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This thesis addresses the issue of foreign domestic workers. The government of Canada has been involved in the recruitment of people to perform domestic service for households since the turn of the century. The devaluation of domestic labour and increasing employment opportunities for Canadian women resulted in a constant shortage of labour to fill the demand. A variety of programs have been initiated to solve the "servant problem" culminating in the Foreign Domestic Movement in 1981. Within this policy foreign domestics are classified as a category of migrant labour and, as such, are formally denied citizenship rights. The majority of workers who come to Canada as foreign domestics under this program are Filipino women. These women often migrate to Canada as domestic workers due to limited options for employment in their home country. Their need to remain in Canada due to limited options in the Philippines, the lack of political rights in Canada, and the restrictions placed on workers who enter Canada under the Foreign Domestic Movement combine to situate these women in a position of dependence and vulnerability. In addition, live-in domestics perform devalued labour within an isolated work setting, and are often not included within provincial labour standards. These conditions keep wages depressed and lessen the ability to bargain for improved conditions of employment. The thesis problem is examined within an historic context. In addition to a literature review of the specific topic and related areas of gender and migrant labour, the data are from Statistics Canada, Employment and Immigration and the Special Collections Division of the University of British Columbia. The data shows : the labour market activity of Canadian women, the shift away from domestic service as other alternatives became open, the increasing number of dual income earning families, and the number of foreign domestics recruited to provide domestic service for Canadian households. Interviews with a variety of people draw out the particular factors leading to the reasons for the supply and demand of this group of workers. In addition, the interviews point to specific problems frequently experienced by women who work as live-in domestics.

The purpose of the thesis is to compare mining and forestry single-industry-towns in Canada in terms of their community and work structures. More specifically, what is examined is how these structures interconnect at local levels and impact upon social relations and class consciousness. Following a critical review of selected literature in political economy, labour and community studies, insights from Harold Innis' staple theory are expanded in order to link these three theoretical approaches and to justify the analysis of community and work in specific resource contexts. Drawing from this discussion, a comparative model of forestry and mining town structures is outlined. The main underlying idea is that the overall structure of forestry towns could be seen as more modern--in spite of its traditional elements--for it is more diversified and opaque, whereas that of mining towns is more archaic--despite the modern features of its industry--because of the greater control industry has on economic and community life. This theoretical model however needs further empirical testing.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, as a part of broad North American phenomenon of industrial militancy and labour law reform, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) became recognized as the legitimate bargaining agency for most woodworkers throughout the Pacific coast. In British Columbia, as a basis for consolidating trade unionism and furthering the class struggle within the important forest industry, a well-organized cadre of communist trade union militants channelled the syndicalist and revolutionary traditions of earlier twentieth century woodworkers organization into District One of the IWA, and into compliance with state institutions governing industrial relations that emerged during World War Two. By 1948, though, the quest for legitimacy had entrammelled the communist leaders of District One in a restrictive web of institutional, bureaucratic and political relationships from which they sought escape by serving ties with the union they had struggled hard to establish. Their fledgling Woodworkers' Industrial Union of Canada, considered illegitimate by both the state and the mainstream labour movement, attracted only a small minority of woodworkers and enjoyed a very short, unremarkable history. Through a detailed examination of union, industry and state records of industrial relations activity, this thesis provides both narrative and analysis of a complex course of events leading from the era of the open shop, through the attainment or union recognition and a period of consolidation, to a final confrontation in 1947-48 within the Canadian IWA between two distinct visions of trade union practice. Ultimately, the early, militant woodworker traditions, subsumed within communist industrial unionism, proved to be in contradiction with the institutional structures governing relations between labour and capital in postwar Canada. The post-1948 leaders of IWA District One more closely reflected the emerging North American reality in their approach to trade unionism and industrial relations than did their predecessors. Out of the intense struggles of the 1930s and 40s, a full-blown business unionism emerged by the latter 1950s as the governing programme of the modern Canadian IWA, albeit a programme not universally accepted by rank-and-file woodworkers....

