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Recognized on the first day of May every year, International Workers’ Day, or May Day, commemorates the struggles of workers around the world through the labour movements and the political left. Although established in Canada since the beginning of the 20th century, this day is not deemed a statutory holiday, as opposed to Labour Day, celebrated on the first Monday in September.
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The Canadian worker has been a neglected figure in Canadian history. Workers have contributed in many ways to the development of Canadian society, but the history of working people — their families, communities and work places — has only gradually become part of our view of the past and an important component of understanding how we came to occupy our present. --Introduction. Contents: Early historiography -- Postwar scholarship -- 1970s-1980s -- Class and labour -- Scholarship proliferates -- New interpretation and debate -- Working women and gendered class relations -- Labour history at the current juncture.
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Coal miners at Bienfait, Saskatchewan, had joined the militant Mine Workers' Union of Canada in 1931. In September of that year they went on strike to win recognition of their union as a prelude to pressing demands for a restoration of wages cut by the local coal operators. --Introduction
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On September 29, 1931, almost 400 striking coal miners clashed with local police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in the streets of Estevan, Saskatchewan. The battle lasted less than an hour but left three men dead and twenty-three seriously injured. It was Canada's worst day of labor-related violence since "Bloody Saturday" in Winnipeg (June 21, 1919), and before long Estevan's day of infamy became known simply as "Black Tuesday."
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For six weeks in the early summer of 1919, Winnipeg, then the largest city in the Canadian Prairies, was shut down by a general strike. More than 30,000 of the city's workers walked off their jobs in a test of strength that was to prove the focal point of a labor explosion that was national and international in scope. The strike was provoked by the refusal of employers to recognize and bargain with the metal and building trades federations of unions. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council organized a poll of its affiliates' members, and a general strike was approved by a vote of 11,112 to 524. The response to the strike call on May 15 was overwhelming. Not only did organized workers respond solidly, shutting down factories, newspapers, telephones, and streetcars, but thousands of unorganized workers joined them. The city fell silent....
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In 1944 the first social democratic government in North America was elected in the province of Saskatchewan. The new government of Premier Tommy Douglas intended to introduce plans to insure both medical and hospital services immediately following the election; however, because of financial limitations, it decided instead to establish a provincewide system of hospital insurance. The Saskatchewan Hospital Insurance Plan, established in 1947 and funded mainly from provincial tax revenue, provided free inpatient hospital care for all residents of the province. ...on July 1, 1962, the date the Medical Care Insurance Plan was to go into effect, more than 90 percent of the province's doctors withdrew their services. This strike, although relatively short–it only lasted twenty-three days–was very bitter....
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In early April 1935 hundreds of dissatisfied, disillusioned men walked out of federally run relief camps throughout British Columbia and descended on Vancouver in a bold attempt to reverse their dead-end lives and bring about some kind of "work for wages" program. No one wanted to deal with the men, least of all Conservative prime minister R. B. Bennett, who believed that the Communist Party of Canada had orchestrated the protest. As the stalemate dragged on week after numbing week, the men decided to go to Ottawa and lay their grievances directly before the government....