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On 25 February 1932 some 6000 protestors descended on Vancouver for a “Hunger March” organized by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to demonstrate for better conditions for workers, both employed and unemployed, across the nation. Although Hunger Marches were organized throughout Canada, Vancouver’s march was by far the largest and certainly the most successful. This study presents a thorough examination of the circumstances surrounding the Hunger March and explains what made the event such a unique success in this city. The event’s success derives from the Vancouver CPC ‘s ability to take advantage of the large mass of transients who came into the city in the early part of the Great Depression and then to funnel their discontent into mass agitation. The following study shows how the Hunger March is symbolic of the Vancouver CPC’s revolutionary pragmatism during the Third Period,

“The relation between an employer and an isolated employee or worker is typically a relation between a bearer of power and one who is not a bearer of power. In its inception it is an act of submission, in its operation it is a condition of subordination, however much the submission and the subordination may be concealed by the indispensable figment of the legal mind known as the 'contract of employment'.” Otto Kahn-Freund , Labour and the Law (London: Stevens, 1977) This study examines the legal evolution of the common law of employment contracts in Ontario between the 1890s and the 1970s. It focuses on the changing relationship between notions of property and contract in employment, as visible through the judicial discourse of reported common law cases. I argue that between the 1890s and the end of the 1970s Ontario saw the emergence and consolidation of two different conceptual paradigms for regulating work at common law. The common law of employment contracts was framed and reframed over different eras of the 20th century through what the courts understood of the nature of the exchange between the parties, the property interests involved and the legal tools necessary to manage that exchange. Contrary to the traditional narrative in the field, the courts of Ontario first conceptualized employment as an exchange as of the turn of the 20th century. This first paradigm emerged in tandem with the province’s second industrial revolution, and sought to regulate the discretionary nature of white collar professional work. The second paradigm was entrenched in the 1960s and 1970s. It is over these years that workers in Standard Employment Relationships (SER) first began to bring employment-related claims to the common law courts, a few decades after it emerged as the paradigmatic form of work around which Ontario’s labour market and employment laws were fashioned over the mid-century. The basic premises of the SER, of long-term employment, job security and internal career advancement, fundamentally changed the psychosical and economic terms of employment. But faced with workers’ claims for recognition of these new terms in law, the courts instead chose to entrench a limited legal framework which denied job security as an enforceable contract term.

In the digital games industry women are statistical and cultural outliers. Using a cultural studies lens, this thesis examines the experiences of women game-makers in order to more deeply understand the attitudes of female game-workers, and to ascertain whether work in the male dominated gamed industry can be ‘good work’ for women. When compared to other cultural sectors, female game workers face unique barriers to sustaining careers in this high status industry. Gender stereotypes keep many women from fully participating in games industry culture which in turn discriminates against any worker who does not fit in to the ‘might is right’ mindset. Female game workers are getting mixed signals from an industry that appears to desire gender diversity in order to attract the growing ranks of female gamers, but is resistant to change sexist and discriminatory work practices that continue to alienate women.

Contrary to government official discourses that present the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) as a ‘human and just’ labour migration model, in this paper, the SAWP is presented as a migrant labour regime that functions as labour apartheid system of discipline and control, which is in place to satisfy the needs of capitalist development in the Canadian agricultural industry. By identifying the parallels and similarities of the differential treatment of Black migrant workers under South African apartheid with the differential treatment to which migrant farm workers are subjected under the SAWP, I explore how coercive migrant labour regimes of work function today in the context of heightened neoliberal hegemony and state multiculturalism. Through empirical evidences and theoretical claims, I identify main constitutive elements and forms of governance that cause workers to living and experiencing apartheid conditions; I explain how these forms of governance actually work on the ground, and how are they embodied, lived and contested by migrant farm workers participating in the program. I also delve in workers’ politics and their expressions of resistance and contestation to such system as they speak directly to the ways they experience apartheid conditions and the particular forms of how racism is inflicted over them. The SAWP presents an interesting opportunity to closely examine the ways in which colonialism works, how it is manifested today through labour and immigration schemes, and how these regimes are contested and challenged through migrant farm workers’ political subjectivities. In this respect, this paper paves the way for future movement-related research study of seasonal agricultural workers, which can generate collective insight and knowledge to support the organizing efforts of the precarious migrant workers in Canada.

