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This thesis examines the reaction of organized labour to Quebec separatist nationalism for the period between 1960, the year of the creation of the Rassemblement pour l'independance nationale and the beginning of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and 1980, the year of the first referendum on Quebec's constitutional status. The thesis investigates four labour organizations: the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), the Federation des travailleurs et travailleuses du Quebec (FTQ), the Confederation des syndicats nationaux (CSN), and the Centrale de l'enseignement du Quebec (CEQ). It shows in which ways the positions of the four centrals have been informed by their members' national identifications and the emotional and cognitive mechanisms that resulted from these identifications.

Over the past two decades there has emerged a generalized critique of the quality of the labour supply in industrialized countries in relation to concerns about corporate profitability and national competitiveness. Frequently, the critique has focused, in whole or in part, on the so-called 'literacy' or 'basic skills' competencies of workers. This thesis examines the problematizing of workers' literacy competencies at a time when general educational attainments in Western countries have reached unprecedentedly high levels. Both broad-based and historically informed, the study focuses on the United States, Canada and England over the period of the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. The motives of the agencies and interests which have proclaimed a worker 'basic skills crisis', as well as the processes through which their claims have been disseminated, are analyzed. The ideological and material contexts in which these claims have resonated are described. The thesis concludes that the workforce basic skills 'crisis' is a socially constructed one which has little or no basis in fact. It is an issue which has had utility for a number of interests (including business, labour, educationalists and the state sector), however, and this, it is argued, accounts for the role they have taken in its social construction. The evidence presented here establishes that the workforce literacy issue has had real consequences for workers. It has operated to scapegoat sections of the working class and to further marginalize less formally qualified workers in their workplaces and in the labour market. This-the industrial relations context in which the putative workforce 'basic skills crisis' has operated-forms the principal focus of the thesis. The impacts on workers of actions stemming from the acceptance of the idea of a basic skills crisis-including increasing scrutiny of literacy and language competencies of workers and the promotion and establishment of 'basic skills' programmes of questionable value in workplaces-ought to give cause for many who have endorsed claims of a 'crisis' and embraced workplace literacy to re-evaluate their position.

The phenomenon of offshore migrant labour in Canada poses an interesting challenge to the literature dealing with unfree labour relations in capitalist societies. This thesis uses in-depth interviews with Jamaican migrant labourers in Ontario, along with supporting statistical data to further our understanding of the subjective domain of labour relations in agriculture. According to the literature The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program constitutes a system of unfree labour, and many employers in the Ontario agricultural sector benefit from this system. Jamaican migrant workers do not necessarily share this view of unfreedom. While recognising the definite restrictions as defined in the contract, these migrants accept the conditions of employment as a trade off for the opportunity of material advancement not available to them in Jamaica. This discrepancy over the definition of unfree labour reflects the disparities between the North and the South, and needs to be addressed.

This thesis examines the Paid Education Leave (PEL) program of the Canadian Autoworkers Union (CAW), fomerly the Canadian Region of the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). This four-week program takes place at the CAW Family Education Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario and potentiatly provides 90% of the CAW's members with class-based, union-centred, labour education. Interviews conducted with key CAW sources uncover PEL's histoncal roots. A chronicle of the stniggle to establish PEL is detailed in relation to the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 140 on Paid Educational Leave. Thematic oral-history interviews were conducted with six CAW Local 222 members, al1 former participants of PEL. Interviews are used to illustrate a detailed description of the program's pedagogy and curriculum. Interview respondents were Generai Motors (GM) of Canada workers located in Oshawa, Ontario. Several policy and programmatic suggestions are made, including increased understanding of, and elevated respect for, informal learning.

This thesis examines the history of female immigrant domestic labour in Canada from a socialist feminist perspective. Over the past hundred years, Canadian immigration policy with respect to domestic workers became increasingly regressive with the shift in the racial composition of foreign female domestics. The women's movement contributed to this change as gains in Canadian women's public rights did not effectively challenge the dominant social paradigm of women's roles, and so left intact the public-private divide and the sexual division of labour to which were allied biases of race and class. The women's movement thus became an unwitting participant in the formulation of regressive immigration policies which rebounded on the women's movement itself, reinforcing its internal divisions.

The 1920s is generally seen as a period of defeat for Canadian labour. With the rise of monopoly capital, strike activity and union membership steadily declined in the face of wage cuts, new technologies and corporate welfare schemes. The continental alliance of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (TLC) that, for the most part, provided labour's leadership during this crisis, proved ineffective. By 1927 a secessionist movement challenged the legitimacy of the AFL/TLC alliance. In March of that year, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railroad Employees (CBRE), gathered with the One Big Union (OBU), the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL), and communist-influenced unions, including the Mine Workers' Union of Canada and the Lumber Workers' Industrial Union, to form the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL). It is the focus of this thesis to bring the Congress front and centre and to provide an alternative interpretation of its effort to build a national labour movement in the 1920s--one that was neither opportunistic, anti-communist, nor right-wing. Instead, this thesis supports the contention that the ACCL was a counter-hegemonic, working-class initiative that aimed to improve the political representation and material conditions of the Canadian worker.

In 1924, the General Hospital at Kingston, Ontario, began a process of rationalisation, following Taylorist principles of scientific management. In concurrence with the restructuring of other N orth American hospitals, and with the advice given in professional literature, the Governors of K.G.H. secured the services of R.F. Armstrong, a civil engineer. His mandate was to facilitate the transformation of K.G.H. into an efficient, economical modem health institution which would attract not just indigent patients, but also upper-class, paying clients. Part I of this paper analyses the process by wrhich rationalisation was wreaked upon student nurses in the K.G.H. Nurse Training School, considering these women not primarily as students but as an unpaid labour force. I argue that administrators employed a combination of paternalism and scientific management in an attempt to conform student-wrorkers into an 'ideal nurse labourer', as defined by historically specific discourses of gender, class, and Canadian nation/race which converged in the image of the Nurse. Balancing this 'top-down' approach, Part II of the paper attempts to reconstruct student-workers' experiences of and responses to nursing training. Using nurses' cultural productions and oral interview's, I explore the concept of 'everyday resistance' in the contexts of the Nurses' Home and the hospital workshop, arguing that the continual supervision and surveillance endured by student-workers did not preclude successful attempts to wrrite their own script for their experience of nursing. To the contrary, nurses-in-training developed a culture of mutuality which provided them with the resources to resist and ameliorate the most repressive and totalising aspects of hospital labour and residence life. The result of this reconsideration of nursing training is an increased understanding of student nurse labourers as individuals with hopes and expectations of their own, rather than simply dutiful, obedient daughters in the hospital 'family' who accepted their subordination to the 'ethic of service'.