"Unpacking ""Alberta beef"": class, gender, and culture in Edmonton packinghouses during the era of na ti on al pattern bargaining, 1947-1979"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"The struggle to establish a progressive American-based industrial union, United Packinghouse Workers of America, in Edmonton's four major packinghouses during World War Two sparked the "awakening" of a social conscience in many workers who embraced the goals of strengthening the labour movement and promoting working-class political activism. The impact of this working-class community on electoral politics, however, was limited to a significant degree by notions of gender difference. The most successful politician to come out of an Alberta packinghouse was Ethel Wilson, a seamstress in the laundry department at Edmonton's Bums plant, who rose through municipal and provincial politics to become a cabinet minister in the anti-union Social Credit government of Ernest Manning, while a number of packing men were unable to achieve electoral success. \n\nDrawing on a wide array of sources, including oral interviews, union and government records, and newspapers, I argue that notions of gender difference intersected with class and ethnicity to handicap packing men and women in distinctive ways linked to a national system of pattern bargaining that gave them unprecedented trade union power during the decades following World War Two. During these years workers tended to support male leaders who could be aggressive, even bullying and dictatorial. This masculinist leadership style was most effective in confrontations with the powerful companies that comprised Canada's "meat trust," particularly Canada Packers, and with the province's increasingly right-wing provincial government, but it often marginalized progressive voices in the union and excluded women almost entirely from the most powerful leadership positions. Conversely, in community politics, the aggressive image of packing masculinity was a liability that did not handicap Ethel Wilson, who was able to achieve success by downplaying her union credentials and trading on an image of respectable white Anglo-Canadian femininity."
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".