Search

Working at the mill had been a family affair for generations of Sturgeon Falls' mill workers, as young men followed their fathers, uncles, older broth­ers, and occasionally mothers, into the Northern Ontario mill - the town’s largest employer for more than a century. The mill’s workforce was over­whelmingly white and male, with a historic linguistic divide between largely English-speaking managers and mainly French-speaking production workers. This linguistic division of labour and the near total exclusion of Aboriginal people were remnants of industrial colonialism in the region. Within a year of the mill’s December 2002 closure, I began interviewing the former employ­ees about their experiences and these interviews continued for the next two years. During that time, efforts to reopen the mill fizzled out and it was demol­ished by the departing company. Work-life oral histories offer us a way into the shifting sands of culture and economy in this former mill town. This article explores the shifting sense of temporal and spatial proximity or distance in the plant shutdown stories told by 37 former mill workers. Several dimensions of proximity are explored such as the temporal proximity of the interview to the events being recounted, the perceived social proximity that prevailed before the mill closing, the remembered physical proximity of the mill in the narrated lives of residents, and, now, after the mill’s closure, the spectre of forced relocation or distant daily commutes to new jobs in other towns and cities. For long-service workers, employment mobility or permanent relo­cation was understood to be a last resort. These interviews make clear that forced employment mobility was a core concern to everyone we interviewed, not just those who actually relocated or commuted to jobs found elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PAPER EXAMINES THE EXPERIENCE of C.B. Wade (1906-1982), a chartered accountant and university instructor who was recruited to work for organized labour during the period of transition from wartime mobilization to postwar reconstruction at the end of the Second World War. In hiring Wade in 1944, District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America became one of the first Canadian unions to employ a research director to help address the challenges of the new age of industrial legality and advance their social democratic agenda. The paper discusses Wade's background, including his involvement in the Workers' Educational Association, and documents his contributions to the work of the coal miners' union, including the efforts to promote public ownership of the industry. In addition, the paper discusses Wade's unpublished history of the union, a manuscript that has had a long life as an underground classic. While the negotiation of the postwar compromises between labour, capital and the state gave union staff such as Wade an increasingly central role in labour relations, this was not a stable context, and the paper also considers the deepening Cold War conditions that led to the end of his employment in 1950. In the context of labour and working-class history, Wade can be associated with a relatively small cohort of politically engaged intellectuals who made lasting contributions to the research capacity of unions and to the field of labour studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER EXAMINES THE TENSION between macro level regulation and the rule breaking and rule following that happens at the workplace level. Using a comparative study of Canada, Norway, and Germany, the paper documents how long-term residential care work is regulated and organized differently depending on country, regional, and organizational contexts. We ask where each jurisdiction's staffing regulations fall on a prescription-interpretation continuum; we define prescription as a regulatory tendency to identify what to do and when and how to do it, and interpretation as a tendency to delineate what to do but not when and how to do it. In examining frontline care workers' strategies for accomplishing everyday social, health, and dining care tasks we explore how a policy-level prescriptive or interpretive regulatory approach affects the potential for promising practices to emerge on the frontlines of care work. Overall, we note the following associations: prescriptive regulatory environments tend to be accompanied by a lower ratio of professional to non-professional staff, a higher concentration of for-profit providers, a lower ratio of staff to residents and a sharper division of labour. Interpretive regulatory environments tend to have higher numbers of professionals relative to non-professionals, more limited for-profit provision, a higher ratio of staff to residents, and a more relational division of labour that enables the work to be more fluid and responsive. The implication of a prescriptive environment, such as is found in Ontario, Canada, is that frontline care workers possess less autonomy to be creative in meeting residents' needs, a tendency towards more task-oriented care and less job autonomy. The paper reveals that what matters is the type of regulation as well as the regulatory tendency towards controlling frontline care workers decision-making and decision-latitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada’s system of industrial