Labor conflicts in the Toronto construction industry, 1968–1973. A crossroads of ethnic issues, business innovations, class struggle, and union action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concerns a case study in labor history which represents an interesting example of union action in a workers’ community characterized by intersections between ethnic and class belonging.The focus of the article is on labor conflicts in Toronto’s construction industry between 1968 and 1973. In that period, the Torontonian residential sector represented a sort of ethnic niche dominated by Italian immigrants, who populated this industry both as workers and as contractors. At the same time, important economic, technological, and organizational innovations formed part of this niche. In particular, it refers to the new Toronto real estate boom and to the introduction of new building techniques such as the drywall technique, or concrete forming, as well as business innovations such as the flying form or the creation of teamwork. This article tells the story of successful unionization in a peculiar industry dominated by continuous formal and informal bargaining. Moreover, the powerful presence of the phenomenon of mafiosi and widespread racism made the context still more difficult. In this situation, despite the ambiguities, the final result was the unionization of thousands of workers and the successful signing of collective contracts.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".