Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario, 1900–1980 by Ian Radforth

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 921 reader to enlarge on and continue that effort through the connections to a broader history. I should also point out the remarkable role pictures play in the book. Rather than illustrating an occasional point, the 100 illustrations provide substantial additional information about the ways and places in which carpenters work, from historic houses to pile driving to concrete bridge building. Presented with little or no commentary, they strongly assist the reader’s ability to comprehend the carpenters’ history. • Laurence F. Gross Dr. Gross is a curator at the Museum of American Textile History in North Andover, Massachusetts. He is currently working on a history of the Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario, 1900—1980. By lan Radforth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Pp. x + 336; illustrations, tables (appendixes), notes, index. $C42.50 (cloth); $C17.95 (paper). Ian Radforth has turned his prizewinning York University doctoral dissertation into an outstanding account ofthe effect of mechanization on work and workers in the northern Ontario pulpwood logging industry. He describes the creation of the modern work environ­ ment—highly mechanized, capital intensive—as the outcome of strug­ gle and conflict between managerial initiatives and workers’ responses in the context of a changing labor market. The work force was not deskilled but reskilled; it emerged having more in common with ma­ chine operators and mechanics in other industries than with lumber­ jacks of earlier generations. Although Radforth’s material on union organization and ethnicity will not be of direct interest to most readers of thisjournal, his treatment of technology makes the book one which can be read with profit by all historians of modern industrial production. Like so many Canadian historians, Radforth begins with geography. The diverse, intractable terrain and species mix of the boreal forest long resisted the implementation of uniform technical solutions and preserved the value of workers’ knowledge and experience. Technical problems were highly site specific, more effectively solved by the worker with ax in hand than by forest engineers. As late as 1945 the bush was a traditional workplace, looking more as it did 100 years previ­ ously than it would thirty years hence. The impetus for change came from booming demand, a tight labor market, and competition from other producing areas with lower costs. To meet these challenges, to keep the pulp mills supplied with an inexpensive, reliable, year-round supply of logs, the industry turned TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 922 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology to a set of technological solutions, introducing mechanization on a massive scale. For the most part, this involved borrowing components from the available pool of technology, then adapting and recombining them. The creativeness of this process receives only lukewarm ac­ knowledgement from Radforth. The search for new technology had its focus in the Woodlands Section of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. The section brought competing forest companies and equipment suppliers together to pool their knowledge and find so­ lutions to their common problems. This is an important story, and Radforth tells it well, though he fails to set it adequately within the growing literature on the history of industrial research in Canada. My principal complaints about this book relate to sources. First, the University of Toronto Press must learn that a proper bibliography is not a luxury to be dispensed with in cutting costs. It is a necessary part of a scholarly work, and readers will feel its absence here. Second, Radforth has not exploited the records held by any Ontario pulp and paper firm. I researched a dissertation on the Canadian pulp and paper industry at the same time as Radforth and found the industry to be entirely cooperative. Access to such records would have added welcome balance and a fresh perspective to an otherwise thoroughly researched and well-written study. James P. Hull Dr. Hull is visiting assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. He is completing a study of the ways in which forest-products firms in Canada have managed technical knowledge. Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire. By Daniel A. Cornford...