Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939-1945
Abstract
Despite acute labour shortages during the Second World War, Canadian employers—with the complicity of state officials—discriminated against workers of African, Asian, and Eastern and Southern European origin, excluding them from both white collar and skilled jobs. Jobs and Justice argues that, while the war intensified hostility and suspicion toward minority workers, the urgent need for their contributions and the egalitarian rhetoric used to mobilize the war effort also created an opportunity for minority activists and their English Canadian allies to challenge discrimination. Juxtaposing a discussion of state policy with ideas of race and citizenship in Canadian civil society, Carmela K. Patrias shows how minority activists were able to bring national attention to racist employment discrimination and obtain official condemnation of such discrimination. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Jobs and Justice offers a new perspective on the Second World War, the racist dimensions of state policy, and the origins of human rights campaigns in Canada.
... There is less of an appetite for exploring collective struggle, in terms Jameson would use, of wresting Freedom from the realm of Necessity, making the study of class a part of the analytic playing field of a politics of engagement, the kind of orientation that animated such pioneering and influential texts as Panitch's and Swartz's now decades-old study of austerity's state-crafted assault on workingclass entitlements. 6 There are indications that some historians in Canada are willing to swim against the stream, with established scholars such as Joan Sangster and Carmela Patrias and younger members of the Graphic History Collective keeping older socialist-feminist sensibilities alive in their studies of women, the labor movement, and class struggle (Patrias 1994(Patrias , 2012Patrias and Savage 2012;Sangster 2010Sangster , 2011Graphic History Collective 2016;Julia Smith 2014). But, the fusion of labor history and gender studies that seemed so promising in the 1980s, when many feminist scholars aligned with Marxism in one way or another, has lost much of its collective edge (Maroney 1983;Hamilton and Barrett 1986;Sangster 2002;Luxton 1980Luxton , 2001Luxton and Corman 2001). ...
This contribution to the Workers of the World forum makes the case for the need to historicize workers’ experience, doing so in a particular kind of Marxist way. In this historicization, class must be conceived broadly, with the accent placed on the critical importance of processes of dispossession and the ways in which this historical divorcing of producers from relationships to the means of production inevitably leads to particular kinds of class conflicts. How these conflicts are conceived and written about, even when they seemingly do not lead to clear-cut clashes of adversarial class interests, can play a role in sustaining and widening class struggle. It is this class struggle which ultimately remains a decisive agent in social transformation.
This article examines the subject of immigrants and crime by focusing on the ethnically diverse towns and villages of the Niagara Peninsula during the period of rapid industrialization in the early twentieth century. Relying on the jail registers of Welland County, local newspapers, and oral testimonies, the study analyzes the complex encounter between immigrants from outside Britain and its white settler colonies and the Canadian justice system. It explores both the criminalization of immigrants by hegemonic Canadian groups and institutions and the nature, extent, and significance of unlawful behaviour by immigrant workers and small-scale entrepreneurs. The article is guided by the works of historians of labour, immigration, and ethnicity, leisure and recreation, and crime.
In the wake of a series of prolabor Supreme Court decisions in Canada, the mantra of “workers' rights as human rights” has gained unprecedented attention in the Canadian labor movement. This article briefly reviews the Canadian labor movement's recent history with the Supreme Court before arguing that elite-driven judicial strategies, advocated by several academics and Canadian unions, threaten, over time, to depoliticize traditional class-based approaches to advancing workers' rights. The argument is premised on the notion that liberal human rights discourse does little to address the inequalities in wealth and power that polarize Canadian society along class lines.
In 1966, 264 male workers from Jamaica were allowed entry to Canada to work on a seasonal, contractual basis in the southwestern Ontario fruit and vegetable harvest. During the past two decades the numbers of workers increased to the point where during the late 1970s and early 1980s, an annual average of 4,700 men, and a small number of women, from a number of other Caribbean countries, including Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Montserrat, and Dominica entered the country. They currently constitute about 5 per cent of the harvest labour force in southwestern Ontario.2.