolutionary role of the normally peaceful French-Canadian peasant. By doing so he provides a social history with new dimensions. --Publisher's description

During the last century, 26 million Italian women, men, and children have traded an uncertain future in Italy for the prospect of a better life elsewhere. Canada has long been home to Italian immigrants, but in the years just after the Second World War they began to arrive in multitudes. Toronto emerged as the most popular Canadian destination and now, with more than 400,000 residents of Italian heritage, has one of the largest Italian populations outside Italy. Franca Iacovetta describes the working-class experiences of those who came to Toronto from southern Italy between 1946 and 1965, focusing on the relations between newly arrived immigrant workers and their families." "The Italians who came to Toronto before 1965 were predominantly young, healthy women and men eager to secure jobs and prepared to make sacrifices in order to secure a more comfortable life for themselves and their children. Franca Iacovetta examines the changes many of them had to face during the transition from peasant worker in an under-developed, rural economy to wage-earner in an urban, industrial society." "Although both women and men had to struggle and were exploited, Iacovetta shows that they found innovative ways to recreate cherished rituals and customs from their homeland and to derive a sense of dignity and honour from the labours they performed." "Such Hardworking People is informed by a feminist analysis. Iacovetta shows that for both sexes work patterns and experiences, as well as self-perceptions, were influenced by domestic responsibilities and gender relations within the household and by the labour market, employer strategies, and kin-linked networks of support. In addition to conducting numerous interviews with some of the immigrants, she has drawn on recent scholarship in immigration, family, labour studies, oral history, and women's history. --Publisher's description

In the early 1970s, when women's history began to claim attention as an emerging discipline in North American universities, it was dominated by a middle-class Anglo-Saxon bias. Today the field is much more diverse, a development reflected in the scope of this volume. Rather than documenting the experiences of women solely in a framework of gender analysis, its authors recognize the interaction of race, class, and gender as central in shaping women's lives, and men's. These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women's studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women's history. --Publisher's description. Contents: When the mother of the race is free': Race, reproduction, and sexuality in first-wave feminism / Mariana Valverde -- Maidenly girls' or 'designing women'? The crime of seduction in turn-of-the-century Ontario / Karen Dubinsky -- The 'hallelujah lasses': Working-class women in the Salvation Army in English Canada, 1882-92 / Lynne Marks -- The alchemy of politicization: Socialist women and the early Canadian left / Janice Newton -- Wounded womanhood and dead men: Chivalry and the trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies / Carolyn Strange -- Class, ethnicity, and gender in the Eaton strikes of 1912 and 1934 / Ruth A. Frager -- 'Feminine trifles of vast importance': Writing gender into the history of consumption / Cynthia Wright -- Making 'new Canadians': Social workers, women, and the reshaping of immigrant families / Franco Iacovetta.