legality has routinely limited the collective abilities of workers to strike. Under the conditions of neoliberal globalization, those limitations have intensified. Yet, in 1997, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, waged a successful strike against Pepsi-Cola Canada. In addition to defeating the company, the union also expanded workers’ collective rights through a successful constitutional challenge to restrictive common-law rules limiting secondary picketing. This paper examines the history of that strike, exploring the multifaceted strategies that the workers undertook to challenge the company, the state, and the existing law. It argues that workers were successful because they utilized tactics of civil disobedience to defend their abilities to picket. Recognizing that success, the paper is also critical of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision and its evolution of common-law torts to limit workers’ collective action. The paper concludes by arguing that the Pepsi conflict highlights the importance of civil disobedience in building workers’ movements while emphasizing the inherent limitations of constitutional challenges to further workers’ collective freedoms in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As many of the traditionally unionized sectors of the economy experience crisis, unions are turning to social unionist strategies of coalition-building and community mobilization as a means of defending jobs through external solidarity. This paper explores the politics and dynamics of the Canadian Auto Workers' (caw) organization of a union-community coalition and rally in Windsor, Ontario as a means of defending the manufacturing base. The paper contends that while Windsor's May 2007 Manufacturing Matters rally was quite successful in its short-term aims, due to the caw's strong mobilizing structures and longstanding relationships between local unions and community organizations, internal coalition dynamics and framing processes led to decisions which limited the longer-term capacities of the campaign. The coalition opted to emphasize place over class as the unifying element, to produce non-adversarial discourses and tactics so as to avoid appearing anti-business, and to marginalize more militant talk and tactics. These outcomes raise questions about both the sustainability for ongoing solidarity and mobilization amongst the Windsor working class, and the capacity of the local labour movement to articulate counter-hegemonic interpretations of economic problems and promote policy options not dominated by the needs and interests of economic and political elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the experiences of children and youth who were born into the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) during the 1920s and 1930s. It examines the priorities of the movement's parents and male leaders and their efforts to implement activities that would serve to politicize and impart a strong sense of Ukrainianness in youngsters. It also considers the ways in which young people themselves contributed to the shape of the movement. Children and youth, because of their particular positions at specific intersections of class, ethnicity, age, and gender, experienced the ULFTA in ways that were distinct from their parents. Because of the ULFTA's emphasis on Ukrainian culture, their childhoods were also significantly different from other socialist children. The movement's emphasis on Marxist-Leninism and the class struggle also divided these children from their non-socialist Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian peers. By applying an intersectional perspective to the interwar Ukrainian left, this paper also seeks to broaden our understanding of the movement's connection with the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). The ULFTA and the CPC enjoyed a consistently difficult relationship through much of this period, particularly where Ukrainian cultural expression was concerned. An examination of youngsters' activities illustrates some of the many ways in which the ULFTA leaders and rank-and-file members (including the young people themselves) resisted the CPC's attempts to control the ULFTA and its resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER PRESENTS a reinterpretation of the causes for the US Patriot movement of 1837-38, which rose up in support of the Canadian rebellion in Upper Canada (UC) initiated by William Lyon Mackenzie (the companion rebellion in Lower Canada is not considered in this paper since its causation was arguably considerably different). Most traditional treatments of this event, by US historians in particular, are stuck in narrative mode and lack convincing interpretation and analysis. The US Patriot war is usually quickly dismissed as the work of a few Anglophobes and adventurers seeking land and coin. The hypothesis advanced here suggests that the US Patriot movement and its progenitor rebellion in UC may be seen as an expression of the social class tensions growing out of the transition from a subsistence-barter/household economy and culture to the more impersonal commodity market economy - a transition that was proceeding in an uneven and combined manner on both sides of the nominal Canada/US border. Mackenzie's UC rebellion was both motivated by and encouragement