"The Force of All Our Numbers": New Leftists, Labour, and the 1973 Artistic Woodwork Strike
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through late 1973, the Artistic Woodwork strike captivated not only the left-wing milieux of Toronto – from young New Leftists, to rank-and-file union members, to activists from a plethora of political groups – but also the entire city. Artistic was a first contract strike by immigrant workers organized by the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union (ctcu). The narrative of the strike came to be dominated by supporters after many of the workers picketing left due to both fear and the availability of alternative employment. By November, mass pickets of four hundred people added to political pressure and helped secure a first contract settlement. Coming at the end of a period of intense political debate and discussion concerning the agent of social change and the role of the working-class, Artistic assumed special significance in the personal trajectories of many supporters. On these violent picket lines, supporters had an opportunity to act out the prevailing Marxist sociology of the time. Artistic demonstrates the confluence of a variety of forces at the end of the long sixties: the widespread turn towards Marxism and the working-class as a necessary component of social and political change; the importance of nationalism as a unifying feature between some New Leftists and unions such as the ctcu; and the continuing social responsibility of the student and the intellectual. While Artistic was decertified in 1975, we can take valuable lessons from the strike concerning the impact of allowing strikebreakers as well as the power and importance of a social network in garnering widespread strike support. Resume Vers la fin de 1973, la greve menuiserie artistique a captive non seulement les milieux de gauche de Toronto – allant des jeunes gauchistes aux syndiques du rang, aux activistes d’une abondance de groupes politiques – mais aussi toute la ville entiere. La greve menuiserie artistique etait une greve de premier contrat des travailleurs immigrants organisee par le Syndicat canadien des travailleurs du textile et de la chimie. La narrative de la greve a ete ensuite dominee par les partisans par suite du piquetage de nombreux travailleurs en raison de la peur et de la disponibilite d’autres emplois. Au debut de novembre, un piquetage en masse de quatre cents personnes a ajoute a la pression politique et a aide a conclure une premiere entente contractuelle. Se trouvant a la fin d’une periode de debats et de discussions politiques intenses a l’egard de l’agent de changement social et du role de la classe ouvriere, la greve menuiserie artistique a assume une signifiance speciale dans les trajectoires personnelles de nombreux partisans. Sur ces lignes de piquetage violentes, les partisans avaient l’occasion de mettre en acte la sociologie marxiste predominante de l’epoque. La greve menuiserie artistique demontre la confluence d’une variete de forces la fin de longues annees soixante : la tendance repandue de se pencher vers le Marxisme et la classe ouvriere comme un element essentiel de changement social et politique; l’importance de nationalisme comme un caracteristique unifiant entre certains nouveaux gauchistes et syndicats tels que le Syndicat canadien des travailleurs du textile et de la chimie; et la responsabilite sociale permanente des etudiants et des intellectuels. Bien que l’accreditation syndicale de la menuiserie artistique soit revoquee en 1975, nous pouvons tirer des lecons valables de la greve a l’egard de l’impact de la permission des briseurs de greve ainsi que le pouvoir et l’importance d’un reseau social dans l’obtention du soutien generalise de la greve.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".