Local government, the Standard Employment Relationship, and the making of Ontario’s public sector, 1945–1963

Abstract

This article examines the unionization of local government workers in Ontario during the 1940s and 1950s. While these workers played a central role in consolidating a standard employment relationship across the public sector, the advancement of collective bargaining rights, regular hours of work, and wages and benefits was fractured and spatially uneven. Bringing together theories of state formation with recent debates in labour geography, this article explores the politics of scale in the unionization of local government workers. Through the 1950s, it is argued that local government workers were able to effectively mount campaigns for recognition, develop shared bargaining capacities and establish federated labour organizations across the province, building from their embeddedness in a rapidly expanding metropolitan environment. Moreover, it is shown that the ‘scaling up’ of collective bargaining in this way provoked civic officials to establish new governance structures with the aim of containing the explosive growth of public sector unions. This entailed both the professionalization of labour relations practices and the development of more centralized administrative capacities. In this sense, it is argued that state formation through the 1950s and 1960s advanced through the efforts to normalize the demands of local government workers within a wider economy of service.