Canadian Labour History Research Articles

Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021

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...

Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle ed. by Graphic History Collective

Reviewed by: Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle ed. by Graphic History Collective Candida Rifkind Graphic History Collective, ed., Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle (Toronto: Between the Lines 2016) Comics and the labour movement have a long and entwined history that could begin with 18th-century satiric and editorial cartoons. Even if we take the definition of comics to be multi-panel sequences rather than single panel images, there is still a century of material for contemporary cartoonists to cite. One branch of this tradition is strip cartoons that poke fun at those who have not yet come to class consciousness, such as the 1910s Industrial Workers of the World Mr. Block series by Ernest Riebe in The Industrial Worker. Another branch is orientation comics produced to teach new workers about their unions and workplace issues. A third important type of labour comic is devoted to commemorating important moments in labour history. No less educational than satiric or orientation comics, contemporary labour history comics tend to also have close aesthetic ties to the radical traditions in alternative, underground, and indie comics pioneered by Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb in the 1960s. They often eschew the regular panel grids and realistic styles of mainstream comics for more fluid, disruptive layouts and expression-istic caricatures that echo the woodcut tradition of early-20th century proletarian art, pamphlets, and posters. This is the context for the nine short Canadian labour history comics collected in the Graphic History Collective's (ghc) anthology, Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle. As the editorial collective explain in the Introduction, in the early 2000s the ghc received Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funding to create accessible materials to raise awareness of Canadian working-class history. The first collaborative work they published was May Day: A Graphic History of Protest (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012). Following its success, the ghc solicited proposals from new cartoonists for short comics for website and potentially print publication. To their credit, the ghc applied for all available funding to provide the artists with at least an honorarium, and there was clearly an effort to include female cartoonists in a field traditionally dominated by men. Guided by Paul Buhle's and Howard Zinn's commitments to popular history as a politically transformative tool, the ghc seeks to reclaim comics as a working-class art form that can inspire hope. The final product is this volume of Canadian labour history comics that tell inspiring, although not always politically successful, stories of 20th-century working-class organizing that includes Indigenous, feminist, and immigrant worker struggles. Brief introductions by labour historians and organizers precede each of the comics, and Acknowledgements and Notes appear at the end of each chapter to cite sources and suggest further reading. Members of the ghc contributed to the writing of many of the chapters. [End Page 255] Various combinations of Sean Carleton, Julia Smith, and Robin Folvik co-wrote five of the nine comics, two are illustrated and written by a single artist, and two are based on the words of historical figures themselves. There is quite a lot of variation between these black-and-white comics. The first chapter, "Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Canada, 1880–1900," uses Sam Bradd's sketchy cartooning style and plenty of typed text by Carleton, Smith, and Folvik to tell this story of a movement that, while flawed, is still inspiring. The same team collaborated on Chapter 6, "Madeleine Parent: A Life of Struggle and Solidarity." This comic reveals how Parent's lifelong commitment to labour and feminist issues charted some of the most important struggles of the 20th century. One of the most visually interesting and lesser known stories appears in Chapter 2, "Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land: Indigenous Labour on Burrard Inlet." Illustrator Tania Willard (Secwapemc Nation) and co-writers Folvik and Carleton focus on the 1910s and 1920s struggles of Squamish longshoremen and the organization of Indigenous workers on Vancouver's waterfront, ending with today's fight by the Coast Salish to protect the land and sea. This sequence is...

Primary Canadian Labour History Resources at York University: The Ray Stevenson Fonds d’Archives

Primary Canadian Labour History Resources at York University: The Ray Stevenson Fonds d’Archives

Some Millennial Reflections on the State of Canadian Labour History

The suprise of being invited to comment on the state of Canadian labour history was exceeded by the honour. The explosive early growth of the field in the 1970s, and its domination by the team that created Labour/Le Travail, has concealed stasis and even a decline in the past decade, a harsh economic climate sent the paths of the labour movement and of younger historians in unexpected directions. Historians who believed they got closer to the present by understanding the past might reflect on misjudgments as well as successes. Resume La suprise d'etre invite a donner des commentaires sur l'histoire de la classe ouvriere canadienne ete depassee par l'honneur. Le domaine etait en pleine croissance au debut des annees 1970, et sa domination par l'equipe qui a cree Labour/Le Travail, a cache la stase et meme un declin au cours de la derniere decennie, en meme temps qu'un climat economique feroce envoyait les chemins du mouvement syndical et des jeunes historiens dans des directions imprevues. Les historiens qui croyaient se rapprocher du present en comprenant le passe pourraient reflechir sur les jugements mal fondes ainsi que sur les oeuvres reussies.

