Working Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour 1800--1990

The first edition of "Working class experience" was published almost ten years ago. This new edition has been extensively rewritten and brought up to date, giving new and serious attention to the twentieth century experience. "Working class experience" is a sweeping and sympathetic study of the development of the Canadian working class since 1800. Beginning with a substantial and provocative introduction that discusses the historiography of the Canadian working class, the book goes on to establish a general framework for analysis of what ultimately is a social history of Canada. Dividing the years into seven periods in the evolution of class struggle, it begins each chapter with an assessment of that period's prevailing economic and social context, followed by an examination of the many factors affecting the working class during that period. Written in a colourful and sometimes irreverent style, "Working class experience" focuses on the processes by which working people moved, and were moved, off the land and into the factories and other workplaces during the Industrial and post-Industrial Revolutions in Canada. In this new edition, coverage of the period since 1940 has been expanded from one chapter to two. The first of these two chapters focuses on the increased labour/state/management settlement expectations following the war; the second covers the containment of and crisis within the working class and its leadership since 1975. The new edition also gives more attention to the significance of gender, and the role of the law and the state in the creation of the working class identity. The use and abuse of the law by management and by extension, the state, in defining the legality of unions in the nineteenth century and the intervention of disputes in the twentieth are explored. Drawing on much recent work on contemporary capitalism, "Working class experience" offers a significant explanation of the malaise in current labour and management relations and speculates on its significance for progressive change in Canadian life.

Table of Contents:
Producing classes paternalist authority 1800--1850; Class differentiation and antagonism 1850--1880; The consolidation of working-class opposition 1880--1895; The remaking of the working class and its oppositions 1895--1919; Dissolution and reconstitution 1920--1939; Class culture and movement 1940--1975; Hard times: economic downturn the state and class struggle 1975--1990.