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Book Notes / Références Bibliographiques
| Michael R. Weldon, Little Mosie from the Margaree: A Biography of Moses Michael Coady (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing 2001)
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THIS IS AN ENGAGING biography of Canada's most famous cooperator. It assesses the relationship between Coady's religious views and his commitment to workers' cooperatives. There are also some materials on Coady's political views, which stood to the Left of the Catholic hierarchy's reactionary perspectives. But Coady's politics, and the extent to which he saw cooperation as an alternative to both trade unionism and state socialism, are under-explored in this account.
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| Penny R. Gurstein, Wired to the World, Chained to the Home: Telework in Daily Life (Vancouver: UBC Press 2001)
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THIS BOOK provides many statistics from survey results, though limited analysis, regarding the impact of paid home work on the workers. The back cover suggests the book will deal with such interesting questions as, "Will telework solve many of society's ills, from traffic and pollution to stress, or will the home become a new ghetto, where we are forced to work continually?" But Gurstein offers cautious conclusions — home work may not be especially desirable but a variety of factors make it a logical choice, particularly for many women. Mostly, she just records the views of teleworkers regarding their work and home lives.
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| Miriam Edelson, My Journey with Jake: A Memoir of Parenting and Disability (Toronto: Between the Lines 2000)
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THIS BEAUTIFULLY written book tells a mother's story of raising a severely disabled son. But it is a story that goes beyond personal relationships, though these are essential to the story, to the battles for government support of disabled people and their families. Edelson's professional life has been lived as a trade union employee, and her social commitments and personal needs met pointedly as she successfully fought Ontario's cost-cutting measures (in this case during the NDP administration) involving the disabled.
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| Jim Bohlen, Making Waves: The Origins and Future of Greenpeace (Montreal: Black Rose 2001)
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ONE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL organization's founders reflects on the past of Greenpeace and other ecological groups, and makes recommendations for future activism. While Bohlen advocates a "Global Green Constitution," that "will reflect values that enshrine a sustainable society with justice for all," (131) he has nothing to say about how workers' communities and jobs are to be preserved during the transition to a more ecologically- sane political economy.
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| Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)
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PECK EXAMINES the role of padrones among Italian, Greek, and Spanish-speaking workers headed for the American and Canadian wests. He focuses both on the ways they enriched themselves off workers and the ways in which they helped immigrant workers to find jobs, to send money home, to find accommodation, to deal with the authorities in the new land, and the like. Peck analyzes why the padrone system all but disappeared by 1930, stressing the role of growing worker opposition to the exploitative side of the work of immigration agents within their linguistic communities.
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| Dale Hathaway, Allies Across the Border: Mexico's 'Authentic Labor Front' and Global Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2000)
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THIS IS A MEATY, if completely uncritical, history of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) which was formed in Mexico in 1960. FAT challenged the dominance of the unions associated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party government, and led the movement of workers towards both on-the-job militancy and involvement in opposition politics. The book examines the negative impact of NAFTA on Mexican workers, calling for continental worker solidarity to produce a better labour regime for all North American workers.
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| Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001)
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THIS BOOK deals broadly with the lives of working women in Chile during three decades when industrial sweatshops were spreading in the cities. It examines both the conditions of women's labour and women's struggles to improve their lot. Hutchison critically examines the response of the labour movement to women's working conditions, and the efforts of working-class feminists to make women's work a crucial issue for the trade unions and for socialists.
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| Maria Victoira Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)
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THIS BOOK traces the movement towards neoliberalism in Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico in the 1990s. In each country it examines the extent of labour support or opposition for a turn towards markets to solve deep-seated economic problems. Murillo attempts to explain the reasons for competing ideologies among Latin American unionists, and to analyze the degree to which unions were able to shape the economic agenda in their countries.
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| Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlechild 2000)
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"THE CHALLENGE ahead is to reclaim the pedagogical promises of the revolutionary and to summon the world-historical actions of the victims of capital, remembering that the pedagogy of revolution cannot be sacrificed to the fashionable apostasy of today's education pundits, who, in this post-secular, heterophilic culture of the dead end, would all too willingly domesticate the political reach of vision and ontological vocation that Che and Freire so steadfastly struggled to keep alive — which was the transformation of the capitalist world system, and through that struggle, the transformation of the human heart." (204) Hey, what did I say right now? The back cover is filled with plaudits, but this pretentious book is recommended only for left-wing masochists.
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| Gerd-Rainer Horn and Emmanuel Gerard, eds., Left Catholicism: Catholics and Society in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation-1943–1955 (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press 2001)
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THESE ESSAYS examine the role of left-wing tendencies within the Catholic Church in early post-World War II Europe in France, Italy, Belgium, and West Germany. The authors assess the efforts of socially-minded Catholics both to confront the conservative leadership of the Church and to come to terms with secular socialists and communists.
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| William B. Husband, "Godless Communists": Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press 2000)
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HUSBAND ANALYZES the Bolsheviks' efforts during their first fifteen years in power to convince Russians to embrace materialist views. While they were partially successful, the Communist Party lacked a consistent stance on how to counter the Russian Orthodox Church's social influence. Workers and peasants rather liked the Church's many feasts even if many also went along with its fasts. The Day of the Tractor and the propaganda of the League of Militant Godless by no means attracted universal support among Russian workers as substitutes for feast days and Church institutions.
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| John Belchem, Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2000)
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BELCHEM SUGGESTS that ethnic divisions in the 19th century produced a particular set of political and social relations, including notions about social class, in Liverpool. While he underplays class divisions in favour of macro-economic discussion, Belchem does provide a great deal of information regarding the evolution of politics and a bit regarding unions in the city.
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| Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press 2001)
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CROWSTON TRACES the rise of the seamstresses' guild, an all-woman organization that challenged the longstanding male tailors' guild's control over the clothing industry in pre-Revolutionary France. She explores the lives of the seamstresses, which sometimes defied social conventions for their sex, but also notes the way in which this guild's members shaped notions of femininity that helped to confine the life choices available to other women.
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| Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2000)
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PILBEAM TRACES the various currents of socialist thought in France before 1848, demonstrating that the grounds for Marx's synthesis had been paved by a variety of theorists in the years before he began writing.
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| John Isbister, Capitalism and Justice: Envisioning Social and Economic Fairness (Bloomfield, CT: Kummarian Press 2001)
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AN ECONOMIST TRIES to square capitalism and justice, taking into consideration the tenets of various moral philosophies. All he is saying is give the Keynesian welfare state a[nother] chance. At times, however, he does seem to wonder if that is enough. "We must find ways of restraining capitalism's environmental rapaciousness," (228) writes Isbister. But he warns that because capitalism requires continuous economic growth, "full environmental justice is unlikely to be achieved within the system of capitalism regulated by a democratic state." (234)
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