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Between the 1880s and the Great Depression agriculture emerged and matured as the mainstay of the prairie economy. Farm workers were essential to the developing economy and society, but their place in the rural west was ambiguous. During the pioneering period, labour shortages and accessible land gave farm workers bargaining strength in the labour market and a niche in prairie society. A cooperative working relationship and a shared ideology resulted in a lack of overt conflict between labour and capital. But as lands were taken, farm workers faced more and more the necessity of remaining as wage labourers. Their position became institutionalized. The First World War highlighted the conflict that was fundamental to labour-capital relations, as farm workers and farmers alike bolstered their economic positions. Labour and capital entered the post-war decade recognizing the increasing divergence of their aims. Their relationship became more overtly conflictual. Throughout this transformation, farm workers used strategies to influence the shape and rate of change in the industry and to maintain significant control over their own working lives. They responded as members of the working class, as active agents in relationships with their employers and with capitalism.
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Using union records, newspapers and relevant secondary sources this thesis examines the complex process of union organization at a local level, an area of union activity that has received little attention from Canadian labour historians. In 1938, the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers began a drive to organize workers at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company's industrial complex in Trail, British Columbia. Although the campaign took place in an era of explosive trade union growth, the attempt to establish a local in Trail was long and difficult, succeeding only in 1945. The following study analyzes the various factors which limited or aided Local 480's growth during this seven year period. The historical development of both company and union is examined along with organizational strategies, management reaction, worker response and the effect of labour legislation. This thesis argues that, while all the above factors were important, labour legislation had the greatest impact on the organization process and was instrumental in the successful completion of Local 480's campaign.
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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racism, in the form of white supremacy, shaped relations between whites and Chinese British Columbians. In resisting and accommodating to white supremacy, the Chinese were active participants, along with the members of the dominant society, in shaping these relations. White supremacy was consequently a dynamic system, one whose many parts were continually in flux, and whose central constructs—notions of "race" and British Columbia as "a White Man's province"—were largely political in nature. The thesis argues that white supremacy, as both ideology and organization, was deeply imbedded in British Columbia society. Exclusion based on "race" was incorporated into government institutions as they were remade at Confederation in an effort to enhance the power of white male property-owners. By the early twentieth century, ideological constructs of "the Chinaman" and "the Oriental" were used as foils in the creation of identities as "whites" and as "Canadians." The official public school curriculum transmitted these notions, while schools themselves organized supremacy in practice by imposing racial segregation on many Chinese students. In reaction, the Chinese created their own institutions and ideologies. While these institutions often had continuities with the culture of South China, the place of origin of most B.C. Chinese, they were primarily adaptations to the conditions of British Columbia, including the realities of racism. Chinese language schools played an especially important role in helping to create a Chinese merchant public separate from the dominant society. This public was at once the consequence of exclusion and the greatest community resource in resisting white supremacy. The study concludes by questioning the workability of contemporary anti-racist strategies which treat racism as a marginal phenomenon, or as merely a set of mistaken ideas. Instead, it suggests that such strategies must recognize that racism is one of the major structures of Canadian society.
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The subsistence-based mixed economy of Northern Canada is both productive and essential to community life and survival (Berger, 1977; Brody, 1981 ; Wenzel, 1981; Asch, 1982; Fait, 1982; Usher, 1982). Usher further states that this economy needs to be maintained for its economic value and fundamental linkages to social and cultural conditions. Most researchers state that the productivity of this economy depends on the interdependency of women's and men's work; however, within the extensive literature on this subject few writers examine the labour of women. The purpose of this thesis is to document and analyze Woods Cree women's labour within the subsistence-based mixed economy. Their labour, which is embedded in the profoundly different voice of Woods Cree culture, is best understood through detailed case studies. Oral histories were collected from three generations of Woods Cree Women aged sixteen to seventy, covering the period between 1900 and 1989. Usher's analytical framework of the anatomy of the Northern economy is a most useful model; however, it required some adjustment in order to address gender affected production. The feminist critiques of Delphy and Nicholson are used in analyzing the nature of women's labour. The research found that although Woods Cree women's labour has changed over time and space, it is still essential to the functioning and maintenance of the subsistence-based mixed economy.