This collection of essays offers a comprehensive examination of the working class experience in British Columbia and contains essential background knowledge for an understanding of contemporary relations between government, labour, and employees. It treats workers' relationship to the province's resource base, the economic role of the state, the structure of capitalism, the labour market and the influence of ethnicity and race on class relations.

The history of British Columbia's economy in the twentieth century is inextricably bound to the development of the forest industry. In this comprehensive study, Gordon Hak approaches the forest industry from the perspectives of workers and employers, examining the two institutions that structured the relationship during the Fordist era: the companies and the unions. He relates daily routines of production and profit-making to broader forces of unionism, business ideology, ecological protest, technological change, and corporate concentration. The struggle of the small-business sector to survive in the face of corporate growth, the history of the industry on the Coast and in the Interior, the transformations in capital-labour relations during the period, government forest policy, and the forest industry's encounter with the emerging environmental movement are all considered in this eloquent analysis.

From the back cover: The billions of dollars in Canadian pension funds belong to the workers for whom these funds were established. The money, in effect, is their "deferred wages", but, even though these vast sums now constitute the largest source of capital in the country, it has only been in the past few decades that workers, through their unions, have started to play a role in how, when and where their pension money is invested. This informative and fact-filled book examines the growing involvement of labour organizations in the management--and more often the co-management--of pension funds. It looks at the duties and rights of union trustees on pension boards, at their "fiduciary responsibility", at the crucial issues of social and ethical investments--and it also explains the success of progressive labour-sponsored investment funds.

Canadian Working-Class History: Selected Readings, Third Edition, is an updated version of the bestselling reader that brings together recent and classic scholarship on the history, politics, and social groups of the working class in Canada. Some of the changes readers will find in the new edition include better representation of women scholars and nine provocative and ground-breaking new articles on racism and human rights; women's equality; gender history; Quebec sovereignty; and the environment.

Politics, Policy, and Government in British Columbia examines the political life of Canada's dynamic Pacific province. Each of the seventeen chapters, written by well-known experts, provides an up-to-date portrait and analysis of one of the many faces of B.C. politics. Taken together they provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the dominant themes and issues that have been the distinguishing features of the province's political life.

In the early years of the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed homeless transients settled into Vancouver’s “hobo jungle.” The jungle operated as a distinct community, in which goods were exchanged and shared directly, without benefit of currency. The organization of life was immediate and consensual, conducted in the absence of capital accumulation. But as the transients moved from the jungles to the city, they made innumerable demands on Vancouver’s Relief Department, consuming financial resources at a rate that threatened the city with bankruptcy. In response, the municipality instituted a card-control system—no longer offering relief recipients currency to do with as they chose. It also implemented new investigative and assessment procedures, including office spies, to weed out organizational inefficiencies. McCallum argues that, threatened by this “ungovernable society,” Vancouver’s Relief Department employed Fordist management methods that ultimately stripped the transients of their individuality. Vancouver’s municipal government entered into contractual relationships with dozens of private businesses, tendering bids for meals in much the same fashion as for printing jobs and construction projects. As a result, entrepreneurs clamoured to get their share of the state spending. With the emergence of work relief camps, the provincial government harnessed the only currency that homeless men possessed: their muscle. This new form of unfree labour aided the province in developing its tourist driven “image” economy, as well as facilitating the transportation of natural resources and manufactured goods. It also led eventually to the most significant protest movement of 1930s’ Canada, the On-to-Ottawa Trek. Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine explores the connections between the history of transiency and that of Fordism, offering a new interpretation of the economic and political crises that wracked Canada in the early years of the Great Depression.

Doyle (1874-1961) was founder and first general manager of a major consolidation of packing companies, British Columbia Packers Association (established in 1902), which became British Columbia Packers Ltd., one of the few pioneer fish-packing companies that remains viable today. He was recognised by friends and enemies alike as the unofficial industry historian not only for British Columbia but also for Alaska and the Pacific US coastal states. Doyle was a vora-cious collector of "intelligence," whose extensive papers, now stored in the archives of the University of British Columbia, constitute the only comprehensive insider's history of the rise of the industry. Newell has culled this collection of documents for revealing highlights, important trends, and events within this profitable industry. These documents are reproduced in the text and are supported by editorial essays, annotations, a statistical appendix, and a lengthy glossary of historical terms. The result is an intriguing combination of both the personal and the scholarly view of this industry through its most exciting and critical years.