Cape Breton Canada At The Beginning Of The Twentieth Century 1902

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Here is the story of how mass production came to Canada and what it meant for Canadian workers. Craig Heron's Working in Steel takes the reader inside the huge new steel plants that were built in Sydney, New Glasgow/Trenton, Hamilton, and Sault Ste. Marie at the turn of the century. Amid massive fire-breathing machines, we meet the steelworkers, many of them migrants from southern and eastern European villages or Newfoundland outports, who braved the smoke, noise, and heat in gruelling twelve-hour days, seven days a week. And we watch the inevitable conflicts that developed when these workers began to make demands on their bosses. Professor Heron presents a stimulating new analysis of the Canadian working class in the early twentieth century, emphasizing the importance of changes in the work world for the larger patterns of working-class life. He examines the impact of new technology in Canada's Second Industrial Revolution, but challenges the popular notion that mass-production workers lost all skill, power, and pride in the work process. He shifts the explanation of managerial control in these plants from machines to the blunt authoritarianism and shrewd paternalism of corporate management. His discussion of Canada's first steelworkers sheds new light on the uneven, unpredictable, and conflict-ridden process of technological change in industrial capitalist society.

The emergence, dominance, and alarmingly rapid retreat of modernist industrial capitalism on Cape Breton Island during the “long twentieth century” offers a particularly captivating window on the lasting and varied effects of deindustrialization. Now, at the tail end of the industrial moment in North American history, the story of Cape Breton Island presents an opportunity to reflect on how industrialization and deindustrialization have shaped human experiences. Covering the period between 1860 and the early 2000s, this volume looks at trade unionism, state and cultural responses to deindustrialization, including the more recent pivot towards the tourist industry, and the lived experiences of Indigenous and Black people. Rather than focusing on the separate or distinct nature of Cape Breton, contributors place the island within broad transnational networks such as the financial world of the Anglo-Atlantic, the Celtic music revival, the Black diaspora, Canadian development programs, and more. In capturing the vital elements of a region on the rural resource frontier that was battered by deindustrialization, the histories included here show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively.