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Sisters & Solidarity provides a clear and well-researched overview of the position of women in relation to the labour movement across Canada. After surveying the development of the labour movement at the turn of the century, the author traces the increasing influence of women members in the Canadian labour movement. Sisters & Solidarity considers not only what unions have negotiated with employers, but the position of women inside the union movement itself. Based on interviews with unions and labour centrals across the country, Julie White examines the representation of women in union executives, committees, conventions and staff. She describes the development of women's committees and examines the responses of unions to demands for change concerning family responsibilities, harassment, and union education. Using new data the author analyzes who are the unorganized, where they work, and why it is difficult to organize them. Three case studies examine the attempts to unionize homeworkers and cleaners and new labour relations legislation in Ontario. Sisters & Solidarity also considers the position of racial minorities, disabled persons and gays and lesbians in the Canadian union movement and the steps unions and labour centrals have taken to meet the needs of these workers. --Publisher's description

In the wake of the continuing recession and destabilized global economy, theorizing about the industrial peace that reigned after World War II through the 1970s has undergone considerable revision. In this path-breaking discussion of Canadian labor relations, Charlotte Yates shows how the state-centered European theories of political economy did not fit the Canadian and United States experiences and treated them as anomalies. Through a case study of the Autoworkers Union in Canada (a branch of the UAW until 1984), Yates subjects this theorizing to critical scrutiny. Using extensive archives of union political activities, Yates describes how unions were demobilized in their relationships with the state, employers, and political parties as Fordist regulatory structures and practices forced unions to accept the constraints of responsible union behavior. She argues that the Canadian Autoworkers' collective identity and internal organizational structure counteracted these demobilizing tendencies. This historical legacy laid the groundwork for the Autoworker Union's return to militancy in the 1980s and 1990s and has shaped its responses to the pressures of economic globalization and heightened competition. From Plant to Politics demonstrates how continued union militancy in resisting concessions from employers and other attacks on unions has placed the union in a position of strength from which it now hopes to negotiate the Canadian path to a restructured economy. This study of the internal dynamics of a major union contributes to an understanding of unions as complex organizations engaged in strategic activities that have a definite impact on the national political economy. --Publisher's description

J.K. Bell was one of the finest labour leaders of his time. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the turn of the century, Jimmy Bell headed down the proverbial road to Toronto to find work as the depression years began. When war broke out, he returned to Saint John, New Brunswick and went to work at the dry dock where he founded a local of what would become the Maritime Marine Workers' Federation. For many years, Bell was ostracized by the labour movement because of his leftwing views. As the Cold War whipped the country into hysteria, Bell was "purged" from the provincial labour federation in 1949, and didn't succeed in being re-elected until 1965. Nonetheless, he managed to play a key role, and in this book, he remembers the events and recalls the characters with fondness and humour. --Publisher's description

Contents: Adjustment and restructuring in Canadian industrial relations: challenges to the traditional system / Richard P. Chaykowski and Anil Verma -- Industrial relations in the Canadian automobile industry / Pradeep Kumar and Noah M. Meltz -- Industrial relations in the Canadian steel industry / Anil Verma and Peter Warrian -- Industrial relations in the Canadian mining industry: transition under pressure / Richard P. Chaykowski -- Industrial relations in the construction industry in the 1980s / Joseph B. Rose -- Industrial relations in the clothing industry: struggle for survival / Michael Grant -- Industrial relations in the Canadian textile industry / Terry Thomason, Harris L. Zwerling, and Pankaj Chandra -- Restraint, privatization, and Industrial relations in the public sector in the 1980s / Mark Thompson and Allen Ponak -- Industrial relations in elementary and secondary education: a system transformed? / Bryan M. Downie -- Canada's airlines: recent turbulence and changing flight plans / E.G. Fisher and Alex Kondra -- Industrial relations in the Canadian telephone industry / Anil Verma and Joseph M. Weiler -- Canadian industrial relations in transition / Richard P. Chaykowski and Anil Verma

This book describes how business, labour and government have organized the production of goods and services in Canada since 1945. Daniel Drache and Harry Glasbeek focus on the industrial relations system and how it works. They call for fresh thinking on the economy and offer proposals for the reorganization of production. --Publisher's description

