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Cobalt's rich history is full of the romance of prospecting, stories of immense wealth, deaths and mining accidents, struggles to obtain pure drinking water and fire protection, labour-management turmoil, legal conflicts between the town and the mining companies, the founding of the Ontario Provincial Police, and the struggles to provide religion, education, and leisure activities in a mining boom town. Its story is one of immense capital accumulation, labour strife, technological progress, new government policies and ventures, regional growth, and the struggle for law and order. The discovery of the fabulously rich silver mines led to the emergence of northeastern Ontario and helped Toronto to assert its financial dominance. --From Introduction
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[This book] is a collection of original papers that presents a vision of an invigorated and vibrant labour movement, one that would actively seek the full participation of women and other traditionally excluded groups, and that would willingly incorporate a feminist agenda. This vision challenges union complicity in the gendered segmentation of the labour market; union support for traditionalist ideologies about women's work, breadwinners, and male-headed families; union resistance to broader-based bargaining; and the marginalization of women inside unions. All of the authors share a commitment to workplace militancy and a more democratic union movement, to women's resistance to the devaluation of their work, to their agency in the change-making process. The interconnected web of militancy, democracy, and feminism provides the grounds on which unions can address the challenges of equity and economic restructuring, and on which the re-visioning of the labour movement can take place. The first of the four sections includes case studies of union militancy that highlight the experiences of individual women in three areas of female-dominated work: nursing, banking, and retailing. The second and third sections focus on the two key arenas of struggle where unions and feminism meet: inside unions, where women activists and staff confront the sexism of unions, and in the labour market, where women challenge their employers and their own unions. The fourth section deconstructs the conceptual tools of the discipline of industrial relations and examines its contribution to the continued invisibility of gender. --Publisher's description. Contents: Foreword / Judy Darcy -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Feminist Challenge to the Unions / Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott. Part 1. Women on Strike. The Eaton's Strike: We Wouldn't Have Missed It for the World! / Patricia McDermott -- Alberta Nurses and the 'Illegal' Strike of 1988 / Rebecca Coulter -- Reflections on Life Stories: Women's Bank Union Activism / Patricia Baker. Part 2. The Politics of Gender within the Union Movement. Union Women and Separate Organizing / Linda Briskin -- Trade Union Leadership: Sexism and Affirmative Action / Carl J. Cuneo -- Women Working for Unions: Female Staff and the Politics of Transformation / Jane Stinson and Penni Richmond -- Black Women Speak Out: Racism and Unions / Ronnie Leah -- Unionism and Feminism in the Canadian Auto Workers Union, 1961-1992 / Pamela Sugiman. Part 3. Unions and Women Workers. Patterns of Unionization / Julie White -- Collective Bargaining and Women's Workplace Concerns / Pradeep Kumar -- The Gendered Dimension of Labour Law: Why Women Need Inclusive Unionism and Broader-based Bargaining / Judy Fudge -- Can a Disappearing Pie be Shared Equally?: Unions, Women, and Wage 'Fairness' / Rosemary Warskett -- Unions and Women's Occupational Health in Québec / Karen Messing and Donna Mergler -- From the DEW Line: The Experience of Canadian Garment Workers / Armine Yalniziyan -- Professions, Unions, or What?: Learning from Nurses Pat Armstrong. Part 4. Studying Women and Unions. A View from Outside the Whale: The Treatment of Women and Unions in Industrial Relations / Anne Forrest.
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Bill 6, the government of Alberta’s contentious farm workers’ safety legislation, sparked public debate as no other legislation has done in recent years. The Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act provides a right to work safely and a compensation system for those killed or injured at work, similar to other provinces. In nine essays, contributors to Farm Workers in Western Canada place this legislation in context. They look at the origins, work conditions, and precarious lives of farm workers in terms of larger historical forces such as colonialism, land rights, and racism. They also examine how the rights and privileges of farm workers, including seasonal and temporary foreign workers, conflict with those of their employers, and reveal the barriers many face by being excluded from most statutory employment laws, sometimes in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. -- Publisher's description
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Now in its seventh edition, Rethinking Canada presents compelling essays on the fascinating lives, struggles, and contributions of women in Canadian history. Reflecting an interdisciplinary approach, this comprehensive and engaging resources stresses the diversity of women's history and demonstrates the analytical richness of ongoing research in the field. Featuring insightful chapter introductions that provide scholarly and historical context for each reading, [the book] helps students gain a more nuanced understanding of women's experiences across Canads's history. --Publisher's description
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Sarah Carter's "Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies" examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own. Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the "spade-work" of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its surplus women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts. Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains, to the land army women of the First World War. --Publisher's description