Winnipeg tailoring craftworkers formed four unions during 1882-1921. This master's thesis in Canadian labour history finds that their institutionally-differentiated practice of labour organization expressed a sustained remedial effort to codify, enforce and reformulate elements of their craft subculture. They mounted this effort in response to the competitive constraints of clothing sector capitalism as these conditioned workplace experience in the city trade as well as the tailors' identifications with other working-class Winnipeggers. The study first discusses the reproduction of tailoring craft subculture in the energing city market, and offers a periodized sketch of the 'double jeopardy' which merchant tailors faced as master artisans and as clothing sector capitalists. The remaining chapters employ this periodization to organize discussion of the course of working-class activism pursued by the tailors. During c1882-1900, the integration of national markets in sewn clothing and in tailoring craft labour power exhausted the jour tailors' earliest attempts - the 'Winnipeg Operative Tailors Union' (fl. 1882) and Harmony Local Assembly 9036 of the Knights of Labor (fl. 1886-87) - to devise a viable labour organization. Only with the chartering of Journeymen Tailors' Union Local 70 (fl. 1892- 1919) was this achieved. During c1901-13, Local 70 secured significant wage and other concessions from boss tailors. Wheat Boom-era economic development, coupled with a persisting city-market skills scarcity, broadly favoured such gains. Meanwhile, JTU Local 70 inbibed ideas about industrial unionism and social radicalisn which were encouraged by such figures as John T. Mortimer (d1908), a Socialist Party of Canada activist. During c1914-21, the custom tailors' experience was overshadowed by the exigencies of war-making, the labour revolt, and of the post-war recession. Paradoxically, Local 70 momentarily became in 1918 the largest JTU local in Canada, yet soon bolted from the international parent body to reconstitute itself as Tailors' Industrial Unit Number One of the One Big Union. The study interprets this development in terms of Local 70's war-time isolations from the south and the east, which were counterbalanced by an epochal quickening of working-class activist identifications and social conflict in the city itself. But the new OBU Unit retained the jour tailors' craft-bounded distinctiveness within the OBU's organizational structure, and was blooded in 1921 attempting to enforce a contractual measure inherited from Local 70. The study's major primary sources include the local labour press, as well as an intensive reading of the JTU's journal, The Tailor, 1887-1921. The study's general approach is indebted chiefly to perspectives suggested by the work of Gregory S. Kealey, Herbert Gutman, Eric Hobsbawm, David Montgomery, Geoffrey Crossick, and David H. Bensman.

Trade unions in a liberal society are caught on the horns of a dilemma over freedom of association. In respect to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unions are faced with relying on the positive freedom to associate as a defence for union security clauses, and, at the same time, denying freedom from association claims of those who do not wish to participate in union membership and/or union activities. The aim of this thesis is to explore that dilemma, and to assess some of the possible strategies union leaders could employ to come to terms with it. The dilemma that trade unions face consists of several elements. The source of the dilemma is found in the conflict over negative and positive liberty and the nature of freedom, and more specifically over competing visions of freedom of association in the trade union context. This conflict has found its way into the courts; in particular, the Lavigne case, which challenges political expenditures by unions (in certain circumstances), has generated much controversy and resulted in two opposing judicial decisions. However, the courts are not the only arena in which an attempt is being made to balance the competing claims of liberty; the political realm offers another avenue through which trade unions could attempt to influence labour legislation. However, unlike other intervenors such as women's or aboriginal groups, the trade union movement was largely absent from pre-Charter Joint Committee hearings. In hindsight it is quite clear that labour's non-participation represented a missed opportunity to influence the wording of freedom of association in a way that would make challenges from a negative liberty standpoint more difficult. In addition, the post-Charter prospects of lobbying government to implement legislation which would prevent negative liberty claims from succeeding (possibly through the "notwithstanding" clause in the Charter) appear quite dismal. Thus, a trade union strategy which would look for a political avenue out of its dilemma was not implemented pre-Charter and looks doubtful post-Charter. Nonetheless, in terms of the individual and his freedom (of association) in a liberal society, a fair balance between negative and positive liberty claims should be struck; one which allows limited coerion of the individual in the form of union security (the agency shop), but also restricts trade unions in the form of limits on political expenditures. This balance may, however, seriously threaten the political role of the trade union community. But, while individuals retain their right to exercise negative liberty claims, whether or not they exercise them depends upon their moral beliefs. And an individual convinced of the importance of the trade union community and the threat to that community posed by negative liberty claims, will be much less likely to exercise his right to invoke freedom from association. Unions might be able to meet this difficulty, however, by working towards a consensus about the importance of the trade union community and, more particularly, its political objectives. Such a strategy may be the most suitable alternative that trade unions can adopt in a liberal society.