to radical Democratic anti-bank forces in the US. Historians are urged to consider the Patriot movement in the larger context of class conflict and accommodation then being played out on a shared Canadian/American stage [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS CHAPTER seeks to move the discussion of labour and politics beyond the contest of political ideologies in the movement and the constraints of the liberal democratic state. To explain the different political histories of the Australian and Canadian movements we use a model with three dimensions: the changing balance between labour and politics; the different social forces that labour seeks to represent; and the different conceptions of politics that labour holds. After a discussion of the literature on labour and politics in the two countries, the paper applies this model to distinguish two periods, a formative period up to the early 1920s, in which labour entered politics. and the period from the 1920s to the 1950s when parties or governments took politics into the labour movement. The model enables us to characterize the politics of the Australian Labor Party as a form of class-based labourism, with significant moments of working-class socialism. We characterize the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party as a form of populist socialism. The paper concludes with some insights gained from using a common model in a comparative exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER examines labour process developments within Canada and Australia during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. In contrast to traditional labour process studies, which have focused upon the development of sophisticated forms of managerial control within modem industry, this comparative analysis stresses the much simpler forms of labour control that existed within Canadian and Australian rural and urban workplaces. The paper explores the reasons underlying differences in labour process developments, and argues for the need to broaden labour process analysis in order to take account of spatial and geographic variations in working life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NO PERSUASIVE ACCOUNT of labour in Australia and Canada can ignore the impact that immigration has wrought on the composition of the working class and preoccupations of workers, unions, and the varied political parties they have sponsored. Highlighting both similarities and differences between countries, the paper explores the paradoxical relationship that immigration has had with the labour movements of Australia and Canada. Although immigrants have been a critical source of union recruits, new ideas, and leaders (this being especially true for British skilled men), their presence was also long a source of concern, chauvinism, and division within predominantly white, Anglo-Celtic, and male-dominated union movements that adopted exclusionary policies, particularly regarding Asian and continental European workers. A more recent shift towards non-racist and inclusive policies unfortunately has not obliterated labour segmentation along racial and ethnic lines, especially job ghettos for immigrant women. Meanwhile, global restructuring and the loss of hard-earned union protections have increased immigrant workers' historic vulnerability. In explaining differences in the two countries -for example, Australia's greater 'success' at restricting non-white immigration before 1945 and Canada's earlier experience with a racially diverse work force - the paper cautions against easy generalizations, pointing instead to a series of historically contingent factors (such as 'accidents' of geography and differing political developments) that on some occasions led to rather different outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPERS CENTRES on the struggles over job ownership between labour and management that have been integral to the shaping and reshaping of the Canadian steel industry over the course of the 20th century. In the first phase of industry development (1900-1940s), management had virtual control over the structuring of jobs. The second phase (1940s-1970s) saw the arrival of industrial unionism and the establishment of seniority and grievance systems which gave workers employment security and, over time, a sense of job ownership. The third phase (1980s) has been a period of crisis in which steel management in Canada has embarked on a restructuring campaign -- a critical feature of which is their determination to recapture job ownership through the introduction of new technologies, job amalgamations, and the implementation of teams. If steel management succeeds in wresting job ownership back from its workers, the paper concludes, then conditions will return to the pre-union period where management created and destroyed jobs as they desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A chapter of the book "Labour/Le Travail" is presented. It explores the correspondence and internal working papers released by the Public Archives of Canada (PAC) related to the transfer of records by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). It highlights history of the RCMP materials and information about archives, security forces, Access of Information legislation, and the appeal process. An overview of the story is offered.