My dissertation project examines women’s family lives, career trajectories, and status attainment. I draw on the concept of the work-family interface to highlight how work and families operate as contextual layers that cross-over in shaping definitions and appraisals of mothers as workers and workers as mothers. Utilizing data on married mothers’ complete working histories, I demonstrate that job exits due to motherhood negatively impact women’s occupational status attainment (SES), but I also show that women face penalties when changing jobs involuntarily and also due to personal reasons not tied to the maternal role. Importantly, in each instance, I demonstrate that these effects operate independently of the non-employment durations they engender, offering broad support for the status characteristics framework which points to the role of employer appraisals of women’s work commitment in shaping their SES outcomes. I also bring families back into the discussion of the work-family interface via the construction of a family-level framework that draws on mothers’, fathers’ and children’s attitudes about maternal employment as a platform for the development of discrete family configurations. I reveal a wide array of family attitude configurations that underscore that maternal employment continues to be contested moral terrain in some families while it is ii supported in others. In particular, I show that in egalitarian families—where maternal employment is not seen as a risk to ‘good’ mothering—mothers report more positive experiences of family and marital relations, less housework and more paid work, and higher earnings. I argue that family contexts represent an important yet understudied contextual reality that is more than the sum of individual views and which have unique consequences for women’s family lives and status trajectories.

Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation.

This dissertation explores the claim that, in advanced capitalist countries like Canada, a powerful knowledge class is assuming increasing dominance within the social relations of production. Attached to such theories are claims of trends toward post-bureaucratic organizations, rising job complexity and autonomy, and increased power within operational and strategic decision-making processes. In my study I focus on Canadian “specialist” employees (professionals and semi-professionals) and managers. I present aggregated and disaggregated data from two Canadian surveys conducted in 1983 and 2004 and complement this with original interviews with information technology (IT) workers and engineers. I find a seeming paradox within the labour process of specialists and managers, with task-level autonomy declining even as job complexity and involvement in organizational decisions are rising. I provide evidence that imperatives for profit/cost effectiveness are leading to efforts to make specialist and managerial labour and knowledge more transparent, integrated, and manageable, but this is not the same as degradation or proletarianization. In contrast to my expectation, I find boundaries in the division of labour are durable despite this “socialization” of many labour processes. I argue that a specialist-and-managerial class (SMC) exists in Canada, and will continue to exist, though it is subordinate to and exploited by the capitalist elite even as it excludes and exploits the working class through occupational closure and credential barriers. The SMC is thus contradictory, internally heterogeneous and fraying at its borders, but simultaneously resilient. The resiliency comes via possession of specific strategic knowledge and consequent ability to secure rents and/or control specific organization assets via delegated authority. Resiliency is also structural, with management in many organizations retaining an interest in separating planning and design (“conception”), on the one hand, from process and completion (“execution”), on the other, in order to maximize efficiency and productivity through more centralized control.

This thesis challenges the historiography that asserts the waterfront strike in Vancouver in 1935 was a failed militant surge by a new radical leadership in an otherwise twenty-year period of dormancy among the city's longshoremen. Using union documents, employer records, and interviews with workers, the thesis presents the entire company era, between 1923 and 1944, as a period of developing solidarity and resistance. In this context the 1935 strike and the union's leadership were a product of, not a radical departure from that continuity. The thesis shows that despite two lost strikes in 1923 and again in 1935, the administrative structures the employers established produced a resilient culture of solidarity that was in place before Partiament acted in 1944 to provide longshorement with the legal framework for union representation.

In February 2011, a wave of creative direct action swept across postal depots in the city of Edmonton which saw rank-and-file workers organizing outside of the channels of formal-legal unionism. Fighting against management’s imposition of compulsory overtime as a staffing measure, Letter Carriers and other “outside” postal workers relied on solidarity and resistance at the point of production in a successful campaign to put an end to this practice. The relevance of this particular struggle to the Canadian labour movement is twofold. First, the intensified workloads of Edmonton postal workers reflect a wider shift in the nature of employment relationships away from the existence of employer support as part of the rise of neoliberal capitalism. Second, the choice of workers to organize at a distance from the historically militant Canadian Union of Postal Workers reveals both the predicament facing labour of a highly restrictive formal labour relations system as well as an alternative path of resistance. For Edmonton postal workers, this path was forged in large part as a result of the influence of IWW dual-carder organizers and, more specifically, their introduction of a mode of union praxis known as solidarity unionism.

