Craig Heron

Through the Prism of the Strike: Industrial Conflict in Southern Ontario, 1901–14

The trouble with the heads of many industries is that they become money mad and drunk with the power that money brings. They think that they can do anything and everything in a high-handed and ruthless manner just because they have a fat bank account and gilt-edged securities lying in some safety deposit vault. When an employer gets that notion into his head he is almost shaking hands with disaster. It is a purely selfish idea and is mainly responsible for strikes. It is the unbusiness-like attitude that produces unrest among the toilers. It is the tidal wave that will some day engulf the greedy, grasping and gloating galoots who think they can do as they like because they happen to be rich and powerful. The worm always turns on men like that. •

The Mill: A Worker's Memoir from 1945 to 1948

ALFRED ED WARDS IS BACK! Readers of this journal will recall his fascinating story of working-class life in southern-Ontario factory towns in the later 1930s and early 1940s. His tale ended with his enlistment in the Canadian Air Force in 1943. This time the skilled chronicler picks up the story with his return from active service at the end of the war and carries us through the immediate postwar years, during which he became a central figure in his local union in Hamilton. Once again, his reminiscences bring back the small details and the large issues of a workers experience in this important transitional period. When Edwards stepped down from a bus in Hamilton in September 1945, he was one of the thousands of demobilized servicemen who had to pick up the traces of their former civilian lives and to assess the changes that had taken place in their absence through the lenses of their military experience. As he tells us, there were many men from the Canadian Air Force who were troubled and upset by what they found. A lot had changed, but a lot was still the same. Full employment in the war economy had apparently not massively improved the standard of living of the families left behind. In the factories, hours were still extremely long, and, in the textile industry where Edwards got back his old job as a knitter, skilled workers still had to try to get the best work out of aging machinery. Much of the prewar popular culture had been curtailed during the war. One former airman was particu-

The Anatomy of Work: A Review Essay

Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1979). Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books 1979). Richard M. Pfeffer, Working For Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1979). Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press 1979).