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The town of Ladysmith was one of the most important coal-mining communities on Vancouver Island during the early twentieth century. The Ladysmith miners had a reputation for radicalism and militancy and engaged in bitter struggles for union recognition and economic justice, most notably the Great Strike of 1912-14. This strike, one of the longest and most violent labour disputes in Canadian history, marked a watershed in the history of the town and the coal industry. --Publisher's description

Examines the "coercive assault" (i.e., legislative overrides) on trade union rights in Canada by both federal and provincial governments from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Also discusses labour-related decisions of the Supreme Court, and strategies for union renewal. Includes tables of union membership, strikes and lockouts, back-to-work measures, use of designations, and complaints of violations of union rights filed with the International Labor Organization.

In the period since the Second World War there has been both a massive influx of women into the Canadian job market and substantive changes to the welfare state as early expansion gave way, by the 1970s, to a prolonged period of retrenchment and restructuring. Through a detailed historical account of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program from 1945 to 1997, Ann Porter demonstrates how gender was central both to the construction of the post-war welfare state, as well as to its subsequent crisis and restructuring. Drawing on a wide range of sources (including archival material, UI administrative tribunal decisions, and documents from the government, labour and women's groups) she examines the implications of restructuring for women's equality, as well as how women's groups, labour and the state interacted in efforts to shape the policy agenda. Porter argues that, while the post-war welfare state model was based on a family with a single male breadwinner, the new model is one that assumes multiple family earners and encourages employability for both men and women. The result has been greater formal equality for women, but at the same time the restructuring and reduction of benefits have undermined these gains and made women's lives increasingly difficult. Using concepts from political economy, feminism, and public policy, this study will be of interest across a range of disciplines. --Publisher's description

Rabagliati's strip "Paul: Apprentice Typographer" was one of the highlights of 1999's Drawn & Quarterly anthology, and his first comic book Paul in the Country won the 2000 Harvey award for Best New Talent. This, his first graphic novel, is eagerly anticipated by comix connoisseurs who enjoy a sweet, unsentimental story about being a teenager and Rabagliati's crisp retro-modern 1950s drawing style. This book continues the story of Paul, a Quebecois teenager in the 1970s, as he experiences the first conflicts of responsibility with his desire to be free. Paul is outraged that he is forced to stop his high school art training. But he's been asked to put art aside because his other grades are so terribly low. Defiant, he quits school and anticipates a summer of leisure. But instead Paul follows the path of so many Quebecois teenagers: he lands a job as a counselor at one of the many summer camps in the mountains outside the city. There he finds himself guiding a motley band of kids, misfits and troublemakers, much like himself. After quitting school and trying his luck in the "real world," average teenager Paul gets a job as a counselor at a summer camp run for underprivileged children in 1970s Quebec. --Publisher's description

The election of neo-conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario in the early 1990s brought dramatic changes to provincial public policy; both the Ralph Klein Revolution and Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution emphasized fundamental changes in the role of government, balanced budgets, and the elimination of provincial debts. While public sector unions were forced to react, the response of the Alberta and Ontario unions differed significantly. The reasons, outcome, and long-term impact of the difference is the focus of Yonatan Reshef and Sandra Rastin's careful and revealing analysis. The authors' argument concentrates on union responses to the neo-conservative transformation in the two affected provinces, but the scope of the discussion expands to cover such issues as the differences between the two regimes, the damage to the Ontario labour movement dealt by the labour-oriented NDP government, the limits of inter-union cooperation, and the role of modern unions in politics. Lively and timely, Unions in the Time of Revolution places Canada's unions in the full context of the neo-conservative trend in provincial politics, and demonstrates the importance of individual union responses in times of such significant change. --Publisher's description. Contents: Alberta and Ontario: Industrial relations and their contexts -- Revolutions, Canada style -- Collective action conceptual framework -- Revolutionizing the Civil Service: OPSEU and AUPE -- Teachers: Protecting the profession, defending the union organization -- Sins of commission and sins of omissions: The Ontario days of action and missed opportunities in Alberta -- Sleeping with the devil: Strategic voting in the 1999 Ontario Election -- Revisiting the collective action model -- Additional thoughts on collective action.

