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This thesis examines three Ontario strikes during the 1970s: the Dare Foods, Ltd. strike in Kitchener, Ontario, 1972-1973; the Puretex Knitting Company strike in Toronto, 1978-1979; and the Inco strike in Sudbury, 1978-1979. These strikes highlight gender issues in the Canadian food production, textile, and mining industries in the 1970s, industries that were all markedly different in size and purpose, yet equally oppressive towards working women for different reasons, largely based on the regional character of each city the strikes took place in. In Kitchener, the women's movement worked closely with the Dare union local and the left to mobilize against the company and grappled with the difficulties of framing women's inequality within the labour movement. At Puretex, immigrant women workers were subject to electronic surveillance as a form of worker control, and a left-wing nationalist union needed to look outside of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) for allies in strike action. At Inco, an autonomous women's group formed separate from the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) but struggled to overcome a negative perception of women's labour activism in Sudbury. Ultimately, these strikes garnered a wide variety of support from working women and feminist groups, who often built or had pre-existing relationships with Canadian and American trade unions as well as the left-wing milieu of the 1970s. This thesis uses these strikes as case studies to argue that despite the complicated and at times uneven relationship between feminism, labour, and the left in the 1970s, feminist and left-wing strike support was crucial in sustaining rank-and-file militancy throughout the decade and stimulating activist careers for women in the feminist movement, in unions, and on the left.

This dissertation examines the history of working-class environmentalism. It investigates the relationship between work and the environment and between workers and environmentalists. It presents five case studies that focus on the relationship between workers and the environment in British Columbia from the 1930s to the present, with particular emphasis on the forestry industry. Each case study examines how the interests of workers both intersect and conflict with the interests of environmentalists and how this intersection of interests presented itself throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Additionally, this dissertation examines how the working class has historically been constructed as the adversary of nature or wilderness and aims to explore how the working class, resource workers in particular, have come to symbolize that adversarial relationship. As well, it hopes to answer more epistemological questions about why working class environmentalism has not entered our lexicon and how lacking a sense of the working-class environmentalist serves to shape a discourse in which the history of worker environmentalism has been largely passed over. This study also explores how the collective memory of environmentalism has been constructed to exclude notions of class, and thus how environmentalism and the working class have been constructed as mutually exclusive categories. While this dissertation explores the exclusion of working class environmentalism it also attempts to write the worker-environmentalist back into history and show how teaching working class and labour history can help remedy this exclusion.

his thesis examines a selection of print materials from the radical and Communist-affiliated Left in the 1930s, a group and time period that are often passed over in assessments of Canadian literature. While similar texts have been studied in the context of legal evidence or political propaganda, they have rarely been considered as print objects in themselves, operating within a network of production, circulation, and response alongside other literary and non-literary media. In looking at the 1930s, a moment when the project of Canada was acutely challenged by the political and economic forces of the Great Depression, I see an equal challenge to scholars and critics by writers and readers struggling to organize from below. By considering examples of Canadian proletarian print from different points along the communication cycle, this project seeks to connect the imaginary aspirations and rhetorical strategies of these texts to the material contexts of their producers and readers. Chapter One addresses the existing gap in Canadian literary history, which maintains a liberal orientation throughout its associated institutions, approaches and subjects; this orientation has been upheld through political and legal structures hostile to proletarian movements. This chapter discusses Ronald Liversedge’s Recollections of the On-to-Ottawa Trek as a text that highlights and crosses such institutional boundaries. Chapter Two takes up the methods of book history, using the example of the “Worker’s Pamphlet Series” to discuss expanding this approach to include material such as pamphlets, periodicals, and manifestos as part of an explicit class analysis. Chapter Three analyzes the self-reflexive circulation of proletarian print in the restrictive legal environment created by Section 98 of the Criminal Code through materials produced by the Canadian Labour Defense League. Chapter Four examines surveillant readings and misreadings as they intercept proletarian print, using the Edmonton Hunger March and the subsequent pamphlet “The Alberta Hunger-March.” By mapping locations associated with this event and with the print economy in 1932 Edmonton, Chapter Five considers the formation of proletarian publics as highly localized interpretive communities, and how the application of tools such as GIS mapping might further re-center readers’ material lives in the analysis of print culture. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrates how the methods of analysis and historicization offered by book history can and should be applied to bring proletarian print and readers into conversation with the wider patterns of Canadian writing through the twentieth century. This is a necessary confrontation: as the study of Canadian literature begins to acknowledge the construction and contestation of our national myths, it must also avow the lasting political consequences for those who have been excluded.