Postscript: Comparative Research and the 'New World Order'

I SHOULD STATE at the outset that I am not a specialist on either Canada or Australia and most of what little I know about their respective labour histories I learned from reading this volume. I do have an interest in historical comparisons, however, and like the contributors to this volume I have engaged in comparison of the labour histories of former European colonies which share a common cultural and institutional legacy inherited from a single imperial power. My work has focused on Spanish America and has included comparative study of the labour movement of the one country in that region, Argentina, whose history has occasionally been the subject of formal comparisons with Canada and Australia. In this short postscript I first try to describe in very broad outline what I, as a non-specialist, take away from the reading of this detailed comparison of Australian and Canadian labour history. I then comment briefly on what my own experience with Latin American material might contribute to thinking about the Australian and Canadian comparison presented here. I end with a short statement that re-emphasizes the virtues of comparative research, especially among historians, and stresses the timeliness and utility of the comparative method adopted by the team of researchers who brought this study to completion. The aim of this postscript, in short, is to present one view of the accomplishments of the volume and to suggest some of the many ways this comparative project in particular, and comparative labour history more generally, might proceed in the future.

The Mill: A Worker's Memoir of the 1930s and 1940s

DURINGTHE LAST DECADE students of Canadian labour history have benefited from a proliferation of working-class memoirs and oral biographies. In the main, this genre has been concerned with worker activists whose political commitments have featured at least as prominently as their working lives. ' Alfred Edwards' The Mill' is written from the perspective of a left-leaning but politically unaligned rank-andfile worker. Its focus is the workplace and the craft of silk knitting as practised in the fully-fashioned hosiery mills of southern Ontario. Although The Mill' cannot be considered representative or typical (since the very act of producing a workingclass memoir marks out the producer as an uncommon common man), it provides

Adult Education and Union Education: Aspects of English Canadian Cultural History in the 20th Century

THE UNION MOVEMENT IN CANADA is under siege in the 1990s, according to its leaders. The attitude of the community toward unions is said to be negative. Understanding of the purposes served by unions, let alone sympathy for or even interest in the broader social goals of the movement is said to be at an all-tune low. How did Canada reach such a state? This paper addresses such questions within the context of the adult education movement and of union-sponsored educational and communication activities. In doing so, it defines adult education as the study of intentional forms of education (rather than the education of adults, which would encompass all of life itself), and, thus, examines formal attempts to transmit knowledge and skills and attitudes in a variety of sites. It also examines union-run activities in education as well as a few of the movement's attempts to establish a communications and public relations program. By sketching three identifiable aspects of recent Canadian labour history,

Australian Canadian Labour History Conference

Australian Canadian Labour History Conference

Sex, Court Records, and Labour History

COURT RECORDS have proven valuable in researching and writing the history of numerous aspects of the past. Recently, feminist historians have used court records to explore a variety of subjects, including the history of women's crime and the historical meanings and experience of rape and heterosexual conflict Court records are also the primary source I have used to document the making of homosexual subcultures and identities in turn-of-the-century Ontario. In what follows, I want to draw attention to one particular, relatively-unknown set of court records, housed at the Archives of Ontario: the Crown attorney prosecution case files. I want to highlight the potential of these records as a source for Canadian labour history.

H.C. Pentland and Continuing Education at the University of Manitoba: Teaching Labour History to Trade Unionists

HISTORY TEACHERS in Canadian universities spend very little time at professional meetings discussing die design of their courses. This is true of most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Scholars in these subjects rarely investigate formally why one course seems to have considerable impact upon students and another does not. Nor do they debate the long-term contributions of various types of course and program to a student's development. At the University of Manitoba, where numerous workshops consider techniques of teaching, the content and scope of the courses are rarely addressed. The conventional approach to course design stems from a discipline-centred concern to explain a field rather than from an attempt to fulfill some other definition of a student's needs. Is this appropriate? In order to consider this question, I have organized this paper around three subjects: the first concerns the Manitoba Federation of Labour-University of Manitoba certificate program and the students who participate in it; the second reports on some interviews I conducted with several graduates as a means of assessing the program and its distinctive labour history course designed by the late Clare Pentland; third, in view of the striking response of the students to my questions, I would like to comment on the content and purpose of such a labour history course within the broader context of continuing education and Canadian labour history. The Manitoba Federation of Labour — University of Manitoba Three-Year Certificate Program is now 30 years old. Each year, a diverse group of about twelve new students commences its studies, one three-hour session per week at Winnipeg's Union Centre, two classes per year, mree years to completion, with the

KEALEY, Gregory S. et Greg PATMORE, Canadian and Australian Labour History. Towards a Comparative Perspective. St John's and Sydney, Canadian Committee on Canadian Labour History and Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1990. 141 p. SWERDLOW, Max, Brother Max: Labour Organizer and Educator. St. John's, Canadian Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1990. 129 p.

