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This thesis is a critical analysis of the multimedia project Piece Work (2017) by Toronto-based, Italian Canadian artist Sara Angelucci (b. 1962). Focusing on Coppley Apparel, a garment factory in Hamilton, Ontario, the project explores the process of making business suits through the digital collage Coppley Patterns and the photographic series Mano d’Oro. The sound installation A Sewers’ Chorus features the voices of the garment workers who recall positive and negative memories of their work experiences and personal histories, while the video installation Suit Elevator depicts the business suit in its final form. The majority of Coppley Apparel’s employees are women from non-white racialized groups. Deploying an intersectional feminist approach, this thesis argues that Piece Work reveals the complex lives of these factory workers from immigrant backgrounds in ways that speak against persisting discourses and practices of racialized and gendered labour in the garment industry. It begins by providing an overview of the history of the Coppley Apparel factory in relation to the history of migrant garment factory workers in Hamilton, and the broader history of racialized and gendered factory labour in the city. This thesis also acts as a record of the migration story of Nina Acciaroli, the artist’s mother, whose first job in Canada was at Coppley Apparel. It then examines A Sewers’ Chorus and its use of oral history, providing a discussion of the different stories shared by the interviewees, which range from happy childhood memories and nostalgic flashbacks to accounts of traumatic experiences. The thesis provides a comprehensive discussion of the process of making Piece Work, contextualizing it within Angelucci’s larger artistic practice of incorporating voices in the exploration of her family’s immigrant experience. Ultimately, Piece Work recognizes the employees of Coppley Apparel as people with singular voices and unique experiences and highlights their agency by including the complexity of their voices and identities as women, garment workers, racialized minorities, and contributing members of Canadian society.

Canadian theatre designers share many similarities with other freelance, creative workers in Canada. The conditions of precarity that define their working relationships are similar to those that affect workers in other sectors, such as film, music, television, and visual arts. This thesis begins by examining the existing literatures and research concerning creative and precarious work, primarily in Canada, but also internationally. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 55 designers from within the relatively small community of Canadian theatre designers, approximately 500-700 workers, I examine the working conditions that designers find challenging and seek suggestions for how they can be improved. Additionally, I explore the different models that designers have used to organize in Canada, Quebec, and the United States. By comparing these models with the interviews from designers, I conclude that the best way for Canadian designers to improve their working conditions is to build a closer relationship with IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees], the union that represents stagehands and technicians. Finally, I identify some questions for further exploration, including the tension between artistic and worker identities, while also touching on the present circumstances of the Covid-19 crisis and the current conversations concerning racism and white supremacy within Canadian society.

This dissertation examines Canada’s program to employ prisoners of war (POWs) in Canada during the Second World War as a means of understanding how labour projects and the communities and natural environment in which they occurred shaped the POWs’ wartime experiences. The use of POW labourers, including civilian internees, enemy merchant seamen, and combatant prisoners, occurred in response to a nationwide labour shortage. Between May 1943 and November 1946, there were almost 300 small, isolated labour projects across the country employing, at its peak, over 14,000 POWs. Most prisoners were employed in either logging or agriculture, work that not only provided them with relative freedom, but offered prisoners unprecedented contact with Canada and its people. Work would therefore not only boost production but, it was hoped, instil POWs with Canadian mores and values through interaction with guards, civilians, and the natural environment. Rather than attempt a narrative encompassing almost 300 labour projects, this dissertation examines POW labour through a series of five case studies. The first examines prisoners cutting fuelwood in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park while the second and third examine POWs cutting pulpwood in Northwestern Ontario for the Ontario-Minnesota Pulp & Paper Co. and Abitibi Power & Paper Co., respectively. The fourth case study examines POWs employed by Donnell & Mudge in its tannery in New Toronto, Ontario and the fifth examines the practice of employing POWs in farm work in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Through these case studies, this dissertation examines how how internment officials employed remote parts of Canada as a physical boundary to prevent escape attempts, while also using it as a space to provide POWs with relative freedom as an inducement to work, and how work challenged definitions of who or what was the “enemy”. With significantly more freedom than the typical internee, POWs interacted with civilians and guards on a more familiar level, resulting in illicit fraternizations and relationships between POWs and Canadians. Although such fraternization also triggered considerable protest, these interactions reveal a great deal regarding POWs’ opinions of and attitudes towards Canada and its people as well as Canadian attitudes towards POWs.

