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The deplorable exploitation of immigrant workers from the 1890s to the Depression is documented in this vivid account of Canada's early immigration policies. Transported by boxcar and often herded at gun point, these "men in sheepskin coats" were lured from Central and Eastern Europe by promises of shared wealth in a veritable promised land. Their backbreakaing labour in industry and agriculture directly furthered Canada's economic development, transportation lines, and land settlement. But their status, as detailed here with public records, newspaper accounts, and private correspondence was little above that of slave labour. Professor Avery records the immigrants' poor working conditions, bad pay, violent treatment at the hands of challenged authorities, and wholesale deportation when work became scrace. Recounted as well as their hostile reception by British Canadian, the government neglect of immigrant assimilation programs, and the workers' ultimate recourse to radical ethnic and political organization to better their lot. --Publisher's description
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In 1976, a group of women bankers decided to organize their workplace. The banks were enraged. When they decided to do it themselves, the big unions were upstaged. Over the next two years, nearly a thousand bank employees in western Canada participated in a unionizing drive that challenged not only the banks but organizated labour's approach to a workplace that they had long considered beyond their range of union activity. This is the story of the United Bank Workers of SORWUC (Service, Office and Retail Workers of Canada). With honesty and humour, the clerks and tellers of the UBW tell why they decided to take on the banks and what happened when they did. --Publisher's description
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Without labour there would be no history. As this book shows, the history of labour in Alberta is colourful, exciting and filled with dramatic characters and events well worth discovering. Alberta Labour traces the growth of union organizations in Alberta: the Knights of Labour in the 1880s, the legendary Wobblies, the abortive One Big Union and finally the Alberta Federation of Labour, founded in 1912. This history, the first of its kind, has been compiled from interviews with union members, original letters and documents, and contemporary newspapers and magazines. Illustrated with over 90 full-page photographs, most of them never before published, Alberta Labour vividly depicts the working people of Alberta and their unparalleled contribution to the province's history. --Publisher's description
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Illustrated history based on research, interviews and recollections made by members of the Carpenter Pensioners Association of British Columbia. Foreword by Arnold Smith.
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If you believe the advertisements, Bell Canada is in the business of putting grannies in touch with their loved ones, helping blind kids play baseball, and generally making it easier for society to "communicate." In this book, Joan Newman Kuyek presentes a different story - a story of stifling bureaucracy, of increasingly fragmented and dehumanizing jobs, of the elimination of workers through changing technology, of flashy corporate expansion abroad and declining service at home. It's a story that reveals what lies behind the rate increases demanded almost annually in the last decade. It does much to explain the struggle for unionization and the wave of strikes that recently hit the phone company. The Phone Book is an "inside view" of work at the Bell. Joan Kuyek speaks from personal experience - she spent nearly three years as a Bell service representative, and interviewed dozens of her co-workers, operators, service representatives, installers and others, for the book. --Publisher's description
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Along with J.S. Woodsworth, William Irvine was one of the pioneers of socialism in Canada, a member of the radical Ginger Group, progenitor of the C.C.F. and N.D.P. In the wake of the First World War Irvine struggled relentlessly to organize Alberta farmers for political action. Elected to Parliament in 1921, he along with close friend Woodsworth were the sole labour representatives in the House: they worked incessantly against the monopoly power of large corporations and financial institutions. Together they laid the basis for a socialist challenge to the Eastern-dominated, two-party system in Canada. William Irvine: The Life of a Prairie Radical chronicles his immense contribution to the search for political alternatives in this country, a contribution that can still be felt in Canadian politics today. --Publisher's description
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[This book] is a study of continuity and change in the lives of skilled workers in Hamilton, Ontario, during a period of economic transformation. Bryan D. Palmer shows how the disruptive influence of devel oping industrial capitalism was counterbalanced by the stabilizing effect of the associational life of the workingman, ranging from the fraternal order and the mechanics' institute to the baseball diamond and the "rough music" of the charivari. On the basis of this social and cultural solidarity, Hamilton's craftsmen fought for and achieved a measure of autonomy on the shop-floor through the practice of workers' control. Working-class thought proved equally adaptable, moving away from the producer ideology and its manufacturer-mechanic alliance toward a recognition of class polarization. Making ample use of contemporary evidence in newspapers, labour journals, and unpublished correspondence, the author discusses such major developments in the class conflict as the nine-hour movement of 1872, the dramatic emergence of the Knights of Labor, and the beginnings of craft unionism after 1890. He finds that the concept of a labour aristocracy has litlle meaning in Hamilton, where skilled workers were the culling edge of the working-class movement, involved in issues which directly related to the experience of their less-skilled brethren. More remarkable than the final attainment of capitalist control of the work place, he concludes, are the long-continued resistance of the Hamilton workers and their success in retaining much of their power in the pre-World War I years. --Publisher's description
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Historian Carlos A. Schwantes studies the forces that shaped the history of the labor movement on either side of the forty-ninth parallel and the reason for the eventual demise of the socialist movement in Washington State and its continuing vigor in British Columbia. --Publisher's description