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Over the past decade, Canada has experienced considerable growth in labour migration. Moreover, temporary labour migration has replaced permanent immigration as the primary means by which people enter Canada. Utilizing the rhetoric of maintaining competitiveness, Canadian employers and the state have ushered in an era of neoliberal migration alongside an agenda of austerity flowing from capitalist crisis. Labour markets have been restructured to render labour more flexible and precarious, and in Canada as in other high-income capitalist labour markets, employers are relying on migrant and immigrant workers as "unfree labour." This book explores labour migration to Canada and how public policies of temporary and guest worker programs function in the global context of work and capitalist restructuring. Contributors are directly engaged with the issues emerging from the influx of temporary foreign workers and Canada's "creeping economic apartheid." --Publisher's description
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Farm workers were central to the development of Canada's prairie West. From 1878, when the first shipment of prairie grain went to international markets, to 1929, when the Great Depression signalled the end of the wheat boom, the role of hired hands changed dramatically. Prior to World War One, hired hands viewed themselves and were treated in the rural community as equals to their farmer employers. Many were farmers in training, informal apprentices who worked for wages so they could accumulate the capital and experience needed to secure their own free 160-acre parcels of land. In later years, as free lands were taken, hired hands increasingly faced the hkehhood of remaining waged labourers on the farms of others. They became agricultural proletarians. In this first full-length study of labour in Canadian prairie agriculture during the period of settlement and expansion, Cecilia Danysk examines the changing work and the growing rural community of the West through the eyes of the workers themselves. World War One was a catalyst in bringing into focus the conflicting nature of labour-capital relations and the divergent aims of workers and their employers. Yet, attempts at union organization were unsuccessful because most hired hands worked alone and because governments assisted farmers by stifling such attempts. The workers' greatest form of workplace control was to walk off one job and find another. --Publisher's description. Previously published in 1995 by McClelland & Stewart. Contents: Introduction -- Labour-Capital Relations in Prairie Agriculture -- Part 1. Beginnings, 1870s-1900. Recruiting the Agricultural Labour Force. Part 2. Expansion, 1900-1918. Agricultural Labour as Apprenticeship -- Class, Culture, and Community -- The Nature of Work --Part 3. Consolidation, 1918-1930. Proletarianization -- The Dialectic of Consent and Resistance -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Index.
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In [this book] Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities. --Publisher's description
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With bright, strong imagery, Ginger Goodwin presents the story of labour activist and martyr Albert “Ginger” Goodwin. This accessible and thoughtful graphic history explores Goodwin’s life, work, and death in the mining communities of Cumberland and Trail, British Columbia. Drawing on local history, and exploring the ways the history of labour organizing affects contemporary movements, Ginger Goodwin is a story that needs to be shared. --Publisher's description
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Workplace injuries happen every day and can profoundly affect workers, their families, and the communities in which they live. This textbook provides workers and students with an introduction to effective injury prevention. It pays particular attention to how issues of precarious employment, gender, and ill-health can be better handled in Canadian occupational health and safety (OHS). Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces offers an extensive overview of central OHS concepts and practices and provides practical suggestions for health and safety advocacy. It attempts to bring OHS into a twenty-first century context by discussing contemporary workplaces and the health effects of new work processes and structures while recognizing that safety has gendered and racialized dimensions. Foster and Barnetson contend that the practice of occupational health and safety can only be understood if we acknowledge that workers and employers have conflicting interests. Who identifies what workplace hazards should be controlled is therefore a product of the broader political economy of employment and one that should be well understood by those working in the field. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Workplace injury in theory and practice -- Legislative framework of injury prevention and compensation -- Hazard recognition, assessment and control -- Physical hazards -- Chemical and biological hazards -- Psycho-social hazards -- Health effects of employment -- Training and injury prevention programs -- Incident investigation -- Disability management and return to work -- The practice of health and safety.
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When Winnipeg's Cy Gonick started the magazine Canadian Dimension in 1963 to provide a home for the thinking and analysis of mostly young leftists engaged in Canadian economic, social, cultural, artistic and political issues, he had no grand plan. But Canadian Dimension was welcomed by intellectuals, scholars and students, and it proved enduring. Hundreds of Canada's leading figures of the left have contributed to its pages over the years, writing about every major topic in Canadian public life. This book offers an account of the most important developments in Canadian history from the sixties until today, as seen and interpreted by scholars and writers on the pages of Dimension. Each chapter reviews a major theme, such as Canada's relationship to the U.S., the development of our health care system, the dynamics of Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations and the role of Canadian cultural work in shaping Canadian society. Taken together, the book provides a unique and broad perspective on virtually every significant event and development in recent Canadian history. Readers who know the magazine will find this book a compelling summary of how Canada changed in the past five decades, and how the Left saw those changes and challenged them. Readers who discover Canadian Dimension through this book will find a multitude of compelling voices who challenge the dominant neoliberal thinking of mainstream Canadian intellectual life. --Publisher's description.