I locate this study within the context of my own work and experiences as an academic librarian and the disconnect that I have often felt between what I consider my role and the value of my work to be versus the perception and understanding of that role, the work, and its value by others. Overwhelmingly, librarians working at Canadian universities are considered academic staff, if not faculty. However, the role and fit of the academic librarian within the academic enterprise is overshadowed and frequently misunderstood. As the subaltern, librarians’ expertise and contribution to the university’s academic mission is often sidelined: the nature of the work too frequently viewed through an organizational rather than an academic lens and characterized as preoccupied with a structured set of regularized responsibilities. The goal of this study is to make visible the processes that shape the work experiences of academic librarians such as they are. Two research questions served as the impetus for this study: How is it that the academic librarian’s lesser status is the ideal at Canadian universities? What are the social processes that shape this ideal? This study is informed by the epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of institutional ethnography: a research approach developed by the Canadian social theorist and sociologist, Dorothy Smith. Institutional ethnography considers the everyday, lived experiences of people as the research problematic—a term used by Smith to focus the inquiry on the actual, social, and active world as it is lived and experienced by people. An institutional ethnography progresses through layers, in this case the progression is from the academic librarian, to the library, to the institution, and beyond, to reveal how power structures external to the local setting influence daily life. To understand how the everyday world is put together so that things happen as they do, the focus of the investigation is on individual experiences and what people are doing relationally. However, in institutional ethnography the actions and experiences of people within a particular setting are not regarded as representative. Rather, the local experience is regarded as a window into the role of power. It is a politically charged and activist type of scholarship. Because institutional ethnography is concerned with explicating the actual rather than formulating or advancing the theoretical, the emphasis is on discovery rather than hypothesis testing. The findings of this study reveal how the value of librarians’ work is socially constructed and based on work that is perceived as women’s work; how the work of librarians is organized as library work rather than academic work; how accreditation bodies and the professions privilege the library over the librarian; and how institutional policies and practices position the librarian as academic on the margins of the academy. These social processes reveal how things come about so that librarians’ experiences as academic staff are such as they are. However, it is ideologies that help us understand why things are the way they are. I propose that two ideological codes—women’s work and the library—permeate our social consciousness, including speech, text, and talk, and infuse librarians’ work with particularizing characteristics. Ultimately, the findings of this study tie librarians’ work experiences to the necessary and gendered exploitation of labour that happens within a capitalist mode of production.

Montreal’s garment industry was the largest in Canada until most of its factories closed or relocated in the 1980s and 1990s, but it did not go out quietly. Staring down the barrel of rapid, state-sanctioned deindustrialization, 9,500 members of the Quebec ILGWU, most of them immigrant women, launched an industry-wide strike in August of 1983, the first in 43 years, as well as the last. Using the strike as a springboard, this thesis combines oral history interviews and archival material with historical, geographical, and feminist literatures to understand how women workers experienced and contested garment deindustrialization in 1980s Montreal. The result is a graphic novel about garment work and feminist labour struggle, for public consumption. This thesis adds much-needed female perspective to a growing body of work around deindustrialization and its contestation within history and geography. Conceptually and politically, it seeks to recast the Mile End and Mile-Ex as a site of feminist, working-class struggle, placing gentrification in conversation with deindustrialization while offering a primer on place-based labour organizing during a time of unprecedented capital mobility.

This thesis uses anti-racist and feminist political economy of health perspectives that intersect with immigrant status, in order to analyze the findings from a single-case study investigating the social determinants of health and work precarization in a residential long-term care (LTC) facility in Toronto, Ontario. Throughout this dissertation, I use mixed methods case study to investigate social, political, and economic implications in the lives of health care workers. Observation, interview, and survey methods were utilized to investigate workers health in relation to the precarization of work. Specifically, I used the concept of precarization as a lens to track the ways in which work relations impact the other social determinants of health. The main areas of focus include the intersections of gender, work, and occupational health with race, immigrant status, and culture; the ways in which precarization affects employees in this specific health care sector; the implications of precarization in the health and wellbeing of workers and their families; the role of (un)paid care work and social support provided by family members; and the exercise of strength, resilience, resistance, agency, and coping strategies. Broadly, I will argue that precarization in LTC is an increasingly experienced phenomenon, and that various levels of precarization are experienced by particular workers who are women, racialized persons, and immigrants. This study contributes to our understanding of racialization as a social determinant of health, and analyzes the health impacts of workplace inequality through the lens of precarization. The study makes the case for closer attention to racism and precarity both on and as social determinants of health.

Poor peoples organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment. This dissertation examines ruling relations and the social relations of struggle from the standpoint of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. With political activist ethnography as my central theoretical framework and methodological approach, I conducted field research, interviews and textual analysis of City and organizational documents. Focusing on OCAPs homelessness campaigns, I examine the social relations of struggle in three campaigns in Toronto: a campaign to stop the criminalization of homeless people in a public park by private security, a campaign to increase access to a social assistance benefit for people in emergency housing need, and a campaign to increase the number and improve the conditions of emergency shelter beds. My research demonstrates the active and ongoing research and theorization that anti-poverty activists engage in as well as the practices of delegitimization, excluding critique, testimonial injustice and epistemic violence that ruling relations engage in to counter activist research and theory. Some of this research and theory has regarded both Housing First policy and philosophy and Torontos emergency shelter system which OCAP, homeless people and other advocates have been decrying as unjust and inept for years. This dissertation explicates some of the ways that the City works to delegitimize its challengers and demonstrates the validity of many of the longstanding critiques of the ruling regime. While the City of Toronto has worked to contain homelessness organizing in Toronto, and deployed numerous demobilization tactics to do so, each campaign was fully or partially successful. Full or partial victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use (or threat) of direct action tactics.