IN CONFRONTING THE FILTH AND DECAY of the early 20th century city, civic reformers often undertook ambitious programs that sought to not only eliminate the sources of disease from the urban environment but also to civilize urban dwellers, teaching them to live in pure and morally hygienic ways. Historical studies have tended to focus on the consumption side of this process, looking at how sanitary reformers and public health officials worked to establish fundamentally new understandings of household waste and its disposal, laying the foundation for the "throwaway" society of the 1950s and 1960s. However, they have tended to neglect the parallel efforts to fashion a new kind of city worker. Drawing on Toronto as a case study, this paper examines how the rise of a modern, scientifically managed waste regime in the early 20th century contributed to fundamentally new conceptions of civic employment, premised on the "purification" of the worker from the contaminating influence of neighbourhood-based patronage networks and an informal waste economy. I explore how efforts to expunge filth from urban space were paralleled by struggles to disentangle class from community-based solidarities in the labour process. Moreover, I explore how this contributed to the view that public workers somehow stood apart from the community as an anonymous and uniform service. I conclude by discussing the implications in how we think about city workers and their struggles today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores employers’ anti-union strategies in the Niagara Peninsula from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s in order to enhance our understanding of the nature of relations between labour and capital during the period generally described as that of the postwar compromise. Relying on such unexplored archival collections as the papers of the St. Catharines firm, Ontario Editorial Bureau, as well as the collections of the Archives of Ontario and Library and Archives Canada, the study focuses on four main union-avoid­ance strategies: the establishment of company-dominated unions, anti-union public relations campaigns, corporate welfarism, and company relocation. By illustrating the depth and endurance of Niagara employers’ opposition to unions during the period of supposed compromise between employers, workers and the state the study demonstrates that there was greater continuity than we have supposed between management views of workers’ rights during the period of the postwar compromise and the neoliberalism that character­ized subsequent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the musical culture of Kirkland Lake miners and considers one of its dimensions, as expressed by their musical practices, whether classical or pop, vocal or instrumental, performed at concerts or accompanying dances or parades. With access to the names and occupations of all the employees of two of the major mining companies in the city. Lake Shore and Wright-Hargreaves Gold Mines, we sought to determine if the miners were linked in one way or another to the different music events reported in the local paper, the Northern News, over the year of 1934. In our view, the diversity of musical practices observed could be explained by the presence of many ethnic communities in the mining workforce, and also by widely different working conditions, depending on whether a miner worked underground or at the surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

URANIUM MINERS IN ELLIOT LAKE went on a wildcat strike in 1974 to protest their occupational health concerns on the job after a spike in cancer cases. They learned that the provincial government had known of the poor working conditions causing their illnesses, but had not informed them of the dangers or acted to improve their situation. As a result of union and political pressure, the Ontario government created the Ham Commission to investigate and make recommendations. Its hearings revealed the industry's scandalous conditions, and its report eventually resulted in the Ontario Health and Safety (OHS) Act in Ontario. It did not cover the miners until 1984, so they worked through their internal health and safety committees to gain improvements in the work environment. Others have discussed this situation in relation to the emergence of the OHS and environmental movements. This paper discusses the events in terms of the mine owners' attitudes towards their employees, the industry's relationship to governments, and the impact of the uranium mining industry (part of the nuclear industry) on the local community and environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines diversity management in a multinational forest company in Saskatchewan, Canada. Drawing on insights from intersectionality theory, it highlights how white and Aboriginal women's experiences inform our understanding of workplace practices to include marginalized groups. Scholars in organization studies have critiqued diversity management for how its underlying individualism translates into a narrow understanding of difference. This critique is complicated by demonstrating how women's experiences and representations of diversity management were uneven. Women's portrayals of diversity management were structured by their gender, class, and by whether they were white or Aboriginal. Women's experiences and representations extend critiques of diversity management by uncovering some of the ways that corporate liberal ideology works through local constructions of difference. Since diversity management did not challenge white women's beliefs of meritocracy, it helped to re-inscribe racism towards Aboriginal peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the rise of class politics in Toronto, Ontario in the era around the Rebellion of 1837. In particular, the introduction of "gentlemanly capitalism" into Upper Canada by British financiers and corporations is discussed, including their creation of what are described as three "fictitious commodities": money, land, and labor. Topics discussed include the introduction of paper money, the rise of chartered corporations as an extension of state power, the creation of a land market, and the effects of these developments on the relations of production for farmers and tradesmen.

