Gregory S. Kealey

1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt

This essay attempts to place Canadian workers 1919 militancy in a national and international context. Utilizing freshly compiled strike data and focusing on events outside of Winnipeg, the paper argues that the 1919 revolt was nation-wide and part of the international post-war revolutionary upsurge. The new prominence of women and immigrant workers, reflecting the drive for industrial unionism, is emphasized. n nResume n nCet article tente de situer le militantisme des travailleurs canadiens en 1919 dans le contexte national et international. Grâce a des statistiques compilees recemment sur le niveau de greve et en tenant compte devenements survenus a lexterieur de Winnipeg, lauteur soutient que la revolte de 1919 a touche tout le Canada et fait partie dune poussee revolutionnaire internationale dapres-guerre. Larticle sattarde aussi au role de premier plan quont joue les femmes et les travailleurs immigrants, ce qui sinscrit dans un mouvement vers le syndicalisme industriel.

Labour and Working-Class History in Canada: Prospects in the 1980s

THIS ESSAY IS A contribution to the debate concerning the direction of social and working-class history. Comments are made on periodization, regionalism, ethnicity, and culture. Class analysis and the utility of culture for the study of Canadian workers are strongly defended. n n nLARTICLE VEUT APPORTER une reflexion sur lorientation de lhistoire sociale et ouvriere. Des themes comme la periodisation, le regionalisme, lethnicite et la culture seront abordes. Lauteur defend fermement lanalyse de classe et la necessite detudier la culture ouvriere pour comprendre les travailleurs canadiens.

Note Des Rédacteurs En Chef

À compter de ce numéro, Sean Cadigan quitte son poste de rédacteur en chef de la revue Labour/Le Travail. En raison de ses responsabilités administratives accrues à l’Université Memorial de Terre-Neuve, Sean est obligé de renoncer ses responsabilités éditoriales, et ce numéro est préparé conjointement par Sean, Gregory S. Kealey et Bryan D. Palmer. Greg et Bryan agiront comme rédacteurs en chef intermédiaires jusqu’à ce qu’un nouveau rédacteur en chef soit nommé. Nous remercions Sean pour le temps et les efforts qu’il a consacrés en tant que rédacteur en chef, et pour sa contribution de longue date à la revue. Ce numéro contient plusieurs articles et une note de recherche en matière du « travail exigeant des sentiments altruistes », dont toute contribution faite par les membres de l’Association canadienne d’études du travail et du syndicalisme. La publication de ce matériel représente une autre étape dans la consolidation de la relation entre l’Association et le Comité canadien sur l’histoire du travail, grâce à la publication de la revue Labour/Le Travail qui encourage les affiliations étroites, les rapports permanents, et le travail commun entre ces deux organismes d’études du travail. L’élan vital de ces articles dans Labour/ Le Travail provient d’une conférence parrainée par l’Association canadienne d’études du travail et du syndicalisme sur la dissidence et la résistance en milieu de travail, organisée par Donna Baines, qui a eu lieu les 3 et 4 octobre 2014, à l’Université McMaster à Hamilton, en Ontario. Nous remercions Donna et Sean, qui ont travaillé ensemble sur la présentation originale des documents du « travail exigeant des sentiments altruistes » qui apparaissent dans ce numéro.

Postscript: Australian and British Labour Compared

At the outset I should make it eminently clear that I am expert in neither Australian nor British labour history. As a Canadian labour historian, I have read broadly in both fields but can claim no particular research expertise in either. I can claim, however, a broad interest in the development of comparative and transnational approaches to the study of the working class. Undoubtedly, this interest was the basis for Greg Patmore and Neville Kirks request that I produce a brief afterword or postscript for this collection of essays. In April 1987 a group of Canadian labour historians met with Welsh colleagues in the beautiful setting of Gregynog Hall new Newtown in mid-Wales. Under the joint leadership of Deian Hopkin, then editor of Llafur, and myself, Canadian and Welsh colleagues learned much from each other in comparing working-class development in the two geographic areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Approximately 20 months later, a similar group of Canadians traveled to Sydney, Australia to participate in a joint conference with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.2 Both of these conferences, while undoubtedly productive and stimulating, left their organisers frustrated with the limitations of simply placing two national perspectives side-by-side with no explicit effort to tease out the comparative insights. Hence, Patmore and Kealey devised the technique utilised in a second Australian Canadian conference in Sydney, and repeated in this British-Australian volume. Experts from each national context wrote theme papers on their country but then they were asked to work together to develop a truly comparative essay. The results of the first effort appeared in 1996, and this collection represents the fruits of the most recent collaboration between the Australian and British Societies for the Study of Labour History.3 One significant difference between the two efforts is that fewer of the final matchups are contained in the current volume. As Kirk suggests in his introduction, it is to be hoped that the conference presenters on historiography, race, gender and the passages of radicalism and culture will submit their final essays for publication.4 For these would provide a broader context in which to situate the essays published here; in this regard, the historiographie essay would be particularly beneficial. The absence of these essays leave the existing collection rather too narrowly focused on work and the labour movement at the expense of an array of other aspects of workers lives. The editors are evidently well aware of this fact as the Berger / Patmore essay itself highlights the importance of transnational transfer processes for the development of nationally constituted labour movements.5 We have spoken already about comparative and transnational labour history. It is important that we clearly distinguish these approaches because, while related, they are not identical. As recently refined by Michael Hanagan, Transnational labour history studies state border crossings that result from labor market demand, state labor policies, the actions of workers, or the practices of working-class institutions.6 Hence, not all comparative labour studies qualify because not all of them involve

Manchester's Workers

ALTHOUGH ONE TITLE DISGUISES the fact, both these books are about Manchester. Hanlans study, a revision of his 1979 Clark Ph.D. thesis written under Harevens supervision, is a community study, conceived in the spirit of the developing tradition of a new social history. (xv) Harevens volume is a continuation of her ambitious project which has previously resulted in a number of articles and the justifiably highly-praised Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Pantheon 1978), co-authored by Randolph Langenbach. As Harevens title suggests, her book stands firmly on the terrain of family history, but it transcends many of the familiar problems of that field by its constant effort to relate family to work. A study of the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, this volume demands careful reading as the most thorough attempt yet in the North American literature to bring together the insights of family history and working-class history. It manages to disappoint as well as to stimulate. Harevens project, which commenced in 1971, set out to study the mill workers through a combination of traditional historical research (newspapers, company records, labour sources), kinship reconstitution (based on a sample of the extensive employment records of the company), and oral history. This mix of historical methods results in a study that can actually begin to address many of the questions about which other quantitative social historians, because of their limited sources, can only speculate wildly. The book, however, shares some similar problems with that work. First, the single background chapter, The Historical Context, drawn largely from Amoskeag, does not provide