The practice of design has become obscured by global networks of production, circulation, and consumption. Traditional design studies tend to focus on high-profile products, presenting heroic designers as the primary authors of works of design. This approach is inadequate for understanding design in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Contemporary design is better understood as an iterative and distributed process of give-and-take among actors, human and non-human, including people, tools, places, and ideas. It is a process that is influenced by conditions along the commodity chain that fall outside of the designers traditionally recognized sphere. This research demonstrates that commonly held conceptions of designers as sole authors and of design work as a largely intellectual, creative activity distanced from manufacturing, misrepresent the real practices and relations of design labour in the current global economy. Two object ethnographies follow the production, circulation, and consumption of everyday, mass-produced goods: the Vanessa steel-toe boot by Mellow Walk and the Non Stop flatware by Gourmet Settings. These case studies map networks of design labour across continents, countries, cities, and generations. Primary research includes 18 interviews, observations of environments and practices, and the analysis of material evidence. This process reveals actors whose contributions have typically been omitted from design history, and describes practices of design that contest traditional depictions of designers, design work, and evidence thereof. This research contributes a fuller and more accurate understanding of the range of creative labour and labourers involved in the design and development of goods for global markets while challenging the view of these goods as placeless and culture-free. I respond to the call by design historians to extend the scope of designs histories beyond the West, and I build on the work of design and creativity scholars who identify design thinking outside of recognized design roles. My work challenges established hierarchies of design, including who is permitted to design, which countries are perceived as superior sources of design and manufacturing expertise, and the hand-head dichotomy that underwrites how we think about design and that has been entrenched in traditional conceptions of manufacturing and the global division of labour. Understanding how the work of design is distributed and how it has changed in response to globalization gives insight into the politics of production and consumption.

This dissertation is a study of working-class identity and subjectivity among a sample of male nickel miners in Sudbury, Ontario. Recent foreign takeovers of mining firms and a protracted strike at Vale-Inco in 2009-2010 motivate this dissertation's new look at class relations and subjectivity in one of Canadas most historically significant regions of working-class organization. This study understands these recent events as part of a set of decades long economic processes that have transformed workers lives in and outside work. It explores how the form that trade unionism took in the post-WWII period has shaped class relations and class identity among male nickel miners in Sudbury. The dissertation asks: how have class subjectivity and socioeconomic change interacted over this history? After first analyzing the political economy of mining in the Sudbury Basin, the dissertation traces the formation of historically situated class subjectivities. In it, I examine how the postwar compromise between capital and labour influenced unionization and class identity among male workers at the mines. I then inquire into how industrial restructuring and job loss, the rise of new managerial strategies and neoliberal governance, and the growth of precarious, contract labour have transformed both the material contexts of workers lives and their practices of reproducing their identities as members of a working class. To form the central arguments of the dissertation, I draw on 26 oral history interviews with current and retired workers, and organize their narratives into three thematic areas of class identity: first, issues of work and the labour process; second, themes of place, space, and belonging in the formation of class identities; and third, how historical memory and generational conflict influence class. Within and across these thematic areas I show how material conditions and workers own practices of identity formation interact, adjust, and at times, contradict. I argue that the postwar class compromise between labour and capital contributed to a resilient form of working-class subjectivity among workers that is reproduced by local processes of social remembering and class reproduction. Yet, industrial restructuring, the growth of precarious employment, and the internationalization of ownership and management at the mines challenge the efficacy of this historical subjectivity. By studying unionized workers who are confronting profound industrial change, this dissertation raises questions about how the making of male working-class identity limited broader processes of class formation, as well as how we understand class and class formation in the global economy at a time when labour movements face growing structural challenges.