SINCE THE MID-1990'S, Canada and Quebec have initiated important changes to their system of social protection; the objectives of the reforms were to control public expenditure or attain zero deficit, improve the efficiency of social policies, particularly in relation to employment incentives, and guarantee acceptable living conditions. Such objectives were conveyed by a restructuring of several social protection mechanisms, achieved by reconfiguring protection parameters and activating the same social expenditure. To understand this restructuring, the article analyses the changes introduced in certain income security mechanisms including unemployment insurance, universal family allowance and welfare, at both the Federal and Quebec levels. To explain this approach, the paper is divided into three parts: the first on the reconfiguration of each mechanism, the second on the activation of social expenditure and the third introducing the elements of analysis towards this recent restructuring of social policies. The subject matter is dominated by a fundamental question, that of knowing whether the reforms convey a neo-liberal change of policy in the disengagement of the state and erosion of social rights or whether they convey a reorganization, a modification of the framework as a result of change of paradigm or reference in a socially active state or as a form of social investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon the payroll and personnel files from two mining companies in Kirkland Take, the Take Shore Gold Mines and the Wright-Hargreaves Mines, this paper examines the significance of absences from work during the years 1927 to 1943. Miners, the best paid industrial workers in Canada, were able to take advantage of the organization of work that included overtime and bonus. Taking in extra money while enjoying high salaries, miners could indulge in the practice of occasional absenteeism in the form of unpaid vacations and extended Sunday that amounted to creating the "weekend." The pattern of absenteeism differed according to the mine, the occupation and the nature of the work, whether it was surface or underground. The practice, however, was in place well before the adoption of the two weeks' paid vacation in Ontario in 1944 and the 40-hour workweek at the beginning of the 1950s. Absenteeism was not only a by-product of accidents, industrial disease or lay-offs. Miners could stay home simply because they wanted free time and freedom from owners and bosses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BETWEEN 1890 AND 1940 Canada's three largest department stores -- Eaton's Simpson's, and the Hudson's Bay Company -- developed a multifacted system of employee commodification. Not only did they encourage their employees to become avid consumers, so did they market their employees' activities, interests, and bodies. They undertook these commodiyfing gestures in an attempt to extract value from their workforces. Investigating the rise and operation of commodification at these major retailers, this paper offers new insights into corporate management systems, demonstrates that commodification had negative consequences for employees, and provides fresh perspectives on 20th-century consumer capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TRADE UNIONS have dealt with the thorny issue of layoffs since their formation, but relatively little has been written on the topic of union strategies for surviving large-scale redundancies. This paper examines these strategies in an industry that is all too familiar with massive layoffs: railroading. An analysis of union responses to job losses presupposes an understanding of the factors underlying managerial decisions about staff reduction. We argue that the nature of "downsizing" has changed considerably in the last 40 years. In industries such as railroading, managers were formerly preoccupied with labour-saving technology. As such, unions struggled for a significant voice and co-determinative role in the introduction of new machinery. In Canada, unions came close to obtaining such a role through the recommendations of the Freedman Report. Following their defeat in acquiring a major role in determining issues of technological change, railway unions focused on winning employment security provisions in their contracts. However, managers would view employment security as an anomaly when they turned to organizational change to increase productivity. More recently, older railway unions and newer union entrants to the industry have experienced tactical disagreements over how to confront the offensive against employment security in railroading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVER THE LAST FEW years, the activities of minimum wage commissions in the western provinces and in Ontario have been the subject of several historical studies. Inspired by these projects, this paper examines the work of the Quebec Women's Minimum Wage Commission, from its inception in 1925 to its dismantling in 1937. After giving reasons which forced the Quebec government to legislate on this issue, the author presents the position of international and catholic unions on women in the work force. In his analysis of the operating mode of the commission and, more precisely, his critical evaluation of its mechanism for enforcing the law, the author concludes that as with the other commissions across Canada, the Quebec Women's Minimum Wage Commission would not have allowed wage increases for women. In a