Reviewing a conference poses some particular problems. Unlike a book, against which any comments and criticisms can be compared directly, confer ences are ephemeral entities where live people articulate and interpret, ges ticulate, perspire, and fretfully await the intervention of the discussant and audience. In most instances copies of the papers take the form of the proverbial hen's teeth ? a difficulty that becomes compounded when it is acknowledged that the reviewer failed to attend each and every session. Naturally, this was to some extent unavoidable as different sessions ran concurrently and the selec tion process ran its inevitable course: Struggle For Control versus Labour Force Patterns, Industrial Conflict versus State and the Worker, or and Class Consciousness versus Canadian Postal Worker. Taken together such factors make a somewhat subjective process even more personal. The reader of this review is forewarned. The Third Conference on Blue Collar Workers and Their Communities can be assessed in two inter-related ways. The first involves a comparison of the Windsor conference with its 1977 London predecessor. At first glance such an exercise reveals what seems to be some striking similarities. Side by side both programs listed sessions centering on women, unemployment, primary produc tion, class consciousness, and Quebec. (It is an unfortunate similarity that both conferences held the major sessions on Quebec on the last day.) Moreover, both conferences involved men and women from outside the academic com munity thereby allowing for more broad-based and informative discussions. And, finally, many authors in both conferences attempted suggestions for con structive and creative change along with the radical critique. Nevertheless, both conferences did not have equal value; a fact due mainly to a differing orientation that underlay all the nominal similarities. The delineation of such differences begins by observing the of the blue collar orientation of the Windsor conference. Due in part to com plaints stemming from the London meetings, and in part from the increasingly obvious necessity to incorporate such an analysis into any examination of life in capitalist society, two sessions were scheduled on Women and Trade Unions and Women Workers. Such stretching was evident in the latter of these two sessions but was also manifest in the former in which quite diverse papers were woven together into a carefully argued and highly constructive