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This research tested the applicability of Sylvia Walby's theoretical model of patriarchy to a case study of women working and unionizing at the T. Eaton Co. The focus was on the two time periods 1947-1952 and 1984-86 when a unionization drive was underway at Eaton's. In-depth interviewing was conducted with over ninety participants in the events. Support was found for the aspects of Walby's model that pertain to patriarchal relations within paid work. In addition, forms of women's resistance and empowerment were examined specifically in relation to the 1984 unionization events. It was found that women's political action contains components that traditional politics do not explain. Overall, the findings of this case study strongly support Walby's position that gender inequality in society as a whole cannot be understood without the concept of patriarchy (1990).

The purpose of this study was to examine class and gender relations in the Toronto printing trades during a period of intensive industrial capitalist growth between 1870 and 1914. Consistent with socialist feminism, it is argued that the experience of class cannot be comprehended without a consideration of gender relations. -- During the late nineteenth century segmentation and specialization occurred within the Toronto printing industry with technological innovations in the production process, the emergence of the daily press, and a proliferation of firms specializing in a product line or in a particular aspect of the production process. Throughout the period from 1870 to 1914 male workers dominated the Toronto printing trades. Women were segregated in those jobs socially designated as unskilled, specifically, pressfeeding, and folding, stitching, and collating in the binderies. -- The bulk of the study focuses on printing-trades workers employed at the Methodist Book and Publishing House, a large Church-owned multi-faceted printing and bookbinding establishment. An analysis of a select group of printing-trades workers derived from the firm's extant payrolls for the fiscal years 1882-83 and 1890-91, and for the calendar year 1902, and identified by occupation through linkages with the city directories, revealed a hierarchical and gender division of labour typical of the broader late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Toronto printing industry. Developing the argument that to understand fully the complex interaction of patriarchy and capitalism we must go beyond the workplace and consider the family, the household economies of the sample group of Methodist Book Room workers were analysed using linkages between the decennial census manuscripts and the municipal tax assessments. The majority of Book Room workers studied lived in subsistence-level conditions and tended to rely on the income of one or more secondary wage earners. A breadwinner wage was a reality only for comparatively few skilled male printing-trades workers. -- In the latter part of the study, the trade unionism of Toronto printing-trades workers was explored. Male unionists in Toronto Typographical Union, Local 91 successfully defended their skilled-worker status with industrial capitalist incursions and effectively excluded women compositors from membership in the local typographical union. Considerable attention was also given to the organization of bookbinders, including the formation of the short-lived Women's Bindery Union. -- The study is thus an attempt at a convergence between socialist feminist theory, and working-class and labour-history, feminist history, and family history.

During the years 1941 to 1968, issues relating to workers’ compensation in British Columbia were subjected to the unprecedented number of three royal commissions. An explanatory framework that evaluates the merits of the commissions and their recommendations, both perceived and otherwise, and the degree to which governments adopted the recommendations, is presented in this paper. The framework is designed to make use of the available relevant primary sources, particularly minutes of the commission proceedings, newspaper accounts and legislative statutes. All three of the Commissions were thorough, well-received exercises whose recommendations were almost wholly adopted by B.C. governments, though in differing time frames. The need for the second Commission, which was created a mere six years after the finish of the first, primarily arose because of rapid developments in the B.C. labour movement during the mid-1940’s. An infusion of leaders with communist ties caused it to harden demands for workers’ compensation benefits and reforms. The first Commission had been considered a success by all parties, but the context of its recommendations had changed due to the increase in labour’s militancy. This second Commission was also considered to be reasonably successful. However, dissatisfaction with a Workmen’s Compensation Board that had completely turned over shortly after the second Commission, led to demands, particularly by labour, to create another commission to review its work and procedures. Board members, at that time, were subject to long tenures and were without any formal mechanism with which to be reviewed. Critical to the success of the three Commissions was the independent, non-partisan nature of their proceedings and recommendations. Because of this, the credibility accorded to the recommendations, particularly by labour, caused the Commissions to supercede the traditional mode of cabinet or legislative committtee deliberation for public policy formation in this case. The series of Commissions ended because of satisfaction with the Workmen’s Compensation Act, a much higher turnover rate of the Board and increased strength of the provincial labour-backed New Democratic Party. Thus, the Commissions and the three B.C. Supreme Court Justices that served as the Commissioners, must go down in history has having played a significant role in the evolution of occupational safety and health policy in British Columbia.