socio-economic context where women on average made half of the salary of men, the decision to use the minimum wage as stool to fight the abuse of the capitalist system had the major consequence of keeping salaries low. In fact, the low rate of the minimum wage agreed to by the commission upheld the principle of pay inequity by gender, thus reflecting the dominant ideology of the era during which the work of women was considered marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN AUGUST 1964, the souther Ontario local 523 of the United Electrical and Radio Machine Workers led some 450 female auto-parts workers onto the picket-line. A year later, the same union local led over 1,200 male steelworkers in a strike against the Steel Company of Canada. In both cases, Italian immigrants joined with their non-Italian co-workers in a show of class solidarity. Italian men framed their decision to strike in terms of a manly duty as the family's decision maker and breadwinner; Italian women assumed the role of aggressive labour militant with relative equanimity, while the more outwardly militant Italian men expressed considerable personal uncertainty and fear even while they engaged in a public display of cross-ethnic class solidary. The paper explores how gender, class and ethnicity interact to influence the dynamics of labour militancy in the two strikes, though it also gives due consideration to the structural factors that helped to determine the outcome of both strikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to identify and explain the main differences in the structures and strategies of the national union movements in Australia and Canada during the 20th century. Parallel historical narratives reveal that the differences between the two union movements ebbed and waned. They were most similar to each other in the 19th century and after the 1960s, while there was more convincing evidence of divergence in the intennediate period. Following Ross Martin, the explanation offered for these trends emphasises the relationships between unions, political parties and the state. The earlier growth of mass unionism and the political strategies adopted in Australia after their defeats in the 1890s produced more sympathetic state policies (specifically compulsory arbitration from around the turn of the century), which allowed Australian unions to prosper in ways which Canadian unions did not begin to enjoy until the 1940s. At the same time, differences in the types of state policies in the two countries subsequently affected both the structure of unions, Canadian unions being more fragmented at national level than their Australian counterparts, and the strategies they employed, Canadian unions relying more on decentralized collective bargaining compared to the more centralized arbitration approach of Australian unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article from the book "Labour/Le Travail," the author replies to Martin Glaberman's criticism of his paper "Strikes and Class Consciousness" in the Fall 1994 issue. The author recognizes a perspective on the question of class consciousness provided by Glaberman. He sees affinity between the conceptions of class consciousness introduced by Glaberman and Georg Lukács. He also stresses his opinion on the Canadian socialist movement's need for the contributions of activist workers.

AT THE TURN of the century, the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches of the Canadian state responded to the labour conflicts associated with the second industrial revolution by simultaneously expanding both their coercive and their facilitative roles. This paper examines one aspect of this development, the rise of the labour injunction, through a study of a series of strikes conducted chiefly by metal workers in south central Ontario between 1900 and 1914. In addition to retrieving the largely forgotten genealogy of a body of law that continues to play an important role in regulating and containing trade union activity, the study contributes insights into debates raging among labour historians regarding the role and significance of state institutions and public discourse in determining the trajectory and fate of organized labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DURING THE 1930S the Communist Party of Canada organized and promoted the working-class struggle against conditions resulting from the Depression. And while some have argued that the state's intelligence community paid little attention to the efforts of the communists between the wars, the evidence reveals a major operation on the part of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to watch and suppress Commu- nist Pasty activities. By tracing the involvement of World War I veteran and Communist Party activist, Stewart O'Neil, in four radical movements - the Workers Ex-Servicemen's League, the On-to-Ottawa trek, the workers' theatre movement, and the Spanish Civil War- this paper demonstrates the extent of, and the tactics used by the RCMP in its surveillance and suppression of these radical movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER EXAMINES how women fared in the Canadian unemployment insurance scheme from the end of the World War II until the early 1960s. The implementation of UI in this period reinforced women's marginal economic position, as they were channelled into low-wage Sectors and their access to income security benefits limited. The tatter resulted, in particular, from a special UI regulation for