Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021

Abstract

Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021 David Sobel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Wayne Roberts, aged 76, passed away on 20 January 2021 after a five-month battle with leukemia. An impressive and extensive community of family, friends, and admirers were part of a collective effort to support his treatment and care. It was a testament to the many people Roberts had touched and inspired through his activism, research, and writing on food security and urban issues. His contributions to the food, environmental, and green movements were rightly recognized in the media. [End Page 13] His work in Canadian labour history also merits remembering. He belonged to a group of Canadian labour historians, influenced by E. P. Thompson and others, who sought to expand the writing of history to include culture, social movements, and class struggle. Roberts completed a master's degree in history at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, and he occasionally spoke of what an exciting and intellectually challenging environment that was. It was there that his interest and involvement in left-wing politics grew. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Toronto in 1978, with Kenneth McNaught as the supervisor. Roberts' deeply researched and interpretively venturesome dissertation on Toronto's working class in the years 1896 to 1914 remains a vital reference for the labour history of the city. His historical writing and research helped develop an explicitly class-conscious Canadian labour history, informed, in part, by his participation in left-wing activism. For much of the 1970s to the mid-1980s, Roberts was a committed Trotskyist. He was part of a group aligned with Ross Dowson that parted ways with the League for Socialist Action (lsa) in 1974, forming the Socialist League, also known as the "Forward Group," after the newspaper of the same name. Roberts served as Forward's editor beginning in 1974 and continued to do so for about a decade. As his interest in more popular journalism grew in the early 1980s, Roberts, his then partner Ellie Kirzner, and his close friends Alice Klein and Michael Hollett established the alternative newspaper Now Magazine, where Roberts would become a featured columnist. Much of Roberts' early labour history scholarship detailed and interpreted the exploitation of women and men and their struggles under capitalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He had no illusions that these struggles had somehow come to an end. I first met Roberts while an undergraduate, in 1980 at a labour history conference at McGill University called "Class and Community: Perspectives on Canada's Labour Past," where he was speaking. The presenters were an eclectic mix of practitioners, indicative of a certain tumult that the discipline was then undergoing. Roberts' paper clearly reflected the perspective of the upstarts, and his brand of history upset the academic establishment. Though the questions I raised with him after his talk were clearly those of a novice to the discipline, he took them seriously and was generous with his response. This was typical of him, as I came to know decades later. Before completing his dissertation Roberts had already published two interesting works in women's labour history, uncommon for a male historian at the time. They first appeared in a collection of essays entitled Women at Work: Ontario, 1850–1930, published by the Women's Press in 1974. His chapter with Alice Klein explored the many challenges that confronted Toronto's women working for wages at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The essay demonstrated a sensitivity and understanding of the material conditions in many occupations dominated by women in the period. [End Page 14] The contradictions that women encountered as union members were astutely noted, when Roberts and Klein observed that a 1905 column on women's work in a labour newspaper was reduced to recipe suggestions a few months later. The anthology, edited by Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith, and Bonnie Shepard, provided information about how to do labour history, with suggestions for sources and methods. This aligned with Roberts' belief that writing history should not be left to academics alone. He later contributed to many popular history projects...