Canadian Committee on Labour History

In Labour/Le Travail issue 93, Julie Guard, author of Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-twentieth-century Canada, explores the moment in 1947 when thousands of children and youth across Canada took to the streets to protest a three-cent increase in the price of chocolate bars.  In addition to adding the youngsters’ challenge to capital and the state to the history of the popular left, this study of the event contributes to the growing literature on children and youth engaged in political protest, while their creative protest strategies offer a youthful dimension to the study of performance activism.

May 24, 2024

Labour/Le Travail's issue 93 features Elizabeth Quinlan's piece "Making Space for Creativity: Cultural Initiatives of Sudbury's Mine-Mill Local 598 in the Postwar Era." This piece has inspired the journal's cover, which is a reproduction of a lost mural commissioned by the union.  In 1956, Henry Orenstein (1918-2008) painted a 12-metre mural for Sudbury’s Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 598 hall, where it was originally installed in the basement beverage room.  Unfortunately the mural was destroyed by fire. The mural image on the cover is reproduced from slides by Ian Hodkinson, of the Art Conservation Program, Queen’s University and with the permission of the artist’s daughter, Sarah Orenstein.  The editors would like to extend special thanks to Rosemary Donegan for her efforts in obtaining high quality digital scans of these slides from her collection.

May 24, 2024

In 2019, G. Douglas Vaisey completed the second edition of The Labour Companion: A bibliography of printed sources of Canadian Labour History. This extraordinary bibliography is now available for free download as an e-book at cclh.ca.  Drawing on a wide range of printed sources from the 19th century until the late 1980s, this bibliography should be useful to anyone interested in the history or historiography of Canadian labour and working class history.

May 24, 2024

The Canadian environmental movement has long included significant engagement from organized labour, Chad Montrie, author of The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (2018), writes in the next issue of Labour/Le Travail. Montrie shows that some of the most dedicated labour environmentalists came from unions representing workers in the auto, steel, mining, chemical, and oil industries.

May 22, 2024