[The author] continues her study into why British Columbians – and many Canadians from outside the province – were historically so opposed to Asian immigration. Drawing on contemporary press and government reports and individual correspondence and memoirs, Roy shows how British Columbians consolidated a “white man’s province” from 1914 to 1941 by securing a virtual end to Asian immigration and placing stringent legal restrictions on Asian competition in the major industries of lumber and fishing. While its emphasis is on political action and politicians, the book also examines the popular pressure for such practices and gives some attention to the reactions of those most affected: the province’s Chinese and Japanese residents. --Publisher's description

Alan Sears examines education reform in relation to a broad process of cultural and economic change. His book makes the case that education reform is one aspect of a broad-ranging neo-liberal agenda that aims to push the market deeper into every aspect of our lives by eliminating or shrinking non-market alternatives. The author begins by showing that advocates of education reform have had to make the case that the current system is not working. This sets the ground for an examination of the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution,' a claim that drastic change was required to redesign government policies to fit a changing world. Lean production methods are a crucial component of this changing world, and broader social and cultural change is now required to consolidate the emerging order built on the spread of these methods. Education reform is designed to recast the relations of citizenship, contributing to the cultural and social change promoted through the social policy of the lean state. --Publisher's description

Recasting labor studies in a long-term and global framework, the book draws on a major new database on world labor unrest to show how local labor movements have been related to world-scale political, economic, and social processes since the late nineteenth century. Through an in-depth empirical analysis of select global industries, the book demonstrates how the main locations of labor unrest have shifted from country to country together with shifts in the geographical location of production. It shows how the main sites of labor unrest have shifted over time together with the rise or decline of new leading sectors of capitalist development and demonstrates that labor movements have been deeply embedded (as both cause and effect) in world political dynamics. Over the history of the modern labor movement, the book isolates what is truly novel about the contemporary global crisis of labor movements. Arguing against the view that this is a terminal crisis, the book concludes by exploring the likely forms that emergent labor movements will take in the twenty-first century. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- Labor movements and capital mobility -- Labor movements and product cycles -- Labor movements and world politics -- Contemporary dynamics in world-historical perspective -- Appendix A: The World Labor Group Database: conceptualization, measurement, and data collection procedures -- Appendix B: Instructions for recording data from indexes -- Appendix C: Country classifications.

Hi-tech tactics during a strike at a dockside factory in Montreal. A workplace cancer tragedy in Sarnia, Ontario. Immigrant workers sticking with their union at the chocolate factory. A struggle for pay equity in the courts and on the streets. A campaign to create jobs by cutting hours of work in B.C. An organizing drive 350 kilometres out into the frigid Atlantic. These are some of the fascinating stories told by Jamie Swift in his chronicle of the first ten eventful years of one of the most dynamic labour unions in North America. --Publisher's description

In early June 1935, one thousand relief-camp strikers clambered aboard freight trains to take their grievances to Ottawa. Their trek would end in bloodshed on the streets of Regina on 1 July 1935, later known as "The bloodiest day of the Depression." In All Hell Can't Stop Us, noted historian Bill Waiser examines the social and political background of the On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot, and provides an in-depth account of the strikers, their supporters, and their powerful adversaries. This gripping history includes many unpublished sketches and photographs. --Publisher's description

The economic boom of the 1990s created huge wealth for the bosses, but benefited workers hardly at all. At the same time, the bosses were able to take the political initiative and even the moral high ground, while workers were often divided against each other. This new book by leading labor analyst Michael D. Yates seeks to explain how this happened, and what can be done about it. Essential to both tasks is "naming the system"-the system that ensures that those who do the work do not benefit from the wealth they produce. Yates draws on recent data to show that the growing inequality-globally, and within the United States-is a necessary consequence of capitalism, and not an unfortunate side-effect that can be remedied by technical measures. To defend working people against ongoing attacks-on their working conditions, their living standards, and their future and that of their children-and to challenge inequality, it is necessary to understand capitalism as a system and for labor to challenge the political dominance of capitalist interests. Naming the System examines contemporary trends in employment and unemployment, in hours of work, and in the nature of jobs. It shows how working life is being reconfigured today, and how the effects of this are masked by mainstream economic theories. It uses numerous concrete examples to relate larger theoretical issues to everyday experience of the present-day economy. And it sets out the strategic options for organized labor in the current political context, in which the U.S.-led war on terrorism threatens to eclipse the anti-globalization movement. --Publisher's description.

