BC’s Forgotten Labour Daily
Published on:
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” in the mining and smelting district of BC’s southern interior.
In the pre-Internet era, Canadian trade unions often clamored for a daily newspaper of their own to respond to negative media coverage. New research reveals that the dream of a labor daily was realized in British Columbia more than a century ago.
Ron Verzuh, author, most recently, of Smelter Wars, explores the history of this newspaper in a forthcoming piece in Labour/le Travail. In it, Verzuh documents how the World supported Rossland miners through a bitter strike in 1900-01 and managed to survive as the region’s labour daily until 1904.
Subscribe here and look for it in Volume 92 in Fall 2023
Images
Related Articles
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.