The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History ed. by Jeremy Milloy and Sangster Joan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History ed. by Jeremy Milloy and Sangster Joan James Naylor Milloy, Jeremy and Joan Sangster, eds.–The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 200 p. Discussions of violence in the workplace make one think of the latest headlines; in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the violence directed at health care workers looms large. Examples are not hard to come by. Stories of nurses being advised not to wear their scrubs on their way to their hospital shifts boggle the mind. A feature on the CBC Radio show White Coat, Black Art on the ways in which the quotidian violence in a big-city Emergency Room has been exacerbated by the multiple effects of the pandemic, and the opioid crisis, was sadly not surprising. These are, of course, “in-your-face” examples of workplace violence in a sector bearing the brunt of a combination of crises and very much under the spotlight. I was aware of the campaign by the Canadian Federation of Nurses’ Unions that declared “Violence is not part of the job” but, as they effectively acknowledge, it clearly is. Violence runs deeper in health care and far beyond. One of the contributions to this edited collection focuses on nursing: Sarah Jessup relates the story of the murder of Lori Dupont, a recovery room nurse in Windsor, Ontario, at the hands of her sexual harasser. At first glance, this is a case of intimate partner violence; when she rejected his advances, he killed her and himself. But it is very much a workplace story. The perpetrator was a doctor, and the hierarchies of hospitals are deeply entrenched and run along multiple lines of professional authority, gender, and management. What ensued, as Jessup articulately explains, was a struggle to recognize harassment and gender-based violence as an issue of workplace health and safety. We tend to look at violence as episodic and exceptional. Today, it is in health care and the pandemic. In the past, it may have been workers’ battles with police or mining disasters. But the editors and authors of this fine book explore a range of work experiences, past and present, to point out that violence pervades the world of work in many ways and for many reasons. And, to echo the nurses, it is far too often hidden or trivialized, becoming just “part of the job.” In realms which we may consider as having been particularly dangerous, such as sex work in early-nineteenth-century Montréal, violent encounters were multifarious as danger lurked, it seemed, from all directions. Mary Anne Poutanen explores how workplaces, homes, and the streets were places of danger from a range of clients, employers, authorities, and often their peers. They and other workers were embedded in a culture of violence. James Schmidt considers the violence perpetrated by workers themselves by examining Progressive Era reform schools in Iowa. He places the abuse of children within a longer history of corporal punishment where the limits of abuse were vague and shifting. As Schmidt notes, it is hard not to think of the abuse at Indian residential schools, rooted in both settler colonialism and settler notions of adult authority, and aimed at instilling, among other things, settler work habits. Chad Pearson further explores this legacy by drawing what might seem to be a tenuous connection between the antebellum wars to remove the Seminoles from Florida and the kidnapping—and forced relocation to an island near [End Page 228] Honduras!—of 13 leaders of a 1901 cigar workers’ strike in Tampa. The mastermind of the latter action was a leader of the anti-union Tampa “Citizens Committee” and historian (and enthusiast) of antebellum Florida society and the wars against the Seminoles. The language and goals of the two campaigns, 60 years apart, were remarkably similar. The West, of course, exists in American mythology as a particular place of violence and Aaron Goings’ story of Billy Gohl is fascinating. Gohl was a union leader in early-twentieth-century Grays Harbor, Washington, practising “militant, sometimes violent, forms of labour activism...