Labour goes to war: The CIO, the people's war, and the construction of a "new social order," Toronto, 1939--1945
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The CIO related this narrative to working-class Canadians through new, union channels of communication and through a myriad of union-minded social interactions. Together---the CIO's narrative of victory and its subaltern public sphere that communicated this narrative---helped the CIO overcome formidable obstacles to organizing. The Canadian CIO's 1930s momentum had stalled by 1939, but by 1944 it was the country's largest labour organization and was influencing Canadian politics. Using union newspapers, organizing literature, minutes, correspondence, oral interviews, government and corporate records, and the daily press, this dissertation describes and analyzes how the CIO organized thousands of wartime workers into unions in spite of significant obstacles. This study then examines the institutions the CIO developed to create a union "mini-public sphere," where workers debated and developed union positions on issues facing them as workers, family members, citizens and military veterans. The CIO was successful in turning private, workplace issues such as union recognition and bargaining rights into public issues that government was forced to deal with, and its organizing successes and its entry into politics witnessed burgeoning support for the social democratic CCF, a phenomenon that encouraged mainstream political parties to adopt more progressive platforms. The CIO's breakthrough was based not just on worker-empowering wartime labour shortages. Its skill in using modern communications was also a factor in its wartime success, as well as its use of the war as a central character in these communications efforts. CIO communications used a narrative that elided workers with warriors as partners in a "people's war" to defeat the nation's enemies and build a new social order. The CIO told workers that if they organized into unions, they would have the power to shape a peace that, unlike after the Great War, would benefit this worker-warrior partnership. Victory was thus defined not merely as defeating the Axis but creating a modern, new Canada, where workers would have citizenship rights in the workplace and where citizenship entailed a fairer, more egalitarian society. The CIO's talk about rights extended to women workers, and its arguments for equal pay and women's seniority were increasingly based on women's human rights.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".