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Based on in-depth oral interviews with local residents, and rich archival sources, We Lived A Life and Then Some relates the common person’s struggle to overcome harsh working conditions and government neglect. The unique culture of the hardrock mining town of Cobalt is exposed through the eyes of retired miners, young welfare mothers, and grade-school children. Angus and Griffin reveal why, in spite of great adversity, Cobalt remains a distinctive and cohesive working-class community. --Publisher's description

Historien reconnu à l'échelle internationale, Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson a été un précurseur par sa réinterpretation de l'histoire des peuples de Canada. Ses ouvrages se tiennent une place tout à fait singulièredans l'historiographie canadienne. Intelluelle d'envergure, il a su allier l'excellence scientifique à la responsibilité sociale ; tout au longue une carrière de plus de soixante années, il a conservé ce profil de militant et d'historien engagé. Sa recherche, toujours inspirée des problèmes de société, a été animée par des valeurs de justice, de solidarité et de liberté. Cet ouvrage auquel participent quatorze collaborateurs qui veut faire connaître le plus important historien Marxiste du Canada. Il vise égalment rétracer la trajectoire militante et le cheminement intellectuel progressiste qui a laissé derrière lui une œuvre fort imposante. --Résumé de l'éditeur

This ground-breaking collection demonstrates the research interests of a new generation of scholars. Stressing such themes as gender, race and class, the book is compelling evidence that Western Canadian history is far more complex and subtle than its depiction in the traditional literature. The contributors emphasize the way society has been made, and the extent to which it was - and is - the product of human agency rather than possessing an intangible existency beyond the interaction of groups of people. --Publisher's description

[E]xamines thoroughly the ecological, economic, political, legal, and social influences that drive public, private, and parapublic sectors into intense and often bitter disputes over employment conditions. --From publisher's description

Recounts the story of labour from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. A masterful overview that encompasses all regions of the country, the book paints a vivid portrait of labour's varied past, covering the birth of craft unionism prior to World War I, the setbacks of the interwar years, and the post-World War II breakthrough that gave unions a permanent, if still constrained, place in the national economy. In its analysis of the more recent past, the book ranges just as widely, discussing everything from the organization of public sector employees in the sixties to the anti-free-trade coalitions of the eighties and the massive layoffs of the nineties. --Publisher's description

Fondée en 1925, la ville d'Arvida est née de la nécessité de fournir de la main-d'oeuvre à l'usine Alcan qui venait de s'implanter sur les rives du Saguenay. L'arrivée de la grande enterprise dans le Québec rural a conduit au téléscopage de deux cultures: la culture industrielle moderne de l'Amérique du Nord Anglophone et la culture rurale traditionelle du Québec francophone. Arvida est un véritable microcosme de la naissance d'une ville industrielle et du développement de l'identité communautaire de sa population. José Igartua s'intéresse tout particulièrement au movement ouvrier local qui a atteint son apogée lors de la célèbre grève sauvage de 1941, démontrant que la lutte pour l'action collective a marqué un tournant dans l'épanouissement de la conscience communautaire. --Résumé de l'éditeur

[P]rovides an historical background to native labour in BC from the Gold Rush to the beginning of the Great Depression. It counters the common misconception that native people responded to European settlement and industrial development by retreating to a reserve existence. Evidence amassed from logging, transport, construction, longshoring, commercial fishing and canning, and a host of other industries shows that native Indians played a significant role in British Columbia's economy from the moment the first European explorers appeared off the coast. --Publisher's description. A massively documented history of Native Indian wage labour in British Columbia from initial European settlement in the mid 19th century to the beginning of the great depression. The first and as yet only historical study of Native Indian workers in Canada, it challenges many of the romantic misconceptions which have developed over the years. An expanded version of a title originally published in 1978. --Author's description

Discusses the origins and history of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, a progressive organization founded in 1918 as the Ukrainian Temple Labour Association.