In this thesis I address the question of sympathetic action - action by one group of workers designed to aid another group of workers in their struggle with an employer, manifested most obviously through refusals by workers to cross a picket line - through the lens of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As the law currently stands in Canada, undertaking sympathetic action collectively is invariably illegal as it is considered an illegal "strike" under Canadian labour legislation. Further, workers who undertake sympathetic action - whether collectively or individually - can be subject to discipline or discharge by their employer. I argue that workers who undertake sympathetic action can have numerous motivations, ranging from economic self-interest to deeply-held political or moral beliefs (the latter manifested through the concept of "solidarity"), and that when those motivations include expressive or conscientious interests, sympathetic action should be entitled to protection by the fundamental freedoms of conscience, expression, and association found in section 2 of the Charter. I further argue that a each of these freedoms represents a different aspect of the inherent dignity and worth of an individual, and that a right to sympathetic action promotes both those freedoms and Charter values. Finally, I argue that a constitutional right to sympathetic action is a free-standing right that can exist even in the absence of a constitutional right to strike. This thesis reviews the current and historical state of Canadian law (in both the statutory labour relations regimes and in common law) regarding sympathetic action, the potential application of the Charter freedoms of conscience, expression, and association to sympathetic action, and finally options for reform that reduce or eliminate restrictions on sympathetic action and therefore make our labour relations system more in keeping with Charter values.

Policymakers, politicians, and media outlets have declared an obesity epidemic. In doing so, they have named a variety of villains, including fast food. Despite the framing of fast food as being a leading contributor to weight gain and obesity, we have yet to understand the impact that fast food has on those who work with it every day. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the food choices, BMIs, and self perceived weights of the food service worker population. Using Pierre Bourdieu‘s concepts of habitus and field, I investigate the role of the workplace and external cultural influences, such as the family, in navigating an obseogenic workplace environment that is centered on selling highly caloric food to the Canadian public in a quick and cost effective manner. The first stage of this research addresses the question: Are food service workers more likely to be overweight or obese and perceive themselves as being overweight compared to the general population? In order to do this, I analyzed secondary survey data from the Canadian Community Health Survey cycle 5.1 (2009-2010). I used logistic regression techniques to construct models that analyze the likelihood of having high BMIs and high self perceived weights in both the food service worker and general Canadian populations. In addition to this, I sought to understand the food choices that contribute to weight gain in fast food workers. To do this, I conducted forty semi-structured qualitative interviews with workers from a variety of fast food chains. The results of my research disprove my original hypothesis that food service workers are more likely to be overweight or obese because of their frequent exposure to fast food. Instead, I found that they are less likely to be overweight or obese than the general Canadian population. Additionally, they are also less likely to perceive themselves as being overweight or obese. Through the qualitative interviews, I found that these individuals participate in a process of regulation where they monitor their food intake at work. Additionally, I found that their consumption patterns stemmed from habitus generated through cultural exposures in other areas of their lives. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues that we develop habitus through meaningful cultural exposure. We use our habitus, or engrained dispositions, to navigate hierarchical spaces or fields. Through this research, I found that workers viewed their jobs as being temporary and their cultural consumption patterns did not seem to change from their exposures to their workplaces. The majority were part time students, working in this industry to pay for living expenses and tuition. For the most part, they were raised in middle class homes where their mothers prepared food for their families from scratch on a daily basis. Fast food was viewed as a special treat and not an item to consume on a regular basis. I conclude that the meaningful exposures we have to food and cultural norms throughout life are more important in determining our food choices than our exposure to fast food restaurants.

