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In the early twentieth century, the Canadian Lakehead was known as a breeding ground for revolution, a place where harsh conditions in dockyards, lumber mills, and railway yards drove immigrants into radical labour politics. This intensely engaging history reasserts Northwestern Ontario's rightful reputation as a birthplace of leftism in Canada by exposing the conditions that gave rise to an array of left-wing organizations, including the Communist Party, the One Big Union, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Yet, as Michel Beaulieu shows, the circumstances and actions of Lakehead labour, especially those related to ideology, ethnicity, and personality were complex; they simultaneously empowered and fettered workers in their struggles against the shackles of capitalism. Cultural ties helped bring left-wing ideas to Canada but, as each group developed a distinctive vocabulary of socialism, Anglo-Celtic workers defended their privileges against Finns, Ukrainians, and Italians. At the Lakehead, ethnic difference often outweighed class solidarity - at the cost of a stronger labour movement for Canada. --Publisher's description.  Contents: Part 1. The Roots of Revolution?: 1. Early socialist organizations at the Lakehead, 1900-14; 2. Repression, revitalization, and revolutions, 1914-18 -- Part 2. From Winnipeg to the Workers' Unity League: 3. "The Hog Only Harms Himself if He Topples His Trough": The one big union, 1919-22; 4. "Into the Masses!": The Communist Party of Canada at the Lakehead, 1922-25; 5. Bolshevization and the reorganization of the Lakehead Left, 1925-27; 6. Turning to the left, 1928-30 -- Part 3. The Great Depression and the Third Period: 7. "Class against Class": socialist activities, 1930-32; 8. Wobbly relations: The Communist Party of Canada, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Lakehead, 1932-35.

[This book] traces Canada's transformation into a modern consumer nation back to an era when Eaton’s, Simpson's, and the Hudson’s Bay Company fostered and came to rule the country’s shopping scene. Between 1890 and 1940, department stores revolutionized selling and shopping by parlaying cheap raw materials, business-friendly government policies, and growing demand for low-priced goods into retail empires that promised to meet citizens' needs and strengthen the nation. Some Canadians found happiness and fulfillment in their aisles; others experienced nothing more than a cold shoulder and a closed door. The stores' advertising and public relations campaigns often disguised a darker, more complicated reality that included strikes, union drives, customer complaints, government inquiries, and public criticism. This vivid account of Canadian department stores in their heyday showcases them as powerful agents of nationalism and modernization. But the nation that their catalogues and shopping experience helped to define - white, consumerist, middle-class - was more limited than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest. --Publisher's description. Contents: Rise of mass retail -- Creating modern Canada -- Fathers of mass merchandising -- Crafting the consumer workforce -- Shopping, pleasure, and power -- Working at the heart of consumption -- Criticizing the big stores. Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-292) and index.

Does Canada have a working-class movement? Though most of us think of ourselves as middle class, most of us are, in fact, part of the working class: we work for wages and are not managers. Although many of us are members of unions - the most significant organizations of the working-class movement in Canada - most people do not understand themselves to be part of this movement. Is the working-class movement a relic of the twentieth-century factory worker, no longer relevant to workers in the twenty-first century? David Camfield argues that, despite its real deficiencies, the movement is as important today as it was a hundred years ago. Drawing on the ideas of union and community activists as well as academic research, David Camfield offers an analysis of the contemporary Canadian working-class movement and how it came to be in its current state. he argues that re-energizing the movement in its current form is not enough - it needs to be reinvented to face the challenges of contemporary capitalism. Considering potential ways forward, Camfield asserts that reforming unions from below and building new workers' organizations offer the best possibilities for effecting real change within the movement. --Publisher's description

The Shifting Landscape of Work is a contributed text that explores contemporary issues pertaining to labour in the context of race, class, age, economics, and gender, presented from a left-of-center perspective. All of the contributors are well known and respected scholars in their field of research. The authors challenge students to think about the dynamics of the labour market, including the realities of unpaid work and the impact of structural shifts in societal power relations. --Publisher's description

