"We No Longer Respect the Law": The Tilco Strike, Labour Injunctions, and the State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1967 a strike of marginalized women workers in small-town Ontario became a cause celebre for the Ontario and national labour movements due to the employers’ use of an ex parte injunction to break the strike, and the trade union movement’s subsequent legal challenge to that injunction. This article explores the initial Tilco strike in Peterborough, the ensuing attempts by the labour movement to support the striking local of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), the criminal trials of those arrested for disobeying the injunction, and the Ontario Royal Commission on Labour Disputes which followed, chaired by Justice Ivan Rand. These events serve as a useful window through which to view labour-capital relations in this period, particularly the way in which the “Fordist” accord was profoundly gendered. Tilco also reveals a labour movement strengthened by post-World War II industrial legality, but challenged from its own margins by dissatisfaction of the rank and file with that same industrial legality. Finally, Tilco and the ensuing battle over injunctions highlights interpretive debates in Canadian working-class history concerning the state, the legal regulation of labour, and the potential malleability of state institutions in the face of pressures for reform. Resume En 1967, une greve de travailleuses marginales dans une petite ville de l’Ontario etait devenue une cause celebre pour les mouvements ouvriers ontariens et canadiens en raison de l’injonction demandee ex parte par l’employeur pour briser la greve, ainsi que pour la contestation judiciaire subsequente du mouvement syndical a l’egard de cette injonction. Cet article permet d’analyser la greve initiale a la Tilco a Peterborough, les essais consecutifs du mouvement ouvrier pour appuyer la section locale du Syndicat des travailleurs amalgames du vetement et du textile, les proces criminels des personnes arretees pour la desobeissance a l’injonction, ainsi que la Commission royale sur les conflits industriels qui a suivit, de l’Ontario, presidee par le juge Ivan Rand. Ces evenements servent de fenetres par lesquelles on peut clairement voir les relations entre la main-d’œuvre et le capital dans cette periode, en particulier, la facon dont l’accord « fordiste » etait profondement sexiste. La greve a la Tilco revele aussi un mouvement syndical renforce par la legalite industrielle apres la Seconde Guerre mondiale, mais conteste a sa peripherie en raison de l’insatisfaction de la base syndicale avec cette legalite industrielle. Finalement, la greve a la Tilco et la bataille subsequente provoquee par les injonctions soulignent les debats interpretatifs dans l’histoire canadienne de la classe ouvriere concernant le role de l’Etat, le cadre juridique des relations ouvrieres et la malleabilite des institutions de l’Etat face a des pressions pour des reformes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".