The primary question for investigation throughout this research is how the environmental knowledges of settler-colonists and their descendants have been formed through processes of work and dwelling in place. This dissertation results from over a year of fieldwork in an aging community where retired loggers, semi-retired fishermen, and retired exurban migrants are actively renegotiating the meanings of local places and natures as the local economy shifts from a base in logging and fishing to one in recreational and retirement real estate development. Through archival research, life history interviews and participant-observation with loggers, fishermen, exurban retirees and other long-term residents I explored the complications and contradictions inherent in learning to value nature through processes of transforming and intervening in ecological processes for economic ends. Writing against hard social constructivism I examine the ways in which the life cycles of fish and fish populations, the contingencies of weather, topography and currents, and, the physical form of the land are active elements in the formation of labour and settlement patterns in coastal British Columbia. As a contribution to the underdeveloped field of first world political ecology this work maps environmental knowledges and values developed in tense complicity with regimes of natural resource management and accumulation by dispossession. Central to this process is how people become agents of the commodification of nature and place in their everyday lives and work, and, how private property has become naturalized as a prerequisite to "protecting" self, nature, and community from precarity in the era of late capitalism. This dissertation tracks the various ways, both historically and in the present, that settlers and their descendants on the BC Coast have attempted to simultaneously make a living and make a home of an occupied place-the imperialist nostalgia and (neo)liberal white guilt endemic to the process.

Focusing on a case study of a union organizing effort at the La Platosa mine in northern Mexico from 2009-2012, this paper studies the challenges facing labour activism at Canadian mining companies in Mexico within the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The positions of the Mexican and the Canadian governments in relation to contemporary workers’ struggles in Mexico’s mining sector are considered, particularly the latter’s adoption of a ‘corporate social responsibility’ approach to addressing the activities of Canadian extractive firms abroad. By studying the outcome of the request for mediation filed by La Platosa miners with the Canadian government’s Extractive Sector CSR office in 2011 and evaluating the evolution of this government’s policy approach to extractive companies abroad since 2009, we find that CSR as practiced by the Canadian government has been ineffective at mitigating abusive practices by Canadian mining companies in Mexico and that an alternate outcome is not to be expected under existing policy structures. The relative strengths and weaknesses exhibited during labour organizing at the La Platosa mine are evaluated to find both locally specific and more broadly applicable strategies which could be applied to union renewal, both by workers employed under NAFTA’s transnational sector, and by the general labour movement.

At the close of the American Revolution thousands of American Loyalists were forced into exile and made their way to British colonies beyond the United States. Most of the Loyalists landed in British North America, particularly the Maritimes. Along with the trauma and losses of the conflict, the Loyalists brought with them a way of doing things, an intense political history, and ideas concerning the imperial structure that framed their everyday lives. This dissertation is a study of the Loyalists. Specifically, it explores a prominent Loyalist and his journey from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia along with family members, servants, and labourers, including enslaved persons. A central objective of the dissertation is to illuminate the story of the enslaved and magnify their place in Nova Scotia’s eighteenth century colonial history narrative. The objective is addressed by adapting a holistic perspective that considers a single geography – the plantation. The holistic perspective, developed through an interdisciplinary methodology, explores the people, places and culture that formed the Loyalist plantation and were informed by it. The picture that emerges is one that puts into place the structure and organization of a Loyalist plantation in the late eighteenth century. This dissertation argues that an interdisciplinary approach is fundamental when exploring the subject of the plantation and its inhabitants in Nova Scotia. Through study of the slaveholder and the comparison of his plantation spaces, the dissertation argues for Loyalist continuity. Such continuity confirmed a slaveholding culture during the mass migration. Finally, this dissertation argues that the Loyalist period can be described as Nova Scotia’s Age of Slavery. The Loyalist migration represents an unprecedented arrival of enslaved persons to the province. Furthermore, the Loyalist migration represents the unprecedented arrival of a political and ideological framework that carried within it perceptions of race and seeds of discrimination that took root.

There has been a significant expansion in Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) over the past ten years. The Pilot Project for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training (PPORLLFT), a sub program of the TFWP, has been leading this expansion. Drawing upon testimony given to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, this thesis examines the development and expansion of the program, since its inception in 2002, and shows that it is connected to the ongoing process of neoliberalisation in Canada. One significant example of this connection is the program's support for increases in two-step immigration streams that involve employer sponsorship for successful transition to permanent residency; this increase represents a privatisation of citizenship decisions. More than this, the neoliberal aspects of the PPORLLFT have increased inequality and the ability of employers to have a more disciplined workforce. This has decreased the ability of working people to have influence in their workplace and over economic policy more generally.

