Working People

Nicholas Rogers was Associate Professor, Department of History, York University, Downsview, Ontario.

This second edition of Working People does not differ dramatically from the first. Certain points of detail have been revised and the final chapters have been reorganized to bring the story up to 1983, but there has been no radical surgery. Desmond Morton’s book remains firmly within the mainstream of labour history. It is essentially an institutional cum political account of the fortunes of organized labour in Canada, recalling its regional peculiarities, its relationship to American unions, and its strikes, factional disputes, and mergers. The central thrust of this tangled history is the struggle for union recognition in the face of employer opposition and governmental manipulation. Its milestones are the legislative enactments that gave workers collective bargaining rights and protection against industrial injury, especially those that came in the wake of World War II.

In taking this tack, Morton reveals his sympathy for the pragmatic reformism of the union leaders. He disparages the contributions of the early socialists and the Communists to the labour movement and argues that the enduring legacy of the Knights of Labor was intellectual rather than organizational. As a result, Morton self-consciously distances himself from the new generation of social historians, who have linked the Knights to the emergence of a Canadian working-class culture and who have attempted to broaden the terrain of labour history to include discussions of the work place, the labour process, the family, and the neighbourhood. This is unfortunate. Interpretive differences aside, Morton’s rich survey of union labour could have benefitted from these methodological departures, for it would have enabled him to bridge the gap between the minority of organized workers and the wider working-class experience and to chart the changing parameters of the working-class presence over time. The narrow focus of the book, which rarely ventures far beyond the union hall and the picket line, is especially telling in the post-1945 era, where the absence of any sustained discussion of the changing structure of labour, family demography, state intervention, and the cultural rehabilitation of capitalism makes the current political preferences and fragmentation of the working class, even in the organized sector, inexplicable. The problem is not helped by the consistent use of the narrative mode, which reinforces the summary treatment of non-union issues, and the complete lack of graphs and tables. The real treat of the book is the photographs, a truly admirable collection, aptly complementing Morton’s strong suit, the complex chronicle of union struggles, especially at the top.