KEALEY, Gregory S. et Greg PATMORE, Canadian and Australian Labour History. Towards a Comparative Perspective. St John's and Sydney, Canadian Committee on Canadian Labour History and Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1990. 141 p. / SWERDLOW, Max, Brother Max: Labour Organizer and Educator. St. John's, Canadian Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1990. 129 p.. Un article de la revue Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française (Volume 45, numéro 1, été 1991, p. 3-174) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Class, Community, and the Labor Movement in Wales and Canada, 1890–1930

On the face of it, Canada and Wales would appear to be unlikely companions in a comparative study; the discrepancies in scale, geography, location, ethnic ity, and culture suggests that any comparison is likely to be superficial and contrived. Yet over recent years, there have been growing links between Wales and Canada, even though relatively few people have migrated in either direc tion. In some measure, this is due to the proselytizing work of the Canadian Studies in Wales Group (CSWG), an interdisciplinary body that was formed in 1983 and has been energetically organizing conferences and seminars and pub lishing pamphlets and reports. On the other side of the ocean, too, there are active labor history societies. The Committee on Canadian Labour History and its journal, Labour/Le Travail, will be well known to readers of IL WCH, as they are in Wales. The impressive output of books and articles, the energy with which the Canadians have sought to construct their historiography, and the extent of their international contacts, have long been admired in Wales. Llafur, the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, was formed in 1971 and its journal, Llafur (the Welsh word for labor), was first published in the following year. Unlike most labor history societies in Britain, Llafur has always maintained strong links with the trade-union movement. Its committee contains trade unionists as well as academics, while the program of day schools, workshops, and the highly successful residential Easter School have ensured a wide participation by the seven hundred members in the work of the society. The suggestion for a joint conference arose when the editors of Llafur and Labour/Le Travail, Deian Hopkin and Greg Kealey, happened to meet in Ger many in 1985 as members of Dirk Hoerder's project on working-class immi grant culture in the United States. The idea took root when Denis Balsom, the enterprising treasurer of the CSWG, offered to find pump-priming funds (always a major problem in Thatcher's United Kingdom). The objectives of the symposium, held at Gregynog Hall in Newtown, Mid Wales, were twofold. Clearly, we sought to create a bridge between two orga nizations that pursued a similar task?the encouragement of an awareness of the historical dimensions of working-class consciousness. More specifically, the symposium sought to explore the factors common to two countries very

Canadian Labour History: Selected Readings

Canadian Labour History: Selected Readings

CHERWINSKI, W. J. C. et Gregory S. KEALEY, eds., Lectures in Canadian Labour and Working-Class History. Toronto, Committee on Canadian Labour History and New Hogtown Press, 1985. 198 p.

CHERWINSKI, W. J. C. et Gregory S. KEALEY, eds., Lectures in Canadian Labour and Working-Class History. Toronto, Committee on Canadian Labour History and New Hogtown Press, 1985. 198 p.. Un article de la revue Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française (Volume 40, numéro 3, hiver 1987, p. 339-494) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Three Faces of Canadian Labour History

The Three Faces of Canadian Labour History

First British Commonwealth Labour History Conference

The first conference on the labour history of the British Commonwealth was held in England in September 1981. Its success opens the way to further international meetings in which Australian labour historians will take part. About 40 papers were presented: 15 from Britain, 12 from Australia, two from New Zealand, nine from Canada, and a few others. Hence it was a major event in labour history, even in the present flourishing state of the study. In particular the substantial contributions from Australia and Canada as well as Britain made it a balanced international gathering which could explore or at least discover similarities and differences over wide areas. A conference of this size and novelty did not come about easily. The preparatory work occupied three years in three continents, beginning tenta tively, continuing hopefully, all the while constrained by the slender resources of the labour history societies. Some $8,000, for example, had to be found for the essential expenses of the meeting. Most of this came from Britain and Canada through the efforts of Professor Royden Harrison of Warwick University, Dr. Henry Katz, International Secretary of the British Society and Professor Ross McCormack, Chairman of the Committee on Canadian Labour History. From Australia we are grateful to the Herbert Vere Evatt Memorial Foundation which gave money when it was urgently needed. The organisers had to begin by designating themes and soliciting papers. Since the response could not be predicted the original themes were necessarily broad: historiography of labour; trade unionism; work groups common to all countries; labour parties, social democracy, political movements of the working class; immigrants. Most of the subjects invited attention to British origins and were familiar in that work had been done and was continuing on them. This served its purpose of eliciting a good degree of interest in both Australia and Canada and from those who first responded a sufficient number were eventually able to attend. In final form the subjects divided into eight groups: historiography; trade unionism; coal miners; other work groups; workers' control of the labour process; earlier and later social democracy; labour, racism and white settlement. In the historiography section two Australian papers were delivered on labour history and social history. The coal miners section was one of the most successful because direct comparisons arose and the British origin of the miners provided a common background. It included two papers from Australia and one from New Zealand. Australia and New Zealand were