The literature of British Columbia and the study of labour therein have been largely ignored in academic criticism. I address this deficiency by foregrounding labour in the prose literature of British Columbia as well as the significance of British Columbia literature itself. My introductory literature review demarcates the field, situates the authors and texts I take up, and points to the general importance of such a study. Chapter two begins by analyzing the male-dominant labour narrative in Bertrand Sinclair’s The Inverted Pyramid and Roderick Haig-Brown’s On the Highest Hill and Timber—each focused on the theme of logging. Rather than an overarching argument, the section on Sinclair addresses many concepts, including Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields, a connection between environmental conservationism and loggers, and a cooperative economic model that opposes capitalism. Likewise, in Haig-Brown I focus on his treatment of danger in the logging industry, the oft-forgotten history of Canada’s national parks, the way that language connects people to nature, and the presence of homosocial and homosexual relationships in logging. My project shifts in chapter three from logging to orcharding and from novels to three works of creative non-fiction by Harold Rhenisch:Out of the Interior: The Lost Country, Tom Thomson’s Shack, and The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys through a Dark Century. Operating out of a site of tension and contradiction,Rhenisch resists what he sees as the dominant discourses in the Interior of British Columbia. In my fourth chapter I return to novels but move from a study of manual labour to white collar labour. Here the phrase “white collar” becomes an analytical lens to view labour stratification, exploitation, authorship, sexism, and agency in Douglas Coupland’s JPod, Robert Harlow’s Scann, and Jen Sookfong Lee’s the end of east. In chapter five, I conclude by using Daphne Marlatt’s novel Ana Historic as a way to reflect on the positions of chapters two through four. Marlatt’s criticism of male dominant conceptions of history and patriarchal systems of power illuminates the texts I have taken up and reveals possibilities for further analysis, debate, and discussion.

Why are class politics more prevalent in Canada than in the U.S., even though the two countries share similar cultures, societies, and economies? Many view this cross­border distinction as a byproduct of long­standing differences in political cultures and institutions, but I find that it is actually a relatively recent divergence resulting from how the working class was politically incorporated in both countries before, during, and after World War II. My central argument is that in Canada, this incorporation process embedded "the class idea"--the idea of class as a salient, legitimate political category--more deeply in policies, institutions, and practices than in the U.S.Out of the social and political struggles of that period emerged two working class movements that, although bearing a surface resemblance, were organized along different logics. In Canada, the working class was incorporated as a class representative, whereas in the U.S. It was incorporated as an interest group. That difference in political incorporation enabled or constrained labor's legitimacy and organizational capacity in different ways in both countries. Canadian labor's role as a class representative legitimized it and expanded its organizational capacity, while U.S. labor's role as an interest group delegitimized it and undermined its organizational capacity.I show this through a detailed analysis of trajectories of labor movement strength in both countries over the course of the twentieth century, as measured by unionization rates, or union density. Starting from the observation that union density was very similar in both countries until the mid-1960s, then diverged, I first examine competing explanations for this divergence. Having illustrated their strengths and limitations, I then develop an argument showing how the divergence in working class organizational strength was the outcome of struggles for political incorporation.I identify two key moments that shaped these different processes of political incorporation. The first was the restructuring of party-class alliances in both countries in the 1930s and 40s, where U.S. labor decisively abandoned the project of building an independent working class party in favor of an alliance with the Democratic Party, at the same moment that Canadian labor forged an independent class alliance with progressive agrarian forces under the banner of the CCF. The second was differences in the effects of postwar Red scares on the relationship between labor and the left in both countries. While anti-Communism took its toll on working class movements in both countries, the labor-left alliance was severed in the U.S., but only strained in Canada. The outcome of these processes was a U.S. labor movement that conceived of itself more as an interest group representing a specific constituency within the Democratic Party, and a Canadian labor movement that conceived of itself more as a class representative with closer ties to a broader social movement.Differences in labor's political incorporation also shaped the formation and development of the regimes governing labor-management relations in both countries. The Canadian labor regime was created as a result of working class upsurge from below, whereas the U.S. labor regime was created as part of an elite reform project from above. This original difference influenced the organizing logics of each regime. Whereas the Canadian labor regime was organized around recognizing the existence of class conflict and seeking to mitigate it, the U.S. regime was organized around protecting workers' individual rights. Although this created a more interventionist Canadian system that restricted labor's scope of action in important ways, it also reinforced a collective, oppositional class identity vis-à-vis both employers and the state. Meanwhile, the U.S. system's focus on rights led to a stronger focus on legalistic proceduralism and imposing a formal equality between labor and management that obscured the power imbalance inherent in the employment relationship. Additionally, labor drew different lessons from these different processes of regime formation. Whereas Canadian labor learned the value of winning gains through disruptive mass mobilization, U.S. labor learned the value of winning gains through sympathetic politicians and favorable legal precedents.The combination of a more protective and institutionally stable labor regime and a labor movement more accustomed to winning gains through mass mobilization, Canadian labor was better positioned to defend itself than its U.S. counterpart when employers began a counter-offensive beginning in the late 1960s. While U.S. labor spiraled into decline, Canadian labor proved more resilient, leading to the divergence in union density rates.

