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"Labor unions -- Canada -- History"
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Angels of the Workplace
In this renowned 1997 study of the clothing industry in Canada, Mercedes Steedman examines how the intricate weaving together of the meanings of class, gender, ethnicity, family, and the workplace created a job ghetto for women.
eBook
Power, politics, and principles : Mackenzie King and labour, 1935-1948
\"Set against the backdrop of the U.S. experience, Power, Politics, and Principles uses a transnational perspective to understand the passage and long term implications of a pivotal labour law in Canada By utilizing a wide array of primary materials and secondary sources, Hollander gets to the root of the policy-making process, revealing how the making of P.C. 1003 in 1944, a wartime order, that forced employers to the collective bargaining table and marked a new stage in Canadian industrial relations, involved real people with conflicting personalities and competing agendas. Each chapter of Power, Politics, and Principles begins with a quasi-fictional vignette to help the reader visualize historical context. Hollander pays particular attention to the central role that Mackenzie King played in the creation of P.C. 1003. Although most scholars describe the Prime Minister's approach to policy decisions as calculating and opportunistic, Power, Politics, and Principles argues that Mackenzie King's adherence to key principles especially his determination to preserve and enhance the cohesiveness of the country, created a more favourable legal environment in the long run for Canadian workers and their unions than a similar collective bargaining regime in the U.S.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Gompers in Canada
Samuel Gompers, the charismatic chief of the American Federation of Labor at the turn of the century, claimed to represent the interests of all workers in North America, but it was not until American corporations began to export jobs to Canada via branch plants that he became concerned with representing Canadian workers. Within a very short time the Canadian labour movement was rationalized into a segment of the American craft-union empire. In order to secure the loyalty of these new recruits, the AFI reduced the national trade-union centre of Canada, the Trades and Labor Congress, to the level of an American state federation of labour.
But Gombers failed to perceive the different political, historical, and cultural climates north of the forty-ninth parallel, and his policies inevitably generated friction. Although some Canadian workers felt sympathy for labour politicians inspired by left-wing doctrines and the social gospel movement, Gompers strove to keep Canadian socialists at bay. And although Canadian workers expressed considerable interest in governmental investigation of industrial disputes, Gompers remained inimical to such moves. Canadian labour groups desired a seat on international labour bodies, but Gompers would not allow them to speak through their own delegate. Canadian unions deemed rivals to AFL affiliates were banished. Dues were siphoned off into union treasuries in the US, and American labour leaders kept firm control over organizing efforts in Canada. Perhaps most importance, the AFL’s actions at the TLC convention of 1902—its opposition to dual unionism—helped spawn a separate labour movement in Quebec.
Yet by 1914, following nearly two decades of effort by Gompers, many Canadian workers had become his willing subjects. Though others struggled to loosen Gompers’ grip on the Canadian labour movement, Canadian trade unions appeared firmly wedded to the AFL’s continentalism.
The story of Gompers in Canada has never been properly treated: this book is a significant addition to Canadian and American labour history and to the study of American expansion. Based upon exhaustive research in the Gompers papers, the AFL-CIO archives, and in various Canadian manuscript and newspaper sources, it clearly reveals one importance aspect of the growth of American’s ‘informal’ empire at the turn of the century.
eBook
Angels of the workplace : women and the construction of gender relations in the Canadian clothing industry, 1890-1940
In this renowned 1997 study of the clothing industry in Canada, Mercedes Steedman examines how the intricate weaving together of the meanings of class, gender, ethnicity, family, and the workplace created a job ghetto for women.
eBook
Harnessing Labour Confrontation
The 1940s in Canada are crucial to the understanding of labour history in this country. Following the Depression, and sparked by the need to mobilize the workforce during the Second World War, this decade led to a restructuring of the relationship between labour and the state. In Harnessing Labour Confrontation, Peter S. McInnis examines the reformation of Canadian society and its industrial relations regime from the perspective of labour organizations and their supporters and from that of government and business. What results is a synthesis of labour and political history, which the author uses to analyze in a North American context the role of confrontation and heated debate in the formation of a national postwar compromise and in the birth of a modern welfare state.
Among the factors affecting the postwar compromises were, argues McInnis, the divided jurisdiction between federal and provincial governments, the return to gender-biased societal norms, a developing Cold War climate of national insecurity, and a promise of strong consumer purchasing power based on postwar wages and benefits packages. While some of the results of the 1940s compromise and the welfare state remains intact today, many of the political and social structures have deteriorated in the last two decades.
eBook
Labour's Dilemma
The growth of the United Auto Workers in Canada dramatically improved the lives of thousands of workers. Not only did it achieve impressive bargaining gains, but the UAW was regarded as one of the most democratic and socially progressive of the major industrial unions in North America. However, workers in the automotive sector, who constituted the largest segment of the UAW membership, witnessed blatant gender inequalities. From 1937 to 1979, UAW leaders did little to challenge these inequalities. Both the union and the workplace remained highly masculine settings in which male workers and bosses played out the gender politics of the times.
Pamela Sugiman draws on archival materials and in-depth interviews with workers and union representatives to explore the ways in which the small groups of women in southern Ontario auto plants fought for dignity, respect, and rights within this restrictive context. During the Second World War, women auto workers formed close bonds with one another - bonds that rested largely around their identification as a sex. By the late 1960s, they were drawing on a growing union consciousness, the modern women's movement, and their gender identity, to launch an organized collective struggle for sexual equality.
In describing the women's experiences, Sugiman employs the concept of a `gendered strategy.' A gendered strategy incorporates both reasoned decisions and emotional responses, calculated interests and compromises. Within a context of gender and class divisions, workers developed strategies of coping, resistance, and control. Labour's Dilemma reveals how people may be simultaneously agents and victims, compliant and resistant.
eBook
Labour Goes to War
This book examines the explosive growth of the CIO in Canada during the Second World War, showing how cultural as well as economic forces were at work in the gritty work of union organizing.
eBook