The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest scholarship of Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists as well as U.S. historians. These essays highlight both the supra- and sub-national aspect of selected topics without neglecting nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies, and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and advance their interests. What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich lead off the volume with critical commentaries on the project of transnational labor history. Their responses offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of labor and empire, indigenous peoples and labor systems, international feminism and reproductive labor, labor recruitment and immigration control, transnational labor politics, and labor internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars introduce each section and recommend further reading. -- Publisher's description. "Associate editors, Eileen Boris, John D. French, Julie Greene, Joan Sangster, Shelton Stromquist." Contents: Another World history is possible: reflections on the translocal, transnational, and global / John D. French -- Historians of the world: transnational forces, nation-states, and the practice of U.S. history / Julie Greene -- Transnational labor history: promise and perils / Neville Kirk -- Labor history as world history: linking regions over time / Aviva Chomsky -- Overlapping spaces: transregional and transcultural / Dirk Hoerder -- Transnational migration: a new historical phenomenon? / Vic Satzewich -- "black service ... white money": the peculiar institution of military labor in the British Army during the Seven Years' War / Peter Way -- "We speak the same language in the new world:: capital, class, and community in Mexico's "American century" / Steven J. Bachelor -- Indigenous labor in mid-nineteenth-century British North America: the Mi'kmaq of Cape Breton and Squamish of British Columbia in comparative perspective / Andrew Parnaby -- "De facto Mexicans": coffee workers and nationality on the Guatemalan-Mexican border, 1913-1941 / Catherine Nolan-Ferrell -- "No right to layettes or nursing time": maternity leave and the question of U.S. exceptionalism / Eileen Boris -- The battle within the home: development strategies and the commodification of caring labors at the 1975 International Women's Year Conference / Jocelyn Olcott -- Feminizing white slavery in the United States: Marcus Braun and the transnational traffic in white bodies, 1890-1910 / Gunther Peck -- Patronage and progress: the Bracero program from the perspective of Mexico / Michael Snodgrass -- Unspoken exclusions: race, nation, and empire in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s in North America and the greater Caribbean / Lara Putnam -- Claiming political space: workers, municipal socialism, and the reconstruction of local democracy in transnational perspective / Shelton Stromquist -- A migrating revolution: Mexican political organizers and their rejection of American assimilation, 1920-1940 / John H. Flores -- Fugitive slaves across North America / Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie -- Movable type: Toronto's transnational printers, 1866-1872 / Jacob Remes -- Global sea or national backwater? The International Labor Organization and the quixotic quest for maritime standards, 1919-1945 / Leon Fink.

Working People in Alberta traces the history of labour in Alberta from the period of First Nations occupation to the present. Drawing on over two hundred interviews with labour leaders, activists, and ordinary working people, as well as on archival records, the volume gives voice to the people who have toiled in Alberta over the centuries. In so doing, it seeks to counter the view of Alberta as a one-class, one-party, one-ideology province, in which distinctions between those who work and those who own are irrelevant. Workers from across the generations tell another tale, of an ongoing collective struggle to improve their economic and social circumstances in the face of a dominant, exploitative elite. Their stories are set within a sequential analysis of provincial politics and economics, supplemented by chapters on women and the labour movement and on minority workers of colour and their quest for social justice. Published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Working People in Alberta contrasts the stories of workers who were union members and those who were not. In its depictions of union organizing drives, strikes, and working-class life in cities and towns, this lavishly illustrated volume creates a composite portrait of the men and women who have worked to build and sustain the province of Alberta. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction : Those who built Alberta -- Millennia of Native work / Alvin Finkel -- The fur trade and early European settlement / Alvin Finkel -- One step forward : Alberta workers, 1885-1914 / Jim Selby -- War, repression, and depression, 1914-1939 / Eric Strikwerda and Alvin Finkel -- Alberta labour and working-class life, 1940-1959 / James Muir -- The boomers become the workers : Alberta, 1960-1980 / Alvin Finkel -- Alberta labour in the 1980s / Winston Gereluk -- Revolution, retrenchment, and the new normal : the 1990s and beyond / Jason Foster -- Women, labour, and the labour movement / Joan Schiebelbein -- Racialization and work / Jennifer Kelly and Dan Cui -- Conclusion : A history to build upon / Alvin Finkel.

