"À faire un peu de Poussière": Environmental health and the asbestos strike of 1949

In Mid-February 1949, Workers at the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Québec, voted to strike against the American-owned Johns-Manville Company. This work stoppage precipitated a provincial industry-wide strike that lasted for almost five months. The 1949 Asbestos strike has been incorporated into Québec's broader political historiography, and is generally regarded as a critical turning point in the history of labour and social relations in French- speaking Canada. Yet the environmental health aspects of the conflict in Asbestos remain largely unexamined. Showing how environmental health issues were a trigger for the strike and a sustained goal of the Asbestos workers seeking improvements in their conditions of work, this article demonstrates how central dust and disease were in the negotiations and arbitration hearings involving unionized workers and the company, both in 1949 and in the years that followed. It also accents the extent to which these environmental issues became health concerns that spread throughout the community. In looking at the Asbestos strike of 1949 through the lens of environmental concerns, fresh insight is gained about the nature of one of Canada's major labour conflicts, expanding our understanding of how health issues emerging in the workplace but extending well past it can affect the nature of everyday life and well being in a resource community

La mine qui commence à grignoter le village1 : Expansion minière territoriale à Asbestos

The town of Asbestos is home to what was once the largest opencast asbestos mine in the world, the Jeffrey Mine. Most of the town's history has been dominated by the resource industry that gave it its name and by the American Johns-Manville Company, which owned the mine and carried out an aggressive style of land management. When it expanded the edges of the mine into the community in order to meet rising global demand for asbestos, the company brought radical changes to the local environment and landscape. As the global asbestos industry began to collapse, Johns-Manville stepped up its expansion plans, much to the detriment of a local community that, however, did not remain voiceless in this process. This paper examines how the community negotiated a balance between progress and place at the epicentre of this mining industry

International agency over local land: Mine expansion and industrial priorities in the Town of Asbestos, Canada

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.From the late 19th to the late 20th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. In focusing on the town of Asbestos, Canada, this paper will show how this process of market boom and bust shaped a fierce local culture rooted in working and living on a rapidly changing environment. By analyzing the successive expansions of the giant mine located in the centre of Asbestos, this paper will highlight how unique understandings of self and place develop in mining communities and form a complex culture rooted in a constantly changing environment