Actualités
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NFLY and the Candy Bar Kids: Radical Youth, Popular Protest, and the Red Scare in Postwar Canada
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.
Making Space for Creativity: Cultural Initiatives of Sudbury's Mine-Mill Local 598 in the Postwar Era
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.
The Labour Companion: A bibliorgraphy of printed sources of Canadian Labour History
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.
‘What is Labour’s Stake?’: Workers and the History of Environmentalism in Alberta
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.
NOUVELLES PERSPECTIVES DE RECHERCHE ET DE DIFFUSION EN HISTOIRE DU TRAVAIL, DES MOUVEMENTS SOCIAUX ET DU CAPITALISME / NEW PERSPECTIVES ON RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN THE HISTORY OF LABOUR, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND CAPITALISM
Le programme est téléchargeable ici / Download the program here.
'Lawless' Cape Breton Miners and the Lingan strike of 1882-83
Cape Breton Island’s Sydney coalfield had been an arena of intense conflict long before the storied labour wars of the early twentieth century. With the use of untapped local sources, Don Nerbas reconstructs the Lingan strike of 1882-83 in the forthcoming issue of Labour/Le Travail.
Unionization and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
For decades, a “jobs versus environment” frame has boxed in conversations about labour and environmental policy. From the battles over owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest that pitted loggers against environmentalists to the current conflicts between fossil fuel workers and governments moving slowly toward greenhouse gas reductions, workers and their unions have been cast as obstacles to ecological progress.
Maurice Spector’s “Labour and the Law in Canada” (1932)
Maurice Spector helped create the Communist Party of Canada and served on the Executive Committee of the Communist International until he was dismissed on charges of Trotskyism. Less well known was that he was in law school when he began his career with the Communist Party, paused his studies for a decade, and returned to that project after his dismissal. He wrote a prize-winning essay in 1932, providing a rare glimpse into the state of labour law at the time from the Marxist-Leninist perspective.
Waitresses in Action: Recovering the History of Labour Feminism
Restaurant and food service workers – an estimated 1.3 million in Canada – face an uphill organizing battle. Precarious working conditions and powerful, hostile...
BC’s Forgotten Labour Daily
On May Day, 1901, District Union No. 6 of the Western Federation of Miners, began publishing the Rossland Evening World , an “advocate [of] the cause of organized labor”...
Organizing Precarious Professionals
An unfortunate reality of our time, precarious employment encompasses a vast array of occupations. Archaeologists working on contracts in Québec are precariously...