[E]xplores the ways in which several of Canada’s women journalists, broadcasters, and other media workers reached well beyond the glory of their personal bylines to advocate for the most controversial women’s rights of their eras. To do so, some of them adopted conventional feminine identities, while others refused to conform altogether, openly and defiantly challenging the gender expectations of their day. The book consists of a series of case studies of the women in question as they grappled with the concerns close to their hearts: higher education for women, healthy dress reforms, the vote, equal opportunities at work, abortion, lesbianism, and Aboriginal women’s rights. Their media reflected their respective eras: intellectual magazines, daily and weekly newspapers, radio, feminist public relations, alternative women’s periodicals, and documentary film made for television. --Publisher's description

A leading textbook in industrial relations at the university level, this book is valuable both as a primary and as a supplementary text for students of industrial relations, sociology, labour studies, economics and management programs. The book contains highly accessible coverage of conventional topic areas, including the history of industrial relations, contemporary employer practices, labour unions, labour law, collective bargaining, and contract administration. Yet it also includes coverage of broader economic and social issues relevant to the study of labour and employment relations in both the union and non-union sectors. Readers are thus able not only to develop a strong practical knowledge of Canadian industrial relations, but also to ground this knowledge in a deeper understanding of these relations and the broader issues and debates that surround them. This latest edition incorporates up-to-date statistics relevant to the study of industrial relations (e.g., strike activity, union membership, income inequality) as well as recent developments in the literature. It also streamlines the previous edition. The chapters on management practices and the effects of high performance practices have been merged and edited down, as have the chapters on contemporary developments and contemporary alternatives. --Publisher's description. Contents: Foundations: concepts, issues, and debates -- The broader debate: three theses on the nature and development of industrial relations, the economy, and society -- Understanding labour-management relations -- Work and industrial relations in historical perspective -- Contemporary management practices -- Understanding and explaining management -- Labour unions as institutions -- Labour unions as organizations -- The role of the state -- Understanding the state -- Labour law: the regulation of labour-management relations -- Collective bargaining: structure, process, and outcomes -- Strikes and dispute resolution -- The grievance and grievance arbitration processes -- The collective agreement: content and issues -- Contemporary problems, challenges, and alternatives. Includes bibliographical references (p. [431]-452) and index.

Many Canadians believe that immigrants steal jobs away from qualified Canadians, abuse the healthcare system and refuse to participate in Canadian culture. In About Canada: Immigration, Gogia and Slade challenge these myths with a thorough investigation of the realities of immigrating to Canada. Examining historical immigration policies, the authors note that these policies were always fundamentally racist, favouring whites, unless hard labourers were needed. Although current policies are no longer explicitly racist, they do continue to favour certain kinds of applicants. Many recent immigrants to Canada are highly trained and educated professionals, and yet few of them, contrary to the myth, find work in their area of expertise. Despite the fact that these experts could contribute significantly to Canadian society, deeply ingrained racism, suspicion and fear keep immigrants out of these jobs. On the other hand, Canada also requires construction workers, nannies and agricultural workers — but few immigrants who do this work qualify for citizenship. About Canada: Immigration argues that we need to move beyond the myths and build an immigration policy that meets the needs of Canadian society. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- Immigration: a critical analysis -- Evolution of immigration policy: learning about the past to understand the present -- Immigration policy and practices: the mechanics of migration -- Immigrants and the labour market: devaluation, frustration and downward mobility -- Reception party: the settlement process for immigrants -- Revolving door: temporary workers in Canada -- Under the surface: Canada's hidden labour force -- Coming to a better place? Not always a happy ending.