This study explores how teacher unions in British Columbia and Ontario attempted to influence public opinion during periods of labour conflict between 2001 and 2016. A comparative case analysis was conducted based on eight interviews with members of the British Columbia Teachers Federation, six interviews with members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, as well as documents from each union. In addition, newspaper items published in each province during the conflict period were collected. The unions’ efforts were analyzed through the framework of Habermas’ concepts of the public sphere and validity claims. Findings indicate that both unions had active public relations strategies designed to influence media coverage and discourse in the public sphere. However, most of their efforts were focused on influencing the public sphere indirectly, by using tactics that are not traditionally considered part of public relations strategies. While the unions’ efforts were similar in nature, the impact that these efforts had on influencing public opinion and producing policy change varied substantially. I argue that a combination of historical and political differences, mediated through a validity claims framework, helps explain this variation.

This dissertation turns to recent feminist history of the 1980s to consider feminism’s relationship to class, economics, and labour. Challenging the idea that feminism is an inclusive project, I look at how feminist ideology produces commonsense forms of racism, classism, and sexual normativity. To demonstrate this argument, I evaluate two important moments in 1980s Canadian feminism: the development of feminist political economy and the debates of the feminist sex wars. In tracing the ways in which these histories unfold to value some feminist subjects more than others, I show how feminist narratives appear cohesive through quotidian practices of exclusion. I claim that the resistance of marginalized subjects is integral to these narratives, particularly when this resistance has been made to appear invisible or absent. I first turn to feminist political economy to show how a white feminist discourse about gendered domestic labour emerged while simultaneously omitting analyses of the experiences of women of colour and migrant domestic labourers. This white feminist discourse is imbued with commonsense racism, and imagines migrant domestic workers as located elsewhere to feminism. Subsequently, I examine how the feminist sex wars pursued a line of inquiry into sexuality that privileged a framework of danger. Feminist theorizing of violence against women as intrinsic to prostitution and pornography had dire consequences for understanding sex work and the diverse women employed in the industry. In promoting a white, middle-class perspective on sexuality, feminists appropriated sex workers’ experiences of violence and sought state support for abolishing commercial sexuality, in turn contributing to the heightened state surveillance of sexual minorities. In looking to and for marginalized women’s experiences within an archive of women’s publishing, this project insists on the integral place of sex workers and migrant domestic workers within Canadian feminist labour histories.

This paper examines precarious work, its historical origins and certain social consequences. I use the 2015 Canadian Election Study to analyze the relationship between work-related insecurity and economic anxiety with voting, non-voting political behaviour and attitudes toward equity-seeking groups. I propose a theory of "harmonizing down", in which workers who were once able to access the benefits and status of the standard employment relationship have generally seen their opportunities for stable and secure work decline. This has resulted in economic anxiety for most workers. Results were mixed, suggesting that broad generalizations around economic anxiety are problematic. Insecurity and anxiety may reduce the likelihood of voting but may increase non-voting participation. Some aspects of insecurity and anxiety were related to negative attitudes toward equity-seeking groups, but the relationship is not clear. Gender and political party identity influence these attitudes.

Previous research has indicated the prevalence of customer violence towards workers in the service sector, but few studies have looked at the impacts of this violence for LGBTQ2S+ workers. Drawing from survey results (n=208) and interviews (n=11) with LGBTQ2S+ service sector workers in Windsor and Sudbury, Ontario, this thesis explores the rates and experiences of customer violence for these workers, using chi-square analyses to identify relationships between customer violence and independent variables related to workers’ identity and workplace. Further analysis was conducted on qualitative interview data to understand how this violence was experienced, as well as how workers resisted and perceived management’s response. Customer violence was found to be widespread among survey and interview participants, with participants who were racialized as non-white, union members, and in precarious work situations reporting higher levels of violence. Interviews also showed how participants often resisted customer violence through individual means, and perceived support from management to be lacking and contingent upon economic motivations.

This study concerns the social and emotional dimensions of Mexican migrant workers’ temporary labour migration experience as they relate to precarity and unfreedom within the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). My principle inquiry centers around understanding migrant workers’ subjective and emotional experiences of being away from home and family. This study makes the case that migration and family separation, as requirements of SAWP employment, are precarious labour conditions that result overwhelmingly in distressing emotional experiences that go unseen in workers’ daily lives. I draw on a deeply qualitative methodological approach and theories of precarity, emotion and practice to explore the ways that SAWP workers navigate their labour migration experience through a series of practices in their daily lives. I conclude by sharing my participants’ recommendations for a more dignified and humanized labour experience and with their insistence that they are not maquinas (machines).

International teaching assistants (ITAs) in North American English-medium universities often work with an accent. In one sense, to work with an accent entails doing one’s work while having an aural stigma. This is due to the increased likelihood that students and other university stakeholders perceive ITAs’ foreign-accented English as difficult to understand. The purported problem of their foreign accents can thus create additional facets in working with an accent such as working with the idea of how to change an accent and performing (around) it in order to be viewed as effective workers. All of this work can be considered a type of aesthetic labour in that ITAs need to develop the right sound for their professional duties. Based on a narrative inquiry of the experiences of 14 ITAs working in various universities in Ontario, Canada, this thesis explores how they conceptualize and execute aesthetic labour. Specifically, it details their perceptions of a satisfactory aural aesthetic for work as well as the extent to which they incorporate this aesthetic in discussions about their professional practices. Regarding the first research objective, the ITAs understood a satisfactory accent in linguistic, racial, and professional terms. Indeed, an accent could sound “native” or “nonnative,” become “whitened” or remain racialized, and match or not match one’s work (environment). In terms of taking up these perceptions in their professional practices, which took the general form of working on or around an accent, the ITAs’ prior views on aural aesthetics were upheld and/or tempered by contextual factors in their universities. On the immediate level, the above findings provide suggestions for changes to existing forms of ITA training, which tend to ignore the knowledge of ITAs and fail to prepare them to effectively communicate according to the specificities of their work environments. More broadly, the findings are useful in highlighting how accents are not stable individual traits, but rather, malleable tools that help workers negotiate intercultural encounters in a range of professional settings. Therefore, this study counters research that frames the ITA accent as an inherent problem needing to be rectified for a homogeneous audience.

This dissertation explores the political economy of the physical and mental illnesses that the migrant workers experience while living and working under conditions of illegality in Canada's late capitalism. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part locates four social determinants of health underpinning the structural vulnerability to which the Latin American undocumented workers are subjected in this particular context. The second part describes the mental and physical health illnesses that the undocumented workers develop while living and working in Canada without authorization, according to the type of industry they work in (1.—Multinational Corporations, 2.—Medium-size local industries and 3.—Underground workers' cooperatives) and to the type of work they do. The empirical evidence illustrates that the undocumented immigrants who work for medium-size local enterprises, those who have been affected by deportability and deportation, as well as those who lost their legal status after being engaged in refugee claimant applications, are more likely to develop the most dramatic forms of physical and mental health diseases, all linked to what is called here "short- term historical trauma." In contrast, undocumented workers who work for underground workers' cooperatives are more likely to report better physical and mental health outcomes. Cooperative labour, free time and social solidarity make this possible. Overall, this thesis indicates that --as explored in part three-- under the social conditions organized by late capitalism, social solidarity and engagement in non-waged cooperative labour constitute social mechanisms by which undocumented migrants can access to forms of refuge, care, solidarity and social recognition that partially emancipate them from illnesses, suffering and social death. This thesis is based on an ethnographic work that I carried out over 24 months in Montreal. During that period of time, I worked side by side with Latin American undocumented workers in slaughterhouses and meatpacking factories, construction and home renovation companies, employment agencies, and as industrial cleaner for multinational corporations, spaces where I carried out direct empirical observation in the points of production and conducted 47 in-depth interviews on illegality, labor and health. I also conducted ethnographic work in hospitals and deportation centers.