An exploration of the vital role played by Mexican seasonal workers in Canadian agriculture and how they have become a structural necessity in some sectors. Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's demand for their labour is related not only to economic need but to the rigid control exercised by the Mexican Ministry of Labour and Social Planning and Canadian growers over workers' participation in the Canadian guest worker program, as well as the paternalistic relationship between the Mexican harvesters and their Canadian employers. --Publisher's description

An examination of the social, political, and demographic history of British miners and their households on Vancouver Island in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century coal-miners imported from Europe, Asia, and eastern North America burrowed beneath the Vancouver Island towns of Nanaimo, Wellington, and Cumberland. No group was as numerous and influential in this enterprise as the hundreds of British immigrants who traveled half-way around the world to take up back-breaking work in the most remote colony in the Empire. What drew the British miners and their families to the north Pacific? Why did they set aside six months to journey to a colony about which they knew little? Once they reached Vancouver Island, what did they make of it and what did they make it into? And how did they re-make themselves in the process? In Colonization and Community John Belshaw takes a new look at British Columbia's first working class, the men, women, and children beneath and beyond the pit-head. Beginning with an exploration of emigrant expectations and ambitions, he investigates working conditions, household wages, racism, industrial organization, gender, schooling, leisure, community building, and the fluid identity of the British mining colony, the archetypal west coast proletariat. By connecting the story of Vancouver Island to the larger story of Victorian industrialization, he delineates what was distinctive and what was common about the lot of the settler society. Belshaw breaks new ground, challenging the easy assumptions of transferred British political traditions, analyzing the colonial at the household level, and revealing the emergent communities of Vancouver Island as the cradle of British Columbian working-class culture. --Publisher's description

For a clear understanding of the legal protections and remedies available to employers and workers in Canada, this convenient survey and analysis is ideal. Although it may be said that there are eleven distinct systems of labour law in Canada - encompassing ten provinces and the Federal government - the authors ensure depth of treatment by focusing on common policy themes and typical legal solutions, with significant departures noted in whatever province or area of law they may arise. However, the relevant law of the three most populous and influential provinces - Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia - is covered in particular detail, as is Federal labour legislation and case law. Among the important areas of Canadian law and practice emphasised are the following: the tension between trade union power and business flexibility; collective "labour law" and individual "employment law"; the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement; the central place of the legal concept of the employment contract; labour standards legislation; the influence of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms; court intervention in labour law, both under common law principles and Quebec's civil code; the role of labour relations boards; and judicial review of administrative decisions and arbitration awards. As an accurate and usable guide for lawyers not expert in Canadian law, Labour Law in Canada is without peer. --Publisher's description

Against all odds, the miners of Bienfait, Saskatchewan, attempted, in 1931, to change their miserable situation by organizing a union. Exploring the social consequences of capitalist restructuring during the Great Depression, Stephen Endicott focuses on the miners' tumultuous thirty-day strike. Their bid to gain union recognition with the aid of the Workers' Unity League of Canada ultimately failed, and Endicott's in-depth examination of the key factors and players attempts to explain why this was the case and why a similar union drive a decade later succeeded." "Based on a large number of both oral and written primary resources, Bienfait offers a new interpretation of the role of corporations, governments, courts, and the police in the events surrounding the strike. In the process, Endicott demonstrates how a militant union leadership helped the workers gain the strength and unity of purpose to challenge the powers of wealth and deep-seated prejudice. Bienfait opens a new chapter in the history of Canadian labour relations that reveals much about Canadian and Canadian society during the Depression. --Publisher's description

Toronto's Cabbagetown in the Depression...North America's largest Anglo-Saxon slum. Ken Tilling leaves school to face the bleak prospects of the dirty thirties-where do you go, what do you do, how do you make a life for yourself when all the world offers in unemployment, poverty and uncertainty?"As a social document, Cabbagetown is as important and revealing as either The Tin Flute or The Grapes of Wrath. Stern realism has also projected upon the pages of a whole gallery of types, lifelike and convincing. He is well fitted to hold the mirror up to human nature." Globe and Mail.Cabbagetown was first published in an abbreviated paperback edition in 1950 and was published in its entirety in 1968. This, the first quality paperback edition, contains the full unexpurgated text of Cabbagetown. --Publisher's description

