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...This study describes and analyzes the extent to which work, as a philosophical concept and as an economic reality, influenced the lives of working-class children in late nineteenth-century urban Ontario. Chapter I examines the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the working-class family and describes how the concepts of work and social control intersected to feed the development of welfare programmes based on middle-class objectives. Chapter II examines the conditions and experiences of children in the paid labour force, focussing particularly on the family economy, labour legislation, and the response of reformers and trade unionists. In addition, chapter II discusses the link between a child's economic responsibilities and his or her opportunities for personal development and social mobility. Chapter III applies the themes of chapter II to youngsters who worked in the home and on the street. Chapter IV describes the work experiences of children who spent part of their early lives in orphanages or foster homes and analyzes the reform impulse behind this style of welfare. Chapter V applies the themes of chapter IV to youngsters committed to reformatories, refuges, and industrial schools. Chapter VI examines the treatment, work experiences, and social development of needy British children who filled the roles of agricultural labourers and domestic servants in Canadian homes and discusses the motivations behind this programme. Chapter VII examines the connection between youngsters' work responsibilities and school attendance and analyzes the education system's approach to the issue of children and work. Throughout the text, the thesis argues that child labour composed a critical element of a complex social culture, deeply rooted in a capitalist economy, that defined work in both a material and philosophical sense. At the material level, working children made essential contributions to families that could not survive in the city on parental wages alone. Simultaneously children provided cheap labour for self-serving employers in industrial, commercial, and domestic settings. At the philosophical level, most members of nineteenth-century society believed that hard, honest work held the key to life-long success and happiness. This view prevailed among middle-class reformers who additionally believed that child labour under proper supervision would preserve social order and avoid future welfare costs by creating a class of efficient and compliant workers. The failure of this culture of work to balance its social and economic motivations, however, led to suffering and exploitation for youngsters more often than it created personal opportunity and social harmony. As the poorest, most powerless, and least secure members of industrial society, children of the working class most visibly bore the scars inflicted by a social system designed to serve middle- and upper-class interests.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was the leading labor organization in North America during the late­ nineteenth century. The entire history of the Knights in Canada spans approximately thirty years (1875-1907). In the early to mid-1880s the Order expanded rapidly throughout the cities, towns, and villages of Ontario. After the mid-1880s, the number of local assemblies across Ontario began to decline. A significant percentage of the Ontario work-force was drawn to the Knights over the course of their history. The Knights were the first North American union to organize workers based on an all-inclusive style of membership. All workers, regardless of skill level, gender, ethnicity, and religion were welcome into the Noble and Holy Order. Historians and social scientists have advanced several competing perspectives on the Knights of Labor. This thesis evaluates the positions that the competing 'labor schools' have advanced on the Order, with special reference to south­ central Ontario in the 1880s. The evaluation the competing labor schools is based on a content analysis of the late-nineteenth century labor press. The main sample selected for this thesis is Hamilton's Palladium of Labor (1883-1886). A combination of primary and secondary data sources are examined in order to build support for one of the competing perspectives that has been advanced on the Knights.

The subject of this research is the conflicting policy interests and ideas of Canadian organized labour and the federal Conservative government between 1984 and 1988. This conflict is placed within the context of the political and economic changes accompanying the international restructuring of capital and focusses on the opposition of the Canadian trade union movement to federal economic development policies. The struggle of ideas and interests surrounding specific policy areas is detailed. These areas include deficit reduction, the privatization of Crown corporations and government services, deregulation of certain economic activities and sectors and comprehensive bilateral free trade with the United States. Labour's opposition is shown to have manifested in a new strategy for building a broad-based coalition with other popular interests, in an effort to defeat the Conservative government and their policies at the polls. The research work concludes with speculation as to the future of labour and popular-coalition politics.

This thesis studies the historically varied political strategies pursued by the Canadian branch of the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers in the union's attempts to shift the balance of power in its favour between 1936 and 1984. In so doing, the thesis examines and explains the Canadian UAW's changing relations to governments, corporations and political parties. Particular emphasis is placed on explaining the conditions under which this union pursued militant forms of political action. The analytical framework used in this work is constructed around an understanding of unions as strategic actors which make choices under limits arising from the historical, political-economic and internal conditions in which the union operates. In turn, a union's strategic capacity--defined as its ability to pursue a particular course of action successfully--is understood as being determined by both external conditions, such as the state of the economy, and by the internal resources and dynamics of the union. The most important external constraint on the Canadian UAW's strategic pursuits was the construction/destruction of the Fordist mode of regulation, which was organized around a wage/productivity trade-off and encouraged the institutionalization of labour-management relations, union control of membership militancy and the practice of 'responsible' unionism. At the same, it is argued that the Canadian UAW shaped the nature of this compromise and the timing of its own acceptance of this arrangement. More specifically, the Canadian UAW's distinctive organizational structure and collective identity are argued to have delayed the union's acceptance of the practices of 'responsible' unionism and influenced the particular regulatory mechanisms put into place in the Canadian auto industry. Overall, this study finds that, in contrast to current interpretations of union postwar political behaviour, Canadian Autoworkers continued to pursue militant, mobilization-based forms of political action until the early 1960's. It was only at this time that Canadian Autoworkers appeared to accept constraints on their militancy in exchange for improved wages and benefits and greater access to political decision-making. This period of detente between the UAW, governments and corporations was short-lived, however, owing both to emergent strains within the union between the rank and file and the leadership and the crisis of Fordism. Consequently, the UAW, in an attempt to protect its organizational integrity and position of strength in the workplace and society, returned to militant forms of political action, the effects of which were a shift in the balance of power in favour of the union and Canadian Autoworkers' split from their International union.