History of Canadian Labor: The Term Paper

" (Turkstra, 2008)

VII. CHURCH & LABOR ALLIANCE ENDS

The alliance between labour and the church began to notably weaken and in 1921 the printers' strike in Toronto "was the final blow that ended the alliance between the churches and labour." (Turkstra, 2008) Turkstra states that this conflict centered around the Methodist Book Room and the refusal of the superintendent S.W. Fallis to agree to the demand of workers for a 44-hour workweek. This strike is stated to have caused "irreparable damage to the alliance between labour and the churches..." (Turkstra, 2008) the labour leaders had been willing to engage with the churches prior to the war because."..a complete rejection of the churches might have alienated potential supports. Also they would have recognized that church bodies and ministers were important models in the community and an alliance, therefore, would help put pressure on the government to pass legislation that was favorable to labour." (Turkstra, 2008)

VIII. LAWS CHANGED in CANADA in LATE 1930s

The work of Bryan D. Palmer (2003) entitled: "What's Law Got to do With it? Historical Considerations on Class Struggle, Boundaries of Constraint, and Capitalist Authority?" states that the period of 1936-37 in Southern Ontario "saw plant occupations and militant outbursts...culminating in the organization of Ashawa auto workers, years of obsolete craft unionism, on the one hand, and/or depression and state inaction around the basic provisioning of relief, on the other, had reconditioned the meaning of both accommodation and resistance." (Palmer, 2003) Labour law at this time was "moving toward an eventual narrowing of boundaries and reification of capitalist authority in contract law, collective bargaining being premised on management rights' clauses and the union being, in part, responsible for policing its members." (Palmer, 2003) in fact, events that had taken place during the late 1930's in Canada had "assured a future stand in Canadian class relations [for industrial unionism even if it were] weak and wobbly." (Palmer, 2003) in other words, while labour law was at this time, "narrowly conceived...was constricting the boundaries of class struggle through becoming entrenched, codified, professionalized and integrated into the state-orchestrated system tending toward the production of labour-capital rapprochement t, the actual legal spaces where class was now operative were in fact expanding." (Palmer, 2003)

SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

The labour class in Canada experienced many shifts in their political and social climate during the period 1920-1930 in that the labour class rode upon the high waves of victory through their alignment with workers unions that succeeded in bring out about gains to these individuals only to have those gains abruptly removed following World War II. However, the determination of workers unions to organize combined with the injustices experienced by Canadian labour following the war resulted in a final victorious achievement for Canadian laborers, which they were able to realize finally in the late 1930s.

Bibliography

Leir, Mark (2003) the Strike as Political Protest. Online available at http://www.sfu.ca/labour/HEU,%20The%20Strike%20as%20Political%20Protest5.pdf

Turkstra, Melissa, Constructing a Labour Gospel: Labour and Religion in Early 20th-Century Ontario. Labour/Le Travail.57 (2006): 53 pars. 12 Aug. 2008 http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/57/turkstra.html…