<i>Working Lives: Essays in Canadian Working-Class History</i> by Craig Heron

In the late 1970s, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, became a hotbed of the new labor history. One of the first graduate students to emerge from this Halifax School was Craig Heron, who over the course of his nearly forty-year career at York University has become not only one of Canada’s leading labor and working-class historians, but also — as recognized by his term as president of the Canadian Historical Association from 2007 to 2009 — one of its leading historians in any field. Working Lives collects articles and essays from across his career.In the book’s 640 pages, there are only four previously unpublished essays. One of them is an autobiographical introduction, in which Heron places each of the volume’s chapters into the context of his career. His research interests followed a familiar pattern in labor and working-class history. Heron’s began in the 1970s and 1980s with a Marxist-influenced attention to workplaces, the work process, and the shaping of the Canadian working class. In the 1990s and 2000s, his interests shifted to culture and representation, to neighborhoods and families, and to leisure. Like many male scholars of his generation, along the way, Heron gradually developed a better analysis of gender. A notable part of Heron’s autobiographical accounting is his eagerness to acknowledge those who influenced him, shown through his attention to his intellectual milieu, including not just his departmental affiliations and professional organizations but also reading groups, seminars, and conferences. Because the chapters that follow the introduction are arranged thematically, rather than in the order in which they were initially written, the chronological introduction also provides another way into the book (unfortunately, there is no index to provide a third approach).The other new chapters are works of historical scholarship. In “Arguing about Idleness,” never previously published but written in the early 1990s, Heron traces the rhetoric of short-hour proponents and, to a lesser extent, their antagonists from the 1870s, when a Canadian movement arose to demand a nine-hour day, to the 1940s, when demands for leisure shifted from shorter hours to vacations and holidays. He places each shift in rhetoric in the context of the labor movement and of broader cultural attitudes toward leisure. In a chapter on the rise and fall of Labor Day parades, originally written in the mid-1990s as a public lecture, Heron convincingly demonstrates that close attention to such events “tell[s] us a lot about what organized workers in particular periods of Canadian history wanted out of life and how determined they were to get it through working-class solidarity” (255). It’s a compelling chapter and it shows how the changing ways that unions and their members celebrated Labor Day related to how working-class ideas about leisure and solidarity changed over time. Like several other chapters, however, this one would have been better had it considered the role of religion, especially in shaping workers’ expectations for and understandings of public processions. The final new chapter, which appears to be actually new, is a history of working-class photography. It is a useful history, especially for those who seek to interpret photographs as primary sources, not just use them as illustrations.The already-published articles included in Heron’s volume remain relevant, too. His very first article, for instance, reprinted here as “Labourism and the Canadian Working Class,” is a crucial analysis of how a British political ideology was adopted by Canadian craft unionists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two chapters extracted from a volume Heron edited on the strike wave of 1919 — the “labour revolt,” as he and his collaborators termed it — remain definitive. They should be especially useful as US historians reassess the strike wave and Red Summer of 1919. And the book’s final chapter, Heron’s address as president of the Canadian Historical Association, is a clear call for the importance of understanding class as a category of experience in history, using his own working-class family as a narrative focus.As Heron writes in his introduction, his work is cognizant of “transnational patterns of workers’ struggles for survival and rights,” but his work is resolutely national, focused on “the specific ways in which workers interacted with the state formation that emerged in Canada, experiences that often differentiated them from their counterparts inside other nation-states (including the United States)” (xvi). Indeed, some of the most interesting chapters in this book are about how Canadian workers interacted with and responded to the state, and in so doing became different from workers in other countries. But like many Anglophone Canadian historians, his focus here is primarily on English-speaking Canada — indeed, on Anglo-Celtic Canadian workers — to the general but not total exclusion not only of Francophones but also of non-Anglophone immigrants, Black Canadians, and Indigenous peoples.Despite the continued importance of the reprinted chapters, a book like this cannot escape certain flaws. First is that the work stands as if preserved in amber, without responding to historiographical changes or additions. This is true even for the previously unpublished chapters, which are several decades old. Second is that a volume of collected essays is necessarily indulgent. It seems pushy to ask a cash-strapped library to pay 50 dollars for a book of scholarship it likely already owns.That said, both the new and old essays in this volume have much to teach us. Scholars of US labor and working-class history, in particular, will profit from engaging the experiences of Canadian workers vis-à-vis their families, their streets, their workplaces, and their state. The research essays Craig Heron has written over the course of his career are a good place to start.

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