married women, in effect from 1950 to 1957. The eventual revocation of this regulation can be attributed to changes in women's labour force participation, in their political representation in women's organizations and trade unions, and in attitudes concerning the proper role for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PAPER EXAMINES the uses of sedition law in Upper Canada. Largely neglected by historians, sedition prosecutions were frequently resorted to by the government between the 1790s and the 1820s, and are suggestive of larger patterns in the Canadian experience of dissent and national security measures. The essay focuses on the series of eases connected to the Gourlay affair as the best illustrations of the various facets of sedition law in the province. The availability and use of sedition law by the government to regulate provincial polities, and in particular, to delineate the loyal community and its enemies, was contested, sometimes successfully, by opposition leaders. The formal claims of the legal system, while helping to legitimate the exercise of power, also limited the repression to some extent. The cases brought to the fore the tension between the rule of law and discretionary power, played out in terms of issues about executive control over criminal prosecutions, jury selection and the scope fo the jury's verdict, and judicial independence. These contested issues appear to have had some degree of broader public engagement based on popular understandings of the British constitution. The sedition eases not only suggest the importance of law in the exercise of authority, but also the importance of the courts as a site of oppositional struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the origins of Canada's labour policy during the first years of this century. It explains why the Canadian government rejected arbitration as the chief means of settling labour disputes, adopting conciliation instead. This choice lies at the foundation of Canadian labour law: governments since that time have sought to dampen industrial conflict by pushing the parties to compromise; they have generally balked at imposing specific terms of employment. The argument proceeds in three stages. It first reviews the formation of Canadian labour policy during the years 1900 to 1907. It then identifies the specific reasons for the government's rejection of arbitration. Finally, it suggests structural characteristics of the Canadian political economy which favoured the choice of conciliation over arbitration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

URBAN TELEGRAPH OFFICES in the early twentieth century employed both women and men as telegraph operators. The fact that both sexes worked together in this skilled occupation makes telegraphy an interesting case for the study of links between gender and skill. Through an examination of the labour process and the telegraph operators' craft culture, this paper describes how the connection between masculinity and skill was established. It is suggested that, while Morse operating provided conditions in which that link was questioned, technological change during World War I helped create a more exaggerated gender division of labour and a newly-defined, fortified link between masculinity and ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN THIS PAPER, we Construct au index of the "cost of job loss" — defined as the income that a "representative worker" would lose upon being dismissed or laid off — in Canada between 1953 and 1985. Since this measure captures the monetary cost of unemployment, it is superior to the aggregate unemployment rate as an indicator of the relative bargaining power of capital and labour. Changes in the distribution of income between capital and labour are then considered. It is argued that with the decline in the cost of job loss between 1962 and 1973, the relative bargaining power of workers increased, and real wages rose accordingly. Subsequently, the cost of job loss has risen dramatically and real wages have fallen as capital has sought to restore conditions for rapid rates of accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE RADICALISM of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early 20th century placed it outside of the dominant, contemporary social ideology. At the same time, there were large numbers of unskilled, migrant, and largely immigrant workers employed in seasonal, labour-intensive industries, whose social and economic marginalization made them receptive to the IWW's radicalism, while the IWW was prepared for the radical step of attempting to organize them. This paper is a study of the IWW's efforts to organize the unemployed of Edmonton and Calgary during the depression of 1913-1915: most were transient and unskilled; many had just arrived from railway construction camps in the interior where the IWW had led massive strikes. The tactics used in the struggle included large demonstrations, the invasion of churches, and refusals to pay for restaurant meals. But the special nature of unemployment — which was caused by the economic system, threatened the men's integrity as workers, but was dealt with by the State — allows a careful examination of the practical effects of the IWW's ideology. Other Canadian cities saw protests by the unemployed, but only the IWW in Alberta asked for work at the best going rate for general labour, 30 cents an hour, and if they could not get that they demanded free food and accommodation. They tried