With few expections trade union histories, even those emanating from the broad left, trace the development of the union movement through a series of hard-won victories codified in modern collective bargaining law. This thesis joins with more recent critical approahcees to industrial legality in a fundamental quesstioning of the effect of progressive legal victories. American scholarship especially has begun to probe the limitations imposed by a framework of rigid legal rules that work as much to circumscribe the expression of workers' interests as they do to promote them. In an attempt to understand this two-sidedness of industrial legality, the first chapter of the thesis embarks on a theoretical examination of law, paying particular attention to the meaning of the base/superstructure configuration. The chapter builds on the original writings of Marx and Engels - which never fully developed a theory of 'law' - bringing their concepts into the context of twentieth-century capitalism and highlighting the role of class struggle. In this way, the law is revealed as growing out of, and sharing, the essential values that constitute cpaitalist accumulation - values that elevate property and the procewss of production and accumulation above the aspirations of the working class. The second chapter traces the development of industrial legality in Canada, situating it in terms of class formation, class struggle, and the role of the state. This is a synthetic account of the formative years of Canadian industrial legislation, setting the stage for the analysis of collective agreements that follows. Chapter 3 explores the developing content of collective agreements forged in the 1940s through a sample of 120 contracts signed between employers and the Steelworkers, Packinghouse Workers, and Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Of particular interest is the effect of management rights clauses, union security and seniority clauses, and grievance procedures. Finally, the last chapter will consider the dilemmas facing unions that now find themselves caught in the web of legality, with alienated memberships and the possibilities for class-action severely circumscribed.

This thesis examines the experiences, attitudes and actions of the women who trained and worked as graduate nurses during the 1920-1939 years--of the third generation of hospital-trained Canadian nurses. The 1920s and 1930s were decades of crisis for Canadian nursing, and the occupation's majority, working in the private duty sector, was most severely affected by the problems of oversupply and underemployment. The economic crisis was national in scope, and endemic to the health care system, and was therefore exacerbated rather than created by the depression of the 1930s. In order to analyze the structure and content of the occupation during these years of crisis, a wide variety of national sources were consulted, supplemented by a detailed case study of nursing in the prairie metropolis of Winnipeg, Manitoba. This research on Canadian nursing during the 1920s and 1930s adds another chapter to the growing scholarly literature on Canadian women and work. It also contributes to the secondary literature on the social history of medicine and of labour in two particular ways. First, as the largest health care workforce, the actions of graduate nurses during the 1920s and 1930s, their agency, served as a critical, force within the development of the Canadian health care system, a force frequently overlooked within medical history. Secondly, the third generation of Canadian nurses borrowed from the organizational strategies of both professionals and trade unions, but neither concept fully captured the reality of nurses' occupational identity as women and as workers. This thesis argues that the third generation of Canadian nurses was recruited from sex-segregated female labour market. The many rituals and routines which constituted nursing technique were based on a theoretical understanding and practical application of the germ theory. As such, nursing practice during the interwar years must be defined as scientific. Nurses' scientific skills permitted practioners to integrate caring and curing, and thereby to create their own definition to what constituted skilled service. Out of this self-definition came a specific occupational identity which was reflected in the many associations designed to reflect nurses' interests. As the interwar decades progressed, conflict developed within nursing organizations as to appropriate solutions to the economic crisis. The compromise solution, hospital employment of graduate nurses, initiated the demise of both the apprenticeship system of hospital staffing, and private duty nursing. This solution successfully prevented the fracturing of nursing organizations in the 1920s and 1930s, but also facilitated the transformation of hospital staffing which would occur in the World War II years. This research suggests that the scholarly literature on professionalism, and on labour organizations, must more fully account for gender as a historical determinant. In suggesting a historical periodization for Canadian nursing history, and in focussing on the third generation of Canadian nurses who struggled through the economic crisis of the interwar decades, this thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to placing nursing history in history.