[This book] tells the compelling story of British Columbia workers who sustained a left tradition during the bleakest days of the Cold War. Through their continuing activism on issues from the politics of timber licenses to global questions of war and peace, these workers bridged the transition from an Old to a New Left.In the late 1950s, half of B.C.'s workers belonged to unions, but the promise of postwar collective bargaining spawned disillusionment tied to inflation and automation. A new working class that was educated, white collar, and increasingly rebellious shifted the locus of activism from the Communist Party and Co-operative Commonwealth Federation to the newly formed New Democratic Party, which was elected in 1972. Grounded in archival research and oral history, Militant Minority provides a valuable case study of one of the most organized and independent working classes in North America, during a period of ideological tension and unprecedented material advance. --Publisher's description

Through Feminist Eyes gathers in one volume the most incisive and insightful essays written to date by the distinguished Canadian historian Joan Sangster. To the original essays, Sangster has added reflective introductory discussions that situate her earlier work in the context of developing theory and debate. Sangster has also supplied an introduction to the collection in which she reflects on the themes and theoretical orientations that have shaped the writing of women's history over the past thirty years. Approaching her subject matter from an array of interpretive frameworks that engage questions of gender, class, colonialism, politics, and labour, Sangster explores the lived experience of women in a variety of specific historical settings. In so doing, she sheds new light on issues that have sparked much debate among feminist historians and offers a thoughtful overview of the evolution of women's history in Canada. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: Reflections on Thirty Years of Women’s History -- Discovering Women’s History == The 1907 Bell Telephone Strike: Organizing Women Workers -- Looking Backwards: Re-assessing Women on the Canadian Left == The Communist Party and the Woman Question, 1922-1929 -- Manufacturing Consent in Peterborough -- The Softball Solution: Female Workers, Male Managers, and the Operation of Paternalism at Westclox, 1923–1960 -- Pardon Tales’ from Magistrate’s Court: Women, Crime, and the Court in Peterborough County, 1920–1950 --Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History -- Foucault, Feminism, and Postcolonialism -- Girls in Conflict with the Law: Exploring the Construction of Female ‘Delinquency’ in Ontario, 1940–1960 -- Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–1960 -- Constructing the ‘Eskimo’ Wife: White Women’s Travel Writing, Colonialism, and the Canadian North, 1940–1960 -- Embodied Experience -- Words of Experience/Experiencing Words: Reading Working Women’s Letters to Canada’s Royal Commission on the Status of Women -- Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-class History.

In Along the No. 20 Line, Rolf Knight takes the reader on a tour through working-class East Vancouver of a century ago. Knight's "through-line" is literally a line: the old No. 20 streetcar route that ran between downtown Vancouver and the present-day neighbourhood of the Pacific National Exhibition. From 1892 to 1949, when it was shut down and replaced by the No. 20 Granville / Victoria Drive bus, the No. 20 streetcar carried thousands of Vancouverites back and forth between their East Van homes and their jobs on the docks, and in the mills, factories, and workshops along the No. 20 line. --Publisher's description

From the end of the Second World War to the early 1980s, the North American norm was that men had full-time jobs, earned a "family wage," and expected to stay with the same employer for life. In households with children, most women were unpaid caregivers. This situation began to change in the mid-1970s as two-earner households became commonplace, with women entering employment through temporary and part-time jobs. Since the 1980s, less permanent precarious employment has increasingly become the norm for all workers. Working Without Commitments offers a new understanding of the social and health impacts of this change in the modern workplace, where outsourcing, limited term contracts, and the elimination of pensions and health benefits have become the new standard. Using information from interviews and surveys with workers in less permanent employment, the authors show how precarious employment affects the health of workers, labour productivity, and the sustainability of the traditional family model. --Publisher's description. Contents: Working without commitments: employment relationships and health -- A short history of the employment relationship: control, effort, and support -- Working without commitments and the characteristics of the employment relationship -- Gender, race, and the characteristics of the employment relationship -- The employment strain model and the health effects of less permanent employment -- The blurred lines between precariousness and permanence -- Sustainable, less permanent employment -- "On a path" to employment security? -- Unsustainable, less permanent employment -- Creating commitments in less permanent employment: policy reforms to address rising insecurity.