In 1973 the Government of Canada and the ten provinces agreed to undertake jointly a complete review of Canada's social security system. The review and development of policy options was scheduled to be completed by 1975 with the implementation of chosen options to take a further two or three years. A prominent and much debated policy option with respect to income security was a guaranteed annual income. In 1974 the Government of Canada and the Province of Manitoba agreed jointly to undertake a guaranteed annual income experiment called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment. The primary research purpose of the experiment was to provide information respecting the labour supply response of the recipients of a system of guaranteed annual income payments. The experiment officially ended in March, 1979, but did not report on the labour supply response. This study examines the history and fate of the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment. Two major conclusions are drawn. The first conclusion is that the Government of Canada had decided shortly after the experiment had begun that it would not support a one-tiered guaranteed annual income program such as was being tested by the experiment. The second conclusion is that social policy research that requires the use of rigorous and complex social science methodology should be considered an important part of the normal policy-making process, but should be conducted by a research body that is independent of the initiating government(s).

Beyond Regina examines the reaction in Manitoba and Ontario to the On to Ottawa Trek, specifically in the cities the marchers would have passed through had they not been stopped in the capital of Saskatchewan: Winnipeg, Fort William and Port Arthur, Sudbury, Toronto and Ottawa. Two major studies on the Trek appeared in the 1980s, Victor Howard's We Were the Salt of the Earth and Lome A. Brown's When Freedom Was Lost. Both monographs offer copious detail on the Trekkers and their journey from Vancouver to Regina, something necessary to provide true context to the event. A national mantle is claimed for the march by the respective authors but the lack of substance in this area effectively renders the event a regional protest movement. The thesis examines in particular the extent and nature of Trek support in various Manitoba and Ontario cities. It seeks to provide a broader perspective on the On to Ottawa Trek and therein a more comprehensive portrait of the event.

This dissertation is an examination of bureaucracy, class, and ideology in the labour movement. It seeks to understand what is meant by the term labour bureaucracy and to determine the degree to which bureaucracy shaped ideology in the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council from 1889 to 1909. -- The first section is an analysis of the theoretical literature and historiography of the labour bureaucracy. As well as providing an overview of the topic, the thesis tries to formulate a different definition of the labour bureaucracy, one that focuses on the power of the bureaucrats, rather than their ideology. The second section is a study of the officials and leaders that made up the VTLC from its beginning in 1889 to the founding of the B.C. Federation of Labour twenty years later. In this section, the ideology of the council is examined to evaluate the impact of bureaucracy on the labour movement. The policies and structure of the council are studied in detail to show how the separation of the leaders from the led developed over time and to demonstrate why bureaucratic solutions - the hiring of experts, reliance on government intervention, the routinization of procedures, and the creation of labour institutions - were taken and to outline the effect they had. The conflict between labourists and socialists is examined closely to suggest first that bureaucracy is not limited to labour leaders of any single ideology, and second, that the needs of the labour movement and the demands of bureaucracy itself tended to soften ideological battles. Even with the ascension of socialists to the council in 1907-1909, continuity remained the hallmark of the labour council, in part because socialists had no particular commitment to rank-and-file control of the labour movement. Finally, the lives and class positions of the labour leaders are illustrated to try to shed some light on the ways in which bureaucracy, class, and ideology become intertwined.

This thesis is a history of the Ottawa Allied Trades and Labour Association in the years 1897 to 1922. The Association is a predecessor of the city's contemporary labour council, Ottawa and District Labour Council. In the years 1897 to 1922, the council derived its authority from its craft union membership, which was affiliated to the Dominion Trades and Labour Congress and the American Federation of Labor. Recent studies have altered traditional interpretations of the events in Canadian labour history, particularly following World War I. It has been generally accepted that the radicalism of the working-class was confined primarily to the western regions. A reinterpretation postulates that the events of 1919 were nation-wide. This thesis attempts to demonstrate that the Ottawa Allied Trades and Labour Association played a part in the working-class revolt of 1919, and that this radicalism was based upon prior experiences of collective bargaining and mobilization.

This thesis explores and categorizes the economic contribution of farm women in the Fraser Delta during the period 1900-1939. The sources were mainly oral history interviews, as well as personal diaries, local newspapers, and government documents. In the particular social and economic context in which they ran their households and raised their families, the twenty-four women whose lives were explored shared many common characteristics, but an effort was made to convey a sense of these women as individuals as well as members of a larger group....