| Book Notes / Reférénces Bibliographiques | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Book Notes / Références Bibliographiques

Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Realities of Domestic Labour (London: Zed, 2000)

THIS WORK EXPLORES the lives of women, largely non-Whites from the South, who work as domestic labourers in Europe and North America. While differences among countries are analyzed, the book makes clear that everywhere these women face super-exploitation, unprotected as they are by labour and citizenship laws. The back cover suggests that the book, by focusing on the roles of class and race in domestic oppression, "challenges both the industrial democracies' own self-image as equitable societies generally, and feminism in particular." But, while Anderson provides a great deal of statistics and some heart-wrenching statements from the domestic workers themselves, she does not, in fact, probe what challenges her data might pose for either existing feminist or class theory.

Barbara Paleczny, Clothed in Integrity: Weaving Just Cultural Relations and the Garment Industry (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000)

PUBLISHED IN A SERIES entitled "Studies in Women and Religion," this book surveys the world of domestic garment workers worldwide and provides detailed information about the historical and contemporary organization of the garment industry in Ontario. It outlines efforts by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union to cope with the rapidly increasing use of home work to produce garments in Canada. There are poignant testimonies here from the women who are the victims of corporate efforts to exploit their labour sufficiently to make profits in a global industry based on cheap labour. The book also probes the ethical dimensions of the super-exploitation of women workers that underwrite this industry. But its Catholic social justice perspective seems at times unable to cope with the realities of capitalist political economy. So, for example, there is an appeal to "corporate elites and financiers who are genuinely interested in the well-being of those affected by their decisions and their amassing of wealth." "Trusting that God's spirit is at work in them in their unrest," (284) Paleczny asks the imaginary justice-seeking capitalists to seek dialogue with others about their values. Mostly, however, the author does focus on coalition-building from below.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)

JOHNSON MAKES an important addition to the literature on slavery in the United States with this detailed account of New Orleans' slave markets. Using a combination of slave narratives, slavers' correspondence and accounts, and court records, Johnson recreates the stories of the various parties involved in slave trading. The efforts of the slave traders to force Africans to behave in set-piece ways that would enhance their salability, and the motives of the slave owners who sold slaves or bought them are closely examined. The voices of the slaves themselves disappointingly are muted relative to those of their oppressors, despite the author's many efforts to tease them out of documentation that is heavily biased in favour of the slavers.

Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith, Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

AND HOW ARE working-class folk faring in Smalltown, US, in the era of post-Fordism? This study of rural Vermont suggests that steep polarization has developed within the American working class. On the one hand, there is a large group of working families with access to decent-paying jobs for both members of a couple and both the ability and the desire to run small businesses on the side as well. Many such families are better off than ever, and their class position is somewhat ambiguous. On the other hand, other working-class families have become trapped in low-paying, short-term or part-time work, and with no possibility of accumulating the capital for anyone in the family to run a small business of any sort. Efforts are made to analyze the impact of this polarization on gender relations in various types of households, and the implications for trade unionism.

Anna Heilman, Never Far Away: The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001)

THIS IS A WRENCHING Holocaust survivor memoir that includes much in the way of detail regarding the lives of slave labourers in the Weichsel Union munitions factory at Auschwitz, where the author worked for fourteen months before the Soviet advance to Germany forced Auschwitz's evacuation in January 1945. Heilman chronicles not only the horrific working conditions of the mainly Jewish workers but also their resistance to their Nazi slavemasters. Aware that their jailers intended to murder them eventually, some of the women working in the factory, including Heilman, smuggled gunpowder to the male prisoners who worked in the crematoria. These men, in turn, made explosives for an aborted uprising in Auschwitz in October 1944. Several of the women who had worked with Heilman in planning the uprising were found out, tortured, and executed, including Heilman's younger sister.

Lesley Gill, Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State (New York: Columbia University Press 2000)

THE MASSIVE SUFFERING imposed on Latin Americans by neoliberal restructuring of their economies has been dramatically demonstrated over the past year in the collapse of the Argentinian economy and the challenge by the Brazilian masses to global capital implied in the election of "Lula," the Workers' Party candidate who is at least nominally committed to reversing neoliberal initiatives. Gill's anthropological study of Bolivia demonstrates the extent of the dislocation imposed on working people in a smaller Latin American country since 1985 when the Bolivian government embraced neoliberalism. Her research suggests that the government's abandonment of workaday people has increased the ranks of the poor and the degree of desperation of the poor. Once well-off tin miners have ended up in urban slums after the government closed state-owned mines. The military, which has traditionally played both repressive and welfare roles in the country, increasingly has only the resources to play the former role, in which it is amply tutored by the American armed forces.

Robert Elliott, Claudio Lucifora, and Dominique Meurs, ed., Public Sector Pay Determination in the European Union (London: Macmillan, 1999)

THIS IS A FAIRLY DRY but massive compendium of information regarding the pay packages of public-sector workers and how they were arrived at in the various countries of the EU. There are statistics here regarding the growth of public-sector employment, comparing changes in pay and benefits for public and private workers in recent years, and much else. What is missing almost completely here is any notion that class analysis, broadly understood, might be of some use in explaining changes in public-sector workers' pay, benefits, and working conditions over time. Trade unions have only a shadowy presence here, gender is reduced to a factor to be dealt with in a few tables, and race does not exist.

Philip Resnick, The Politics of Resentment: British Columbia Regionalism and Canadian Unity (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000)

PHILIP RESNICK has written extensively about relations between English Canada and Québec. This book is largely concerned about the attitudes of British Columbians, élite and ordinary, towards constitutional issues, and particulary relations between the two solitudes. As the title suggests, the author finds the residents of his adopted province somewhat churlish regarding Québec's national aspirations. A weakness of the book is that it fails to interrogate what British Columbians want in terms of their own dealings with the national government, other than an apparent insistence that no province be singled out for special treatment. Resnick seems too preoccupied with Québec's aspirations to deal with British Columbians as more than people who have to come to terms with the challenges of that nation-province's chattering classes, including its political elites.

L. Anders Sandberg and Peter Clancy, Against the Grain: Foresters and Politics in Nova Scotia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000)

SANDBERG and Clancy trace the various debates regarding the managing of the forests in Nova Scotia since the 1920s. They focus on the ideas and practices of seven professional foresters representing a range of views regarding the requisite balance between conservation and exploitation of the province's forestry resources. This book attempts to view the various battles between industry and environmentalists, and large forestry operators versus little guys, through the eyes of professionally-trained foresters. Their mix of scientific and ethical perspectives provides the text's vision of the forest. It is a useful focus, though, at times, it blurs issues regarding what policies were actually being followed in the forests, and because of what power relations.

Keith G. Banting, ed., The Nonprofit Sector in Canada: Roles and Relationships (Kingston: School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, 2000)

THIS IS A COLLECTION of essays that demonstrates how the charitable sector in Canada is coping with the results of government "downsizing" and passing down services once performed in the public sector to nonprofits when no profit-making firm sees any advantage to taking over the service. It is a familiar story: there are more demands than ever placed on nonprofits, but at the same time, the proportion of their finances paid for by state revenues is in decline. Some attempt is made here to provide regional coverage, though the Atlantic region is completely ignored.

A.F.

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