Your search

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. --Résumé 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.

James Naylor traces the transformation of class relations in the industrial cities of southern Ontario, examining the character of the regional labour movement, the nature of employer and state response, and the reasons for the failure of labour's "new democracy." --Publisher's description. Inside front-cover summary: The period during and after the First World War was marked by tremendous labour unrest, not only in Winnipeg where the general strike of 1919 was a watershed, but across the country. James Naylor focuses on southern Ontario, in the industrial heartland of Canada, as a key to understanding the character of this phase of labour history. In the 1919 provincial election, the Independent Labor Party of Ontario swept most of the province's industrial constituencies outside Toronto and formed a coalition government with the organized farmer. Strike activity soared to unprecedented levels. The Toronto Trades Council organized a general strike, and new forms of industrial unionism began to emerge. If these events lacked some of the drama of those in the West, they reflect both an increasingly articulate working-class view of democracy and labour's determination not to be overlooked in the postwar reconstruction. Naylor examines a number of issues: the nature of working-class views of democracy and the state; the role of women in these movements; the logic participation in the electoral process; the dynamic between 'industrial' and 'political' activity in the context of a liberal-democratic system. He also considers the responses of employers and government with a view to undertanding the 'negotiated' character of postwar reconstruction in the context of social classes.

Presents a history of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 500.

Intended to be of interest to students of sociology, ethnic studies and history, this book assesses the political economy of migration. Labour shortages, the racialization of Caribbean migrant farm labour and alternatives to labour imports are discussed. --Publisher's description

Allen was raised in a Christian family, being the son of a United Church minister, and this no doubt influenced his academic interests, which took him to Duke University where he completed his doctoral studies. Out of this came his first major work, and one which still inspires scholars of Canadian socialism and Christianity to this day: The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914-28. Published in 1971, it served as a defining work for how scholars understood the figures, events, motivations, ideologies, and theologies which shaped the social gospel movement in Canada. While of an age that many might deem ‘dated,’ this book was deeply influential on my own understanding of the Christian left in this country, which existed in rudimentary form given my interest in key CCF figures like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, but wasn’t developed in a meaningful way until graduate school. In Allen’s writing, I saw figures and movements that—however imperfectly—melded the ideas of secular social justice with a conviction that Christ was sent to earth not only to teach us about the afterlife, but about how to build a New Jerusalem in the here and now. --From "Remembering Richard Allen" by Christo Aivalis [blog posting, 2019-03-25]

The creation of the NDP out of the CCF in 1961 was intended to strengthen Canada's left-wing political party through a closer alliance with organized labour. This strength has failed to materialize. In Political Choices and Electoral Consequences, Keith Archer reveals why.The most important link between labour and the NDP is the direct party affiliation of union locals. While this sort of affiliation had existed with the CCF, the Canadian Labour Congress showed a greater commitment to encouraging union locals to affiliate with the NDP. Although, as Archer discusses in both theoretical and empirical terms, individuals who belong to union locals formally linked to the NDP are more likely to vote for that party than are other people with similar socio-demographic characteristics, this has had little positive effect on the NDP's fortunes. Archer reveals that although, in principle, each union local may favour high rates of affiliation, it is often not in a local's self-interest to affiliate. Archer suggests that the main reason for such a disappointing record of affiliation is structural rather than ideological or cultural. He compares the Canadian situation to that in Britain, where the Labour Party rules governing affiliation have supported high rates of affiliation. The rules of the NDP, Archer goes on to show, are not significantly different from those that were developed between labour and the CCF. However, the CCF was not a labour party as such but rather an amalgam of farmers, labourers, and members of constituency associations. Labour's role has consequently remained that of a junior partner with the constituency groups. Under these circumstances, Archer argues, one would expect rates of affiliation to remain low. --Publisher's description

Why was Winnipeg the scene of the longest and most complete general strike in North American history? Bercuson answers this question by examining the development of union labour and the impact of depression and war in the two decades preceding the strike. --Publisher's description

Have Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher beaten labour into the ground? Are unions a spent force? Do ordinary people in Canada, the United States and Great Britain truly believe in the so-called free market? How are the Swedish social democrats handling challenges to their consensus society? Is there indeed a neo-conservative hegemony for the nineteen-nineties? These are some of the questions which the authors of this sixth Socialist Studies Annual try to answer. They present case studies from various countries, using the social and political insights of Gramsci and other progressive thinkers. --Publisher's description