The United Nations declared 1975 International Women's Year for the purpose of promoting equality of men and women.... Canada alloted funds for projects aimed at achieving these objectives and many projects were undertaken across the country. The Central Council of Women's Auxiliaries to the United Fishermen & Allied Workers' Union at its annual convention in 1975 undertook to write a history highlighting women's contribution to the trade union movement in British Columbia. Finally, here is that book. Working people in BC have a proud history: a history that accalims the struggles for a better life, a better job and a better community. In 1975, we set out to record the history of the women of British Columbia who struggled for human rights and women's equality and who helped build our trade unions. We interviewed and recorded a wonderful group of women and men. And we appreciated all their stories. [This book] shares those stories. --Publisher's description

Jacobs has brought together the work of a number of progressive feminist writers, who theorize gender, race, diversity research, the social construction of women and work, ethnicity and class. The essays in this reader are focused on issues relating to gender equality in workspaces in society. The editor has gathered essays from well-known and established social scientists. Among them are Pat and Hugh Armstrong, Himani Bannerji, Christine Bruckert and Tania Das Gupta. The result is a stimulating collection that focuses on health-care workers, teachers, strippers, wage-less workers and women who are hidden from view. The collection explores the construction of gender, the selection of careers and the differential in work conditions and wages. --Publisher's description. Contents: Theorizing women's work: feminist methodology / Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong -- The paradox of diversity: the construction of a multicultural Canada and "women of colour" / Himani Bannerji -- Qualitative research to identify racialist discourse: towards equity in nursing curricula / Rebecca Hagey and Robert W. MacKay -- Teaching against the grain: contradictions and possibilities / Roxana Ng -- Racism in nursing / Tania Das Gupta -- Toward anti-racism in social work in the Canadian context / Usha George -- The world of the professional stripper / Chris Bruckert -- Gender inequality and medical education / Jo-Anne Kirk -- Benevolent patriarchy: the foreign domestic movement, 1980-1990 / Patricia Daenzer -- The new wageless worker: volunteering and market-guided health care reform / Elizabeth Esteves -- "Who else would do it?": female family caregivers in Canada / Kristin Blakely -- Marginal women: examining the barriers of age, race and ethnicity / Robynne Beugebauer -- Creating understanding from research: staff nurses' views on collegiality / Merle Jacobs -- Antiracism advocacy in the climate of corporatization / Rebecca Hagey, Jane Turrittin, Evelyn Brody -- Undertaking advocacy / Merle Jacobs.

The 1940s in Canada are crucial to the understanding of labour history in this country. Following the Depression, and sparked by the need to mobilize the workforce during the Second World War, this decade led to a restructuring of the relationship between labour and the state. In Harnessing Labour Confrontation, Peter S. McInnis examines the reformation of Canadian society and its industrial relations regime from the perspective of labour organizations and their supporters and from that of government and business. What results is a synthesis of labour and political history, which the author uses to analyze in a North American context the role of confrontation and heated debate in the formation of a national postwar compromise and in the birth of a modern welfare state.Among the factors affecting the postwar compromises were, argues McInnis, the divided jurisdiction between federal and provincial governments, the return to gender-biased societal norms, a developing Cold War climate of national insecurity, and a promise of strong consumer purchasing power based on postwar wages and benefits packages. While some of the results of the 1940s compromise and the welfare state remains intact today, many of the political and social structures have deteriorated in the last two decades. --Publisher's description. Contents: ntro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Reassessing the 'Labour Question' -- 1 Home Front War: Labour and Political Economy in Second World War Canada -- 2 Planning Prosperity: The Debate on Postwar Canada -- 3 Reconstructing Canada: Industrial Unions in the Immediate Postwar Era -- 4 Teamwork for Harmony: Labour-Management Production Committees and the Postwar Settlement in Canada -- 5 Legislating the Compromise: The Politics of Postwar Industrial Relations -- Conclusion: Interpreting the Legacy of the 1940s.

Before 1950, the greatest number of Newfoundland farmers lived in the St. John's area. They and the townsfolk were interdependent, with the farmers providing meat, poultry, garden and dairy products to the city, while St. John's served as a ready market and a source of cash income. Although many street names serve as reminders of those who once worked the land, and others perpetuate old homesteads, the farmers of St. John's are as unknown today as though they had never been. Cows Don't Know It's Sunday gives a historical overview of farming and its importance to the economy of Newfoundland, and describes in detail, using the words of more than eighty people who grew up on or near farms, what it was like to farm in and around St. John's in the period within living memory. Farmers worked seven days a week throughout the year. This study of both the work life and social life of the farmers of St. John's is a tribute to the farming families who were the mainstay of the city during the first half of the twentieth century. --Publisher's description