Collaborating with Unions to Tell the Workers’ Story: the Celanese Edmonton Workers’ Commemoration Project

First off, the paper I presented is attached. It's really a half paper since Jeff Taylor presented the first part of a joint address regarding the Alberta Labour History Institute and I presented the specific example of our work with the Celanese Workers Commemoration Project, my speaking notes for which I have attached. This was a successful conference and I think that I was one of the key participants, asking questions and making comments in several sessions. The papers that Jeff and I submitted received a warm welcome with many questions and a number of compliments afterwards. During the conference, Jeff and I suggested to the conference organizer, Steven High, that it would be valuable to have him visit both AU and ALHI to discuss issues in oral history. Since that time, Frits Pannekoek has agreed to provide funding for such a visit.Over the past 8 years, the Alberta Labour History Institute (ALHI) has produced videos and transcriptions of over 200 interviews with trade union leaders, activists, and rank-and-filers in an effort to produce a workers' history of their work and community lives. ALHI plans several hundred more interviews in the next several years as a result of partnership agreements with the Alberta Federation of Labour and other organizations. ALHI is a volunteer organization consisting of trade unionists, academics, and other interested parties. As in any such organization engaged in popular history, the activists have different understandings of the purpose of oral history interviews, who is to be interviewed, the kinds of questions to be asked, and how, if at all, the interviews should be interpreted. This paper will present the views of two academics with a long history of participation in ALHI on the academic activist "take" on these issues and the extent to which compromises between academic and popular historians, both having a commitment to preserving histories of class struggle, are possible and desirable.AVPR Special Research Opportunities & Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF

Workers social wage struggles in the Great Depression and the era of Neo-Liberalism: International Comparisons

The paper was presented in a session with one other paper and with about 50 people in attendance. There were three commentators on the paper chosen by the conference organizers and they were all very generous in their comments. The following day I was approached by the key conference organizer who indicated that he was attempting to have the better publications from this conference published as a book. He was writing the proposal to Duke University Press, and wanted to include two papers that would give the Press an indication of the likely quality of the articles overall. Mine was one of the two that he wished to send. In several sessions after I presented my paper, presenters and commentators referred to my paper. So, on the whole, this was a great success.This paper looks globally at the ways in which workers attempted to win a degree of income stability through state guarantees of social entitlements in two periods: first, the Great Depression, when income stability via jobs proved untenable, and the period of neo-liberalism from 1975 onwards when social wage programs won from the Depression onwards came under steady attack from conservative forces who alleged that they limited economic growth. The paper suggests reasons why workers in some countries and on some continents made more gains than other during these two periods

Paradise Postponed: A Re-examination of the Green Book Proposals of 1945

During World War Two, all federal political parties sought to accommodate the growing demand for "welfare state" programs. Mackenzie King's Liberals successfully checked the growth of the CCF by promising a comprehensive program of cradle-to-grave security. After the 1945 election the Liberal government prepared such a program and brought it to a dominion-provincial conference whose purpose was to determine the taxation and administrative arrangements necessary for its implementation. The "conference", which became a series of mini-conferences stretched over nine months, ended without agreement. The federal government blamed recalcitrant premiers in Ontario and Quebec for the conference's failure and abandoned much of the reform program. This article argues that the federal government, in fact, wanted the conference to fail because it did not want to undertake the expenses implied in the reform proposals. After proving inflexible in dealing with provincial criticisms, it cynically and successfully manipulated events to make it appear that the provinces had killed hopes for reform. Post-war prosperity and a declining interest in reform, particularly on the part of the corporate and medical elites, contributed to the federal government's unwillingness to pursue reform vigorously.Au cours de la Seconde guerre mondiale, il n'est pas un parti politique fédéral qui n'ait pas tenté de répondre à la demande croissante pour un « État providence ». Mackenzie King parvint à freiner la poussée de popularité du CCF en promettant un système compréhensif de sécurité sociale qui suivrait les citoyens « du berceau à la tombe ». Après sa réélection de 1945, le gouvernemnt Libéral prépara le programme. Il le proposa aux provinces à l'occasion d'une conférence du Dominion et des provinces, dont la fonction aurait dû être de voir aux arrangements fiscaux et administratifs requis pour la mise en vigueur d'une telle mesure. La « conférence » se transforma de fait en une série de mini-conférences, étalées sur neuf mois, sans que les participants ne puisse parvenir à aucune entente. Dès lors, le gouvernement fédéral accusa les premiers ministres ontarien et québécois d'être responsables de l'échec et il abandonna le plus gros du projet du réforme. Cet article veut montrer qu'en fait le gouvernement de King voulait que la conférence se solde par un échec car il n 'était pas prêt à encourir les dépenses requises. Après avoir repoussé les critiques des provinces sans broncher, le gouvernement parvint même à faire croire que la responsabilité de l'échec de la rencontre incombait aux provinces. Ce sont la prospérité de l'après-guerre de même que le déclin des pressions des élites médicales et entrepreneuriales qui contribuèrent avant tout à ralentir l'ardeur réformiste du gouvernement