This thesis is a comparative study of the changing work experience and relations of two groups of Canadian postal employees in St. John's, Newfoundland. Two related factors are identified as underwriting these changes: technological based reorganization of work and the demand of a conservative state for a move to a private sector model of operations. The latter factor includes the requirement for a deficit free, and even profit-generating, operation at Canada Post Corporation and the divestment of public ownership. Underlying this empirical analysis is a theoretical interest in the labour process, technology and the managerial problem of control. -- I argue in this thesis that among inside postal workers, members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, technological change and the bureaucratic reorganization of work which has surrounded it has undermined their ability to resist management incursions on the shop floor. The subsequent shift in the frontier of control has enabled management to implement a number of productivity and efficiency measures, which from the workers' point of view, has had a major negative effect on their work experience and relations. Moreover, the recent move toward privatization and the generation of more flexible, casual labour further undermines the ability of workers to defend themselves. -- While inside workers have had a continuous history of conflict over the degradation of work through technological change, letter carriers have experienced a relatively stable, institutionalized relationship with management during the past 15 years. This relationship, in contrast to the inside workers', may be characterized as "consent" based. However, with growing pressure on management to solve the economic "crisis" at Canada Post, the status quo between letter carriers and management is eroding and an ultimately antagonistic set of interests is being revealed. -- The data from this comparative study lead to the conclusion that recent interest in the notion of consent within the labour process literature has definite theoretical and empirical limits which become apparent in examining production relations in periods of economic instability. On the other hand, the question of control of labour and technologicl change cannot be addressed in formulistic, determinist fashion. Rather, the unique organizational and historical characteristics of "each" labour process must be understood in its own context.

This study analyzes the concept of alienated labour in the practice of street prostitution in Canada's prairie region and explores the relationship between profit-making relations in street prostitution and the exploitation of street prostitutes in this region. It begins with a brief introduction to the themes of social control that dominate within the Sociology of Prostitution and a discussion of the sources and limitations of data employed. The basic proposition that is drawn from this discussion is that the exploitation of street prostitutes is secured in the organization of the labour process of street prostitution. The review of relevant literature is organized around the basic themes of supply, demand and profit.. This organizational scheme allows the evaluation and critique of the loose application of economic concepts to the causal analysis of prostitution. It concludes with the finding that prostitution is the expression of a profit-making relation and establishes a basis for the analysis of the appropriation of labour within profit-making relations. In light of the focus on the regulation of working activity in economic organization, Marx's theory and method of historical materialism is identified as a fruitful conceptual framework for the analysis of this relation. The discussion of subjective interpretations of Marx's theory of alienation is followed by a detailed discussion of the ontological continuity and epistemological focusing of Marx's intellectual outlook. This leads into an explication of Marx's theory of alienation. A detailed description of the street prostitution commodity market and the street prostitution industry is constructed around the producer's relation to the product and activity of labour in the circulation and production of commodified intimacy. This is followed by a specific analysis of the concept of alienated labour as it is expressed in the social relations of production of the street prostitution industry. The conclusion that is reached is that two forms of alienated labour can be identified within the street prostitution industry in the Canadian prairie region. As free agents, the working activity of prostitutes is subject to regulation by the market and overall structure of the street prostitution industry, and the appropriation of labour is expressed in circulation. As bonded labour the working activity of prostitutes is subject to regulation by the social relations of production that are established between male owners and female workers. As such, the appropriation of labour is accomplished through relations of dependency and domination that are expressed in the production of commodified intimacy and the exploitation of the prostitute is stripped of any appearance of freedom.

In 1937 the strike at General Motors in Oshawa resulted in the first major victory for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in Canada. The president of the Oshawa local was Charles Millard (1896-1978), who subsequently played an influential role in most of the major developments in organized labour between 1937 and 1956. He was the first National Director of the Canadian branch of the United Steel Workers of America in 1943, a position which he retained until his retirement in 1956. Under his leadership the steelworkers’ union became a dominant force in the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL), taking a very active role in political action initiatives, and achieving a number of strategic victories through strike action. Millard was personally involved in the creation of the CCL and its subsequent development. He was also very active in opposing the Communist faction within organized labour, and labored throughout his career to further the relationship between organized labour and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Despite Millard’s many significant contributions during what was a formative period for both organized labour and the CCF, he has been mostly ignored. This thesis sketches Millard’s life, focusing on the major events in which he was involved.