This thesis examines two intimately related topics. First, it analyzes the practices of temporary employment agencies and employers in using the vulnerabilities of migrant and immigrant workers across different precarious labour sectors in Montreal. Second, it aims to understand the knowledge production, learning and non-formal education linked to action that occur in the course of organizing im/migrant agency workers by the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) and the Temporary Agency Workers Association (TAWA). The discussion of agencies is located in a broader context of the global and Canadian neoliberal model which includes attending to racism and racialization, flexible labour and labour deregulation, labour precarity, the defensive position of trade unions, austerity and immigration policies. The study uses longitudinal research and interviews with 42 im/migrant agency workers in precarious jobs, as well as interviews with IWC and TAWA activists and members. It employs an ethnographic and activist approach informed by Global Ethnography and the Extended Case Method. The analysis entailed the description of local experiences of im/migrant agency workers and the ways that agencies manage their vulnerabilities to optimize labour exploitation. It relates IWC and TAWA organizing processes to the growing activity and importance of workers' centres as alternative organizations to traditional trade unionism. The study found that systematic violations of im/migrants' labour rights through agencies also impact their private lives. It argues that the Canadian and Quebec states are complicit in structuring this super-exploitation through their immigration policies and their disengagement from the conditions of im/migrants in the labour market. In response, the IWC and the TAWA have developed an organizing model for agency workers based on five pillars: community organizing, knowledge production, popular education, and leadership development. This includes provision of services infused with education for collective action, arts-based activism, and diverse ways of spreading information and knowledge. Participation in bigger campaigns and partnership with engaged academics has also resulted in important strategies leading to the IWC and the TAWA organizing workers and making visible the problems associated with agencies.

Most extant studies on the relationship between workforce diversity and employment inequalities focus on the impact of a single disadvantaged identity on a single employment outcome such as pay or promotion at the organizational level. Thus, the relation between workers’ multiple identities and different dimensions of employment inequalities within the broader social context remains unclear. The goal of this thesis is to start filling this gap. I start with developing a multilevel model of employment inequalities for workers with multiple identities by integrating the social identity theory, double jeopardy hypothesis, intergroup contact theory, and theory of minority group threat. I test this model with two empirical studies using Statistics Canada’s nationally representative Canadian Survey on Disability (2012) linked with the National Household Survey (2011). Labour force participation, employment, and employment income are the dependent variables of this thesis. I examine the intersection of immigrant and disability identity dimensions by focusing on immigrants with disabilities (IwD) as compared to immigrants with no disabilities, Canadian-born with disabilities, and Canadian-born with no disabilities. Study 1 demonstrates that while immigrant and disability identities are independently negatively associated with employment and employment income, having both identities simultaneously has a positive effect on employment and employment income. Furthermore, with the increase of the residential area diversity (RAD), which is determined by the number of immigrants and people with disabilities in a community, IwD’s likelihood of employment increases but employment income decreases. Study 2 shows that the proportion of immigrants in a residential area (RA) is negatively associated with the likelihood of being in the labour force for IwD. Furthermore, perceived work discrimination is negatively associated with labour force participation for IwD. Moreover, perceived work discrimination mediates the relationship between the proportion of immigrants in an RA and labour force participation for IwD. This thesis contributes to theory by (i) developing a multi-level theoretical framework that demonstrate the complex relationship between individuals with multiple identities, organizations, and society, (ii) extending the intergroup contact theory and the theory of minority threat using empirical evidence from individuals with multiple identities rather than focusing on a single identity, (iii) examining multiple employment outcomes at once and demonstrating how employment outcomes might differ based on intersecting identities, and (iv) demonstrating the impact of societal context by incorporating RAD into analysis and showing how the employment outcomes of individuals with multiple identities differ by where they reside. I discuss practical implications of the findings for workers, employers, policymakers, and society.