Review of \u3ci\u3e The Limits of Labour: Class Formation and the Labour Movement in Calgary, 1883-1929\u3c/i\u3e by David Bright

This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of both Canadian labor and the Canadian West. It weaves together both a wealth of primary documents and secondary sources to fashion a forceful argument about the character of the working class in early Calgary. Bright\u27s study of the evolution of Calgary\u27s working class concludes that Calgary workers, on the whole, did not privilege their working-class identities over other aspects of their identity, including ethnicity, gender, and citizenship in the larger society. Even those who largely identified with their status as workers did not always put class before craft. Workers were divided along craft lines, between so-called skilled and so-called unskilled workers, and between the employed and unemployed. Bright looks at much the same kind of evidence that Greg Kealey and Bryan Palmer used in their studies of Toronto and Hamilton respectively and comes to rather different conclusions. Although he is studying a different city in a different time period, it is fair to say that he challenges the reading of evidence of working class behavior that has become the norm for labor history in Canada. While the work of Kealey and Palmer and those who have following their approach to labor history-sometimes including myself-has broadened the scope of labor history from the old institutional approach, it has been somewhat marred by a degree of romanticization of the working class. In particular, the crafts workers are presented as a working class vanguard, at odds with both the ruling class and the middle class and in sympathy, if sometimes in paternal ways, with unskilled, non-unionized workers. Workers in Orange societies are presented as not so very anti-Catholic after all, and retrograde attitudes about women and non-white workers are underplayed. Bright\u27s approach offers a corrective. I suspect that while many established labor historians will criticize his work as conservative and based on selected evidence, he will have an impact on future labor historians. On the whole, his argument is that the working class exists objectively, as Marx would put it, as a class-in-itself\u27 but that its subjective behavior is not that of a class for- itself\u27-that is, it does not behave as a self-conscious working class submerging its other identities in the name of the larger struggle. Or at least that was the case for Calgary by the inter-war period. In the period before World War One, Bright suggests there was a fair bit of both class consciousness and working-class radicalism in Cowtown

Conrad, the Textbook Writer

Marg Conrad, through her pioneering work on History of the Canadian Peoples, insured that feminist perspectives on Canadian history were integrated into the foundational materials that students receive in first-year Canadian survey history courses. She made clear to students the need to understand the gendered nature of social and political developments throughout Canada's history. Résumé Marg Conrad, par le biais de son travail de pionnière sur History of the Canadian Peoples, a assuré l'intégration des perspectives féministes sur l'histoire soient intégrées dans le matériel de base que les étudiantes reçoivent pour leur cours sur le sondage canadien durant leur première année d'études en histoire. Elle a bien fait comprendre aux étudiantes le besoin de com p ren d re la n atu re g en rée d u développement social et politique au cours de l'histoire du Canada