The Labour Companion: A Bibliography of Canadian Labour History, Based on Materials Printed from 1950 to 1975, compiled by G. Douglas Vaisey with the assistance of John Battye, Marie De Youne and Gregory S. Kealy, Halifax, Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1980, 128 pp.

The Labour Companion: A Bibliography of Canadian Labour History, Based on Materials Printed from 1950 to 1975, compiled by G. Douglas Vaisey with the assistance of John Battye, Marie De Youne and Gregory S. Kealy, Halifax, Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1980, 128 pp.. Un article de la revue Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations (Volume 37, numéro 1, 1982, p. 3-260) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

A Note on the Toronto Printers' Strike, 1872

The Toronto printers' strike of 1872 stands out as one of the most impor tant events in Canadian labour history, and the story has already been told from several different perspectives. Two decades ago the biographers of Macdonald and Brown presented it from the viewpoint of their protagonists, while Bernard Ostry placed the episode in the context of Grit and Tory politics in the 1870s. More recently Sally Zerker has covered some of the same ground, but from the standpoint of the Toronto printers' union. John Battye treats the strike in relation to the Nine-Hours movement in central Canada, while Greg Kealey interprets it as part and parcel of an emergent working-class consciousness in the Queen City.1 None of these authors has cited the letter reprinted below, a recollection by one of the major participants in the strike which was composed some 35 years after the event. John Armstrong, a leader of the Toronto Typographical Union and later president of the International Typographical Union, was closely affiliated with the Conservative party. After the strike he served as president of the Toronto Trades and Labour Council, and Macdonald appointed him in the 1880s to the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital. Still later he became secretary of the Ontario Labor Bureau, where he was working when this letter was written. He sent it to Edmund Bristol in response to a telegraphed request, but unfortunately the exact nature and purpose of Bristol's query is not known. Bristol, a well-known Toronto lawyer and Conservative party supporter, had succeeded E.F. Clarke as MP for the Toronto Centre riding in 1905.2 Armstrong's letter to Bristol sheds some new light on details sur rounding the strike, and, more importantly, lends weight to the conclusions of some interpreters, while undermining the arguments of others.

The Movement towards Labour Unity in Canada: History and Implications

One of the marching songs of the labour movement on this continent is “Solidarity Forever!” But in Canada, its exhortation has sometimes been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. At intervals over the last half-century and more, Canadian trade unionism has been “by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distrest.” In 1902, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (T.L.C.) threw out the Knights of Labor and national unions which were “dual” to international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.). The twenty-three expelled organizations promptly formed the National Trades and Labour Congress. In 1908, this became the Canadian Federation of Labour, a name which has kept cropping up in Canadian labour history ever since. In 1919, just after the Winnipeg strike, and partly as a result of it, a considerable number of western unionists left the T.L.C. to form the One Big Union (O.B.U.). Between 1901 and 1921, small local Roman Catholic unions sprang up in the province of Quebec, and in 1921 these formed the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (C.C.C.L.). In 1927, the Canadian Federation of Labour and other national unions formed the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (A.C.C.L.). In 1936, some of the officers of the A.C.C.L. seceded to form the present Canadian Federation of Labour, which is no longer even mentioned in the Department of Labour's annual Report on Labour Organization in Canada (and has not been since the 1950–1 edition), and which the orthodox union movement never considered a genuine labour organization at all. (About ten years ago, a secession from the Canadian Federation of Labour formed the National Council of Canadian Labour, which —in spite of its grandiose title, and the faint air of respectability imparted to it by inclusion in the Department of Labour's report, which gives it 42 locals and 5,640 members—is also beyond the pale of orthodox unionism.) In 1939, the executive of the T.L.C. suspended the Canadian unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.) in the United States. These unions formed a Canadian C.I.O. Committee.