to preserve the men's integrity as labourers, based on a belief that unemployment was not an inevitable experience to be passively endured, but a nefarious consequence of capitalism to be actively resisted. The IWW also fostered an inter-ethnic solidarity founded on a right to work, "regardless of race, color or nationality." However, the IWW's efforts also took place within very narrowly circumscribed limits: the workers they represented had little economic bargaining power and less still in a time of unemployment. when they were dependent on urban political authorities to whom most had no other connection. Their political force was only equal to their threat to public order and hungry men were no match for the police. Moreover, responsibility for their relief was thrust onto municipalities which could barely afford to care for the resident unemployed. In the end, the difficulty of achieving even short-term material gains must have discouraged most workers and doomed the organization to instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine the extent to which the writing of the history of both women and of the Canadian working class has converged over the last ten years, to suggest other ways in which integration of the two could be sought, and also to suggest some basic conflicts between the paradigms of each which point to areas where integration seems unlikely. It argues that if the goal of writing a history of the totality of the working class is a shared one, areas of Intersection between the two fields must be consciously sought out. New ways of integrating the history of women and of the working class must be sought. For a start, this requires a reconceptualization of the way we define the working class and work, examination of the processes of class reproduction, and acknowledgement of the importance of examining how gender definitions are transmitted, shaped and reshaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TEACHERS HAVE BEEN left out of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labour history just as they have been ignored, as workers, in the history of education. This paper investigates themes in the history of elementary public school teachers' work in Quebec and Ontario during the period when state school systems were being put in place and public teaching forces were becoming predominantly female. During this period teachers contended with the introduction of new subjects and methods, the introduction of increasing amounts of paperwork, and a growing insistence on discipline and uniformity in increasingly hierarchical work places. In addition they had to deal with unhealthy working conditions and conflicts over who was responsible for the upkeep and physical improvement of schools. Although, by the turn of the century, increasing workloads, difficult working conditions, and low pay had pushed urban women teachers to form single-sex protective associations, most schoolmistresses failed to identify with other organized workers. Neither self-identified workers, nor the professionals they aspired to be, they began to understand one major source of their problematic status when they perceived that this derived, in large part, from their Status as women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War II, the government of Canada sought to prevent strikes primarily through the use of "compulsory conciliation:" in specified industries, strikes and lockouts were prohibited until a government-sponsored hoard had investigated the dispute and delivered its report. This paper examines the operation of that regime during the war years. It highlights the tension between two alternative views of the boards' function (adjudication and mediation), indicates how the government manipulated the conciliation process in order to prevent or delay strikes, discusses briefly the reasons invoked by boards in their judgemental and demonstrates the frustration arising from the government's reluctance to prescribe clear norms of industrial conduct. In the turbulent wartime economy, compulsory conciliation failed to achieve the level of industrial peace demanded of it. Eventually, mandatory wage controls and a labour code modeled on the American Wagner Act were adopted, restricting the scope of the conciliation regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER EXAMINES two basic conceptual flaws in H. Clare Pentland's influential history of the early Canadian working class, Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650-1 850. First, Pentland's eclectic use of Marxist, staples thesis, and Weberian approaches makes for a fundamentally incoherent treatment of the subject. Second, focusing on "labour" (that is, waged labour) and "capital," Pentland neglects the central features of Canada's pre-capitalist social formations: features such as the household economy of production and direct consumption, which had little to do with waged labour or capital. Because his understanding of pre-capitalist society is so defective, Pentland is unable to deal adequately with the transition to capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the contributors of the journal "Labour/Le Travail." It says that Hugh Grant is a professor in the Economics Department of the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. It states that the dissertation paper of Steven Tufts, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the York University in Ontario, focuses on contemporary hotel workers and their unions in Toronto.