In the 1980s, following decades of booming business, the global steel industry went into a precipitous decline, which necessitated significant restructuring. Management demanded workers' increased participation in evermore temporary and insecure labour. Engaging the workers at the flagship Stelco plant in Hamilton, the authors document new management strategies and the responses of unionized workforces to them. These investigations provide valuable insights into the dramatic changes occurring within the Canadian steel industry. --Publisher's description

{This textbook] received wide praise for helping students to understand the complex and sometimes controversial field of Industrial Relations, by using just the right blend of practice, process and theory.  The text engages business students with diverse backgrounds and teaches them how an understanding of this field will help them become better managers.The third edition retains this student friendly, easy-to-read approach, praised by both students and instructors across the country. The goal of the third edition was to enhance and refine this approach while updating the latest research findings and developments in the field. --Publisher's description. Contents: An introduction to industrial relations in Canada : the employer-union relationship -- Theories of industrial relations : where Canada's unions are today -- History of the Canadian union movement : a meeting place to remember workers -- The structure of Canadian unions : Labour Council addresses larger issues -- The organizing campaign : union local finds strength in numbers -- Establishing union recognition : certification applications keep BC Labour Relations Board busy -- Defining and commencing collective bargaining : a mutually beneficial approach -- The collective bargaining process : Ontario colleges avoid instructors' strike -- Strikes and lockouts : engineers strike at CN -- Third-party intervention during negotiations : helping parties find their own solutions -- The grievance arbitration process : standing up for workers' rights -- Changes to the union or the employer : Handydart employer changes routes -- Future issues for workers, work arrangements, organizations, and the industrial relations system : providing the youth perspective.

In the late 1980s of London, Ontario—a time in Canada when the recession lay like a lead weight on the shoulders of young people, leaving the future bleak—an eighteen-year-old girl is working for the summer at a corn canning factory. Her story is told through a series of masterfully-sculpted linked poems, following her relationship with her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally-ill grandfather, the factory job, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.” The Onion Man doesn’t speak English and is tormented by the other workers, and ater his son dies, he commits suicide at the factory. The girl finds his body and the traumatic event prompts her to rethink the direction of her life. -- Publisher's description

[The author] argues that the union local, as an institution of working-class organization, was a key agent for the Canadian working class as it sought to create a new place for itself in the decades following World War II. Using UAW/CAW Local 27, a broad-based union in London, Ontario, as a case study, he offers a ground-level look at union membership, including some of the social and political agendas that informed union activities. As he writes in the introduction, "This book is as much an outgrowth of years of rank-and-file union activism as it is the result of academic curiosity." Drawing on interviews with former members of UAW/CAW Local 27 as well as on archival sources, Russell offers a narrative that will speak not only to labour historians but to the people about whom they write. --Publisher's description

There are widely divergent views about racism in Canada. Some believe that racism is a fundamental feature of Canadian society and national identity. This dystopian view of Canada as a fundamentally and irrevocably racist society carries considerable currency in some academic and activist circles. Others argue that racism is oversold as a social problem: while pockets of racism do exist, Canada remains a fundamentally fair place for people of diverse backgrounds to prosper and flourish.Vic Satzewich's short and accessible book explores how racism operates in Canadian society, past and present. Racism is a complex aspect of Canadian society; while it may not be an inherent and invariant feature of our country, it is also more prevalent than many people may realize. The book examines a variety of issues including racism and the immigration system, racial profiling, racism and First Nations and Islamophobia. It concludes with a discussion of some of the dilemmas and challenges associated with anti-racism theory and practice. --Publisher's description

Now in its second edition, this reader presents a critical examination of the changing structure of work in Canada and abroad. Its focus is on the role of Canadian labour in the globalized world. Contributors include David Livingstone, Pat Armstrong, Meg Luxton, Dave Broad, and other prominent Canadian scholars. Each of the seven themed sections begins with a contextual introduction by Vivian Shalla and concludes with critical thinking questions and suggestions for further reading. --Publisher's description.

Active for over forty years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But any notion of him as a Communist party hack would be mistaken. Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne and Meatballs — a memoir written not long before his death in Moscow in 1984 — we meet a cigar-smoking rogue who was at least as happy at a pool hall as at a political meeting. His stories of bumming across Canada in the 1930s, of combat and camaraderie at the front lines in World War II, and of surviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compelling reading. The manuscript of Champagne and Meatballs was brought to light and edited by historian Larry Hannant, who has written a fascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the text. Brash, irreverent, informative, and entertaining, Whyte's tale is history and biography accompanied by a wink of his eye — the left one, of course. --Publisher's description