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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. 

A meeting of twenty-four journeymen printers at the York Hotel in Toronto in 1832 marked the birth of Canada’s earliest and still continuing labour organization. This case study of the printers of Toronto traces the development of the union which began as the Toronto Typographical Society. Through a close examination of this Canadian local’s relations with its eventual parent organization in the US, Zerker reveals the ‘domination’ and brings into question the advantages of an international connection. In 1866, under pressure from the American federation of printing unions, the Toronto body became an affiliate of the International Typographical Union, thus forming the crucial relationship which, as Zerker shows, came to govern every element of local decision and policy. Though the TTU achieved a pioneer victory in independently leading its members in their struggle for a shorter working day, from 1885 on the ITU directives and programs came to rule the Toronto union, causing enormous losses in membership and industry control. Zerker cites as examples the ITU program in the 1920s which resulted in a bitter strike which broke the Toronto union’s control of the labour force in the commercial sector; and, more recently, its misdirection of the printers’ strike of the Toronto newspapers in the 1960s which resulted in the expulsion of members from the workplaces that had been the preserve of the organization for nearly a century. Zerker blames the failure to respond effectively to the technology of the computer age on poor TTU management in pre-strike negotiations but, above all, on ITU intransigence, ignorance, and arrogance. In more recent years, after the end of this history, TTU membership has increased substantially and the local has been revitalized under its new leadership; the International, too, shows signs of being on the way to much-awaited reforms. This history is in many senses a microcosm of the Canadian labour movement and forms an important strand in general cultural history of Toronto. 

Using previously unexplored sources, McCormack has produced the first comprehensive examination of the early history of the radical movement in western Canada, adding an important dimension to our knowledge and understanding of Canadian labour history.

This article tests whether places with higher exposure to unionization during the 1940s, due to their pre-existing industrial composition, tended to have larger declines in wage inequality, conditional on local economic and demographic observables and regional trends. We find a strong negative correlation between exposure to unionization and changes in local inequality from 1940-50 and 1940-60. This does not appear to be underpinned by skill-specific sorting of workers or by firms leaving places with high exposure to unionization. We also find that the correlation between exposure to unionization in the 1940s and the change in inequality after 1940 persists in long-difference regressions to the end of the twentieth century.

This article analyzes the AFL-CIO’s international economic policy activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the context of the collapse of Bretton Woods monetary system. It shows that AFL-CIO economists developed a far-reaching critique of multinational corporations that encompassed not only concerns about import competition and capital flight but also charges that multinational firms contributed to the United States’ balance of payments woes. Fighting charges that union wages drove inflation, labor leaders maintained that private capital outflows and intracompany transactions exacerbated U.S. payments deficits. They therefore advocated for capital controls and import restrictions as alternatives to fiscal and monetary restraint. Their efforts to preserve the expansionary policies underpinning postwar liberalism, however, ultimately failed. By calling attention to the AFL-CIO’s failed activism in international monetary politics, the article offers a new vantage point for understanding organized labor’s declining influence in the last third of the twentieth century.

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.

This article examines the industrial relations systems constructed by Ford and United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders for the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s. Ford’s industrial relations systems extended privileges to men and male-dominated groups to the detriment of their female counterparts and women seeking employment and advancement. Systemic male privilege was integral to Ford’s operations throughout conversion to military production for World War II and reconversion back to civilian production.

From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement is the most comprehensive history ever written on the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of the United Farm Workers, the most successful farm labor union in United States history. Based on little-known sources and one-of-a-kind oral histories with many veterans of the farm worker movement, this book revises much of what we know about the UFW. Matt Garcia's gripping account of the expansion of the union's grape boycott reveals how the boycott, which UFW leader Cesar Chavez initially resisted, became the defining feature of the movement and drove the growers to sign labor contracts in 1970. Garcia vividly relates how, as the union expanded and the boycott spread across the United States, Canada, and Europe, Chavez found it more difficult to organize workers and fend off rival unions. Ultimately, the union was a victim of its own success and Chavez's growing instability. From the Jaws of Victory delves deeply into Chavez's attitudes and beliefs, and how they changed over time. Garcia also presents in-depth studies of other leaders in the UFW, including Gilbert Padilla, Marshall Ganz, Dolores Huerta, and Jerry Cohen. He introduces figures such as the co-coordinator of the boycott, Jerry Brown; the undisputed leader of the international boycott, Elaine Elinson; and Harry Kubo, the Japanese American farmer who led a successful campaign against the UFW in the mid-1970s.

The author measures the effect of unionization on productivity based on a panel of West Virginia coal mines from 1897 to 1928. Output and inputs are measured in physical terms, and most of the mines in the panel changed union status at least once, though not simultaneously, so the panel is close to ideal for measuring the effect of unionization on productivity. Fixed-effects estimates show that the union had little effect on productivity before 1914, but thereafter it had a negative effect of 5 to 10%. This negative effect was not reversed when mines were later deunionized. The author evaluates a variety of possible explanations for these results. Some evidence points to declining investment at union mines relative to nonunion mines, but the evidence is circumstantial and the direction of causality is unclear. The most plausible explanation is a sharp deterioration in labor relations at union mines after the violent Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912–1913.