Teaching staff in Ontario schools do not reflect the increasing diversity of the students who occupy Ontario classrooms today. School boards across Ontario have come under considerable scrutiny regarding the lack of diverse teacher representation that adequately reflects Ontario’s demographic composition (Childs et al., 2010; Ryan, et al., 2009; Turner, 2015). This thesis addresses the Ontario teacher diversity gap (James Turner, 2017; Turner 2015; Turner, 2014; Ryan, et al., 2009) in relation to provincial equity and inclusive educational policies, which have been created to address the dominance of white teachers in publicly-funded education in Ontario. However, findings from the research indicate that these policies have not had the desired results, and in some ways have contributed to perpetuating the status quo, and the ongoing overrepresentation of white teachers in schools. The thesis furthermore addressed the notion of bias-free hiring (Fine Handlesman, 2012; Hassouneh, 2013) practices through narratives of Ontario teachers themselves. The predominant assumption of bias-free hiring is that one can divorce themselves from their unconscious biases and preconceptions of groups who are dissimilar to them in order to recruit the so-called “most qualified applicant”. The narrative of the “most qualified applicant” is a term invoked when racialized people seek access to employment opportunities. School administrators have great influence on who is hired; therefore it is important for administrators to interrogate their own social locations and positions of power, and unconscious bias in terms of how they recruit teachers. Findings from the research indicate that teachers from racialized groups have different experiences when seeking employment as teachers in publicly-funded school boards in Ontario. In response to this the EHT Equity Hiring Toolkit for Ontario School Administrators has been developed to support school administrators to recruit more diverse teachers. The EHT provides a framework for school administrators to engage in antiracist praxis and action, by examining their social location, and ways that their positionality impacts the hiring decisions they make. School administrators can use the creation of the Toolkit based on the findings of the data that emerged from the research as a Creative Professional Activity (CPA). I consider this to be my contribution to the field of social justice education and leadership.

Les grèves générales de la robe déclenchées en août 1934 et en avril 1937 marquent un épisode de solidarité entre ouvrier.ères juif.ves et travailleuses canadiennes-françaises jusqu'alors sans précédent. Si quelques grèves avaient déjà réuni piqueteuses juives et canadiennes-françaises dans les années 1920, aucun de ces conflits de travail n'avait connu cette ampleur. Souvent isolées à une seule fabrique de vêtements, ces grèves étaient de taille plus modeste, tant par la durée du conflit que par le nombre de grévistes qu'elles comprenaient. La grève de 1934 organisée par l'IUNTW rassembla dès son déclenchement 4 000 piqueteur.ses, interrompit l'activité de 90 établissements, et totalisa en tout 45 000 journées de travail perdues. La grève de 1937 qui s'inscrivit dans la continuité de l'organisation des ouvrières de la robe entamée par la grève de 1934, rassembla plus de 5 000 grévistes et couta 55 000 journées de travail perdues à l'industrie montréalaise de la robe. Le présent mémoire explore les grèves générales des ouvrier.ères de la robe qui s'enclenchèrent au cours de la décennie 1930 à Montréal. Opposant un prolétariat canadien-français et juif à des manufacturiers pour la majorité eux-aussi juifs, ces grèves s'inscrivent dans le phénomène plus vaste d'un mouvement ouvrier juif canadien. L'expérience de ces conflits de travail est parcourue par de multiples tensions. Le prolétariat de l'aiguille est traversé par de multiples contradictions où s'entrelacent plusieurs axes de hiérarchisation qui fragmentent la force de travail. Conséquemment, ce mémoire se penche plus précisément sur les rapports de pouvoir et les axes hiérarchiques qui structurent à la fois la production, mais aussi la lutte syndicale, plus précisément autour des rapports de genres, de classes et d'ethnicité sur le plancher de l'usine et à l'intérieur des organisations syndicales. Ce mémoire cherche à comprendre comment l'articulation des relations de genres, d'ethnicité et de classes module l'expérience de la lutte ouvrière dans le cas précis du mouvement ouvrier juif montréalais dans le secteur de la robe, au cours de la décennie 1930 et comment dans un prolétariat fragmenté sur une multiplicité d'axes hiérarchiques ont pu se construire des alliances et des moments forts de solidarité au sein de grèves et de luttes ouvrières.

