Two Eras of Globalising: The Labour Movements of British Columbia and Manitoba in the First and Last Two Decades of the 20th Century

摘要

In "The National Policy and the Development of the Western Canadian Labour Movement" (Prairie Perspectives 2, edited by A.W Rasporich and H.C. Klassen [Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973]), I argued that the labour movement in western Canada was prompted and shaped by the insertion of the regional economy into the "global" political economy of the day (the British Empire) through the "national policy" which was designed to favour national capital. Almost a century later, though many structuralchanges have taken place, the west is again being re-inserted into a new global economy dominated by the American Empire, multinational capital and continental and global "free trade" agreements, a process that is also leaving its imprint on western Canadian Labour. I look specifically at the "global political economies" and technological and structural changes of the 1900-1920 and 1980-2000 periods and their impact on labour in Manitoba and British Columbia to suggest how the different policy frameworks of the two eras have affected the labour movements and the welfare of workers in the two, now quite economically distinct, provinces of the Canadian West.