In the first half of the twentieth century, many of Toronto's immigrant Jews eked out a living in the needle-trade sweatshops of Spadina Avenue. In response to their expliotation on the shop floor, immigrant Jewish garment workers built one of the most advanced sections of the Canadian and American labour movements. Much more than a collective bargaining agency, Toronto's Jewish labour movement had a distinctly socialist orientation and grew out of a vibrant Jewish working-class culture. Ruth Frager examines the development of this unique movement, its sources of strength, and its limitations, focusing particularly on the complex interplay of class, ethnic, and gender interests and identities in the history of the movement. She examines the relationships between Jewish workers and Jewish manufacturers as well as relations between Jewish and non-Jewish workers and male and female workers in the city's clothing industry. In its prime, Toronto's Jewish labour movement struggled not only to improve hard sweatshop condistions but also to bring about a fundamental socialist transformation. It was an uphill battle. Drastic economic downturns, hard employer offensives, and state repressions all worked against unionists' workplace demands. Ethnic, gender, and ideological divisions weakened the movement and were manipulated by employers and their allies. Drawing on her knowledge of Yiddish, Frager has been able to gain access to original records that shed new light on an important chapter in Canadian ethnic, labour, and women's history. --Publisher's description

Le syndicat des employé(e)s de magasins et de bureaux de la SAQ a organisé la première grève dans le secteur public. Pierre Godin rend hommage à ce syndicat d'avant-garde en commémorant son évolution. --Description de l'éditeur

Helena Gutteridge was a socialist and feminist whose vision helped to shape social reform legislation in British Columbia in the first decades of the twentieth century, and also one of the first women there to hold high public office." "She was born in England in 1879. A militant suffragist, tutored by the Pankhursts, she learned the politics of confrontation early. Emigrating to Vancouver in 1911, she found the suffrage movement there too polite and organized the BC Woman's Suffrage League to help working women fight for the vote. And she kept on organizing. As a journeyman tailor she was a power in her union local, and as the only woman on the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council - their 'rebel girl' - she championed the rights of workers and organized women to fight for themselves. In the 1930s, as a member of the feisty new political movement, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, she joined in the struggles of the unemployed for work and wages. Then, in 1937, as the first woman ever elected to Vancouver City Council, she led the fight for low-income housing." "As was typical for women of her class and time, Helena did not keep personal records, nor did organizational records exist to any extent. Irene Howard made it her task, over a period of years, to search out and assemble details of Helena's life and career, and to interview old comrades who knew Helena and the turbulent times in which she lived. Herself a miner's daughter, the author brings to her subject an affectionate regard and sympathy qualified by the larger view of the scholar and researcher. The result is a lively biography, shot through with humour and pathos, that pays homage to Helena Gutteridge and to many of the people who have been inspired by a cause and who have taught us about the politics of caring."--Publisher's description

Unemployment is once again a pernicious and growing fact of life in Canada. Stephen McBride rejects economic interpretations of the return of high unemployment after decades in which Canada enjoyed almost full employment. He argues that the phenomenon can best be understood as the product of a political choice by policy makers - a choice which can plausibly be linked to the preferences and growing power of Canadian business in the post-1975 period. This argument is based on an evaluation of the implications of the monetarist economic paradigm whose influence in the late 1970s, a comparative survey of the policy strategies followed in other countries and the employment outcomes associated with them, and a systematic examination of Canadian public policy in the macroeconomic, labour market, unemployment insurance, and industrial relations areas. McBride's analysis reveals the state's increasing emphasis on addressing the accumulation demands of capital and decreasing emphasis on the provision of concrete benefits (such as full employment and social services) to citizens. Much state activity can be understood as an attempt to legitimate by ideological change the means the change in the state's priorities and the shifting balance of benefits conferred by public policy. Thus the Canadian state has played an important role in managing the return to a high unemployment regime. --Publisher's description

Working Class Experience is a sweeping and sympathetic study of the development of the Canadian working class since 1800. Beginning with a substantial and provocative introduction that discusses the historiography of the Canadian working class, the book goes on to establish a general framework for analysis of what ultimately is a social history of Canada. Dividing the years into seven periods in the evolution of class struggle, it beings each chapter with an assessment of that period's prevailing economic and social context, followed by an examination of the many factors affecting the working class during that period. Written in a colourful and sometimes irreverent style, Working Class Experience focuses on the processes by which working people moved, and were moved, off the land and into the factories and other workplaces during the Industrial and post-Industrial Revolutions in Canada. Drawing on much recent work on contemporary capitalism, Working Class Experience offers a significant explanation of the malaise in current labour and management relations and speculates on its significance for progressive change in Canadian Life. --Publisher's description

This social history of coal mining in Nova Scotia's Pictou County offers a unique portrait of a long-established working-class community.There are detailed accounts of the changing work-life of miners told in the words of the miners themselves. Family and social life, union agitation, relations with the company and strikes are all described. There are several accounts of major disasters in the mines. The book concludes with a discussion of the revival of coal mining in recent years with the Westray Mine, and an account of the 1992 disaster. Extensively illustrated with historical photographs, Coal in our Blood is a valuable contribution to Nova Scotia's social and labour history. --Publisher's description