This study examines the emergence of the New Left organization, The New Tendency, in Windsor, Ontario during the 1970s. The New Tendency, which developed in a number of Ontario cities, represents one articulation of the Canadian New Left's turn towards working-class organizing in the early 1970s after the student movement's dissolution in the late 1960s. Influenced by dissident Marxist theorists associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Italian workerism, The New Tendency sought to create alternative forms of working-class organizing that existed outside of, and often in direct opposition to, both the mainstream labour movement and Old Left organizations such as the Communist Party and the New Democratic Party. After examining the roots of the organization and the important legacies of class struggle in Windsor, the thesis explores how The New Tendency contributed to working-class self activity on the shop-floor of Windsor's auto factories and in the community more broadly. However, this New Left mobilization was also hampered by inner-group sectarianism and a rapidly changing economic context. Ultimately, the challenges that coincided with The New Tendency's emergence in the 1970s led to its dissolution. While short-lived, the history of the Windsor branch of The New Tendency helps provide valuable insight into the trajectory of the Canadian New Left and working-class struggle in the 1970s, highlighting experiences that have too often been overlooked in previous scholarship. Furthermore, this study illustrates the transnational development of New Left ideas and organizations by examining The New Tendency's close connections to comparable groups active in manufacturing cities in Europe and the United States; such international relationships and exchanges were vital to the evolution of autonomist Marxism around the world. Finally, the Windsor New Tendency's history is an important case study of the New Left's attempts to reckon with a transitional moment for global capitalism, as the group's experiences coincided with the Fordist accord's death throes and the beginning of neoliberalism's ascendancy.

The works of Karl Marx have been central to the formation of a body of critical communication scholarship in Canada. But as Nicole S. Cohen adeptly shows, the influence of Marx’s thought has been absent, mostly, as it relates to questions involving cultural labourers. Of particular interest to her is Marx’s formulation concerning exploitation and its relationship to the field of journalism as it affects freelance writers. This dissertation extends the notion of a “missing Marx” by incorporating other concepts from his oeuvre. His writings on alienation help to address one of two major research questions posed in this dissertation. The first being: why is it that freelance writers in Canada are willing to work for such low levels of remuneration? Historically, a dichotomous rendering has prevailed as to whether exploitation or alienation provides a better explanatory framework for understanding the experiences of workers—in this case, freelance writers. One of the aims of this work is to bring alienation and exploitation into conversation with one another. This requires an analytical investigation of the journalistic labour process. Ideas of craft have helped shape identity and understandings of work in the journalistic field over a few centuries now. This understanding segues into the second research question: at this juncture of deepening capitalist crises, and subsequent renewed interest in craft modes of production, what relevance do these forces have in the lives of contemporary freelance writers? This dissertation addresses both of the above research questions as well as the aforementioned phenomenon through interviews of Canadian freelance writers in the spirit of Marx’s workers’ inquiry. These 25 interviews in combination with documentary analysis of the historically changing conditions of journalism explore the pertinence of the field’s craft sensibility upon its freelance workforce under circumstances of intensifying alienation. Statements from informants reveal the craft dimensions of the labour process as both a source of domination and of resistance as well as playing a possible future role in the enactment of broader class struggles.

While precarious work is a phenomenon often associated with non-professional workers, the emerging case of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) calls for a new framework building on scholarship on both precarious work and the professions. An in-depth case study of NTTF in southern Ontario shows how a new phenomenon of ‘precarious professionals’ is emerging. Drawing on sixty semi-structured interviews with faculty members, university administrators and union representatives across southern Ontario, I analyze workers’ experiences in temporary contract work in the academic profession, and their views on the way certain types of professional work are valued. Building off previous literature on precarious work, gender and work, and professional work, this thesis defines precarious professionals as highly skilled workers who do professional work that is valued and devalued along lines of gender. Their experiences in temporary contract work marginalize them economically and professionally in complex and compounding ways that trap them between identifying as precarious workers and as professionals. Union organizers and activists draw on a two-pronged approach that addresses both dimensions of precarious worker and professional identities. This thesis shows variation in workers’ experiences, suggesting that not all temporary contract workers become precarious professionals, and shows how that variation can be explained.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries evidenced extreme changes in industry and urbanization which fueled the movement of people worldwide. Included in this movement was an African Diaspora migration up and out of the Caribbean Basin and into the United States and elsewhere, as people sought to escape economic hardships within the region. Some took the opportunity to make their way to Sydney, Nova Scotia, where they labored for the Dominion Iron and Steel Company. The story of their migration to Cape Breton is of interest because they have remained a footnote in Canadian migration history. This thesis offers an opportunity to look at the lived experiences of these African Caribbean migrants and the community they created in Whitney Pier. This community served to spread notions of racial uplift and Black nationalism, evidenced by its involvement in the then growing Garvey movement.