Making Vancouver is about the people of Vancouver, British Columbia. It traces the social transformation of the city and points out how Shaughnessy Heights lumber barons, Mount Pleasant trades people, and East End labourers were part of a complex society whose members exhibited sharp differences in attitudes and behaviour. In Making Vancouver, Robert McDonald depicts a western city that was neither egalitarian nor closed to opportunity. Vancouver up to the crash of 1913 was a dynamic centre. The rapidity of growth, easy access to resources, a narrow industrial base, and the homogeneous nature of its population, the majority of which was of British birth, softened the thrust towards class division inherent in capitalism. Far more powerful in directing social relations was the quest for status, creating a social structure that was no less hierarchical than that predicted by class theory but much more fluid. The social boundary that separated the working class from others is revealed as a division that for much of the pre-war boom period divided Vancouver society more fundamentally than the boundary separating labour from capital. --Publisher's description

This book sets out to present the economic and social writings of Colin McKay, a pioneer Marxian sociologist and economist in Canada (and no relation to the author), and to place McKay in the context of the international socialist tradition. The manuscript takes the form of an extensive biographical essay, five substantive sections that present and examine McKay's thought both thematically and chronologically, and a concluding essay that places McKay's thought in the context of contemporary discussions with regard to the "decline of Marx" in the late 20th century. Colin McKays's life and work determines the scope of the manuscript, but since this "life and work" extended to subjects as varies as the limitations of Kantian philosophy and the design of North Atlantic schooners, the book is rather less narrow than it might appear at first. --Publisher's description

An important new critique of Marx's labour theory of value. Using the fishing industry in British Columbia as a case study, Alicja Muszynski explores how Marx's labour theory of value can be applied to a specific industry and the creation of a specific labour force. She reworks Marx's theory in order to incorporate race and gender as principles that not only created a proletarianized labour force but also legitimized the payment of low wages to particular groups. Cheap Wage Labour is the first analysis of shore work and shore-workers in British Columbia from the 1860s to the mid-1980s. Muszynski provides an interpretation of the events that led to the creation of a cheap wage labour force of shoreworkers, shows how they organized within the framework of the fishermen's union (the UFAWU), and explains how as a consequence their numbers steadily shrank until today they represent only a small portion of the labour force. She looks at factors contributing to the destruction of First Nations culture and economy, such as the displacement of aboriginal peoples from key fishing sites and from working in the salmon canneries, and examines the structure and patterns of Chinese and Japanese immigration and the development of the capitalist class and the white working class. Cheap Wage Labour situates the history of B.C. shoreworkers within the much larger and complex historical enterprise of industrialization, patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism and provides keen insights into the current fisheries crisis on the West Coast. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Problematic -- Marx's Labour Theory of Value: A Critique -- Patriarchy and Capitalism -- The First Nations, Property Rights, and Salmon Canning -- The Dialectics of Cheap Wage Labour -- Organized Resistance: The United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union -- -- State, Labour, and Capital -- Conclusion: Marx's Labour Theory of Value Reconsidered -- Appendix: J.H. Todd & Sons Ltd.

n the Skin of a Lion is a love story and an irresistible mystery set in the turbulent, muscular new world of Toronto in the 20s and 30s. Michael Ondaatje entwines adventure, romance and history, real and invented, enmeshing us in the lives of the immigrants who built the city and those who dreamed it into being: the politically powerful, the anarchists, bridge builders and tunnellers, a vanished millionaire and his mistress, a rescued nun and a thief who leads a charmed life. This is a haunting tale of passion, privilege and biting physical labour, of men and women moved by compassion and driven by the power of dreams—sometimes even to murder. --Publisher's description

Changing Women, Changing History is a bibliographic guide to the scholarship, both English and French, on Canadian's women's history. Organized under broad subject headings, and accompanied by author and subject indices it is accessible and comprehensive. [Includes sections on Families/Life stages, Unions/Labour activism, and Work/Economy.] --Publisher's description

[This book] is a collection of essays that surveys the burgeoning field of gender history in a Canadian context. Spanning a period from seventeenth century to the 1960s, and covering the regions of Canada, the selections focus on different historical representations and pratices of feminity and masculinity. Historians in the field examine neglected dimensions, and challenge previous interpretations of Canada's past, highlighting the importance of gender relations to our understanding of racism, sexuality, national identity, popular culture, class conflict, government policy, and family in Canadian history. --Publisher's description.

A compassionate look at the effect of industrialization on the individual lives of sailors, Sager argues that sailors were not misfits or outcasts but were divorced from society only by virtue of their occupation. The wooden ships were small communities at sea, fragments of normal society where workers lived, struggled, and often died. With the coming of the age of steam, the sailor became part of a new division of labour and a new social hierarchy at sea. Sager shows that the sailor was as integral to the transition to industrial capitalism as any land worker. --Publisher's description

5700 titres en francais et en anglais, mais aussi dans d'autres langues. Des milliers d'articles, de livres, de thèses, de documents audio et audiovisuels, ainsi que les journaux du monde ouvrier. Des sources essentielles pour tous ceux et celles qui s'intéressent au monde du travail. --Résumé de l'éditeur

