Description
Book SynopsisDuring the Second World War, the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Canada grew from a handful of members to more than a quarter-million and from political insignificance to a position of influence in the emergence of the welfare state. What was it about the good war that brought about this phenomenal growth?
Labour Goes to War analyzes the organizing strategies of the CIO during the war to show that both cultural and economic forces were at work. Labour shortages gave workers greater power in the workplace and increased their militancy. But workers' patriotism, their ties to those on active service, and allegiance to the people's war also contributed to the CIO's growth and to what it claimed for workers. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Wendy Cuthbertson illuminates this complex wartime context. She also shows how the complex, often contradictory, motives of workers during this period left the Canadian labour movement with an ambivalent progressive/co
Trade Review
Although the CIO began the Second World War on precarious ground, by 1945 it had become a powerhouse. Labour Goes to War explains how this transformation took place, offering original insight into the making of the Canadian labour movement during the war years. Drawing on the reconstruction rhetoric of the peoples’ war for democracy, the CIO expanded its own commitment to equality rights for women and minorities and promoted a new language of social entitlement for working people.
-- Joan Sangster, author of Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1 “A Trifle Depressing”: The CIO on the Eve of War
2 Organizing the Unorganized in Wartime
3 Wartime Organizing: Getting to a Majority
4 “Becoming Unionized as Well as Organized”: Union Sociability, the Transmission of Ideas, and the Creed of Equality
5 “The War for the Common Man”: The CIO’s Narrative of a Fulfilled Democracy
6 “Equal Partners in This World Crusade”: Women, Equal Pay, and the CIO
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
