Fighting the Sweatshop in Depression Ontario: Capital, Labour and the Industrial Standards Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The judicial and political failure of Prime Minister R.B. Bennet's New Deal legislation shifted the struggle to reconstitute capitalism to the provincial and municipal levels of the state. Attempts to deal with the dislocations of the Depression in Ontario focused upon the crisis which came to dominate political and social discourse after 1934. Ontario's Industrial Standards Act (1935) was designed to bring workers and employers together under the auspices of the state to establish minimum wages and work standards. The establishment of New Deal style industrial codes was premised on the mobilisation of organized capital and organized labour to combat unfair competition, stop the spread of relief-subsidized labour, and halt the predations of sweatshop capitalism. Although the ISA did not bring about extensive economic regulation, it excited considerable interest in the possibility of government intervention. Workers in a diverse range of occupations, from asbestos workers to waitresses, attempted to organize around the possibility of the ISA. The importance of the ISA lies in what it reveals about the nature of welfare, waged labour, the union movement, competitive capitalism, business attitudes to industrial regulation, and the role of the state in managing the collective affairs of capitalism. The history of the ISA also suggests that regulatory unionism, as described by Colin Gordon in his work on the American New Deal, may have animated key developments in Canadian social, economic and labour history. Resume Apres l'echec juridique et politique du premier Ministre R.B. Bennet et de saloi pour un New Deal, la lutte pour reconstituer le capitalisme passa aux niveaux provinciaux et municipaux. Les efforts entrepris pour composer avec les boule-versements que la Depression en Ontario avaient causes se sont concentres sur «l'exploitation des travailleurs » qui finit par dominer les debats politiques et sociaux apres 1934. La Loi sur les normes industrielles de l'Ontario (1935) avait ete concue pour reunir les travailleurs et les employeurs, sous les auspices de l'Etat, dans le but d'etablir le taux du salaire minimum et des normes de travail. L'etablissement de codes industriels du genre New Deal etait fonde sur le principe de la mobilisation du patronat et des syndicats pour combattre la concurrence injuste, mettre fin a l'expansion du travail subventionne par l'aide humanitaire, et mettre fin a la rapacite du capitalisme dans son exploitation des travailleurs. Bien que la loi sur les normes industrielles n'ait pas apporte de reglementation economique extensive, elle suscita beaucoup d'interet, vu les possibilites d'une intervention de l'Etat. Les travailleurs, dans toute une gamme de metiers allant des ouvriers de l'amiante jusqu'aux employes de la restauration, essayerent donc de s'organiser en fonction de ces possibilites de la loi. La loi est importante par ce qu'elle revele sur la nature de l'aide sociale, des gages des travailleurs, du mouvement syndical, du capitalisme concurrentiel, de l'attitude du monde des affaires envers la reglementation industrielle, et du role de l'Etat dans la gestion des afffaires collectives du capitalisme. L'histoire de la loi semble en outre indiquer que le « syndicalisme reglementaire», tel que Colin Gordon l'a decrit dans son ouvrage sur le New Deal americain, a peut-etre suscite des developpements majeurs dans l'histoire sociale, economique et ouvriere du Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".