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Nursing embodies the seemingly timeless characteristics of feminine healing, caring, and nurturing, yet this archetypally female vocation also boasts a distinctive and complex history. Bedside Matters traces four generations of Canadian nurses to explore changes in who became nurses, what work they performed, and how they organized to defend their occupational interests. Whether in the apprenticeship method of the early twentieth century or in the present day restructuring of hospital work, the position of nurses within the health-care system has been structured by class, gender, and ethnic and racial relations. Located between the doctors and untrained or subsidiary patient-care attendants, nurses have struggled to define the boundaries of their occupation vis à vis other members of the health-care hierarchy, even as tensions between bedside and administrative nurses created divisions within nursing itself. Focusing on the daily labours of 'ordinary nurses', McPherson argues that the persisting sex-typing of nursing as women's work has meant that gender consistently complicated nursing's easy categorization as either professional or proletariat. Combining archival records and oral histories, the author shows how nurses, in their work, activities, and social and sexual attitudes, sought recognition as skilled workers in the health-care system. --Publisher's description
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Les débats sur les inégalités dans l’emploi adoptent habituellement un point de vue économique en se concentrant sur la distribution des revenus plutôt que sur les processus de différenciation sociale. Pourtant, avant d’être un facteur de production, le travail est foncièrement un rapport social, essentiel à l’intégration des individus. La question des inégalités dans l’emploi doit donc être approchée d’un point de vue sociologique. C’est ce que propose cet ouvrage qui, tout en s’inscrivant dans les débats en cours sur la justice sociale, offre une synthèse remarquable des perspectives théoriques, historiques et comparatives sur les inégalités dans les relations d’emploi. Se fondant sur un ensemble de données statistiques récentes, l’auteur décrit les forces qui animent le champ de l’emploi et qui contribuent à définir le statut social au Canada, et dégage ainsi le rôle décisif des politiques publiques dans ce domaine.
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The accounts of three men who are presented here were members of the left in Canada between the first decade of the twentieth century until the late 1970s, when their stories were compiled. --Preface. Contents: Harvey Murphy's account, 1918 to 1943 -- John Smith's account, 1920 to 1970s -- Arnt Arntzen's account, 1890s to 1970s.
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Almost a century before the New Democratic Party rode the first "orange wave," their predecessors imagined a movement that could rally Canadians against economic insecurity, win access to necessary services such as health care, and confront the threat of war. The party they built during the Great Depression, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), permanently transformed the country's politics. Past histories have described the CCF as social democrats guided by middle-class intellectuals, a party which shied away from labour radicalism and communist agitation. James Naylor's assiduous research tells a very different story: a CCF created by working-class activists steeped in Marxist ideology who sought to create a movement that would be both loyal to its socialist principles and appealing to the wider electorate. The Fate of Labour Socialism is a fundamental reexamination of the CCF and Canadian working-class politics in the 1930s, one that will help historians better understand Canada's political, intellectual, and labour history. --Publisher's description.
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Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a historian of the working-class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities. --Publisher's description
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Finding affordable, quality child care is a challenge for many Canadian families. In some areas of British Columbia, expectant mothers place their children on daycare waiting lists months before they are born. Yet, despite the demand, recent efforts to achieve a universal child care program have stalled. As Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma demonstrates, this is nothing new: child care policy in British Columbia has matured in the shadow of a persistent political uneasiness with working motherhood. Charting the growth of the child care movement in this province, Lisa Pasolli examines the arrival of Vancouver’s first crèche in 1912, the teetering steps forward during the debates of the interwar years, the development of child care policy, the rebellious advancements of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, and the maturation of provincial and national child care politics since the mid-70s. In addition to revealing much about historical attitudes toward women’s roles at home and in the workplace, Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma celebrates the efforts of mothers and advocates who, for decades, have lobbied for child care as a central part of women’s rights as workers, parents, and citizens.... --Publisher's description
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This book informs debates about worker participation in the workplace or worker voice by analysing comparative historical data relating to these ideas during the inter-war period in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. The issue is topical because of the contemporary shift to a workplace focus in many countries without a corresponding development of infrastructure at the workplace level, and because of the growing ‘representation gap’ as union membership declines. Some commentators have called for the introduction of works councils to address these issues. Other scholars have gone back and examined the experiences with the non-union Employee Representation Plans (ERPs) in Canada and the US. This book will test these claims through examining and comparing the historical record of previous efforts of five countries during a rich period of experimentation between the Wars. --Publisher's description.
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The third edition of Social Determinants of Health focuses on the socio-economic conditions that shape the health of individuals and communities. This edited collection includes contributions from top academics and high-profile experts from across the country. The chapters take a public policy approach that sees the mainsprings of health emerging from the social distribution of resources. The collection as a whole integrates insights from the health sciences, the sociology of health, and the political economy of health. This revised edition has been well updated and includes a greater focus on the political pathways and mechanisms that explain how the social determinants of health come to be distributed amongst the population; early childhood development in Canada in relation to other developed nations; Indigenous health and its determinants; public policy and the social safety net; and the growing network of civil society organizations addressing the inequitable distribution of the social determinants of health. --Publisher's description
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Driven from their homes in Russia, Poland, and Romania by pogroms and poverty, many Jews who came to Canada in the wave of immigration after the 1905 Russian revolution were committed radicals. A Future Without Hate or Need brings to life the rich and multi-layered lives of a dissident political community, their shared experiences and community-building cultural projects, as they attempted to weave together their ethnic particularity—their identity as Jews—with their internationalist class politics.--Publisher's description