Feminism and the Making of Canadian Working-Class History: Exploring the Past, Present and Future‪.‬

AS WE ENTER the 21st century, working people have reason to be pessimistic about their fate in the new millennium. Despite technological advances, a communications revolution, and a globalized economy, labour remains alienating for many workers, hazardous, and lacks the remuneration necessary for a decent standard of living. In "post-Fordist" North America, even the better paid, if routinized work in industry has been replaced by lower-paid service work in multiple jobs, with far less job security. Moreover, age-old patterns of capital accumulation and women's exploitation seem to be irrepressible. At the turn of the century, many immigrant women toiled in their homes, doing sweated labour, providing piece work for the competitive garment industry. In 1999, an expose of sweated labour in Toronto uncovered a similar contracting out system, exploiting Asian women who were paid below the minimum wage, unable, due to family responsibilities, to work outside the home, fearful of being deported if they protested their conditions of work. Pessimism about the "state of work" at this juncture might be tempered by our recognition, as historians, of the ever-present possibilities of change over time, in both predictable and unpredictable ways, and of the prospect of resistance to the current order. Yet, the prevailing political moment does not look auspicious in this regard. Union membership has not increased dramatically in the last decade, and the shift to a "Mcjobs" economy, along with the globalized downgrading of labour, militates against unionization. Many governments within Canada have been eroding union and workers' rights, and organized workers, who one would expect to be the strongest opponents, have not been able to mobilize to reverse these trends.(1)