In conventional histories of the Canadian prairies, Native people disappear from view after the Riel rebellions. In a fresh departure from traditional studies, Frank Tough examines the role of Native people, both Indian and Metis, in the economy of northern Manitoba from 1870 to the Depression. He argues that they did not become economically obsolete but rather played an important role in the transitional era between the mercantile fur trade and the emerging industrial economy of the mid-twentieth century. Tough reconstructs the traditional economy of the fur trade era and examines its evolution through reserve selection and settlement, scrip distribution, and the participation of Natives in the new resource industries of commercial fishing, transportation, and lumbering. His analysis clearly shows that Native people in northern Manitoba responded to the challenge of an expanding market economy in rational and enterprising ways, but that they were repeatedly obstructed by government policy. --Publisher's description. Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--York University. Contents: 1. 'To Look for Food Instead of Fur': Local Economies -- Indian Bands and Company Posts -- 2. 'The Only Remedy Is the Employment of Steam': Reorganizing the Regional System -- 3. 'Dependent on the Company's Provisions for Subsistence': The Decline of Kihchiwaskahikanihk (York Factory) -- 4. 'To Be Shut Up on a Small Reserve': Geographical and Economic Aspects of Indian Treaties -- 5. 'Lands Are Getting Poor in Hunting': Treaty Adhesions in Northern Manitoba -- 6. 'Terms and Conditions as May Be Deemed Expedient': Metis Aboriginal Title -- 7. 'Go and Pitch His Camp': Native Settlement Patterns and Indian Agriculture -- 8. 'Nothing to Make Up for the Great Loss of Winter Food': Resource Conflicts over Common-Property Fisheries -- 9. 'A Great Future Awaits This Section of Northern Manitoba': Economic Boom and Native Labour -- 10. 'They Make a Comfortable Living': Economic Change and Incomes. Includes bibliographical references (pages 334-363) and index.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order committed to the goal of uniting American labor. At its height in 1886, the Knights claimed the allegiance of perhaps a million workers. Despite a host of local studies by the new labor historians of the 1970s and 1980s, there has been no general study of the Knights since Norman Ware's 1929 book, and no one has ever attempted a comprehensive study of the culture of the organization. In Beyond Labor's Veil, Robert E. Weir presents a fascinating cultural portrait of the Knights across regions, covering the years 1869 to 1893. From the start, the Knights of Labor was an unusual organization, equal parts fraternal order and labor union. It was the only nineteenth-century labor organization to organize African Americans, women, and unskilled workers on an equal basis with white craftsmen. Weir goes beyond the rhetoric of public pronouncements and union politics to consider the real influence of the Knights in communities and homes as well as in the workplace. Weir explores the many cultural expressions of the Knights' ritual, religion, poetry, music, literature, material objects, graphics, and leisure. Although the Knights barely survived into the twentieth century, Weir concludes that the creative cultural expressions of the Knights enabled it to do as well as it did in the face of powerful oppositional forces. What emerges in Beyond Labor's Veil is a rich, detailed description of the Knights as its members adapted to the confusion and contradiction of America's Gilded Age. --Publisher's description

Canadians might expect that a history of Canada's participation in the Cold War would be a self-congratulatory exercise in documenting the liberality and moderation of Canada set against the rapacious purges of the McCarthy era in the United States. Though Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse agree that there is some evidence for Canadian moderation, they argue that the smug Canadian self-image is exaggerated. Cold War Canada digs past the official moderation and uncovers a systematic state-sponsored repression of communists and the Left directed at civil servants, scientists, trade unionists, and political activists. Unlike the United States, Canada's purges were shrouded in secrecy imposed by the government and avidly supported by the RCMP security service. Whitaker and Marcuse manage to reconstruct several of the significant anti-communist campaigns. Using declassified documents, interviews, and extensive archival sources, the authors reconstruct the Gouzenko spy scandal, trace the growth of security screening of civil servants, and re-examine purges in the National Film Board and the trade unions, attacks on peace activist James G. Endicott, and the trials of Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman. Based on these examples Whitaker and Marcuse outline the creation of Canada's Cold War policy, the emergence of the new security state, and the alignment of Canada with the United States in the global Cold War. They demonstrate that Canada did take a different approach toward the threat of communism, but argue that the secret repression and silent purges used to stifle dissent and debate about Canada's own role in the Cold War had a chilling effect on the practice of liberal democracy and undermined Canadian political and economic sovereignty. --Publisher's description