Homer Stevens spent half a century in the BC fishing industry, both as a working fisherman and as a leader of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union. His story, an oral autobiography, was recorded and compiled by Rolf Knight. Stevens grew up in Port Guichon, a polyglot fishing community on the Fraser River delta. He was one of an extended family of working people who argued constantly about the issues of the day. In 1936, when he was thirteen years old, Homer started fishing on his own in a leaky gillnetter called the Tar Box. Six years later, his uncle John said, "One of these days I'm going to have to take you down to a meeting of the United Fishermen's Union in Vancouver. It's run by a bunch of Reds but they're pretty good people." By 1946, Homer was a full-time organizer for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union, going around "float to float, man to man" to sign up new members. Included here are Steven's ominous description of the Cold War years, and an evocative log of travelling the central BC coast during the 1950s, with its bustling fishermen's ports and canneries. There are accounts of the 1967 strike in Prince Rupert, Homer's year in jail for contempt of court and his drive to organize Nova Scotia fishermen, and there is a moving personal description of relearning how to fish in a modern and very different salmon industry. "All and all," he says, "if someone were to ask me, 'Would you do it again?' I'd say, 'Yeah, I'd do it again. I'd try to do it better if I could, but I'd be willing to tackle it.'" --Publisher's description

Historical sociologist Jane Ursel conducts a feminist analysis of reproductive labour in Canada focussing on the shift from the family to the state. --WorldCat record

This is the first comprehensive work in the field of Canadian women's legal history. Author Constance Backhouse, an internationally-recognized authority on Canadian women's legal history, has compiled here the most important of her decade's worth of research. This highly-readable book highlights the status of women through in-depth case profiles of individual women who were swept up into the 19th century legal process as litigants, accused criminals and witnesses. The cases span the country, providing information about all the common law provinces as well as Quebec. --Publisher's description(Osgoode Society)

A Word to Say is a penetrating account of how inshore fishermen, most of them Acadian, came together to take control of their industry and their livelihood. Threatened with the loss of their way of life, they fought long and hard to be heard by governments and companies alike. In the process, they saw their union spread from the east coast of New Brunswick to the shores of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. As the only union in the country made up strictly of inshore fishermen, the MFU is unique. Although it has not altered the social fabric of the region, it has played a major role in the momentous changes in the fishery since the mid-1970s. In telling the story, Sue Calhoun gives fishermen more than a word to say. She offers clear insights into the lives of inshore fishermen, so often ignored and taken for granted. Her characters aren't rich. They aren't powerful. Many aren't educated. They are ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. --Publisher's description

Le Québec compte plus de un million deux cent mille syndiqués et, chaque année, des milliers de nouvelles demandes d'accréditation sont accordées. Le syndicalisme, en dépit des crises qui l'ont secoué, reste donc un important partenaire social et économique. Dans cet ouvrage, Bernard Dionne trace l'histoire du mouvement syndical au Québec depuis le XIXe siècle. Il brosse le portrait du syndicalisme québécois, de son cadre légal, de ses effectifs et de ses structures, en marquant bien ce qui fait sa spécificité. Il explique ensuite les défis qui se posent aujourd'hui au syndicalisme québécois, qu'ils touchent des questions économiques - comme le libre-échange -, sociales - comme la place des jeunes et l'équité salariale des femmes - ou stratégiques - comme la négociation collective dans le secteur public. --Description de l'éditeur

[This book] is the story of the Canadian men and women who, during the period from 1865 to 1924, struggled against the corruption of political patronage, abysmal working conditions and poverty-level salaries in the federal civil service. This is an account of the history of some of the organizations formed to overcome these adverse conditions, and the story of the dedicated men and women who guided them, often at great personal risk. The book documents their few victories and many defeats, and the significant impact that their dogged perseverance has had on the Canadian federal service of today. --Publisher's description

Papers presented at the Pay Equity: Theory and Practice Conference organized through York University's Centre for Public Law and Public Policy, May 14-15, 1990.

James Shaver Woodsworth (1874-1942) stands as one of the half-dozen most important national political figures in twentieth-century Canadian history. Allen Mills acknowledges his outstanding achievements while providing a critical account of the Woodsworth legacy and revising the received opinion of him as a man of unbending conviction and ever-coherent principle. A product of western Canada's pioneer society and a stern Methodist household, Woodsworth grew up to make his way into social service and politcal action. A member of parliament for over twenty years, he rejected the traditional forms of political activity, seeking a new politics and a new political party. The latter turned out to be the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation founded in 1932. Its first leader was Woodsworth himself. In a crucial period between the World Wars, Woodsworth helped define the character of the modern Canadian, non-Marxist Left and of many of Canada's important economic and social institutions. Among them are the welfare state, the Bank of Canada, and Canada's internationalist role in the contemporary world.--Publisher's description.