skip to main content
Idioma:

Forestry Workers and Their Communities

Robbins, William G.

Labour, 2008, Vol.61 (61), p.239-249 [Periódico revisado por pares]

Committee on Canadian Labour History and AU Press

Texto completo disponível

Citações Citado por
  • Título:
    Forestry Workers and Their Communities
  • Autor: Robbins, William G.
  • Assuntos: 20th century ; Canada ; Canadian history ; Capitalism ; Coasts ; Consumption ; Forest areas ; Forest products ; Forestry industry ; Government ; Hak, Gordon ; Jones, William P ; Labor force ; Lumber industry ; Nonfiction ; Rajala, Richard A ; Review articles ; Review Essay/Note Critique ; Timber ; Timber industry ; U.S.A ; Unemployment ; Workers ; Workforce ; Working class ; World War II
  • É parte de: Labour, 2008, Vol.61 (61), p.239-249
  • Notas: ObjectType-Article-2
    SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
    ObjectType-Feature-1
    content type line 23
  • Descrição: [Gordon Hak]'s Capital and Labour in the British Columbia Forest Industry, 1934-1974 is an account of the highly productive forest industries that have sustained British Columbia's economy for more than a century. His study is a critique of mass production, large corporations, and their accompanying bureaucratic structures during the "Fordist age," the great period of timber production from the 1930s to the 1970s. Those were the years when large unions across every major industrial sector in North America reached accords with corporations to assure stability in labour-management relations. "Unions, by maintaining high wages and a disciplined workforce," Hak argues, "contributed to this stability." (5) Governments in the United States and Canada cooperated in providing the necessary social support in the form of insurance systems and unemployment assistance. In the process of accommodating themselves to the Fordist model, unions ceded considerable ground to corporations who were turning out an impressive array of profitable goods for a hot consumer market. While Hak has authored a solid and largely persuasive narrative, Capital and Labour is not without stylistic flaws, including numerous passive voice constructions, lengthy and occasionally ponderous sentence structures, repetition, and inattentive proofreading. The author also makes no mention of First Nations people and their struggles to reclaim Aboriginal lands. More perplexing, however, is the author's curious but brief pandering to "the labyrinth of discourse," in which he confusingly argues that "discourses of liberal capitalism... . persuasively explained the world and were instantiated in institutions and practices." (11) What follows is a discussion of "dominant discourse," "capitalist discourse," "provocative discourses," "competing discourses," "environmental discourse," "alternative discourses," and other disconcerting uses of the term. (12) Readers will be pleased to know thatthe remainder of the text is bereft of such literary artistry. The subject of [Richard A. Rajala]'s book, Up-Coast: Forests and Industry on British Columbia's North Coast, 1870-2005, is British Columbia's middle and north coast forest industries and the relationship between the province's human communities and the forest environment. The author pays special attention to integrating social and environmental history with the emergence of First Nations as significant players in provincial politics. Taking advantage of the government's habit of making generous long-term leases of Crown forests to large corporations, BC politicians pursued policies that treated public lands as a form of private property, ignoring for more than a century the protests of First Nations people. Up-coast forests, including those on the Queen Charlotte Islands, faced other liabilities - low percentages of high-grade timber, high railroad rates, and waterborne cost disadvantages in shipping to East Coast markets. In addition, provincial decision-makers developed policies that favoured the largest corporations to the detriment of sustaining local economies. British Columbia governments, Rajala contends, pursued programs "based on the naïve assumption that healthy corporations would inevitably produce healthy communities." (15) In the end, this misplaced faith brought great harm to middle and north coast settlements.
  • Editor: Committee on Canadian Labour History and AU Press
  • Idioma: Inglês
Voltar para lista de resultados
Ir para página anteriorAnterior Resultado  9 AvançarIr para próxima página

  • Realização: ABCD-USP USP   Logos de Redes Sociais: Freepik

Buscando em bases de dados remotas. Favor aguardar.