Working Lives: Essays in Canadian Working-Class History by Craig Heron (review)

Craig Heron's collection of essays – some new – reflects his intellectual interests and expertise in different aspects of working-class culture in Canada. He is a master researcher and synthesizes the social history of workers on the job, as working conditions became more centralized and mechanized, in communities, and in the home. As the Canadian economy grew, workers coped with changes at work – low pay, long hours, and the effects of wars and depression – with vitality, the support of family, and the help of their organizations, the unions.

Heron explores workers' desire for more free time, leisure activities such as drinking and labour parades, and their notions of respectability. He examines working-class political activity from 1880 to 1920, the impact of World War I, workers' growing radicalism, especially in the West, and their increased political action culminating in a "revolt" in 1919 that was crushed by authorities. The themes are not new, but Heron writes well and analyses the period deftly and in detail.

Heron examines workers' lives in terms of gender, as more girls worked outside the home. He explains cultural factors that created working-class males and analyses their roles at work and in families. In the final section, he examines photographs of workers, the challenges for social historians working on public history projects, and concludes with a touching essay about his own family in an insightful discussion of class.

Heron's history was written when the field of social history was expanding. This new field of working-class history focuses on cultural history and workers' lives in contrast to earlier labour history that studied the rise of unions. It was dominated by Marxists, who were prolific and held seminars, which included Heron, that stimulated their work. A minority in the field were social democrats, who worked in isolation and were dismissed as institutional historians, and many left to do other types of history. The new working-class history has expanded our knowledge of workers' lives and their impact on the economy and society. These Marxist historians have dug deeply to uncover how workers lived and worked, but they have one blind spot, which Heron shares. They greatly admire workers and their resistance to constraints by industry and government, but they consistently denigrate the role of union leaders, elected within democratic unions, as reliable "bureaucrats of the labour movement." In the post-1945 period, labour not only sought collective bargaining legislation in a modern labour relations system but also increasingly supported the social democratic party, resisting adherence to the dominant Liberal Party in Canadian politics. They rejected the Marxist analysis that "politics mattered much more than narrow union interests, and that the state could be an effective instrument for ending workers' exploitation and oppression by seizing control of the means of production, distribution and exchange." Historians like Heron have not forgiven them.