The Live-in Caregiver Program is a temporary foreign worker program that allows workers to come to Canada in order to labour as private caregivers for children, the elderly, and disabled individuals. This program allows caregivers to apply for permanent residency after the successful completion of 24 months of full time work. There are a number of scholars, advocacy groups, former caregivers, and other parties that have raised concerns about certain regulations of this program. For example, caregivers under this program have an employer-specific work permit, must live in the homes of the employers, and have no external monitoring of their work environments. Subsequently, the Live-in Caregiver Program has been seen as problematic because of the high number of abusive labour situations. This thesis is dedicated to an analysis of how the Canadian news print media represents the Live-in Caregiver Program. Although there has been much research done on migrant care work within Canada, and around the world, there are few studies on how the news media construct arguments that describe these transnational labour flows. The main topics that guided the research questions for this thesis were: temporary foreign worker programs; citizenship status; globalized, gendered, and racial stereotypes; the live-in regulation; employer specific work permits, and power relations in the labour relationship. This research was not geared to proving or disproving the main findings of key migrant domestic worker literature, rather it was focused on how these conclusions are interpreted, transferred and argued within a publically accessible format, Canadian news print media. This analysis revealed how journalists within Canadian news media construct important cultural narratives to persuade audiences to either reject the LCP as exploitative and problematic, or embrace it as economically beneficial.

This thesis explores the Canadian state's rationale for the creation and perpetuation of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker's Program (SAWP). Informed by and building on the writing of Canadian political economists, this thesis provides a composite history of the program from its creation in 1966 to its current-day incarnation. While many scholars have looked to neo-liberalism to analyze the program, SAWP existed long before the term entered the political lexicon and instead fits into a much longer history of racialized immigration and labour policies in Canada. Therefore, though we need to understand the changes wrought by neo-liberalism, we must also acknowledge the historical continuities inherent in SAWP: no matter who was in office, and what political ideology they subscribed to, migrant labour schemes have consistently been relied onto support the state's project of aiding the accumulation of wealth and filling the labour vacuum left behind by Canadians who gained safer, more secure, and more lucrative employment elsewhere.

Le Lord's Day Act interdit le travail le dimanche en 1906, mais autorise les travaux jugés nécessaires. Les compagnies papetières québécoises peuvent effectuer les travaux d'entretien et de nettoyage, mais ne peuvent pas produire le dimanche. L' industrie papetière exige la production continue et menace de freiner ses investissements au Québec si le gouvernement ne permet pas le fonctionnement des machines le dimanche. Le gouvernement Lesage instaure donc la Commission d'enquête sur l'observance du dimanche dans les usines de pâtes et papiers en 1964. Le jour du Seigneur fut essentiellement traité comme une question religieuse par les historiens, mais l'attachement pour la conservation du repos dominical déborde les questionnements sur le sécularisme ou la piété populaire. Cette commission instaurée pour régler un problème technique cache un profond conflit de valeurs entre les différents acteurs sociaux. Différentes façons de concevoir le bien commun et le progrès social y sont avancées. Aux séances de la commission, plusieurs groupes et individus font valoir leurs points de vue. Les représentants des compagnies papetières exigent unanimement la production le dimanche pour accroître la production. Pour les groupes religieux, la sanctification du dimanche est une manifestation collective vitale pour la cohésion de la famille, de la paroisse et de la société. Quant à eux, les travailleurs et leurs syndicats défendent l' idée d' un repos commun hebdomadaire et dénoncent le travail par rotation d'équipes. Les débats lors de la Commission Alleyn permettent de mettre en relief une confrontation culturelle à l' intérieur d'un rapport économique de production, tout en offrant un éclairage sur le bouleversement des nouveaux rapports sociaux en plein coeur de la Révolution tranquille.